My Second Day at the Bharat Jodo Yatra

There was a damp breeze under an overcast sky when our march began from outside Ballari at 6:30. Our destination was the village of Moka, near the Karnataka-Andhra Pradesh border. The distance between Ballari and Moka is 19 kilometres. From Santiniketan, where I did college, the district town Suri is 19 kilometres away. I never dreamed of walking the distance. What was unthinkable at the age of 17 is doable at 71. That is the magic of social uprisings. 

As I walked, I heard Hindi, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, Punjabi, Haryanvi, and an Indian language I could not identify. Among the diverse men and women were qualified professionals, working people, peasants, teachers, and students. That is, people from both urban and rural India, and of all ages. There were lots of young men. In our group of Swaraj India volunteers, two men in their twenties, Suheil and Arunoday were the principal coordinators. 

This picture shows Vinayak Rao Patil and Ganesh. Eighty-one-year-old Vinayak Rao from Maharashtra (Latur) would be one of the oldest civil society activists still walking the path of inqilab in India. He was with the Congress, and later, with Anna Hazare movement, and AAP in its initial phase. Many a time his dreams have been shattered, but he keeps on, undaunted. Ganesh, 21, is a student from Mangalore who supports Congress. He has taken a train to join the yatra at his own initiative. The yatra has brought together Vinayak and Ganesh.

Virendra Bagodia is a political worker who was jailed multiple times for his firebrand activism. He is a landless peasant from Haryana whose son is an engineer, and daughter, and MA. Bagodia ji carries the tallest national flag in the yatra, a flag post is so tall that he has to be careful not to touch an overhead electric wire. Mahendra Yadav, who is with me on a selfie, is from Gazipur, UP. Mahendra ji has literally “do bigha jamin”. Both Bagodia and Mahendra, who are in their sixties, are walking 3,500 kilometres from Kanyakumari to Kashmir. They have been with Swaraj India, the political party led by Yogendra Yadav for many years. Neither has much formal education, but when we talked politics, I was amazed to see how well-informed they are and the clarity of their views. 

Virendra from Haryana, Naushin from Kolkata, and Mahendra from Gazipur U.P.

Mahendra Yadav and me

The 118 “National Yatris” are walking from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. Besides, there are state yatris, and others like me. People in the yatra stay together in a community living area, share rudimentary amenities without complaint. Treat strangers as friends. At our camp in Moka this afternoon, I sat between Mahendra Yadav and a handsome young man. When I asked the young man what he did, he simply said, ‘I’m a Congress worker.’ An erudite man, he was a pleasant conversationalist. After the meal, Mahendra ji told me he is the son of a former chief minister. If Congress returned to power in his state, my companion at the lunch table would be a candidate to become the chief minister. 

On both days, I saw local people coming out of their homes to greet the yatris. Waiting for hours to meet Rahul Gandhi. Their goodwill for the yatra and its leader was palpable. They waved at us, smiled at us. It was a new experience to observe such goodwill from people I had never met, nor I ever will. 

Waiting to see Rahul Gandhi

I have written that the distance between Ballari and Moka is 19 kilometres. However, we began outside the town, and we would have walked only about 14 kilometres this morning. The yatra is not a well-knit procession. As people walk at different varying speeds, they get split into small groups. At the head of the yatra is the leader, that is Rahul Gandhi, who walks admirably fast, and the people who can keep up with him, plus the police cordon around them. Behind them are scatterings of yatris for two to three kilometres.  Another procession of high-end SUVs was a pain in the wrong place for the staggered walkers. They belonged to the out-of-shape Congressmen who could hardly walk, but were obliged to show their face to Mr Rahul Gandhi.

As I gradually fell behind, a local person stopped his motor bike and offer me lift. We didn’t have the bond of a common language, but the bond of Indianness was enough. I didn’t have the heart to say No to him, but I didn’t wish to cheat either. So, I got off after about 500 metres. 

On the way, I came across a temporary shed from where villagers were distributing apples, water bottles, tender coconuts etc. to the yatris. I stopped and checked with two men in the kiosk separately. Who organized all this? Congress? The answer was an emphatic “No!” from both. They said villagers had joined together to give some relief to the yatris. When I pointed out at the Congress banner behind, one of them said it was a gift from the local Congress unit. I am inclined to believe them because if a Congress leader had organised it, there would have been large flex banners with the man's portrait announcing his generosity.  

Does the spontaneous expression of love say something? 

Why Bharat Jodo?

Why did I, a person with no political affiliation except for a strong desire to reclaim a liberal democracy join the yatra? In the following lines, I will try to answer myself

Over the last eight years, a poison has taken hold of a lot of Indian Hindus. They believe that Muslims, who are 14% of the population, will somehow destroy the Hindus who are 80%. This is their core belief: Hindu khatre mein hai. Therefore, for their safety, they must pin down the Muslims now. This silly fiction—which has no evidentiary support—has divided India down the middle. It has also divided families and friends.

On one side of the divide are the people who believe they are in danger (the 37.36% of the electorate who voted for BJP in 2019, they are often upper caste Hindus). The group has been created and led by an efficient RSS-BJP machinery. 

On the other side of the line are Hindus who do not buy the “Hindus-are-in-danger” rubbish, along with Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Parsis, plus everyone else. The latter have no formal organization / leadership. After every government misadventure like demonetization, or CAA-NRC, or the Farm Bills, the second group protests. They also hope that as their agitations gain momentum, the opposition parties, who have not seriously challenged BJP-RSS, will defeat BJP through the ballot box. 

It will not happen.

Because of the poison I mentioned. The people who support the present regime see the economy tanking, they have seen dead bodies floating in the Ganga during the COVID pandemic, their nephew or niece may be unemployed for years, yet their faith in BJP is unflinching because they think only that party can “save” them from Muslims. Psychologists like Daniel Goleman say when your mind is in the grip of hatred and anger against someone, you cannot think straight. Your baser caveman instincts take hold of you. This, roughly, is the state of mind of the people who abuse Muslims day in and day out. In that state of mind, it is possible for women to garland a gang of criminals who serially raped a pregnant woman, smashed the body of her three-year-old daughter, and murdered her 14 family members for no reason other than hatred against Muslims. 

If we wish to regain our secular India, we must detoxify those people. But we can achieve little by arguing with them. What we need today is affirmative action to bring people together, to spread love.

Democracy is not self-executing. We must make it work, particularly at a time when the forces of hatred, divisiveness, and violence have taken root in our country. Bharat Jodo Yatra is an attempt to precisely do that. <>

16 October 2022

Bharat Jodo Yatra (BJY)—My first day

Last evening in about eight hours, we covered the distance of 311 kilometres from Bangaluru to Ballari, a mining town in western Karnataka that was earlier spelt as Bellary. The motley crowd of six yatris consisted of an exceedingly soft-spoken activist politician, an environmental activist and author, a tailor who's doing MA, an engineer, a young college prof, and me. Regarding the age profile, we were between in early twenties and early seventies. The six of us, who speak four different languages at home, have come to join the Bharat Jodo Yatra. As you might have guessed, a tiny bit of jodoing has already happened!

It was 10:30 PM when we reached the KRS Function Hall at one end of the town, our camp for the night Throughout South India, we have marriage / function halls which usually have three main sections: a big hall with a stage on one end, an equally big dining hall plus kitchen, and some bedrooms for people who would stay overnight. The main hall often seats 1000 or more people.

As we walked in, we found an empty ornate sofa on the stage at the far end of the main hall. More than 200 basic beds had been spread on the stage and the floor: cotton mattresses covered with garish bedsheets with designs in all the colours the human eye can see. Columns of plastic chairs were piled in a corner. At one end—somewhat unexpectedly—a large man in a dark T-shirt sat hunched before an equally large 24-inch computer screen, engrossed in work. Enormous fans fitted outside at the ground level blew in air through a grille. Although it was past 10:30, the lights were on. Few had slept. They were the yatris of the Bharat Jodo Yatra, the political Kumbh of our time. The men and women would have walked at least 30 kilometres during the day.

The adjacent dining hall had been divided into two parts. Half of it contained a similar array of beds, and the other half, two long rows of narrow dining tables covered with aluminium sheets. We quickly joined the few men and women who were eating. The simple vegetarian meal was piping hot and excellent.

As the halls had been full, we got a small room on the fourth floor. There were five of us in the two-bed airconditioned room with three beds on the floor. Enormously comfortable. 

The breakfast that I had next morning at 5:10 consisted of steaming upma, chatni, and kesar bath. A tall gentleman, who was possibly from the management of the function hall, was supervising the operations; he made us feel we were his personal guests. I silently saluted the famous Kannadiga hospitality and also, the Congress Party, which is organising the yatra. 

*

Inqilabs, that is, revolutions, are “the locomotives of history,” said Karl Marx. According to his most well-known follower Lenin, “Revolutions are the festivals of the oppressed and the exploited.” Nobody knows if the Bharat Jodo Yatra will turn into the locomotive that will ferry us from the present-day dystopia back to a civilised India, but when we were ferried in a van to the starting point of today’s yatra in the tenebrous light before sunrise, I did think I was witnessing a festival of the masses. 

The absolute exhilaration among people was to be seen to be believed. At the beginning of the long procession, local artistes in ceremonial attires—many of them wearing huge masks—presented a pageantry with the accompaniment of drums. They were followed by Congress Seva Dal Volunteers in white. Then came groups of yatris raising slogans. The slogans were surprisingly creative and nonviolent, like, Jodisi jodisi, Bharata jodisi in Kannada (Join, join, join India), or in Hindi: Hum Bhagat Singh ke diwane hai, hum nahi rukhne walle hai (We love Bhagat Singh, we aren't going to give up!) There were NO murdabads, hai hais, or down-downs. 

Except for the Seva Dal volunteers and the performing artistes, the rest of the participants didn’t form two neat columns, as if to highlight that their participation was spontaneous, voluntary, and free from regimentation. A festival, in short. 

My friends Kamlendra Pratap and Jeevan had warned me that when Rahul Gandhi arrived, he would be accompanied by a flood that would throw away anything in their path. The flood arrived soon. 

Rahul Gandhi, who walks really fast, sets the pace and the rest of the people walk / run with him. He has his security men in black safari suits around him and then an outer ring of close associates and registered yatris. Around all of them, state policemen in khaki made a moving cordon with a thick yellow rope and walked along. The mobile yellow ring was the nucleus of the yatra. Beside, in front of, and behind it, there were thousands more walking cheerfully, shouting slogans. 

Can you see Rahul Gandhi? If you can, you'll know how much risk he is taking.

Many of them were local people and curious onlookers. They were keen to get a good glimpse and maybe, a picture of Rahul Gandhi. Some went into the ring and close to Rahul Gandhi after getting a nod from the people in charge of security. Rahul smiled, shook hands, and spoke with each one of them, as people took selfies. But most of his fans were not so fortunate. They would walk as close to the yellow cordon as possible, and try go ahead of Rahul Gandhi to get a good look. 

As soon as the cordon approached where I was, a deluge of people threw me away from the road. And once the deluge went past, Jeevan and I fell back and followed the yatra at a relaxed pace, lending our voices to whoever was leading the slogan near us.  

I got a strong feeling that the yatris aren't going to give up even after the yatra ends. <>

15 October 2022

Bharat Jodo Yatra (BJY)—Day Zero

On the way to Bellary with a group of wonderful people. To walk in the Bharat Jodo Yatra.

My participation will mean little to the Yatra, but the yatra should make a world of difference to me. The picture below has been sent by a friend. It is a picture of the Yatra today somewhere in the remote Chitradurga District of Karnataka.

 Let the mainstream media ignore, let the ruling dispensation and their cohorts try to mass-produce hatred, Bharat is joining herself … and erasing ugly lines that have been dividing her children in the recent past.

 Love spreads, quietly, but unquestionably, just as the sapling grows in front of your eyes but without you noticing it. Away from TV studios and troll factories.

 Watch this space for updates.

 

14 October 2022

Illiberal India

 

According to the Telegraph e-paper today (14 September 2020), 80 people are murdered in India every day. That is, about 29,000 homicides are committed in our country every year.

One of these happened in Bengaluru on 5 September 2017, when a small-built 55-year-old woman, Gauri Lankesh was shot from behind by two men on a motorcycle when she was about to enter her home after the day’s work. Until that afternoon, she had been editing and publishing a Kannada weekly: Gauri Lankesh Patrike.

It calls for infinite cowardice to murder an unarmed woman in the crepuscular darkness of the evening. But that is not why her murder shook the nation.

Gauri Lankesh was the fourth victim in a row after Narendra Dabholkar, Malleshappa Kalburgi, and Govind Pansare. Each one of them was a rationalist who protested against the deep-rooted superstitions of the Hindu religion and promoted a scientific way of life. It has now been established that each of them was killed for their belief by some extreme Hindu right-wing politico-religious Taliban-style extremists. The same killers apparently murdered Kalburgi and Gauri, using the same gun, as noted by forensic experts.

Gauri was a crusader for the values enshrined in Lingayatism, founded and propagated by the 12th-century philosopher and statesman Basava in Karnataka. The original Lingayat sect was unbelievably egalitarian, and had as their preacher people from the so-called lower castes, even prostitutes. It was a revolutionary movement which had to be suppressed by the upper-caste Hindus through much bloodshed, but the flame could not be extinguished.

However, in the recent years, in the rising time of Brahminism among Hinds, Lingayats have been absorbed as another sect within the dominant Hindu establishment and their original egalitarian values have been buried. Gauri opposed this construct.

Gauri Lankesh was also a political activist who began her career as an English language journalist, but later, relentlessly fought the rise of Hindutwa which has been destroying the secular structure of India. A divorcee who never married again, she was a mentor to several young people who an average Indian looks up to as their future saviours. Gauri adopted several of them as her children, including Kanhaia Kumar and Sheila Rashid.

The three bullets that pierced Gauri’s slender body was fired by two cowardly men, but they were not alone. A gigantic project that aims to marginalise Muslims, Christians, and Dalits, that has been trying their best to convert India into a Hindu Pakistan was behind the men holding the trigger, although the connection is hardly clear or easily discernible.

Chidanand Rajghatta, ex-husband and lifelong friend of Gauri Lankesh, exposes the connection through painstaking research with the help of his deep understanding of the situation in Karnataka and India by virtue of being a top journalist.

The story of their personal lives meshes neatly with the recent history of India and the changes we are wading through.

Please read this book. It will help you understand the India of the 21^st century better.

14 September 2020

Playback theatre, Bengaluru

Last night, I was at a performance by Playback Theatre, Bengaluru, and this morning, the omniscient Wikipedia told me what it means: “Playback Theatre is an original form of improvisational theatre in which audience or group members tell stories from their lives and watch them enacted on the spot.”

Turning back a few pages, it was possibly in the 1980s when I watched some of Badal Sarkar’s plays after he took theatre out of the proscenium. During those performances, the audience used to sit on the four sides of a bare hall with zero props, with their backs to the wall and the actors were in the middle. They would directly interact with the audience and often, different men and women would play out different parts of the same play at the same time on two or more parts of the hall. It was an experience.

I do not remember all the Badal Sarkar plays that I lived through on the first floor of the Theosophical Society premises off College Street in Kolkata. It was a fascinating combination, some guys reportedly got in touch with ghosts on the ground floor, even as Badal Sarkar’s ruthless realism played out on the first floor. I watched Michil (Procession) and Bhoma, and a few others there. But what I experienced last night was even more fascinating, and in a moment, I’ll explain why.

There were four actors, three girls and a boy in their twenties, two musicians, a boy who played different instruments and a girl who played the guitar and sang beautifully. The seventh member of the team, the anchor person, got the audience involved in the performance. Last night’s proceedings began with a simple question “How do you feel now?”

A young man sitting next to me said he had taken four Uber rides during the day, and all the four drivers had been Muslims. He said that he hadn’t interacted much with two of them, but with the other two, both driver and the passenger ended up crying together. The moment he stopped, a girl was driving a taxi and the four actors performed the narrator’s experience with an incredible degree of understanding and sophistication. I was dumbstruck. How did they work so well without any preparation? Could they read each other’s mind?

From there, the compere moved on to how the audience felt (after three days of pogrom in Delhi). From there, the discursive conversation moved on to “resistance” and how individual members of the audience was initiated to the idea of resistance. Someone got the idea from penny-less, cast-away former freedom fighter in his early childhood, someone when she studied the Jim Crow Laws at a university in the US and related the caste system she had lived through as a child without ever realising there was anything wrong about it.

The brilliant ensemble brought to life each one of those experiences.

It was so heartening to see these young men and women, who have such depth and who have to offer so much to us. Once again, I thought we must not lose hope. Our future is bright!

Thursday, 27 February 2020

Thotadhahalli In the Land of Coffee

In a way, the desk that I’m writing on is like a sepia photograph. Made of teak and intricately carved, it can be a hundred years old. It’s five in the morning, dark outside, but the world is far from silent. Sibilant sound of air rustling through thousands of silver oak trees is interspersed with gusts of rain lashing the tiled roof of our cottage. But unlike yesterday, the birds are quiet. Are they too soggy and dispirited after the long night of relentless rains?

Welcome to Thotadhahalli Coffee Estate, a short five-hour drive from Bengaluru, but it’s actually on another planet. Two days ago, on a sudden impulse we drove down to this place, which is 10 kilometres from the coffee capital of the country, Chikmagaluru.

As we left the tarred road that goes to Shimoga at Kaimara, Google Map died peacefully and Mother Nature filled our world completely. Fortunately, there were signposts to tell us that our destination was at the end of the narrow alley covered with black soil.

The bungalow, like the other planter’s bungalows, is large. On one side of the main building is a cemented flat space for drying coffee beans. On the other side are the cottages given as home stay. As we enter, quaint charm of a faraway past greets us.

Around a lush green garden, there are cottages with wide verandas with dark red floor and roofs covered with vermilion Mangalore tiles supported by solid carved rosewood pillars that have the stamp of the refined taste one comes across all along the Malabar Coast, in the Raja Rao country. The cottages and the verandas are strewn with ancient wood carvings, gold-inlayed Tanjore paintings, and artefacts from around the world. And not one of them is kitsch!

If you can turn your eyes off the pieces of art and look at the garden again, you will be greeted by orchids, aerophytes (plants that grow without soil, drawing sustenance from moist air), and bonsai plants, while majestic oaks that provide shade to coffee plants sway in the background.

It is a planter’s home, but it could well have been an artist’s – everything has a touch of class here, including the brass lock on our door which has the head of a soldier stamped on it with the inscription “Field Marshall Sir Thomas Biyami”. When did anyone make such a lock last?

Back to the 21st Century, our hosts Pallavi and Prakash make their guests feel at home, literally. The food offered is refined Coorg fare, and every meal is different from the previous one. While we have food, one of our hosts makes it a point to come and check that everything is fine.

Well, everything is, when old-world charm meets the convenience of modern amenities, with the added blessing of the absence of the TV and the Internet.

Ah! As I come to the end of another page in my diary, birds have just been waking up and filling the sky with warble, and the ground below is taken over by the aroma of the finest Arabica coffee. And the sky is clearing up; it’s time to go for a lazy walk through the coffee estate which has denser foliage than most jungles.

Thotadhahalli / 04 August 2017

A memorable journey (with Deepika)

[I am sure that in school, you wrote an essay on this topic. I did, a number of times. Here is the last piece I will ever write with this heading.]

One of my most memorable journeys has happened just today. No, I didn’t go to see the sun rising on the Kanchenjunga, nor did I see any canyon, nor the Taj. I didn’t even drive through a fascinating countryside in the fading light of a dipping sun. I just took a flight from Kolkata and came to our second home in Bengaluru.

Let me begin at the beginning. If you are a frequent flier through the Kolkata airport, you would know that most of their trolleys are physically challenged. So the first stroke of good luck was that I discovered one that had all the four wheels.

As I was approaching the tail of a longish queue at the Jet Airways counter, a young girl who was womanning the farthest counter – which no one seemed to have noticed – came out from behind her desk and asked me and a few others to move to her counter. She needn’t have. I felt she was not just doing a job, she was actually “serving” people. If all the employees in the service sectors believed that they were in the business of serving, life would be so much better! It is a shame that I didn’t read her name tag.

There was no queue at the security check, and unlike a few other times, I didn’t forget to collect my laptop on the other side. I bought a handful of magazines and newspapers and settled down in a cosy chair. As I was debating with myself whether I should buy a coffee for a hundred bucks, I was stunned and mesmerised. Deepika Padukone was pulling a trolley-bag and was walking right in front of me! She was in a striped top, black jeans, and a light blue jacket casually thrown around her shoulders. As I watched her carefully, trying my best to look disinterested, my blood pressure rose ... and then fell. I realised she was actually not the diva. But she could have been Deepika’s twin sister lost in a fairground. Or at least, she was an excellent carbon copy of the beauty, taken when the carbon paper was fresh and new.

On the plane, a had an aisle seat and was watching the Bengali mom seating next to me combing the hair of her twelve-year old son. As she was going through the procedure, she loudly complained that the boy hadn’t even learned to comb his hair. (How on earth would he, with such a loving mother? No wonder lots of Bong boys never grow up! They just move from under their mother’s pallu to their wife’s, and the two women fight over their possession till the cows come home.)

And then, Deepika Padukone boarded the aircraft. She walked straight towards me, smiled and said, ‘Sir, I think you are in my seat.’ I had noticed that my seat number was 16 D, but somehow, it had become 14 D in my pickled brain. I always mix up numbers and dates and names and faces – my students have some entertainment on the side as I regularly call Bipasha Vishakha and Soumen Soumitro. Anyways, for a change, I thanked my dysfunctional memory as I got to get a million-dollar smile thanks to it. The flight took off before time.

The food was good. Jet Airways goes out of its way to cater to the food preferences of their finicky customers. Besides the usual veg and non-veg fare, they had low-fat, gluten-free, and Jain meals. And the two stewards, Subhashish and Saif who served us were exceedingly polite and helpful, like their colleague at the check-in counter.

It's common knowledge that the quality of service is inversely proportional to the size of an organisation. Of all the airlines I have flown, British Airways perhaps has the snootiest air-hostesses. At home, Indigo was super when they started. But as the airline grew bigger, the smile on the faces of their employees became shorter and shorter, until it vanished completely. Anyway, coming back to today, during the two-hour flight, Saif and Subhashish continuously moved up and down the aisle, bringing a paper to someone, a coke to another and so on, with a professional but genuine smile on their faces all the time. And the pleasant experience didn’t end there.

My bag was the first to come out on the conveyor belt and as is usual at the Bangalore Airport, I got a taxi without any hassle. But the icing on the cake was the unjammed roads – I covered the distance of forty kilometres in an hour, something that you usually do in your dreams in Bengaluru.

My stars chose to shine brightly on me yesterday. I ought to have bought a lottery ticket after reaching home.

Bengaluru / Tuesday, 08 August 2016