Chattisgarh, a place in my mind

I remember mom whenever I think about Chattisgarh. I was six years old when she went to visit relatives in Bhilai. Actually it was a clandestine mission to check out a bride for her brother. When she returned, not so impressed by the potential bride but flush with the excitement of travel she told me in great detail how she got off the train at Nagpur and boarded the connecting train called Chattisgarh Express. It means the train to a place which has 36 forts, she explained. I asked her to tell me the names which she could not. Someday hopefully I will learn on my own. But regardless, Chattisgarh is a place in my mind. It is one of those places to which I made a promise that I will return through my writing. A promise that still remains unfulfilled.

I spent exactly 13 months and 12 days in a tiny railway junction town called A’pur in 1989-90. A’pur could easily have become part of Chattisgarh. But somehow perhaps that would have been toomuch to ask. The district of which it used to be an important town, Shahdol remained part of Madhya Pradesh. I dont know if that made life different for the people I knew then. It certainly seems to have made life more complicated for elephants. And then A’pur became the headquarters of a new district by itself. I visited Raipur some 9 years later again but did not make it to A’pur. I should ask D who spent the better part of his productive years there and still keeps in touch although the last time I met him, he sounded very tired and unwilling to talk about it. Perhaps this note will incite him into telling me more because he probably knew Ajit Jogi when he was collector of the district.

Amit Jogi is the son of Ajit Jogi the former Congress chief minister of Chattisgarh. Amit Jogi has a masters in international relations from JNU and seems quite well read. He has been an undertrial in a murder conspiracy and faces charges of faking a tribal certificate apart from caught in some weird citizenship issues because he was born in the US. Sigh! If somebody were to wrote an essay on this whole scheduled tribe, scheduled caste certificates business it would make an excellent ethnography of the Indian state. I will at some point. Reason I looked up Amit Jogi yesterday was K was all excited about Fatima Bhutto’s first public utterance against Bilawal takeover. I had written a few days ago that the person to watch in Pakistani politics is not Asif Ali Zardari but Mumtaz Bhutto the surviving patriarch of the Bhutto clan who will start making his moves soon first in the interest of patriliny contributing to a strange dynamic. Anyways, I have read all of Fatima Bhutto’s columns – out of sheer curiosity. Here is a young woman who is talking about modern democracy. Her utterances are inflected both by her own personal grief and encased in the Shaheed Bhutto legacy myth, yet they sound different from Bilawal Zardari’s soundbyte – My mom always said democracy is the best revenge.

But the family thing has been on my mind for a while. Abhijit Mazumdar, Darjeeling district secretary of CPIML was in December elected as a central committee member of the party and the TOI reports that the CPIML is projecting the son of Charu Mazumdar as its future leader. There is nothing in the news substantiate that the CPIML is indeed doing so. In the first place, between Charu’s custodial death in 1972, when Abhijit was 12 years old and 1986 when a 26 year old Abhijit with a masters in English literature came in contact with the CPIML again, the ML movement turned into a rhyzome in which it is impossible to make any categorical statements about direct lineages. Secondly, Abhijit was one of 47 members of the central committee. But the family is such a powerful trope for us to make sense of reality and so here we are.

So K’s excitement about Fatima Bhutto was an easy excuse for myself to put off my drudgery and go looking for sons and daughters of the high and mighty. And whew I was pleasantly surprised on finding a little club of sons and daughters of a muffassil high and mighty around Amit Jogi’s blog. And my eye fell on the case he makes for Why India needs Rahul Gandhi now. He may indeed be on to something here, although I do think his reading is shaped to an extent by the fact of his own being the son of a politician who owed his career to Rajeev Gandhi. And so it is not very difficult to imagine what the family needs and move from there to what the Congress needs and from there on to what the country needs.

Amit is clearly being the dutiful son. Afterall, he chose to stay back in India because his family needed him. I hope it does not take him a life time to overcome his filial indebtedness like mine did. And then I read his post on lessons from Gujarat for the Congress. Again it is a reading from within the Congress and so it must be taken with some caution. But the point he makes about regional satraps is very interesting.

The Congress needs to develop and empower regional leadership! he says. Absolutely correct. But I dont believe that the regional leadership that so emerges will be radically different in substance from the regional leadership that wins elections for the other parties. Further, any such regional leadership within the Congress will have to be accompanied by a powerful discourse of what the national ideal would be — else the contradictions will disintegrate the party immediately. And that seems to me an unlikely occurrence, simply because what does the Congress really have to erect the national canopy over ? A statistical fiction called the national growth rate? Hardly convincing.

It is not for nothing that Mrs. Gandhi introduced the fascist authoritarian centralism into the functioning of the Congress. She simply could not come up with anything to take the place of Nehru’s imagined India that melted away before her very own eyes. YSR’s seemingly successful innings in Andhra Pradesh is a case in point. He is a regional satrap not only vis a vis the national, but also vis a vis Andhra Pradesh. His rise to power cannot be separated from the aspirations of the cut-throat faction lord-contractor class of Rayalaseema. That is the best answer that the Congress could come up with to dethrone Chandrababu Naidu who represented the aspirations of the KG delta agrarian rich.

But of course neither of them could win elections on such narrow bases. Both of them had to stitch together alliances with other aspirants who identified themselves in caste and regional terms but had distinct socioeconomic histories. Both of them had pursued strategies of destroying each other’s sociopolitical bases through policy decisions. Both of them were animated by powerful transnational policy and funding networks. The old style regional leadership representing ’subnational’ aspirations encased in the ‘national ideal ‘ argument no longer serves any useful purpose whether for political strategy or for indifferent academic analysis.

Amit has been critical of the viciousness of salwa judem in Chattisgarh and records some very telling first hand observations. I wonder if he knows what those observations reveal. salwa judem is not a result of personal preferences of individual politicians. It is the outcome of a drive towards double digit growth rates by policymakers who pretend that only the measurable outcomes matter and by regional elites who have developed a taste for the fallouts of that growth. They are global actors in their own right. The nation is useful to the extent that it enables them to be more greedy. If leaders in Gujarat or Andhra Pradesh or West Bengal think they have to catch up with the west, make up for having missed the industrial revolution and so on, the leaders in Uttaranchal and Chattisgarh and Jharkhand think they have to go an extra mile because they were left behind in the previous edition of this race.

This imagination is febrile. Its manifestations are dramatic. Its violent consequences for the majority of people remain invisible simply because they are experienced at the household level. It took 300 instances of suicide by small and marginal cotton farmers in Warangal for it to be noticed and several years and thousands more deaths, it is now turned into a farmers’ problem. Er… is it possible that the crisis in agriculture is only the manifestation of a serious generalized crisis of reproduction that is flitting across the national space ?

The point anyhow is that the Congress cannot quite develop a regional leadership that would be qualitatively distinct from the regional leadership developed by the other parties. It would have to stitch together an alliance of social groups within the region, articulate the mounting resentments of different social groups in some coherent form to be able to win the elections. But even if it did so, to stay in power, it would have to continue largely within the same mould as the other parties. It cannot offer a new agenda. Not within the confines of these politics. Seriously what can it compete with BJP with ? Development ? More attractive and timely populist sops for those whom the state has to perforce abandon ? Cut into Hindu pride + Regional pride with some other well chosen pride ?

I have a cramp in my neck from toomuch head-shaking in sadness. I want to say that Fatima Bhutto, Amit Jogi and his eclectic friends are all distracting me from my promise to Chattisgarh. But I know that they are pursuing some unfulfilled promises of their own.