The election as a personal emo trip

Election season came at a time of great personal and professional crisis for me. The companion of my every thought for the past year-odd was not around anymore; the wind in my sails was gone.

Election, then, became an excuse to launch myself mindlessly into the summer. There was no one to go home to, no one to reflect with at the end of the day. I didn't hear anyone telling me to take well-deserved-breaks at the end of long days in the sun. I packed a bag, and I left.

Lion capital at Vaishali, seen with a part of the Ananda stupa. If Modi contested from here,
I guess he would have claimed the Buddha called him. Fair enough.

It has been more than 45 days since that first trip. There have been a few one-day breaks in between, during which I spent planning the next day's journey. I must have gone numb at some point: I felt my joints ache for the first time on Friday, when all the reporting was done and the only job at hand was to file the last story. In the evening, as I took a walk around Patna's Gandhi Maidan, I realised I was scared of what lies ahead.

What I learned these 45 days should be fuel enough for a long journey. The first lesson was the most important and I have to thank a 2009 ethnographic study I was part of: I learned that, if I removed myself from the immediate concerns of winning and losing, I could actually learn quite a lot. That led to a near-obsessive effort to avoid predicting winners. The 2009 study was a booth-level one and even after talking to the booth's voters for more than a month, I wasn't able to predict how they would vote. Of late, I'm sure I came across as inadequate to many people who eagerly asked me to gaze at the crystal ball. Instead, I bored them by talking about the various factors at play in each constituency. I often pictured myself as standing in the middle of a milling crowd, wet finger in the air. While it obviously helped me laugh at myself, the image also kept me on track.

There were worrying moments, nothing more serious than the time I travelled with Aam Aadmi Party candidate Dayamani Barla and her supporters through the Khunti night after campaigning. I'd broken my own Standard Operating Procedure, which was to not travel with candidates in suspected left wing extremist areas. To add to it all, the People's Liberation Front of India were after Barla: if someone had flicked on the light inside the car, my white knuckles would have been on show. All of which makes Barla's and her supporters' efforts extraordinary. Later, as I traveled to Bihar's villages, I was shocked at the communal divide: people kept telling me it was normal during an election season, but I doubt things will just decide to go back to being the way they were when dawn breaks on May 17.

Hazaribagh, ahead of the Ram Navami procession. A float supposedly depicting Narendra Modi in the middle, outgoing MP Yashwant Sinha to his right and Sinha's son Jayant - the BJP candidate - to his left. I was deeply disturbed by the communalisation on show; that Jayant Sinha, who must have told me at least four times during out 20-minute-meeting that he studied in Harvard, would need something like to win.

There were moments of disgust, too. This section almost exclusively belongs to journalists - the man who asked a senior Jharkhand leader for money in front of me at the Jamshedpur airport, another in Palamu who advised me to ask for "travel expenses" when I meet an outgoing MP. I looked everywhere for Muslim, adivasi, dalit journalists, but found none. Maybe I looked in the wrong places, but what I saw also told me journalists' biases were out in public: I was in Dumka when Giriraj Singh made his go-to-Pakistan speech in adjacent Godda and couldn't find a reporter willing to share the footage. The NDTV clip online was only 43 seconds long and I correctly suspected the BJP would claim it was taken out of context. However, journalists who I knew had access to it refused to divulge contents. The same evening, I flipped regional Hindi channels to discover they were not reporting on the speech. Instead, there was a lot of righteous anger in studios about Nitin Gadkari's reported comments that, "Caste is in Bihar's DNA." Well, duh.

Sadness was everywhere. When Simon Marandi - since fired from the Hemant Soren cabinet - described the decay of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, I was almost moved to tears. Which was weird, because Simon is a particularly foul-mouthed man. I had been working on a speculative story on the end of the JMM in Dumka then. As I would realise, I was late to the party: JMM was already dead in an "End of History" way. It was quite shocking to see Shibu Soren being controlled by the people around him. They weren't letting the poor man talk.

Ram Vilas Bhagat (97) of Hajipur constituency, who says he was abducted an made to submit nomination papers against Ram Vilas Paswan by the local Yadav strongman. 

There was more sadness than anger in Dumka's Sikaripara police station on April 24 night, as news of the death of colleagues in a Maoist attack came in. It would turn to anger overnight, as the realisation that a suspected malicious nature of deployment by the Superintendent of Police himself had meant poorly trained policemen were on duty in high-risk areas. The Times of India's district correspondent Rajesh Pandey suggested we visit the district hospital that night and what I saw there destroyed whatever faith I had left in Jharkhand's leaders.

That the same night should be the source of astounding wonder should be written in the stars. At some point, as the death tolls kept going up, I looked up in frustration. And there they were, the stars. I could not take my eyes away: at some point, I'd forgotten to look at the stars.

Sunflowers, Supaul.
the sunflower/ that scorned lover/ refused to look/ as the sun went behind her back

However, I found time to stop and click the flowers in Bihar's Supaul. Sunflowers, yes - and I guess you can't smell them without being a pollen carrier and sneeze machine yourself - but that was a #win for sure. I guess it took little to make me happy this season. There was the Cherry Berry Ice Stick by Bihar's Sudha, for one. Essentially a rose milk popsicle topped with two cherries, it became a staple. Rose milk means memories, too - it was amma's treat every time we went to the Indian Coffee House in Chinnakkada together. There was the Santhali midnight service for Easter in Dumka, probably the most peaceful Christian service I've attended. Happiness was the realisation in Raxaul, Bihar that Nepal was across the road; happiness was getting to the room each evening to find the jeans had loosened a bit more around my waist.

The absence of election issues in Jharkhand was disturbing. I had this illuminating conversation with an aide to a political leader once. It was night and the young man, also staying at the same hotel, came over to my room. He wanted to know about Kerala. "What are the usual election issues in Kerala?" I didn't get the question, so told him there was no one set of issues all the time; people also look at candidates' performance, etc. He didn't get the point at all. "So whom do the Brahmins vote for?" Everyone, I said. He had got me so pissed, so when he asked, "What do the Brahmins of Kerala eat?" I said beef. Sent him on his way. I wouldn't be surprised if I see him occupy an important position in the state soon.

Bihar was fun. The sight of .303s was a welcome sight, for one: there were no commandos creating a secure perimeter, no need to worry at the sight of a break in the road and get out to check for landmines, no SOPs. On my second morning there, I was in a helicopter with Sharad Yadav. Evening found me in an open jeep with Pappu Yadav. I've written of Sharad Yadav elsewhere, but Pappu was quite, errr, charming. He had his way with people, who were tripping over each other to please him: the man was suffering from diarrhea, but ate from every plate kept before him. Bihar was fun also because of Prakash Jha, who let me tag along for almost a whole day while he campaigned as a JD(U) candidate in Raxaul. There were many anecdotes, many uses of the f-word and the man seemed genuinely interested in having serious political discussions.

I'm starting a Pappu Yadav Fans' Club.

From what I saw of the two states - and I didn't go to the Maoist areas of Bihar, mind you - Jharkhand's election campaign has lost intimacy. This may be largely due to security reasons, but Jharkhand's difficult terrain also has a say: end-to-end, Singhbhum constituency is about 200 km and cannot be physically covered by a candidate in 10 days. In Jharkhand, too many leaders were falling from the sky and there was a disconnect in what they were saying and what people wanted. In hindsight, this was probably one reason why the BJP failed to impose a ""wave" in the state. In Bihar, on the other hand, people seemed to be clued into political rhetoric - all across Muzaffarpur, people were using the metaphor of "roti palatna hai" to mean a change in government at the center and state. I believe this must have come from the BJP; a Narendra Modi speech, most likely.

There was hope in Saranda as the people of Tirilposi voted without having to worry about having their "hands chopped off" as a lot of villagers told me outside the polling booth. I don't really know whether the Maoists chopped off hands in the past for voting, but only a handful of residents had voted in the past 12 years or so. Though of a different kind, there was hope in the Bihar countryside - that Narendra Modi will secure borders, build roads, defeat the Maoists, bring about social change and teach the Muslims a lesson. I really hope the man realises the implications of what he has done.

A pleasant surprise in Muzaffarpur: Rupesh Kumar Kunwar (green jacket), an Independent candidate meets Akshay Verma (marigold garland) on the road. Verma's contesting as the candidate of a party he floated.
"We want good people to win from here. I am supporting you," Kunwar says.

Despite all the places visited, these 45 days were about the people. Journalists and well-wishers who set up meetings and introduced me to their contacts: my Bihar counterpart Santosh Singh, Prakash Pandey in Hazaribagh and Sanjay Soni in Madhepura, to name a few. Sub-editors in Delhi who had to plod through copies when I indulged the writer in me. Candidates who found time to talk despite knowing my reports won't get them even a vote. The people of Jharkhand who continued to be such impeccable hosts. Those in Bihar who became a target of my caste pilgrimages. Strangers in tea shops, village chowks and courtyards who sat down for a confessional - sharing their hopes, fears, even hatred - never knowing they were being conned into being a part of my therapeutic process.

At the end of it all, I now realise there were days when the thought of her didn't cross my mind.