April 30, Chhapra
"What's your name?" asked Sharad Yadav as soon as we met in his house at Madhepura town. I'd encountered this question before too and as he would demonstrate during the course of the day, the JD(U) president was not really intent on knowing my name. This was an attempt to know what came after my name. There was a time - in Delhi, especially - when I'd happily say "Deepu Sebastian," sometimes to hilarious consequences. "You Srivastava? Me Srivastava! From UP?" said a man grabbing my hand to shake it violently. He was late and had been rushing to catch the opening ceremony of the Delhi Commonwealth Games, but found time to stand outside the stadium and be interviewed for two minutes.
If it was a foreign middle name that made me start using my first name more often, in Jharkhand it almost became a compulsion. My surname, my "title," as they call it there, would be my marker. And I didn't want to give anyone the pleasure of judging me by name.
Bihar, I had come to imagine, would be worse. But then, Sharad Yadav would top worse and then some. I should have known: this was a man who pissed off the upper castes so much, someone has vandalised his Wikipedia page by keying in, "....He also is pro-reservation and supports divisions based on castes in the society instead of promoting meritocracy." So when I told Yadav my first name, he shot back, "Deepu, yes....but what is your caste?" I smiled politely and said that I was from Kerala and didn't know my caste. Yadav looked thoroughly displeased.
Once inside his SUV, Yadav was quite happy to recount his memories of Kerala Socialists. I played along, but wanted to drag him back to caste: it is not everyday that one gets to directly engage with an individual who puts to test all those theories discussed in classrooms and coffee shops. It was time to use my identity as leverage. "I am from a caste that was supposed to catch fish. We are OBCs," I said.
Yadav was positively glowing when I told him that. After all, he had earlier been berating the Hindi news channel reporter ahead of me: "You in the media are all of one caste. How will you understand the problems of the oppressed?" Yadav seemed to enroll me into some private club immediately. "You are a mallaah," he tagged, stamped and sorted me. "We will be going to a mallaah village today. Your people must be going to the sea to catch fish. There's a different caste for that," he mentioned a caste name, but I failed to catch that.
My problem was with the apparent clash of two ideas that the JD(U) was dealing with - vikas, even as it tried to create and nuture caste-based votebanks. There would be no point trying to ask such a question to many politicians in this country: they remain surprisingly coy of describing their votebanks. An exception would be Lalu Prasad, who almost proudly called his votebank the M-Y. The only other time I had probed a politician on the question of identity during this election was when I asked former Jharkhand chief minister Babulal Marandi whether he was a leader of the adivasis, specifically the Santhals - his tribe. This was in Dumka, the heart of the Santhal Pargana, where Babulal was making a move to become precisely that. But his ambition to be chief minister made him tell me that he was a leader of the poor. It took some prodding for him to use the word "adivasi" in a sentence; he said that since adivasis were the poorest, fighting for the poor would made him their representative, too.
There would be no such problems with Sharad Yadav. "No one here votes according to his caste....Everyone is with me here," was his first claim. So I pointed out that the constituency has not sent a non-Yadav to the Lok Sabha since 1957 or so. "Arre, don't you understand your own society? What kind of a journalist are you?" I was learning that Sharad Yadav on the backfoot is a vicious opponent. "I am told the Yadavs are voting for the RJD this time," I said. "You media don't understand the society. People don't look at caste when voting. What happened in 2009 and 2010?" asked Yadav, pointing out that the Yadav candidates of the RJD overwhelmingly lost while the Yadav candidates of his party won in large numbers. "So, you were keeping tabs of the number of Yadavs who won and lost?" I asked. "Of course! Everybody has caste," he said.
I'm sure that at least a part of what Yadav said was right: I had parachuted into Saharsa only the previous night. However, I got the sense that, facing the prospect of coming third this election, Yadav was trying to tell his voters that though caste exists, it should not matter. It remains a fact that what carried Yadav over the line four times in Madhepura was the BJP's votes: he managed to bring in some Yadav and Muslim votes but was always dependent on how the RJD fared. He also broke his own rules. Yadav went to the house of the convicted Bahubali and former MP Anand Mohan, a Rajput, to seek his mother's blessings. The desperation was not lost on anyone. In other places, he presented vikas as something above caste. "Caste will not give you electricity, bridges and this helicopter," he said at Sahugarh, pointing to the Eurocopter EC120 in which we had flown in, the spitoon for his khaini habit on the floor between us.
As we touched down at Manuan in Mahishi block and on the banks of the Kosi, he pointed at the upturned boats kept at the periphery. "Mallaahs!" he said, grinning. I became a campaign prop at the village: "I have brought along a journalist from Kerala today, someone from your Mallaah caste." Yadav later told me he had looked around for me at that moment, but I was thankfully standing by a speaker to listen to the speech and avoided becoming a specimen.
As we got into the chopper at the end of the meeting there, I was on the side where most people were. Yadav slapped me sharply on my arm and ordered, "Wave!" so I raised an awkward right hand. Slap again. "Wave at the people in the back!" I turned around and waved. People waved back. Then, as the rotor's RPM increased, they ran back and disappeared in a cloud of dust.
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