Sinister shadow of power looms across its pious landscape.
By Rajiv Theodore
VARANASI, UTTAR PRADESH: The world abounds with religious towns. Among them are Jerusalem (originally Salem, considered to be the center of the world itself) which remains the holy region for Christians and Jews; the Mecca with the revered black stone of the Kaaba is a sacrosanct spot for the Muslims while Vatican in Rome, is the epitome of a sacred city for the Catholics. Bodhgaya is holy for the Buddhists and so is the Potala in Lhasa.
India too abounds with many such spots and Varanasi or Benares tops the list. It is but an eclectic mix catering to the seekers of nirvana of the mind and body. It is well known that the city caters to those who crave for the philosophy of life. The city symbolizes, in many ways the center of the universe represented in the cosmic layout of Varanasi studded with sacred territorial boundaries and which serves as the gateway between the heaven and the earth.
And specially these days when the city is entangled in an unprecedented frenzy of activity with the only buzz of politics resounding in your ears and which has also permeated every nook and cranny of its ancient walls of this oldest living city, it seems this is the center of the universe.
And as you step on its ancient pathways, the rabbit warren of gullies and lanes pushed and edged by crowds moving without purpose suddenly stopping, and picking up ambulation in one jerking lunge could all be unsettling. Leave alone the growing urge to taste the street foods joints studded in every 20-30 yards, many times you are just pushed ahead or stopped when you don’t want to since the crowd around you always has the last word.
Monday, the city dwellers went for polls and by 1700 hours showed a nearly 50% of voter turn-out, a new high after the 42 per cent in 2009 elections. The city has been grappling for over a month with a certain kind of action literally thrust on it. No, it is not the festivals that crops up at least three times a month throughout the year but the mega jamboree being enacted by the political parties of various hues and shades. There are three main hot spots in this crumbling city—Sigra Crossing, Sigra Police Station and Shivaji Nagar, Mehmoorganj. They all had unusually erupted with the frenzy of polling and they all house the party offices of the three key contenders for this dance of democracy contest between —the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Congress (I) and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).
It is another matter that the new kind of temporal pressure witnessed upon this pilgrim city has strained its shuddering infrastructure.
“The queue at the petrol pumps are longer. It takes nearly four times the time for filling up,’’ complains Raja Bangvi, a motorist in the city.
Now cars with outstation registration numbers teem the narrow, choked roads that barely could take rickshaws and jaywalkers and they all need gas to move up and down the 1,550 square kilometers of the city which Mark Twain had once commented, “Benaras is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend and looks twice as old as all of them put together.”
Nothing much has changed since Twain set his foot in Benares during the end of the 19th century, but the famous Indophile would have been glad to know that its aged edifice could take much more even after two centuries since he wrote on the city. Today, the Benarsi paan (betel nut) chewing locals have to think twice before spewing its juices out, for the momentum of the several campaigns have left a serious strain on the already cramped space with waves of road shows and rallies holding sway in the city.
It has been blistering days of activity.
Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi had held a 12-km and over four-hour-long roadshow matched by UP Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav who also came for a SP roadshow to seek votes for the party candidate Kailash Chaurasiya. AAP also held a roadshow and although supremo Arvind Kejriwal could not join senior party leader Kumar Vishwas, who has taken on Rahul Gandhi in Amethi, took the leadership. In sheer size, Rahul Gandhi’s roadshow was huge and so was Yadav’s. Kejriwal had also held a massive roadshow that continued for over five hours before culminating in a public rally.
The latest series of roadshows began on May 8 when Modi drove through the city after being denied permission to hold a public rally in the Muslim majority Beniabagh area in the city just outside Varanasi city but within this Lok Sabha constituency. Modi also had planned to participate in Ganga Aarti on ghats here, but had to cancel the same after delay in permission from local authorities. Kejriwal conducted Ganga Aarti along with his wife on the same evening. Denial of permission to Modi had triggered a major showdown between BJP and the election authorities and Election Commission had to appoint a special election observer for Varanasi polls.
“What is shining is the BJP,’’ says a poll pilgrim, Ashutosh Garg, who takes out time to chalk out a method in the madness played out in the melee in Varanasi. “Modi would win the game and it would be the AAP that would trail behind and not the Congress,’’ says Garg with all the confidence of a psephologist.
This prediction of Garg comes in despite the fact that Congress candidate Ajai Rai is a local strongman with a sizeable clout and the fact that the other two key contenders Narendra Modi and Arvind Kejriwal are not from Benares.
“We have become the pampered lot whenever elections are around,’’ says Mohammad Hanif, a local businessman in the city’s Beniabagh area. He pointed out that all the parties have left no stone unturned while wooing his community. It was an unusual site for the BJP members seen in the city to reach out to the Muslims. ‘’In Benares there is a mad jostle to grab as much Muslim votes as possible out of a total of three lakh Muslim voters, even if it means stepping into the mosques to grab the votes,” says Ibrahim Ghani another resident of the city who has an auto spare parts business.
Whether Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party stand to gain from the changing caste dynamics in the state or the Congress from the increased communal polarization post-Muzaffarnagar riots, is difficult to say, according to A K Verma who is with the Department of Political Science, Christ Church College, Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh.
Writing in the Economic Political Weekly, Verma says that the 16th parliamentary elections in Uttar Pradesh (UP) have brought to the fore the collapse of the traditional model of caste and communal politics in the state. While the communal polarization in the state might help the Congress, the realignment of castes might boost the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) prospects. This reconfiguration of the caste-communal model combined with developmental aspirations of electors is likely to produce stunning results. Notwithstanding the presence of traditionally strong regional players such as the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), the nature of contest in the state this time is largely bipartisan; the electorate focusing mainly on national parties.
“UP is witnessing Modi-centric elections where traditional electoral behavior based on communal and caste lines is undergoing a change. While the Congress is trying to take advantage of communal polarization, the BJP seems to be benefitting through its inclusive agenda that includes Muslims too,’’ Verma adds.
And as you wade and wade befuddling through people, cows, sheeps, cycles, scooters and even mannequins lined outside shops the sunset begin to flood the ghats with an ochre hue that at once soothes the frayed nerves and so does the temple bells and the rhythm of the drum beats that would finally cast an hypnotic spell accentuated by the site of the thousands of tiny earthen lamps wobbling on the Ganges with the flashes from their oily wicks playing tricks on your senses.
As dusk eased away to darkness the effects of the diyas and the aroma of the burning oil begin to emit an exhilarating warmth within you like the effects of good red wine, and you wonder what this rush and madness of the day was for. Is it lust for power, genuine concern to change the situation for the better and help the wretched humanity or just plain drama to be enacted periodically?
Like it has been done before, many times as the memory goes. Or let the holy towns be left alone as it had been done in the hoary past without the sinister shadow of power looming across its pious landscape.
(Rajiv Theodore is India Bureau Chief, The American Bazaar.)
This post first appeared in americanbazaaronline.com