To be a Maoist in Jharkhand

(This was published, edited, here.)

In the dark about what his bosses think about him, yest over-worked and under-rested. Separated from his wife and unable to see his mother who suffers from mouth cancer. 

Jeevan Kandulna (36) could be just be another Indian man who keeps his emotions bottled. However, Jeevan's is no ordinary life.

In a rare, candid interview, a platoon commander of the Communist Party of India-Maoist's People's Liberation Guerrilla Army spoke to this newspaper in the past week within the Porahat forest of Jharkhand's West Singhbhum district.

Jeevan assumed de-facto charge of the crucial Porahat sub-zone when senior leader Prasadji - whose real name is Krishan Ahir - was picked up by Ranchi police on August 13. "The party has not yet sent a replacement for Prasadji. In fact, no senior leader has talked to me since his arrest. I am supposed to co-ordinate with Bundu sub-zonal commander Dheeraj-da, but it has not been easy," said Jeevan, a Munda adivasi who uses the name Gajendra Singh, hails from Khunti district's Torpa block.

A full platoon of the PLGA comprises 30 fighters. There are at least two other platoons in the Porahat sub-zone. Kundan Pahan, the second-most wanted Maoist leader in the state, moves around with one of them.

The police made another significant arrest after Prasadji's, taking in Mukhlal Mahto (Mochu), who they say replaced Prasadji in Ranchi's Silli sub-zone. Jeevan disputes this: "As far as I know, the in-charge of Silli has been Pragati-da. But then, I wouldn't be so sure - I have not been reading newspapers for the last few months."

When this newspaper visited the site from where police say Mochu was arrested, villagers claimed he was brought in a police vehicle and that no encounter with his squad took place, as claimed by the police. With Prasadji, senior police officers have confirmed to this newspaper that he was picked up while on his way to meet his girlfriend and that no encounter had taken place as claimed before the the media.

Despite the arrests, Jeevan believes Silli has been a major gain. "The party was never present in Silli. We used to use it only as a corridor (connecting West Bengal's Purulia district) and could not afford to stay. We established a sub-zone and Prasadji was given additional charge of it earlier this year," said Jeevan.

The reason why Jeevan could not read newspapers was because he was down with brain malaria since June. Later, when Kundan Pahan's elder brother Dimba - a platoon commander who uses the name Suresh - joins us, he also reveals he was recently diagnosed with malaria.

Jeevan admits the party organisation is not in a healthy state in his region. "We had to hurriedly celebrate the Martyrs' Week (July) this year. The Foundation Week celebrations too, were held hurriedly in four places. The police were swarming here," he said. The Maoists have not managed to conduct the Tactical Counter Offensive Campaign - when they plan and execute major attacks against security forces - yet this year. The party is yet to announce its plan of action ahead of the assembly elections here.

"When a school teacher was arrested for being our supporter, we tried to conduct a mass agitation demanding that his replacement be posted immediately. People did not turn up in large numbers," he said. The party has been trying to mobilise alleged victims of sexual harrassment by security forces on anti-left wing extremist operations, but villagers remain scared to speak up. "I have asked a victim and her father to meet me. They are not coming forward," said Jeevan, constantly reminding us that his operational area shares space with Birsa Munda's.

Jeevan says the grassroots organisation has gone missing: "The party works through its committees. We don't have the Nari (Mukti Sangh) and (Krantikari) Kisan Committee are non-existent. I am the only person running the party here; there should be at least three." The situation is akin to a civilian head of state also being the chief of armed staff. In a sign that the Maoist party has come to be an overtly militaristic organisation, Jeevan says his militia is still strong. "Recruitment is still healthy. Our cadres could do with more training, though. Also, a number of them are not staying for long," he said.

In July this year, the West Singhbhum police had arrested a man travelling with 13 minors. He named Jeevan, saying the children had been on their way to join his squad. Most of the 10-15 sentries who secured the perimeter and kept watch looked like they were pushing the envelope when it comes to looking over 18 years old. When they were making their cadres pose for photographs, Suresh mumbled, "Only the two of us are left as seniors. Everyone else is gone."

Jeevan says he joined the party in 2009. His story is symptomatic of the conditions the CPI-Maoist operates in South Chotanagpur. "I joined after a neighbour who was with the PLFI (People's Liberation Front of India, the state's largest splinter group) killed one of my sisters. Those in my family then began attempting to kill him or his relatives," said Jeevan. Eventually, when he needed external support to counter the PLFI, Jeevan went over to the Maoists. His village is less than a kilometre from Jiten Gudiya's, the PLFI's second-in-command.

The PLFI is the enemy that knows the Maoists all too well and is the immediate threat. Jeevan admits of the three areas in his sub-zone, his party has no presence in one. "They keep coming into our territory. When we try to encounter them, they run away," he said.

The police are also closing in. Jeevan's wife Nirmala was arrested on July 8. This means Jeevan is yet to see his daughter, who was two months old then. He insists his wife was never a member of the party even while admitting two of his sisters were. "Recently, the police took my brother to meet my wife. It must have been to convince me to surrender, because he came back saying the government would give me land, money and five police security guards if I gave up arms," he said. Neither the state's or the central government's surrender policies have provisions for armed guards. He laughs at the suggestion, though. "It was easy to identify and fight the amgrez. On the other hand, these kala angrez - those who cheat our people - are not easy targets," he said.

Jeevan talks of a night early in October when he went to visit his mother, who has cancer in the mouth. "I had to see her because I had not been home for a long time due to my malaria. My parents keep telling me not to come as the police keep an eye out for me. As soon as I reached, the police arrived. I ran, hid in the forest for a day and escaped," he said.

As if it was an afterthought, Jeevan also says that his joining had to do with more than personal gains. "I was there when the Koel-Karo firing took place. I saw people die because they did not have anything to fight back with," he said. The February 2, 2001 firing, which took place in what is now Khunti district, resulted in the death of eight people when police took on those agitating against a hydroelectric project.

Love Tinderbox

The Sangh Parivar had organised a bandh in Ranchi on Monday. On Thursday, the BJP called for one in Chatra. Today, the VHP has declared a shutdown in Khunti. On the day after Eid too, there was a bandh by the Sangh Parivar - to protest a clash in Ranchi between Muslims, adivasis and the police the previous day, in which one individual had died.

The Monday bandh was protesting the delay in the arrest of Ranjeet Singh Kohli, whose wife Tara Shahdeo alleged that he had assaulted her with the intention of converting her to Islam. The Sangh Parivar alleged that it was a case of Love Jihad. The momentum it created through a campaign wholeheartedly supported by the media helped them proclaim an incident in Chatra too, as an instance of Love Jihad and declare another bandh. On Friday, the VHP is protesting the alleged vandalising of an idol in at least one temple in Khunti.

November cannot come soon enough for Jharkhand. As the state inches closer to possibly holding elections that month, the sense is that a communal stake is being driven into the society, one hammering at a time.

Those who usually brand journalists as "paid and sickular" at the first available opportunity have been silent through the reporting surrounding the Tara-Ranjeet case. The media has given them little reason to be aggrieved about. "Do you think he [Ranjeet] is part of the ISI?" asked the reporter of a news channel to Tara in the presence of this newspaper. The 23-year-old, once an Eastern Zone champion in 10 m air rifle, looked perplexed. Another channel showed video footage of Ranjeet's mother swaying at her son's wedding to argue that she was well enough to assault her daughter-in-law.

The English dailies jumped on the bandwagon, too. Reporting on the seizure of Ranjeet's passport, one of them called him only as Rakibul Hasan Khan, the name Tara alleges he uses while in his Islamic identity. The newspaper's insistence on using the name came despite the passport itself being in Ranjeet Singh Kohli's name. Another published a report which claimed Ranjeet was being probed for terror links without having a single official say - either on or off the record - about the nature of allegations. The only quote on the claim is one by the state DGP, who merely says his force is probing, "all angles." By that yardstick, Ranjeet surely should be a suspect in the FIFA bribery scandal. The headline to a report in an English daily here on Friday has gone ahead and called Ranjeet a "love jihadist."

What the media does not realise is that it is becoming propaganda tools in the process. When the BJP declared a bandh in Chatra on Thursday, it alleged that a Muslim boy had been arrested for deceiving a Hindu girl into marrying him. The media has largely gone by the BJP-VHP version of events. Muslim Boy Jailed For Deceiving Girl goes the headline to a report in an English daily, which begins, "Another case of alleged love jihad was reported from Chatra district...." The report ignore the fact that the FIR does not mention conversions and that the boy was jailed because he had sexual relations with the girl, a minor. On Thursday, a Hindi daily reported that the family of a girl in Hazaribagh was alleging that she had been kidnapped by Muslim boys for religious conversion. The paper played up the conversion claim, relegating the Superintendent of Police's explanation that the couple had been in a relationship and had eloped, to the last sentence of its report.

What the reporting around the Tara-Ranjeet case in Jharkhand has exposed is also a shifting of goalposts by the Sangh Parivar: that it has altered the definition of its own conspiracy theory to suit its aims. When the Love Jihad allegations first surfaced in Kerala and Mangalore in 2008-'09, the Sangh Parivar alleged a larger conspiracy whereby Muslim boys were asked to entrap Hindu girls. Now, as the Chatra and Hazaribagh incidents would indicate, it is Love Jihad enough to "deceive" or fall in love with a Hindu girl on your own. Even the Sangh Parivar has alleged that Ranjeet is part of a wider network and the media has picked up on the insinuation, but there has been no evidence or anecdote to support the claim.

Surely, a lot of allegations against Ranjeet may come true yet. The police say he has accepted that he has friends in the judiciary, that he kept a room for himself in a hotel in Ranchi to entertain high-profile guests late into the night and that he assaulted his wife once. He has even accepted that he performed the nikaah two days after marrying Tara in a Hindu ceremony, but claims it was with the girl's consent and that he has never converted to Islam himself. However, media organisations have been only too happy to fill in the gaps in the story with theories of their own: when a former neighbour of the Kohlis' claims Ranjeet's mother was born a Muslim - which she denies - journalists wrote that she may have influenced her son to convert.

The media seems to have pronounced judgement in a case with little documentary evidence and it may have provided the spark for those who want to start a fire. Whatever happened to "Minimise Harm?"

Who wants to be a journalist?

Why would anyone want to be a journalist today? The road to Delhi is littered with the carcasses of editors. No one is hiring; the looming implementation of the Wage Board recommendations mean salaries may not go up this year. New endeavours are few and failures have been spectacular: journalists have been asked to leave without dignified severance pays.

On a broader plane, things are even worse. Has the credibility of the media ever been lower in this country? The term Paid News has come to be synonymous with Paid Media and Paid Journalists, a brush with which to insult us all. The profession did not cover itself with glory this election season – there was a time when we crawled when asked to walk; this time, we cheered when all we had to do was report. Triumph of the Will, apparently. What were you thinking?!

It is time to recognise that this is a moment of crisis in Indian journalism. As the administrative machinery takes a sharp turn to the Right, we have to realise that – as Mukul Kesavan puts it so articulately - the republic’s ‘common sense’ will shift rightwards. Do we have the ability, the resources, the courage and the intellectual grounding to understand and then explain it to our readers as it happens? Or will we take sides and enable the forces that seek to curtail the same freedoms our calling needs to survive?

Understand that we brought this upon ourselves. By not reporting enough on agriculture. By not being outraged at health departments. By not doing our homework on the power sector. By not talking to people, by not “going to the spot,” by not looking at data. By not picking up a book. We let ourselves be complacent and assumed we knew the world. We relied on briefings by people with vested interests. We Wikipedia-ed. Ignorant, fattened on junk tertiary information, we sat down on that couch and let ourselves be overwhelmed by an information avalanche.

Understand, that in a battle between public relations and journalism, the latter did not even turn up. To borrow a phrase from the former, we lacked “effective communicators,” people who could decode the election for their audience. We had reporters with no understanding of economics lauding the idea of development. We did not know our history enough to place what was happening on the ground in a certain context. We lacked journalists with an ideological mooring that would have helped them separate the chaff from wheat. Instead, we had reeds go up against the wind.

Despite – and maybe precisely because of - these abject failures, we must call out for new journalists. For we need people to stand up and articulate against the teaching of “ancient historical texts.” We need people who treat the Ministry of External Affairs as a discipline, not a beat. We need people who became journalists not only because they were conned into studying English Literature for graduation. We need youngsters opting for journalism over the civil services. The pay will keep us firmly in the middle class, but let’s continue to naively justify to ourselves that this was a higher calling; let’s continue to be arrogant that we would have succeeded in whatever we chose to do.

For we came into this to change the world. At some point, we took it down a notch to justify the daily grind to ourselves, but the stones on which we stepped to reach that ideal remain the same: the same things that gave us goosebumps as children, reading Where The Mind Is Without Fear and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Preamble to the Constitution of India and the American Declaration of Independence and Tryst With Destiny and I Have a Dream and The fight on the beaches and The Gettysburg Address. We cannot lose sight of the fact that we are what we are because we are the products of a free thinking society. Even if are not going to change the world, it is imperative on us to stand on the edges of free speech and defend encroachments. As those around us try to reduce us to monolithic identities, we need people who can come out in full expression of the multiple ones within. If we continue to be partisan, if we let ourselves be driven by hate rather than knowledge, there may not be a journalism to write home about tomorrow.

Understand, that the towers have fallen. There is nothing to look up to: our tallest news organisations and journalists are at their most vulnerable now. Instead, look within for the fire and integrity and look below to the Earth. The battle for the towers is something we won’t understand, anyway. Let’s take this fight to our street corners. Let’s pester them on facts, let’s engage them on the truth. That book we have been putting off, let’s read. Let’s poke a finger into those incidents and reports they hope will pass under the radar. Let’s place ourselves firmly in the corner of the underdog. Let’s reclaim journalism.

Jharkhand: guide to results

Published here
Ranchi, April 15

The BJP in Jharkhand will go into counting day confident that, on paper, it remains in contest in all 14 seats.

However, by making the elections all about itself - the party contested alone, and along with the JVM(P), is the only one to contest in all seats - the BJP state unit is flirting with the failure tag. Even one less than eight, which was the number of seats won in 2009, would have the panic bells going off.

Party leaders are confident of winning more than 10 seats. "We are guaranteed 12 seats. Giridih and Rajmahal are the two in which we are facing a tough contest," said BJP leader and MLA Raghubar Das. The Congress says it, along with alliance partner JMM, has a chance in eight constituencies. "I think we can win in Ranchi, Lohardaga, Hazaribagh, Dhanbad, Godda, Giridih, Rajmahal and Dumka," said state Congress General Secretary Shailesh Sinha.

There clearly cannot be a universe where both the BJP and Congress can go home happy. The confusion is evident in the exit poll results: NDTV thinks BJP will win 12 and leave the Congress only one, while Times Now estimates the Congress and JMM will win six. Both agree that former chief minister Madhu Kora's wife Geeta will win from Singhbhum.

Early warning could come from two constituencies - Giridih and Rajmahal, which both sides admit to be unknown territories. The BJP, in a "direct fight" with the JMM in both, knows winning the two will make it unstoppable. If the latter wins in Giridih, it will be a major blow for the BJP, whose incumbent MP won by 94,738 votes in 2009. It will also mean that the JMM votebank is robust, having withstood an assault from alliance partner Congress, whose leader Rajendra Prasad wanted the seat for his son. A JMM win will also mean the rise of a new Mahato leader in Jagarnath Mahato. That Rajmahal - and not Dumka - should be the barometer of Santhal Pargana is curious: BJP's victory hinges on adivasi votes in the constituency, which has a significant number of Muslims. The party hopes that former JMM leader Hemlal Murmu can get some tribal votes while hoping the RSS, which has been active in the area for about 25 years, can use the hype around Narendra Modi to rally Sanskritised adivasis.

However, even if the BJP completes a clean sweep, it may not be evidence enough of a pan-Jharkhand "Modi Wave": the difficult terrain, demographics and cultural differences in the state mean imposing a wave was always out of the question for the BJP. Even winning Dumka - stronghold of the JMM - may be interpreted as a Babulal Marandi effect, with the JVM(P) leader taking away JMM's votes, leading to a BJP victory.

However, there may be a Modi effect on view. The tribals remained largely disinterested in Narendra Modi - in fact, the Sarna Samiti, widely perceived to be moving towards the BJP, supported Congress candidates in Ranchi and Lohardaga. This has been used by the BJP in the Santhal Pargana to mobilise the non-tribal "diku" vote of the caste Hindus. The hype of a Wave was also used to activate cadres and banish disquiet - in Palamu and Hazaribagh, those dissenting against "outsider" candidates eventually fell in line to work for a Modi victory.

If the BJP candidates in Ranchi and Jamshedpur win, it could be evidence of a Modi Wave in these largely urban constituencies. These two constituencies are significant because the BJP was up against the wall in both places - Jamshedpur, where its candidate lost his deposit in a 2011 bye poll and whose incumbent MP is a very popular; Ranchi, where AJSU's Sudesh Mahto was poised to eat into BJP's Ram Tahal Choudhary's Mahato base.

The BJP also claims that the poll percentages going up in the state - from 50.97 in 2009 to 63.55 now - is because of a Modi Wave. While one cannot verify this claim yet, there remains the possibility that Muslims voted in large numbers too, by getting women to come out and vote. A BJP leader claimed caste Hindus had voted to counter that. "Only 52 per cent Muslims voted in Jamshedpur. The rest were women and youth coming out to vote for NaMo," he said, explaining how polling percentage went up from 51.12 in 2009 to 66.38 this time there.

Apart from Geeta Kora in Singhbhum, smaller parties stand a chance to spoil the BJP's party. The CPI (ML) Liberation has mobilised the dalits of Koderma effectively. In Khunti, no one really understands the impact of the alleged support extended by left wing extremist PLFI to Anosh Ekka.

Nitish and the Vikas Vote

That Nitish Kumar may not be rewarded for his good governance is one of the most perplexing issues to emerge out of Bihar this time. Though I definitely think there is an underpinning of caste, maybe there are esoteric issues at play here - as Shekhar Gupta seems to suggest, a Bihari craving for more. Even as I was working on this piece, the Times of India ran a story on it.

What gave me a lot of pleasure is the fact that after I finished it, I came across Gupta's and Sankarshan Thakur's pieces: the fact that such senior editors had looked at the same issue told me I was on the right track. I tend to agree with Thakur's piece more - the man's written a book on Nitish, goddammit - as it agrees with my worldview. However, Shekhar manages to catch a sense of what I was getting, too - people everywhere were telling me they wanted more. I put it down as quotes in my stories, but writing about what Shekhar tries to capture was beyond my brief. Also, is being aspirational a uniquely Bihari trait? Even Shekhar seems to agree how difficult it is to pin down this anti-Nitish feeling: "You need someone with much greater scholarship than I to explain this. Or maybe even a soil scientist."

Maybe we are all wrong. Maybe Nitish will emerge from this one giving the likes of me the middle finger. However, my concern - as with everything else that I have written during this election - is not losing or winning. I am merely looking at the factors at play, merely holding a wet finger in the air. However, whatever happens, most of us in the media would have missed one thing from Bihar this time: the question of what women want. With their husbands and brothers staring them down, I was not successful in this. I really hope some other reporter emerges with clues.

If Bihar is rejecting development politics - we may know for sure only after the 2015 assembly elections here - there are larger implications, of course. What does it mean for this post-liberalisation idea of vikas?

For the moment, the way I see it, both Narendra Modi as well as Nitish Kumar are poised to be foiled by caste in Bihar.



P.S. Friend and former colleague Vinay Sitapati too, has a piece on this today.

An edited version of the following was published here

Vaishali, May 6

You have to feel for Nitish Kumar. Statistics are testimony enough, but the people of the state have recognised that the JD(U) government has been good for them. This reporter is yet to come across someone who failed to reply in the affirmative; the trend is unlike the circumstances under which Sheila Dikshit had to leave Delhi: her voters seemed to have forgotten the massive infrastructural boost. Yet, the Bihari voter is refusing to vote for Kumar and his party this time.

So, some questions - however blunt - have to be asked: Is there no vote for development in Bihar? Is the Bihari electorate, which gave Lalu Prasad's "jungle raaj" 15 years, an ungrateful one?

The narrative that has gained currency is that the voters are poised to punish Kumar for his arrogance. However, scratch the surface a bit, and the complexity of the theory comes to the fore. "Because Nitish got arrogant. He was doing so well, but he had to go and anger the Yadavs. The police was told not to help us," Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, a Yadav voter who lives in the Hajipur Lok Sabha constituency. "He thought he could do it all on his own. We have to show him his rightful place," said Anirudh Kumar of the Teli caste who will vote in Vaishali, in reference to the JD(U) ending its alliance with the BJP.

So, Kumar clearly has multifaceted arrogance. Like almost everything in Bihar, it seems to be split along caste lines: the Yadav Theory of Kumar Arrogance clearly originates from Lalu Prasad, who in his speeches portrays Kumar as a shrewd operator who played a trick too many. The BJP's narrative has been that Nitish tried punching above his weight and should be taught a lesson for that.

Another theory is that the Extremely Backward Classes - a group that the Kumar government consolidated and the JD(U) considers a vote bank - identifies with Narendra Modi, who is from a caste of that standing. While it is something the BJP has been telling voters and journalists, there is scant evidence to prove it. This is mostly because the EBCs are consolidated only on paper - in the villages, they remain scattered with no unifying trait: Jai Narain Nishad is a Mallaah leader, not an EBC champion. In fact, the only two people who admitted they identified with Narendra Modi was a Teli - Anirudh, who said he liked the fact that Modi was from the "vaishya community" and Pankaj Kumar - a Bhumihar in Vaishali constituency who admitted he has a, "soft corner" for Modi. When the EBCs of Muzaffarpur district said they would vote for Modi, they explicitly said it was not because of his identity, but because of what he has promised to do. "My vote is for Narendra Modi. He said he will bring back black money.... I don't want a government that does not respond when soldiers' heads are cut off," said Fakeeri Sahni, a voter in Muzaffarpur.

Which begs the question - Why is the Bihari voter seemingly choosing Modi over Kumar for work the former only promises to do while ignoring the fact that the latter has been good for them over the past nine years? "Badlaav chaahiye," said Gautam Sahni, whose caste Mallaah falls in the EBC category and lives in the Vaishali constituency. The call for change is part of the BJP rhetoric - something that the party's leadership has customised here to mean the state government too.

According to Sahni, a graduate who organises tuition classes for school students, the government has done too much. "Why did he give reservation to women? Now, there are women netas, while their husbands sit at home. When it came to recruiting shiksha mitras, women got preference," he said. However, for him, the election boils down to one thing: "This is a Hindu-Musalmaan ladaayi. The Muslims are on one side, we are on the other."

As it turns out, Sahni's sister-in-law is a ward member - a direct beneficiary of the 50 per cent reservation for women in panchayats, which he opposes. "This government made so many laws for women. But then, do I sit where the rest of the village is sitting?" Renu Devi asks, not answering a question as to whether she still supports Nitish Kumar. With husband Sikander Sahni in the room, Devi's answers were limited to cryptic smiles. Whether the women of the backward castes, a constituency that the media does not talk to often, have exercised their free will in the polling booth is anyone's guess.

In some ways, the BJP's Kumar Arrogance Theory is right - the Bihar CM seems to be losing a leadership battle in which both Modi and Prasad have shown him his rightful place. If that is true, there is no better barometer than the Muslims, who have stood as one across the country against Narendra Modi's ambition: will they return to the JD(U) once the Modi mission is complete? "There is a case to renew Nitish Kumar's license," said Mohammad Javed, who lives in the Hajipur constituency, referring to a possible third term for the JD(U) government. "But will I vote for him in 2015? Let's see if he gives us a good candidate," he added.

Unlike what the Narendra Modi-heavy campaign of the BJP would have you believe, candidates do matter. To be precise, their castes do. With the BJP leaving by taking away the upper castes, the JD(U) is having to fend for itself with a bouquet of backward castes that are being lured with the promise of more development.

The grip of caste is so strong, one comes across many instances where people are torn by the choices they have to make. "Why can't the rest of Bihar vote for Nitish? We Yadavs cannot; he has troubled us so much, said Raghuvansh Singh of Hajipur. "No one in Bihar gives vote for work done," said Surendra Kumar Singh, a Bhumihar in Vaishali constituency. Singh, who himself will not vote for the JD(U), let his frustration spill at one point: "If only the Election Commission banned campaigning altogether. People would judge their leaders on work done," he said.

Pankaj Kumar, a very articulate youngster in Vaishali village of Vaishali district and a Bhumihar, probably put it best. "Itna se galti ka itne se sajja na milna chahiya tha [There shouldn't have to be such a harsh punishment for such a small error.]," he said, even as he indicated he wouldn't be voting for Nitish this time.

Kumar may have been crippled by the shocking Hindu-Muslim polarisation in the state and the caste divisions that followed, but in this frustration lies his hope. If he can keep the JD(U) together - the countryside is rife with rumours about Sharad Yadav's future - there could be a comeback waiting at the end of the next assembly elections. Having built his politics on the foundation laid by Lalu Prasad - who had to counter violent uppercaste hegemony with violence of his own - Kumar can afford to be non-confrontational, thus bringing together even the upper castes, unlike Prasad. "Look, he is not against us. The Chief Secretary and DGP are Bhumihars," said Surendra Singh of Vaishali.

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.

Vaishali: Hindutva Wave Against Caste Seawall

Published here
Bettiah, May 7

There is a sense of looking through a microscope in Vaishali: the micro transactions of caste taking place all over Bihar are magnified here. However linear political parties may have wanted them to move, castes have behaved counter-intuitively, preferring to preserve themselves before worrying about the idea of a consolidated political community being imposed on them.

This is not to say there is no support for Narendra Modi in Vaishali: there is an overwhelming number of electors, especially upper caste, saying they want him to be the Prime Minister. However, the main battle is between three castes - Yadav, Rajput and Bhumihar - that do not see eye-to-eye, and two of them have been coming together of late to defeat a third.

There are four main candidates in Vaishali, which votes on May 12 - Raghuvansh Prasad Singh of the RJD, Rama Singh of the LJP which is in an alliance with the BJP, Vijay Sahni of the JD(U) and Independent candidate Annu Shukla. Conventional wisdom would say the RJD would get the Yadav votes while the BJP walks away with the Bhumihar and Rajput ones. However, RJD's Singh, who is seeking a sixth consecutive term, is a Rajput and Annu Shukla, Lalganj MLA, is a Bhumihar.

"We want Modi sarkar, but we also want Raghuvanshbabu," said Sekhar Singh of Dhanaiya in Paru block of Vaishali, going directly to the heart of the Rajput dilemma. RJD's Singh has won here since 1996 by bringing together the Yadavs and Rajputs. The constituency has always elected either Bhumihars and Rajputs, who, barring a few instances, refused to back the same candidate. "We Rajputs will not vote for a Bhumihar. If they want to, let them come and vote for us," said Chandrabhushan Singh of the same village, referring to the fact that the LJP's candidate is also a Rajput.

This is where the "Hindu unity" idea of the BJP breaks down. Vaishali is symptomatic of what has been observed all across Bihar - despite the BJP's projection of Narendra Modi, the local candidates and their castes matter. Most Bhumihars of Muzaffarpur are set to vote for Congress's Akhilesh Prasad Singh, a Bhumihar. The Mallaahs of Muzaffarpur will mostly vote BJP while most of those of Vaishali will stick with JD(U) - these parties have nominated Mallaah candidates in these constituencies. The Rajputs, out to defeat RJD's Rabri Devi in Chhapra, are rooting for Raghuvansh Singh in Vaishali.

The BJP's victory will depend on a precise definition of "most," when talking about the Bhumihar votes to Akhilesh Singh, for instance. Candidates for the major parties in each constituency are almost always from the most populous castes. The BJP will need its candidates to deliver their caste votes while hoping Narendra Modi can bring over a good number of voters from the opposing candidates' castes.

At Chainpura in Paru block, Anil Kumar Singh - a Rajput - said that his vote will be for Narendra Modi: "No one knows Rama Singh. We are voting for NaMo." However, Singh also does not rule out the possibility of the Rajputs voting for Annu Shukla to keep out the RJD. "If Rama Singh is going to lose, we BJP cadres will vote for Annu Shukla. If she wins, she will be going over to the BJP, after all," he said. Annu is the wife of Vijay Kumar "Munna" Shukla, a former JD(U) MLA currently serving a life sentence for murder. Her campaign material prominently features her husband, shown to be standing behind bars with palms folded. Two duo seem to have burnt their bridges with the JD(U).

"We forward castes want Modi, but at the end of the day, it is all about caste.... We will say "Modi, Modi," but finally we will all go and vote against Raghuvansh Singh," said Pankaj Kumar - a Bhumihar - of Vaishali village, which lends the district its name. "People from our caste advised Annu Shukla not to contest and to let NaMo win. But she has bad chamchas around her who will grow in importance if she contests. Now that she has decided to contest, I have no choice but to vote for her. It has become a question of astitva," said Kumar. Incidentally, Rakesh Kumar Singh - a Rajput - of Dhanaiya also said that voting for Raghuvansh Prasad is an issue of astitva - existence.

It is not that the Bhumihars hate Raghuvansh - called Brahmbaba for his bearded appearance and educational qualifications by the electorate here. "Whatever happens, he is in the constituency on Saturdays and Sundays. Even if we Bhumihars invite him to a function, he will come. However, he never comes here asking for votes. He should; maybe some of us will vote for him," said Surender Prasad Singh of Vaishali.

"When Modi builds a road, we will all benefit," said Shivji Singh, a Bhumihar, of Paru block's Suhasi. "My village has not seen development even after Nitish [Kumar, chief minister]. People are calling it a Maoist village now. The Bhumihars of Lalganj can vote for Annu Shukla, but everyone in my village wants Modi," he said.

However, mere vote transfers by adding raw caste numbers won't ensure victory. "We Bhumihars don't vote. My family has 16 electors; not more than four vote," said Vaishali's Surender Singh. These are villages which were once famous for booth captures. "We would just occupy the booth here and wouldn't let the Yadavs vote. They began voting after [former chief election commissioner] T.N. Seshan," said Pankaj Kumar of Vaishali.

The men consider women as being part of a backup plan, to be used in case they need additional votes. "The women used to stay at home on polling day even though the booth is adjacent to the village. Now, they have begun going on their own. This time, we will ensure all of them goes and votes for Modi," said Anil Singh of Chainpura. "Back in the day, the women never went. We would introduce ourselves to the officials at the booth and cast their votes, too. After EVMs came into being, we ask them to wait till the afternoon. If we sense our candidate is losing, vehicles are arranged to take them to vote," said Chandrabhushan Singh of Dhanaiya. There is a suspicion among men that women - especially from the OBC, mahadalit and EBC castes - will vote for the JD(U) to reward the Nitish Kumar government's pro-women policies. Whether their upper caste counterparts will follow suit is anyone's guess.

Reminding his audiences that he had arrested L.K. Advani during his 1990 Rath Yatra, Lalu Prasad has positioned himself to take credit if the BJP falls short of its targets in Bihar. While Prasad has been leading the charge, it is caste - the consciousness of which was awakened during the backward classes movement - against which the Modi wave has been lashing. "If it wasn't for these regional parties that split us according to the castes of their leaders, Modi wouldn't have had to work so hard," said Satyendra Prasad Singh - a Bhumihar - of Gokula in Paru block.