target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ua9f3ae7e-ce10-5125-8b3e-d8950a1d671e">Nazru Sees It Too
Nazru lived in an elephant-eared taro plot near the orchard. Inside the tiny brick room, his father sat upright on a charpoy, wheezing heavily into his shrivelled chest. Some nights when the asthmatic old man injected himself with medication to clear his passageways, he was knocked senseless. Nazru’s teenaged brother, who was named after an old-time Bollywood star, was ‘weak in the head’ according to their father’s diagnosis and encouraged to keep to himself. An older brother had fled to another state where he had ended up as a moulder in the even more unforgiving world of a brick kiln, with his wife by his side and their five children running around in the beating sun. His mother tried to keep the family from coming apart, but Nazru was forever getting into scrapes.
One night he heard bandits rummaging about in a neighbour’s house and instead of staying away, as others did in such circumstances, he confronted the men. They shot him in the arm. Another time he killed a neighbour’s goat. There was no logic to his actions, as least not any that he articulated to people’s satisfaction. Asked a simple and direct question, he laughed brayingly, hee-haw, hee-haw. The villagers made him apologise to the owner of the dead goat and pay restitution. Time and again they counselled him, ‘apne kaam se kaam rakho.’ Mind your own business.
How could he?
There was nothing for a young man in the village. Sometimes he gathered friends for a drink, sometimes to smoke weed. He’d once gone for a drive in a car, but he didn’t remember very much because it was the time he’d been shot and was being rushed to the hospital. He was too old to hang around the teenagers who stared at their phones, and too immature to socialise with men his own age who were married and had children.
Some people thought they had him pegged. ‘Dar naam ka cheez usko nahin hai.’ He isn’t afraid of anything. Others, who saw him rustling about on one of his evening excursions, knew he was just nosy.
By their early twenties, Katra boys were embedded in that stage of Hindu life known as grihastha, becoming a householder, maintaining a home and raising a family. Nazru was considered odd, but he was hard-working. With one brother gone, another ill and his father bedridden, the burden of feeding everyone – while tending to their only buffalo and all the tobacco – fell to him. He did what was needed. Why then was he still unmarried?
Debating the causes behind twenty-six-year-old Nazru’s bachelorhood became a preoccupation among the villagers who found him annoying. Someone claimed that he was having an affair with a neighbour’s wife. When the neighbour was away, it was said, Nazru slipped into his wife’s bed. Someone else said that he was involved with several men’s wives. A third person claimed that Nazru carried pictures of underage girls in his wallet, making him sound like a pervert.
Close relatives rubbished the rumours. He was not a pervert, the poor boy, he was a hijra, they said. They had come to this conclusion having seen him squat to urinate. The rumours grew and grew, and so the question was put to Nazru’s father. ‘My son,’ said the withered old fellow, ‘is neither a man nor a woman.’
And so Nazru was left to do as he pleased. Every night after dinner, he set off. Animals, squatting women, teenagers being teenagers – no one was safe from the flashing light of Nazru’s Made in China torch.
‘I saw Padma and Pappu,’ he said later. The pair were in his wheat field. ‘They were signalling to each other.’
Nazru saw them together again, and then a third time. ‘I didn’t like it,’ he said. ‘This sort of behaviour could destroy the reputation of our entire family.’
Unspeakable Things
Reputation was skin. And the residents of the next-door hamlet of Jati couldn’t shed theirs. Their reputation grew not so much out of things they said and did, as by stereotyped impressions of their Yadav caste.
Like the Shakyas, the Yadavs came under a broad category known as ‘Other Backward Classes’. The OBCs were low-caste groups that upper-caste groups had systematically kept back. Once forcibly confined to agrarian jobs, Yadavs in Uttar Pradesh were not even allowed to sit on a charpoy occupied by a high-caste Brahmin. After India became independent they were the supposed beneficiaries of affirmative action policies.
The Shakyas and the Yadavs should have found common cause, except that now the Yadavs were politically powerful. The community, which made up an estimated 9 per cent of the population in the state of Uttar Pradesh, always voted strategically, in a bloc. Their leaders formed political alliances with other low-caste groups. And the Yadav-run Samajwadi Party employed the tactics of patronage politics – they were accused of distributing freebies like clothes, cooking pots and even cash6 to potential voters. In 2014, the party was in control of the state government, and its influence extended over the local bureaucracy and police.
Uttar Pradesh was India’s largest and most powerful state, with a population of more than 200 million people. It sent eighty members to Parliament. ‘The road to Delhi,’ it was said, ‘passes through Lucknow,’ the capital city of Uttar Pradesh. In fact, eight out of India’s fourteen prime ministers were from this politically significant state. Even India’s new prime minister, who was from Gujarat, had contested the general elections from here in 2014.
But living conditions in Uttar Pradesh reflected none of this. As many as 60 million people in the state were poor, said a World Bank report.7 The infant mortality rate was the same as in some war-torn countries. In times of drought, when crops perished, people ate grass to survive.8 Against this backdrop, one chief minister had spent taxpayers’ money on filling public parks with statues of herself.9
A state bureaucrat attempted to explain why the system was so broken: ‘If you get a cow that gives you twenty litres of milk twice a day and you know you’ll own the cow for only a short period, what will you do?’
The answer? Milk it dry.
Two years earlier, in 2012, Akhilesh Yadav had become chief minister. Educated in Australia, where he received a degree in environmental engineering from the University of Sydney, the forty-one-year-old had often been photographed on his mobile phone or pecking away on his laptop. The media called him ‘tech-savvy’. This was shorthand for ‘likely to be smart’. His father, Mulayam Singh, a former mud wrestler who had founded the Samajwadi Party, didn’t think much of his son – but a senior advisor had pointed out the advantages of putting the young man forward. ‘Do any of you know who Hannah Montana is?’ he had said. ‘Ask Akhilesh. He knows. That’s why we need the young generation leading the party.’10
Akhilesh had some good ideas to improve the state – more power, better roads and a pension scheme. But his cabinet ministers were old-school thugs. The Association for Democratic Reforms, an organisation that campaigns for better governance, showed that about a third of the politicians who were elected nationwide to Parliament in 2014 had a criminal record.11 In Akhilesh’s cabinet, over half the members had pending criminal cases.12 Critics were convinced that nothing was going to change.
Soon his government, like the Yadav governments that preceded him, was also slapped with the label ‘goonda raj’: the rule of criminals.13 In the climate of fear and insecurity that subsequently developed, the phrase ‘raat gayi baat gayi’ – the night has concluded and so has the incident – circulated as often as it ever had before, meaning that victims of Yadav-led crimes might as well forget about getting justice. The reputation of this dabbang – thuggish – government tainted all Yadavs.
The Yadavs in Jati, the hamlet that adjoined Katra village, occupied the opposite end of this power spectrum. They
