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.)
1 Comment
NOT THE VOTERS, CIA DETERMINES WHO GETS HOW MANY VOTES, USING MICROWAVE SIGNALS FROM SATELLITES
A couple days ago I posted a comment on outlookindiaDOTcom. A couple hours later I found that there were 4 ‘Dislikes’ on my comment and 0 ‘Likes’. A few minutes later, I found that the number of ‘Dislikes’ had been reduced from 4 to 3; the number of ‘Likes’ was still 0. CIA-RAW, which has kept me under 24-hour surveillance with the U.S. National Security Agency satellites for the past 37 years (see below) had done this with microwave signals from satellites; ordinary users can INCREASE the number of ‘Dislikes’ by pressing the ‘Dislike’ button but there is no way they can DECREASE the number of ‘Dislikes’. CIA-RAW routinely controls the number of hit-counts on my blogs, to take another example and can and does put false numbers, usually a small fraction of the actual number, in the hit counters. Note that falsification of vote counts in Electronic Voting Machines does not require the machines to be defective or physically tampered with; it is done electronically via microwave signals from satellites which leave no trace. CIA-RAW can do a lot more than change vote counts with microwave signals from satellites; they can alter the contents of any webpage at will but they can do a lot more than that also; just as microwaves make cell phones do whatever they do, CIA-RAW can use microwave signals from the U.S. National Security Agency satellites to make any digital equipment do whatever it wants; see IndianAirForcePilotsMurderDOTblogspotDOTcom .
The opinions and votes of India’s slave population suffering from mass-psychosis (below) do not matter; only nuclear weapons matter — to simultaneously destroy Washington, New York, RAW headquarters, South Block and North Block with a warning that additional U.S. cities will be destroyed, with nuclear warheads already emplaced in them, if there is any retaliation or sign of retaliation. In a letter dated July 27, 1982 to Indira Gandhi as prime minister I referred to an act, by American Jews, that was “the equivalent of an annihilatory nuclear first strike on India”. In her reply dated July 29, 1982 she wrote “Dear Mr. Chandra, I have received your letter dated July 27, 1982 and am passing it on to my Principal Secretary to deal with it. Sincerely, Indira Gandhi”. In December, 1982 I wrote to her “There was sudden, terminal, overwhelming violence against me during a seminar at Harvard University and rather similar occurrences earlier… India can expect sudden, annihilatory violence … with nuclear weapons … against its population … unless it can mount a decisively superior force to stop it”. Following my advice, India’s strategic program, including the Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme and the Centre for Advanced Technology, was started to give India victory in a nuclear war with the United States and because of my influence on her, Indira Gandhi as prime minister was assassinated by CIA-RAW and later when Rajiv Gandhi realized the truth of what I had written to her after the American invasion of Iraq which was the first Gulf War, he was also assassinated by CIA-RAW. In the past few years, I have had India’s nuclear forces emplace nuclear warheads in Washington, New York and other U.S. cities and India is now in a position to destroy the United States without being destroyed. In fact, India is in a position now to destroy the United States without itself suffering a single casualty by triggering its nuclear warheads emplaced in Washington and New York with a warning that additional U.S. cities will be similarly destroyed if there is any retaliation or sign of retaliation.
This is what I said when asked if India is just a pawn. “Yes, it is a pawn, a slave, a society suffering from mass-psychosis. Despite the recent revelations about M. K. Gandhi being a homosexual who reveled in his “slavery with a vengeance” to the white man, who engaged in a fake ‘freedom struggle” with the British managed by the Intelligence Bureau, the entire Indian government went to his memorial on his death anniversary this January 30, 2012 to pay tribute. India is a very sick society. (I had urged that all his portraits in government offices, etc. be burned). … By saying that India is suffering from mass-psychosis, I am being generous and kind of giving it the excuse of being ill (of the several hats I wear, I am also a mental health professional) but a country of 1.2 billion people being so terrified of much smaller numbers of people from half way around the world cannot really be excused. … ” (see RAWsTraffickingOfIndianChildrenDOTblogspotDOTcom ).
Satish Chandra