Modern India is proud to call itself the world’s largest democracy. With more than one billion people, it is certainly the most populous country in the world where a Western-style democracy is practised. But democracy’s foothold is rather fragile, especially in Bihar. The lower castes and Untouchables make up the majority of the population. So, in a village like Belaur, where a minority upper caste makes life a misery for the majority lower castes, you could expect a champion of the underdogs to be elected. It would certainly be so, but for that neat little trick of booth-capturing. In areas where the landlords knew that they would lose in a fair vote, they recruited gangs of goondas (goons) who specialised in staging military-style operations to occupy polling stations, ensuring all the votes were for their employer’s candidate. Not subtle, not nice, but booth-capturing was totally effective, and a great line of business.
Early on the morning of the poll, well-armed goons moved in. They usually took about three hours to occupy and control an area, depending on the opposition they encountered. Then another three hours to stamp the ballot papers and have the presiding election officer countersign the papers at gunpoint. The cost of hiring the goons to capture a booth depended on the seat’s prestige and the expected difficulty – the polling stations might be in an area where their candidate’s opposition was popular and powerful.
With the evil of inflation biting into every hard-workingman’s pocket, the cheapest you could capture a constituency for in 1996 was about $6,000, while the top seats went for as much as $20,000. These sums were staggering, especially in a state like Bihar where a farm worker earned about half a dollar for a back-breaking ten–hour day. But a seat in the provincial legislature was the gilded path to wealth and power. You and your allies decided which company got that lucrative road-resurfacing contract; who was granted permission to start a bus company; and who, quite suddenly, should find his trading license revoked for no apparent reason.
In Belaur village, Zamindar Purushottam Dubey was leading me on a guided tour. We had been to see the Hindu temples dedicated to locally revered deities. Several small, simple clay deities were casually propped against a fig tree – they had been found while the field alongside was being tilled with an animal-drawn plough. No one seemed to pay those ancient, unpainted statues much heed. He led us through the maze-like streets of the village centre, where one or two-story brick houses invariably belonged to big landlords, and the low mud huts were the abode of Untouchables whose families had been bonded to the landlords or moneylenders for generations. Debt might befall a family through a grandfather who had to borrow money to pay for an expensive dowry because he had one too many daughters. No worse luck can happen to a poor man than to be blighted with many daughters. Or perhaps the promise shown by a clever son might have prompted a proud father to take out a loan to fund an education, a desperate gamble to break the poverty trap. But many bright young men did not make the cut. To rise above the circumstances of your birth in India, one has to be extreme. Extremely brilliant. Extremely talented. Extremely lucky. Perhaps even extremely vicious.
Dirt tracks raised above the monsoon flood level snaked out through the fields to the big landowners’ farms that surrounded the village. Purushottam Dubey stopped and turned with dramatic abruptness, “The fires of revolution brushed past this village in September of 1994. That there,” he indicated a crumbling settlement of grey mud huts across a field, “is where the Naxalites began their war. It is deserted now. They did not succeed.”
He stared closely at me, waiting to see a reaction, even a tightening of my eyes that might have betrayed sympathy for his enemies. Satisfied, he continued the tour, his hands clasped behind his back. It was the affectation of a landlord; the landless did not have the luxury of strolling with idle hands. We were to meet one of the heroes of the zamindars’ struggle. Outside a hut set among fields, I was introduced to a farmer who had faced the onslaught of the Naxalites and triumphed. He was a massive man with powerful shoulders that bulged out from a white vest. His eyes were close-set to either side of a nose bent to one side like a boxer’s, and their blank stare was suspicious and aggressive. “This is a very brave man. Very brave,” stated Purushottam, “the bravest man in Belaur.”
On hearing the translation of this favourable description, the bravest of men invited us to join him on the low wooden pallet on which he and his cohorts were resting. The customary offer of tea was made and accepted. It was a silent, uncomfortable cup - how does one make small talk with a hero? I took leave of my zamindar hosts and crossed the no–go zone that separated the Untouchables from their former feudal landlords. The Bazar Tola was a miserable collection of mud huts – no brick buildings there. Suffering had worsened since the landless rose against their former feudal masters in the Cigarette War, as they could no longer work in the landlords’ fields. They stared suspiciously at the strangers; young women covered their faces and pulled back into darkened doorways. I skirted the edge of the village as a crowd of curious men and children followed a few dozen metres behind.
I had discovered that to get spontaneous photographs, I had to sneak up on scenes to get that two- or three-second window of authenticity before everyone gathered to pose for the camera. So, I stole up on a home that looked out across the fields to the landlords’ village about a kilometre away. A woman looked up, and her eyes widened in panic. She started to yell, grabbed her toddler by the arm and sprinted off. The kid was dangling like a puppet, his whirling feet only occasionally brushing the pathway. There was a chain reaction of screaming and yelling. Men rushed to my side, “Bhumihars! Guns!” galvanised, they pointed across the wheat field at women quietly working the fields.
“No, no, it was me!” I pointed at myself. They stared blankly at me, no doubt thinking I was extremely slow-witted. We had insurmountable language barriers as my taxi driver, Ramisingh, who spoke some English, was not in sight. The Untouchables fearfully readied themselves to defend their hamlet. Fortunately, Ramisingh returned, and a crisis was averted. Back in the village centre, zamindars’ territory, I bumped into a slight man with a serious face and a petty moustache. He was going door-to-door, campaigning for votes. “I am an Independent Candidate,” said Bijander Yadav Singh emphatically, “I am campaigning for equality; against communist violence and against the violence of the landlords.” He spoke in clipped tones; he lectured to the landlords, and he preached to the landless. One thing I had picked up during my time in Bihar was that no one ran as an independent candidate if they realistically hoped to win. A hopeful must be pretty desperate to try to match the resources of an entire caste or party in the strange, convoluted and corrupt game that is Indian politics.
Back in the CPI (ML) office that night, I was being treated to one of Chandrabhusan’s discourses on the Indian Independence Movement, hoping to gather more insight into the political labyrinth. After independence, Gandhi and Nehru’s party, the Indian National Congress, adopted mild Socialism. But all too soon, Socialism became a vehicle for government control, nepotism and corruption. The banner of Socialism fell to the torchbearers, the committed Maoists and Communists, the radicals. In those early days, the middle-ranked castes were at the forefront of the fight to create a society where every individual, no matter what their caste, had equal rights, opportunity and access to the nation’s resources. It was a period of heady optimism. The mighty British Raj had crumbled before the humble strength of Gandhi. It was the time to usher in India’s golden era, free of the shackles of caste. And, sure enough, many of the middle-ranked castes broke through the social barriers that denied them a fair shot at success. They became transporters, businessmen and industrialists. Once they saw the advantages of keeping the masses poor and subjugated, they promptly forgot about the working-class people becoming part of the elite. There are only so many slices to the cake.
“In Belaur, take the example of Bijander Yadav Singh, a little-known but ambitious gangster,” Chandrabhusan’s voice emerged softly from the darkness that lay between us. The sun had set, and the paraffin lamps were not yet lit. Mosquitoes whined softly around my ears. I could not hear the ones around my ankles, but felt their sharp attack. When the Cigarette War began, Yadav Singh (a middle-caste man) saw his chance. If he could be seen as the saviour of the oppressed lower castes from the tyranny of the vastly less numerous upper castes, he would surely win the election. He sent four of his gunmen to assist the lower castes against the landlords. It was his goons who gunned down the upper-caste hostage Barhoo Chowdri when he tried to escape after being kidnapped off the bus at the start of the hostilities over a misplaced cigarette. As the conflict escalated and the landlords recruited the powerful Ranvir Sena army, Yadav Singh thought it smart to switch sides. His goons began to commit acts of brutality against their former friends, the lower castes and Untouchables. He hoped that his newfound zeal would earn him the support of the Bhumihars to be their electoral candidate. The Bhumihars accepted the strength of their new ally, but put forward a candidate from their own caste. Sensing an opportunity, Yadav Singh set himself up as an independent candidate, ostensibly to fight injustice and radicalism.
It suddenly dawned on me that this was the man we had seen campaigning in Belaur earlier that day; this was a giant leap in my comprehension of the intricacies of village politics. Chandrabhusan calmly waited out my burst of excitement on discovering this coincidence. “We are going to eliminate him,” he said quietly, his voice flat, and then added, “he thinks he can toy with the people, make fools of us. We will show him otherwise. Not now. We have too many other things to deal with. Later.”
About the Author
Greg Marinovich, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer and filmmaker, currently teaches visual journalism at Boston University’s journalism school. Over a career spanning more than twenty-five years, he has covered conflicts across the globe. In 1995, he travelled to Bihar to report on the violence and tensions between various caste groups and political parties active in the region. The essay was first published in the same year.
