Saeeda Bai’s face became pale.
‘The Nawab Sahib has promised to assist my father’s campaign,’ Maan explained.
‘Poor girl, poor girl,’ said Saeeda Bai softly. ‘O God, what a world this is. Go now, Dagh Sahib, and may God keep you.’
‘Are you sure—’
‘Yes.’
‘I will not be able to think of anything but you, Saeeda,’ said Maan. ‘At least give me a smile before I leave.’
Saeeda Bai gave him a smile, but her eyes were still sad. ‘Listen, Maan,’ she said, addressing him by his name, ‘think of many things. Never place your happiness in one person’s power. Be just to yourself. And even if I am not invited to sing at Holi in Prem Nivas, come here and I will sing for you.’
‘But Holi is more than three months away,’ said Maan. ‘Why, I will see you in less than three weeks.’
Saeeda Bai nodded. ‘Yes, yes,’ she said absently. ‘That’s right, that’s quite right.’ She shook her head slowly a couple of times and closed her eyes. ‘I don’t know why I am so tired, Dagh Sahib. I don’t even feel like feeding Miya Mitthu. God keep you in safety.’
17.5
The electorate of Salimpur-cum-Baitar consisted of roughly 70,000 people, about half Hindu and half Muslim.
Apart from the two smallish towns included in its name, the constituency encompassed over a hundred villages, including the twin villages of Sagal and Debaria where Rasheed’s family lived. It was a single member constituency: only one candidate would be elected to the Legislative Assembly by the voters. Ten candidates in all were standing: six represented parties, and four were Independents. Of the former, one was Mahesh Kapoor, the Minister of Revenue, who was the candidate for the Indian National Congress. Of the latter, one was Waris Mohammad Khan, the candidate who had been put up as a dummy by the Nawab Sahib of Baitar in case his friend did not get the Congress ticket or chose not to stand or bowed out of the race for some reason or other.
Waris was delighted to be a candidate, even though he knew that he would be expected to throw his weight as actively as possible behind Mahesh Kapoor. Just the look of his name on the list of validly nominated candidates outside the office of the Returning Officer made him smile with pride. Khan came just below Kapoor in the list, which was arranged in the order of the English alphabet. Waris thought this significant: the two allies could almost be paired together by a bracket. Though everyone knew what his function in the election was, the fact that he was present on the same list as some of the better-known citizenry of the district — indeed, of the state — gave Waris a certain standing at the Fort. The munshi continued to order him about, but more cagily than before. And when Waris chose not to obey, he had the ready excuse that he was busy with election work.
When Maan and his father arrived at Baitar Fort, Waris reassured them:
‘Now, Minister Sahib, Maan Sahib, leave everything in the Baitar area to me. I’ll arrange everything — transport, meetings, drums, singers, everything. Just tell the Congress people to send us lots of those Nehru posters, and also a lot of Congress flags. We’ll see that they are put up everywhere. And we won’t let anyone go to sleep for a month,’ he continued happily. ‘They won’t even be able to hear the azaan for the slogans. Yes. And I’ve made sure that the water for your bath is hot. Tomorrow morning I’ve arranged for a tour of some of the villages, and in the evening we return to the town for a meeting. And if Maan Sahib wants to hunt — but I fear there will be no time for that. Votes before nilgai. But first I have to make sure that a good many of our supporters attend the Socialist Party meeting this evening to heckle them properly. Those haramzadas don’t even think our Nawab Sahib should get compensation for the land that is going to be snatched from him — just imagine! What an injustice it is already. And now they want to add insult to injury—’ Waris suddenly stopped, the realization striking him that he was addressing the very author of the black act. ‘What I mean is—’ He finished with a grin, and shook his head vigorously, as if shaking the very thought out of his brain. They were, of course, allies now.
‘Now I must see to things,’ he said, and disappeared for a while.
Maan had a slow and relaxed bath, and came down to find his father waiting for him impatiently. They began to discuss the candidates, the support they could expect from people of different areas or religions or castes, their strategy with regard to women and other particular groups, election expenses and how to cover them, and the faint possibility that Nehru might be induced to give a speech in the constituency during his brief tour of Purva Pradesh in mid-January. What gave Maan a real sense of warmth was the fact that his father was far less dismissive of him than usual. Unlike Maan, he had not lived in this constituency, but Maan had expected that he might simply extrapolate his experiences of the Rudhia farm to this northern subdivision. But Mahesh Kapoor, though he did not believe in caste, and thought little of religion, was more than alive to their electoral implications, and listened with care to Maan’s description of the demographic contours of this tricky terrain.
Among the Independent candidates — quite apart from Waris, who was a supporter — there was no one who presented much of a challenge to Mahesh Kapoor. And among the party candidates, because he happened to be the candidate of the Congress Party — anxious though he was about fighting from an unfamiliar constituency — he started out with an immense advantage. The Congress was the party of Independence and the party of Nehru, and it was far better funded, far more widely organized, and far more quickly recognized than the others. Its very flag — saffron, white and green, with a spinning wheel in the middle — resembled the national flag. The Congress Party had a worker or two in almost every village — workers who had been somewhat active in social service during the last few years, and would be very active indeed in electioneering in the coming couple of months.
The other five parties presented a mixed bag.
The Jan Sangh promised to ‘advocate the spread and extension of the highest traditions of Bharatiya Sanskriti’: a thinly veiled term for Hindu, rather than Indian, culture. It was more than willing to go to war with Pakistan over the issue of Kashmir. It demanded compensation from Pakistan for the property of Hindus who had been forced to migrate to India. And it stood for a United India which included the territory of Pakistan; presumably, it meant a forcibly reunited one.
The Ram Rajya Parishad appeared more peaceable if further removed from reality. It declared that its object was to bring about a state of affairs in the country similar to that of the idyllic age of Rama. Every citizen would be expected to be ‘righteous and religious-minded’; artificial foodstuffs such as vanaspati ghee — a kind of hydrogenated vegetable oil — would be banned, as would obscene and vulgar films and the slaughter of cows. The ancient Hindu system of medicine would be ‘recognized officially as the national system’. And the Hindu Code Bill would never be passed.
The three parties to the left of the Congress who were fighting from this constituency were the KMPP, the party that Mahesh Kapoor had joined and then left (and whose symbol was a hut); the Socialist Party (whose symbol was a banyan tree); and the Communist Party (whose symbol was a sickle and a few ears of corn). The Scheduled Castes Federation, the party of Dr Ambedkar (who had recently resigned from Nehru’s Cabinet on the grounds of irreconcilable differences and the collapse of the Hindu Code Bill), had forged an electoral alliance with the socialists; they had no candidate of their own for this seat. They concentrated mainly on double-member constituencies where at least one member from the scheduled castes was bound by law to be elected to the legislature.