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A bootlegger from Ahmedabad lands in Mumbai, meets Bollywood star Mamta Kulkarni, crosses countries and ends up as an alleged druglord. MOHAMED THAVER tracks the story of Vicky Goswami, who now has the US Drug Enforcement Agency and the Thane police hot on his heels.

BACK IN the ’90s, large black suitcases started appearing as luggage, mostly on flights headed from Mumbai international airport to Cape Town in South Africa. There was something unusual about these bags, though. No passenger seemed to be accompanying them. A Mumbai Police team of ‘encounter specialists’ such as Pradeep Sharma and Daya Nayak would later find that at least five similar black bags were put on planes at the international airport every day by airport loaders.

Photocopies of the airport luggage tags of these bags would be faxed to Cape Town, from where another person would collect these bags. “Each bag had nearly a thousand tablets of Mandrax. We laid a trap several times but no one ever accompanied these bags,” says an officer who was then part of the Anti-Narcotics Cell. Police would later identify the man behind the cartel supplying Mandrax tablets as Vijaygiri ‘Vicky’ Goswami.

For long after that, even as the officers moved on to other units, Goswami went about his business. His cover was blown in 2014 when he was detained in Kenya with former Bollywood actor Mamta Kulkarni. While Kulkarni was eventually allowed to go, her resurfacing from oblivion along with an alleged druglord created a buzz around the identity of the person she was found with. “There are hundreds of people like Vicky operating such cartels about whom no one knows. The fact that his arrest got so much attention because of Mamta Kulkarni destroyed the veil of anonymity he had enjoyed earlier,” says an officer with the Anti-Narcotics Cell who had tracked Goswami.

The Drug Bust

On April 18, the Thane Police arrested a Nigerian national who was allegedly selling ephedrine on the streets of Kalyan. This led to a series of arrests of drug peddlers that eventually led the Thane police to the office of Avon Lifesciences Ltd, located in Solapur, Maharashtra, from where they recovered 18.5 tonnes of ephedrine worth Rs 2,000 crore. On April 27, police arrested Manoj Jain, one of the directors of Avon Lifesciences. Jain’s interrogation revealed that he had gone to Africa several times and met Vicky Goswami. Police believe Goswami was to receive the ephedrine and use it to cook meth at a factory in Mombasa and supply it to several countries. The police are still on the lookout for at least two accused — Kishore Rathod, son of a former Gujarat legislator, and Jay Mukhi, a friend of Rathod’s.

What’s Ephedrine?

Ephedrine is popularly used overseas to treat asthma and bronchitis. While controlled dosage eases breathing and is also an ingredient in making cough syrups, its abuse, popularly in the powder form, is known to cause euphoria, hypertension and nausea. It is synthesised to produce the popular narcotic methamphetamine. There are strict rules regulating the production and transportation of ephedrine — a company producing ephedrine needs permission from the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB).

The 55-year-old is back in the spotlight with Thane Police Commissioner Param Bir Singh naming him on April 27 as the person who had been coordinating with seven people arrested over an ephedrine drug bust, involving the seizure of over 18 tonnes of the drug from the Solapur unit of Avon Lifesciences Limited.

“Vicky has a large network of supply chain to various countries. He was to use this ephedrine to cook meth (methamphetamine), also known as crystal, and supply it to various countries including the US,” says commissioner Param Bir Singh.

The Sunday Express tried repeatedly to get in touch with both Goswami and Kulkarni, but got no response.

************

The story of Goswami’s journey, from a bootlegger in Ahmedabad to an alleged international druglord who owns a private jet and a chain of hotels, involves several godfathers and, like many such Mumbai stories, a dash of Bollywood.

Gujarat Anti Terrorism Squad (ATS) Superintendent Himanshu Shukla says, “Goswami started supplying drugs in Ahmedabad till he eventually moved to Africa, from where he is now operating the drug empire.”

Goswami was one of 15 siblings born to Anandgiri Goswami, who retired as deputy superintendent of Gujarat Police. The family had moved from their ancestral village in north Gujarat’s Sabarkantha district to Krishna Kunj society at Paldi in Ahmedabad.

There are unconfirmed reports of Anandgiri having been suspended after he was caught bootlegging in the dry state, but local police confirm Goswami sold bootlegged liquor and was notorious for getting into fights in the area. “After one such fight, an FIR was registered against him at the Ellis Bridge police station in Ahmedabad. I believe that was the first FIR to be registered against him,” says an officer with the Gujarat Anti Terrorism Squad (ATS).

Still a small timer, Goswami hit the big league after meeting Bipin Panchal, also a resident of Paldi. “We believe Panchal introduced Goswami to methaqualone, better known as Mandrax. You could say Panchal was his guru,” says the Gujarat officer.

Through contacts in Valsad and Gujarat, Goswami allegedly started supplying Mandrax in Ahmedabad. In the early ’80s, the first Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) case was registered against him in India, again at the Ellis Bridge police station.

In 1993, Panchal himself was arrested by the Ahmedabad Directorate of Revenue Intelligence with a consignment of Mandrax. Goswami would later leave Ahmedabad for Mumbai. Apart from the fact that the city had a strong party circuit always on the lookout for new drugs, Mumbai had another draw for Goswami. The Ahmedabad lad had been a huge Bollywood fan since childhood, and those who know the family say he would often be punished by his father to keep him away from movies.

In Mumbai, the Mandrax he allegedly supplied is believed to have endeared him to the city’s party circuit and, by extension, got him a foot in the door in Bollywood. Police say this also led to his initial forays into underworld and that he developed contacts with Dawood Ibrahim and Chhota Rajan.

Many of the reigning stars of the day were said to be on his speed dial. A party that he held in 1997 in Dubai for the launch of a chain of hotels — days before his arrest that led to a 25-year sentence — is still remembered by old-timers for drawing “anybody who was somebody in Bollywood”. The stars were reported to have returned to India with lavish ‘return gifts’ like mobile phones, then rare, and cars. There were rumours of several stars approaching Vicky for expensive gifts.

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It was through this Bollywood connection that he would meet Mamta Kulkarni, an actress who had films such as Karan Arjun and Baazi to her name.

While her career in Bollywood fizzled out, her name began to be linked to the underworld after rumours that a director had to reinstate her in a movie after receiving threat calls from the underworld.

Goswami and Kulkarni were said to be in a relationship by the late ’90s. While there were reports of them having got married, both have always denied it. In media interviews, Goswami has also rubbished stories of Kulkarni attending meetings in several countries on his behalf to broker drug deals as he could not travel abroad after his passport was impounded following his arrest.

In an interview to Aaj Tak on April 28, Kulkarni dismissed Goswami’s drug links and said his arrest in Dubai was over a family dispute. Kulkarni also said she and Goswami were “trying to establish” their business of imported food commodities.

At Goswami’s family home in Paldi, his brother Dinesh Goswami rubbishes the Kulkarni connection. “Vicky was a bright student who became a pilot in the mid-80s. He got married and has three children who are settled abroad. Mamta is a well-wisher who has turned into a sadhvi,” he says.

                                                                                 ************

Parallel to this starry story ran the tale of drugs, and a man shifting countries and continents to escape the law. “The story of the rise of Goswami will not be complete without the story of the rise of Mandrax as the chief party drug of the ’90s,” says an officer of the Ahmedabad police. “Whatever he managed to achieve, be it quick money in a matter of years or his connections in high places, was thanks to peddling the right ware at the right time.”

Adding that most party drugs have a life cycle, the officer says, “In the party circuit, there is this fascination for newer drugs with fancy names. Currently, synthetic drugs like meth are big on the party scene. In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Mandrax was all the rage.”

That was where Africa came in. An officer of the Mumbai Anti-Narcotics Cell says if India was believed to be the largest producer of Mandrax, African countries were believed to be its largest consumers. Goswami reportedly recognised this early.

“Mandrax is a depressant that causes a drop in blood pressure, leading to a state of deep relaxation. While it was banned in India in 1971, it was a favourite among miners in Africa who would mix it with alcohol at the end of the day for relaxation. From miners, it became popular with schools and colleges there. This was the reason why Vicky shifted to Zambia in Africa from Mumbai, as he saw a huge market there. He set up a factory in Zambia where Mandrax could be produced,” the officer says.

According to a report in the Mail & Guardian, a South Africa based weekly newspaper, Goswami met Irvin Khoza, nicknamed the ‘Iron Duke’, chairman of the Orlando Pirates football club and chairman of the 2010 FIFA World Cup Organising Committee in South Africa. Such powerful friends helped Goswami’s prominence as well as wealth grow in Zambia. However, it also brought him to the notice of authorities, and in 1993, Goswami left Zambia for South Africa.

Once in South Africa, he again established his network and was reported to have built a huge empire, with luxury cars and a private jet. The Mail & Guardian report also says he had to leave the country after coming on the radar of law-enforcement agencies, especially after the death of an alleged drug dealer and socialite, Roberto ‘Rocks’ Dlamini, said to be one of the biggest unsolved crimes in South Africa till date.

************

In late 1996, he moved to Dubai, which had by then become the new address of the Mumbai underworld. In 1997, he was arrested and sentenced to 25 years on charges of drug trafficking. There are several theories behind what led to the arrest of Goswami, who had earlier managed to escape officials of three countries.

An officer says that initially, Goswami was close to underworld gangster Dawood, who, along with Chhota Rajan, controlled the Mumbai underworld. When the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts forced everyone to take sides, Goswami allegedly picked Rajan. “It was this proximity to Rajan that led a D-Company operative to tip off the police that led to Goswami’s arrest,” the officer claims.

This is also believed to have been the reason behind the attack on his house in Ahmedabad. Four people had come in an autorickshaw and fired a round at their house at Paldi in 1993, the officer says.

Goswami’s stint in the Dubai prison would lead to two aspects of his life that he has always denied: his conversion to Islam and his alleged marriage to Kulkarni. In an interview he gave to a TV channel, he said that there were two instances, in 2006 and 2008, when convicts on death sentence in the Dubai prison where he was lodged were granted pardon while he was denied the same.

A source says, “Goswami realised he stood a better chance at clemency if he converted to Islam, and hence converted. He was eventually granted pardon and released in November 2012. His sentence was commuted by 10 years.” Goswami has denied this in media interviews.

Goswami reportedly changed his name to Yusuf Ahmed and Kulkarni to Ayesha Begum, and both got married while he was behind bars as per Islamic rites. Goswami has denied this too, so has Kulkarni. Even after the recent controversy, Goswami has said Kulkarni is just a well-wisher and that he had never married her. Reports of the duo staying together in Kenya continue to surface.

After being released from Dubai, an officer says, Goswami first came to India and then moved to Kenya, where he came in touch with the drug cartel run by the Aksaha brothers, sons of slain drug baron Ibrahim Akasha. In October 2014, Goswami was arrested along with the Akasha brothers, Ibrahim and Bakhtash, by the local anti-narcotics unit in Kenya with assistance from the US Drug Enforcement Authority (DEA). They were charged with conspiracy to traffic narcotic drugs to the US and in Kenya.

The Kenyan authorities also agreed to the US request for extradition of the accused so that they could be tried in a New York court. A Mombassa court eventually released Goswami on bail on the condition that he could not leave the city, even as the hearing for his extradition to the US is in progress.

An officer says that while in the past, Goswami has managed to evade law-enforcement agencies of several countries, it will be a real test for him to keep the DEA at bay.

In his interviews, Goswami has denied any involvement in drug cartels and has claimed to be “doing hundreds of things like coal mining and businesses related to kachcha sona (raw gold)”. He claims it was in connection with the raw gold business that Manoj Jain, one of those arrested by the Thane police, met him in Africa.

“My downfall has been brought about by three people who have been plotting against me all along,” he said in an interview without naming the “the three people”. He added, “Don’t be surprised if they abduct me one of these days and take me to the USA.”

Back at Goswami’s home in Paldi, his brother Dinesh refuses to believe the police’s theory. He says, “Accusing Vicky of every other drug case is like booking Dawood Ibrahim for every murder case. I would never advise Vicky to come back to India. He will rot in jail all his life if he did.”

With inputs from Satish Jha

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Fifteen kilometres from Bhubaneswar, and by the side of an irrigation canal in Cuttack’s Dhakulei village, at least 60 men and women are readying themselves for a night during which they won’t get any sleep. It’s 34 degrees even after sunset, and under a grimy canvas, sweaty men are wearing make-up looking into small mirrors propped up on plastic tables, under a 200-watt electric bulb. Just a flimsy curtain away, the women, mostly in their 20s and early 30s, are putting on tight-fitting sequinned dresses and brightly coloured saris, in bold defiance of the weather.

The crowd has been building all through the evening, and the buzz of at least a thousand seated in front of a 3-ft-high stage, barricaded by steel and iron railings with microphones hanging from overhead, makes its way to this make-shift dressing area.

The audience have arranged themselves on flattened paper cartons and mats spread on the ground.

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It’s 11 pm finally when Konark Gananatya, one of the 100-odd itinerant jatra troupes of Odisha, comes on. Today is their last act in these parts. The play for the day is Radha Pindhila Meera Sindura (Radha Got Meera’s Vermillion), a tearjerker tale of two sisters in which one marries a man meant for the other after numerous twists.

It will be 5.30 the next morning by the time they finish. The audience sits glued, without even a fan to stir the night air. As hawkers selling ice-candy, lassi and peanuts do brisk business, others have a little something extra — consumed in tiny swigs from obscure bottles.

Watching on from a makeshift temple, set up backstage, are gods and goddesses.

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***

Even amidst the hectic performance lasting over six hours, greeted by whistles and hoots, the talk backstage keeps going back to the tragedy of April 17 in Deogarh district that wiped out almost the entire Bharati Gananatya troupe. The popular Bargarh-based group was travelling to its next stop after a performance when its bus with 38 people had plunged into a 300-ft gorge. Only 11 survived, including an eight-month-old child, Dipika, and her mother Laxmi.

For Konark Gananatya, the deaths were a reminder of their lives lived on the road, and that of those around them.

Odisha’s jatra troupes such as Bharati or Konark, each comprising 100-150 members —including actors, directors, dancers, sound and costume assistants, lightmen, cooks, technicians and labourers — spend more than 300 days a year travelling, in similar buses. They sometimes cover up to 300-400 km between shows. There are no breaks except for two-three weeks in June, set aside for the Odia festival marking the start of the cultivation season, and a month reserved for rehearsals.

The stay at their brief halts is organised by locals, generally in homes or at anganwadi centres, but they cook their own food. Only the bigger artistes may get airconditioned hotel accommodation.

The schedules are decided by the owners and managers of the troupes towards June-end, after villagers contact them on the basis of the plays lined up for the season.

Mostly, husbands and wives are both part of a troupe, like Laxmi and her husband Rajkumar, who died in the Deogarh bus accident along with their son Dipak, 12. Children are generally left behind to be raised by relatives, unless they are too young, such as Dipika.

Filmmaker Kapilas Bhuyan, whose documentary Jatra Jeevan, Jeevan Jatra got a national award in 2006, says, “One moment a jatra troupe is at a dilapidated school building trying to take some rest before the night’s performance, the next morning they are sipping tea at a roadside dhaba. It’s like a big household travelling, with pit stops.”

Underlining the grime behind the glamour, noted jatra director Lala Biren Ray says, “Only a few make it big, and those who do, pay a big price for it. There is no social life.”

However, as the director of Radha Pindhila Meera Sindura, Ashrumochan Mohanty, points out, “Jatras are still a bigger draw compared to Odia films, TV serials. How many movies and serials get people in villages to fork out Rs 200 for a show?”

The Odisha Film Distribution Syndicate estimates that the Odia film industry, with an average of 30 films a year, makes Rs 20 crore annually. The jatra turnover, industry professionals say, is anything between Rs 120 crore and Rs 130 crore a year.

***

At Dhakulei village, there is still some time for the play to begin. Around 11 pm, a bunch of girls and boys come up on the stage for a 90-minute dance to peppy Odia songs.

Konark’s choreographer-cum-main dancer is Litu Mohapatra, 33. Dressed in a shiny silver suit, he poses on a motorcycle for his photograph. Born to a jatra artiste, Mohapatra was orphaned at the age of 11. He was at the time training in Gotipua, Odisha’s oldest dance form, in which small boys dress up as girls. He joined Konark nine years ago, where he now directs 24 boys and girls.

Mohapatra’s wife Runu, 26, too is part of the Konark troupe. Her father is paralysed, she says, and she had little choice but to drop out of school in Class VI and start working. Runu, who remains a dancer 12 years after joining jatras, dreams of playing a “heroine”. Apart from the money, other things change for the “stars”. “When we wear skimpy clothes as dancers, we have to suffer lewd remarks,” she says. They have learnt to treat the catcalls as “admiration”.

Together, the couple make around Rs 3-4 lakh a year. But that doesn’t compensate, Runu says, for leaving behind their daughter, 7, with her mother-in-law at Puri. “I wanted to put her in an English-medium school, but the cost was too much. So this year I put her in an Odia-medium school,” she says.

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Like Mohapatra, 58-year-old Basant Sahu started young, at 17. He now does character roles. Sahu was born to a Pala singer. Once his father died, it fell upon Sahu to provide for his six siblings. One of his younger brothers is now an assistant engineer in the Water Resources Department while another is a software engineer.

Applying powder on his face, Sahu smiles little, as he talks about staying sleepless “night after night”. The lights have started to hurt his eyes, he says.

Sahu’s eyes still twinkle though when he talks about the time he acted with his wife Parvati in Konark till three-four years ago. “With your life partner around, the hardships seem less,” he says, adding Parvati stays home now to look after his ailing mother.

***

The rehearsals for the new season take place mostly in July. “If a troupe is to enact three-four new plays in the season, the rehearsals last a month,” says director Ashrumochan Mohanty. The music assistants rehearse separately before they all finally practise together. Once the travel starts, there is no time for rehearsals.

The dancers though must squeeze in some practice every day.

Runu Mohapatra calls July the toughest month for them. “We wake up by 5 am and practise from 6 am till 8. After breakfast, we start again at 9.30 am, and continue till 1 pm. Then we have lunch and resume practice at 6 pm, which goes on till 11 pm.”

The dance masters are unsparing, Runu adds. She remembers getting hit on the leg by them if she got a step wrong when she started out. “We would even be asked to kneel on the gravel.”

Jatra director Minaketan Patnaik says the dancers perhaps have the toughest life of all jatra artistes. “The payment is hardly adequate for the work they put in or the conditions in which they live.”

While “A-class troupes” such as Konark earn round Rs 1.5 lakh-Rs 2 lakh a night, mostly raised from tickets priced between Rs 30 and Rs 200, “C-class” ones (also called Malei parties) like Bharati Gananatya earn Rs 50,000-Rs 60,000. The presence of big names on the rolls decides the matter.

Top artistes such as Odia cinema baddie Raimohan Parida and film actress Ushasi Mishra can earn up to Rs 42 lakh and Rs 35 lakh a year respectively, but dancers in C-grade troupes get around Rs 50,000 for working through the year.

Ratikanta Parida, 38, is now among the top performers, cornering the meaty role of hero or villain in his plays. He became a part of jatras fresh after college, after trying his hand at selling tractors.

Now he can draw in a crowd on his own, Parida smiles. He and wife Mituna earn about Rs 25 lakh annually. “In

which other profession do you make money working for just five hours? We make lot more than an average youngster in Odisha,” says Parida.

While most of the troupe travels by a bus, Parida and Mituna move around in their Tata Indigo. “If I can afford a car, why should I travel in a bus?” he says.

However, the working hours still hurt, apart from the pain of leaving behind their five-year-old son Koushik with Mituna’s parents at Jagatsinghpur and of not being around for the rest of the family. When his father died, Parida says, he couldn’t stay for even the last rites as he had a show that day.

The couple are now planning to put Koushik in a boarding school.

Rudra Prasad Mishra, 37, the lead actor of Radha Pindhila Meera Sindura, who earns around Rs 15 lakh a year after a decade in jatras, says no amount of money can make up for the lost family time. Last year, Mishra had to be back on stage soon after burying his three-year-old daughter, who was allegedly killed by his wife over a domestic row. “I could not even grieve properly,” says Mishra, now separated from his wife.

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Rajkumar Rath, the main singer of the troupe, could not attend the funeral of his father four years ago. Like most days, after performing till morning, he and the other artistes had gone to bed putting their mobile phones on silent. “My family members kept trying to inform me,” says Rath.

After 12 years of singing in wedding bands and at birthdays and orchestra parties for as low as Rs 50 a day, and later working as a driver for senior artistes in the troupe, the 41-year-old still earns very little.

But Rath says he can’t really complain. “I have to support my wife and two kids.”

Seven-month pregnant Sarojini Swain, 30, one of the protagonists in the play, wishes she could take maternity leave. Her husband Sridhar does odd roles in Konark’s plays. Everytime she goes up on stage, Sarojini is afraid. “Not of an accident, but about the floodlights affecting my unborn child. I sweat buckets,” she says.

Daitari Panda, who has made a name as villain over 38 years, recently formed an association of jatra artistes to fight for their rights. Its first meeting will be held on June 17, where “security” and other “long-standing issues” will be discussed.

Despite the better remuneration, the artistes have little to look forward to, he says. “None of the owners of the troupes ever gets us insured. We can’t have ice-cream and other cold stuff lest we catch a cold. A jatra artiste can’t afford to fall ill and is expected to perform through the year.”

***

The dance on the Dhakulei stage is still in full flow. As a skimpily-dressed girl sways to an Odia hit, a middle-aged woman grabs her son by the arm and admonishes him, “You don’t seem to study your textbooks as intently as you are watching that useless girl!”

Three girls come with their mother, carrying a frayed paper carton that they spread on the ground before sitting. A few men in their 20s take selfies.

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The audience is more excited than usual as today’s is a “free” show. Such shows are mostly held March to May when the jatra troupes have taken the entire money upfront from the organisers and are not yet looking for ticket sale proceeds.

One by one, the halogen lights start getting brighter, indicating the start of the play.

As the music gets louder, Baban Behera, a small-time trader, turns excitedly to his 11-year-grandson Ranjan, asking, “Can you stay awake the entire night?”

As the boy nods, craning his neck to see the stage, Behera smiles, “Though there is some vulgarity, jatras depict social tensions, unlike Odia movies.”

Backstage, artistes gather near the stage. Just before they climb on, they bow quickly before the makeshift temple, the vermillion on the gods gleaming under the lights.

Ratikant Parida waits patiently for his turn, going through his WhatsApp messages as he sits on one of the iron trunks containing the costumes. Basant Sahu chants some mantras, his eyes closed.

A helper sent by the organisers moves around carrying milk-less tea, that he offers in small plastic cups.

“We can’t afford to eat after evening lest we feel drowsy. But in the afternoon, our greatest worry is getting proper sleep rather than food,” says Parida, as he gets off the stage after some power-packed dialogue. He quickly discards his shirt drenched in sweat for an ironed one.

A few feet away, Rudra Prasad Mishra puts on a red cape, and sits down to sip tea. The respite is brief. As the play inches towards its final act, Mishra and Parida are required to run on and off the stage, panting as they change from black shirts to red ones. The two costume assistants are as busy, ensuring each used cloth goes back into trunks, separate for male and female actors.

While the play goes on, the actors too simultaneously put away their belongings.

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Around 4 am, a dozen labourers who have been sleeping for the better part of the night get active. It’s their job to pack the props. One of the dancers packs the gods and goddesses into one of the trunks.

Within an hour of the audience leaving, around 6 am, the troupe is ready to move.

The next stop is a village in Jajpur district, around 60 km away. The owner of the group belongs to the district.

While trunks with the props and costumes are loaded onto a truck, around 30 artistes, carrying their belongings in rucksacks or airbags, walk up to a 40-seater bus.

Plonking down into a front seat, Sahu declares, “I am hungry, I need breakfast.”

Rath, the singer, talks of how he once rammed a WagonR he was driving into some electric poles. “I was tired after singing through the night,” he says.

Settling carefully into her seat on the bus, the pregnant Sarojini says she is looking forward to catching some sleep. “If I don’t do this (the jatra), someone will do it,” she says. “Why should I complain?”

The day the music died

The accident took away Bargarh jatra’s owner, anchor, main actors, musician

The April 17 bus accident that killed 27 of its troupe members may have shut down Bargarh-based jatra troupe Bharati Gananatya forever. Among those who died in the accident were the troupe’s owner Sitaram Pradhan, its anchor, its manager, its protagonist as well as its heroine-cum-comedienne-cum-vamp, apart from the driver of the rented bus they were in.

Survivors allege driver Ashokdeep was drunk and angry with Sitaram over some payment. Others say the reason was more simple: that he was tired, like the rest of the troupe, after a long night. Police have arrested the owner of the bus on charges of plying the vehicle without a fitness certificate.

No one in Sitaram’s Remta village, where the troupe rehearsed its plays, wants to talk about that night, their wounds still fresh.

The troupe had been started by Sitaram’s grandparents 35-40 years ago. After a successful run, it had suffered losses and shut down. Around 15 years ago, Sitaram re-started it, putting in about Rs 20 lakh of his own.

Younger brother Dasarath Pradhan says the whole family was involved in keeping Bharati running, either taking care of backstage operations or playing small roles. It had once again tasted success, being in demand throughout western Odisha, which has around eight-10 regular jatra troupes, as well as parts of Chhattisgarh.

It was on Sitaram’s request that writer Bijoy Das had written Sitaram Paeen Ayodhya Kande, the last play staged by the troupe before the accident. The title had his and wife Ayodhya’s name in it. She was at home when the accident killed him.

Sitaram Paeen Ayodhya Kande had been a major hit, with its last performance in Deogarh district attracting over 20,000 people.

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“I don’t think we can re-start the troupe,” Dasarath says. “We need at least Rs 5-8 lakh just to hire new artistes and buy costumes and props.”

The others call the loss of percussionist Rasanand Mahanand, a Dalit who played the mouth organ, clarinet and flute with equal felicity, the biggest setback. Mahananda had been playing percussion instruments since the age of 11, and had his own band. “Bharati’s popularity was as much due to the acting as Mahananda’s skills. He would set the tempo for the play. There is no one like him in the area,” says Remta villager Tarani Debata.

Mahananda’s widow Laxmi is inconsolable. “What do I do with the

Rs 2 lakh the government gave us? He was the king of my life,” she says.

Kashinath Pradhan, 35, who would be the anchor at Bharati’s performances, had been diagnosed with a major back problem last year. His family had urged him to give up acting, but there were three daughters, a diabetic wife and ageing parents to provide for.

Angad Pradhan, who played Rama in Sitaram Paeen Ayodhya Kande, was a stage veteran of 20 years. “He played all the major roles,” says younger brother Ashok Pradhan.

Sukanti Parida, 36, who played Sita, had had a difficult childhood, with her father deserting her mother Dukhi shortly after her birth. “She could play the heroine, vamp and a comedienne with equal ease and so got roles in different troupes. Before the accident, she had performed for a month in Berhampur, for which she got

Rs 20,000. As Bharati’s actress had disappeared just before the last play, the owner and the manager had coaxed Sukanti to join them,” says Dukhi.

Laxmipriya, who was among the survivors, along with nine-month-old Dipika, has other worries. An orphan, Laxmipriya would dance in the jatra or did small roles. She got married to Rajkumar Patel, a sound operator with the troupe, 12 years ago, after they fell in love.

Laxmipriya has received Rs 4 lakh as ex-gratia after the accident that killed Patel and their son Dipak. “Though my in-laws never accepted me, now they want me to stay with them due to the money. They are pressuring me,” says Laxmipriya.

Local Congressman Pradyumna Tripathy says that even if they pitched in, putting the troupe back together again would be difficult. “The group has lost its driving force, its owner. I don’t foresee it happening in the next couple of years.”

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It’s the strangest of cases. Two girls of a Meerut locality publicly claimed earlier this month to have killed their father, though police insist it was an accident. In the curtain of silence being drawn around the case, lies a deeper secret. For years now, till his May 12 death, the 46-year-old daily wager allegedly raped his daughters.

Soon after the incident, and the girls’confession, their mother left home without informing them, only taking along their five-year-old brother.

In a 10×5 feet room that is their home, the two girls, 18 and 17, sit without even a fan in the boiling summer. Confused and traumatised, they remain unsure of what will happen to them now. A maternal uncle, who has no source of income himself, has moved in to look after them while a neighbour has been providing them food.

“But how long will she do that, I do not know,” points out the elder daughter, who does all the talking.

The uncle promises to provide for them as long as he can, adding, “Gharwalon ne ye keh kar bedakhal kar diya hai ki tumne bete ko mara. Ab ye kahan jaayen (The family members have disowned them saying they have killed their son. Where do these girls go now)?”

The uncle, who claims to know nothing of the girls being raped, was in Hamirpur (UP) when he heard about the death of his brother-in-law. “I rushed to Meerut and found out that the girls ‘had done something wrong’. Now I am here as their guardian. I do not know where my sister (the girls’ mother) has gone,” he says.

Police say what happened wasn’t murder but an accident where the 46-year-old came home drunk, stumbled, and hit his head against the floor. “There is no question of the girls being arrested. The postmortem report has confirmed that the man died due to a head injury,” says Ravindra Kumar Vashisht, the in-charge of the Medical police station, citing the statement recorded by the elder daughter.

Asked why the two sisters had confessed, the police officer said, “The case is being investigated and the truth will come out.”

Neighbours willing to talk about the girls say they have had a tough life. They studied only till Class I as their parents, both labourers, never had enough money. The neighbours also testify to daily fights at their home, with the father coming home drunk and beating up their mother.

The girls say they turned to their mother for help to prevent the sexual assaults, which allegedly happened in front of her in that small room, but that she could do nothing.

It never occurred to them to seek help outside, the girls say.

A woman who lives in the room next to theirs says, “Jhagda roz hota tha, lekin band kamre mein kya hota tha, ye kise pata (There used to be daily fights, but who can tell what happens behind closed doors)?”

On May 12, the girls say, their father came home drunk again, but they retaliated, beating him till he finally collapsed. “Bahut dinon se aisa chal raha tha. Hum kab tak sehte (This (the assaults) was happening for days. How long could we have tolerated)?” says the elder sister. The girls went straight to the Medical police station located nearby first and “confessed”. But police, citing a statement that they recorded later, said the 47-year-old had tripped, with his head hitting the wall and resulting in death.

While the matter may have remained unknown, the girls, with their faces covered with scarves, later appeared on local media channels and claimed to have killed their father. As the “confession” went viral, police released the statement recorded by the elder girl about their father dying in an accident.

Says a policeman, “Whatever has been done was in the best interest of the two girls. They are already living a hellish life and things would have been worse had they been sent to jail.”

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After the drubbing Tarun Gogoi got at the hands of the BJP, the three-term octogenarian chief minister was compared in the local press to Dhritarashtra, the king of Hastinapur who, blind to his son’s failings, triggered the Mahabharata. It may perhaps sound like poetic justice then that Gogoi, who has had to battle charges of nepotism for promoting his son Gaurav, should be replaced by a bachelor, the BJP’s Sarbananda Sonowal.

It is also a sign of how far Assam politics has travelled that the BJP, which not too long ago was seen in these parts as a North Indian, Hindi-speaking party of outsiders, should emerge as the biggest gainer — from five seats in 2011 to 60. In an election fought on the issue of identity, the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), the original proponent of identity politics in Assam, has also come back in the reckoning, winning 14 seats.

Which is why, this was an election unlike any other this state has witnessed.

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Precision planning by BJP

The saffron party changed colours in Assam — and got its allies to change theirs. The BJP repackaged its core Hindutva agenda in the Assamese context till it became an unbending stance on illegal immigration from Bangladesh.

The party also freely chose its leaders from other parties without quibbling about ideologies. Its CM face, Sarbananda Sonowal, is the man who had once been anointed “jatiyo nayak (national hero)” after his PIL forced the quashing of the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act of 1983. The law dates back to the era of Indira Gandhi and was widely believed to have been a Congress ruse to protect Bangladeshi immigrants who largely voted for the party.

No stranger therefore to the Assamese brand of identity politics, Sonowal cut his political teeth in the AGP, of which he had been both MLA and MP. He joined the BJP only in 2011.

The party also welcomed with open arms Himanta Biswa Sarma, one-time Gogoi lieutenant who quit the Congress in frustration over the rise of Gogoi’s son in the party.

While doing so, the BJP changed its over-centralised model of electioneering to make the state unit the most important cog in the wheel. Assam is a complex state and the high command went with the state leadership’s assessments on alliances rather than foisting decisions and candidates as it had done in recent elections in Bihar and Delhi.

“The entire election was managed by the state leadership — Sarbananda, Himanta and the MPs — who all worked very hard. The Prime Minister and the party president came only thrice each, Rajnathji came twice and Sushmaji and Jaitleyji only once each. We did not let any national issue hijack our agenda of keeping local issues at the top. It was a very controlled campaign,” says BJP general secretary Ram Madhav, who was part of the BJP’s core strategy team for Assam.

The BJP has always had voters in Assam, what it did not have are leaders and that is what changed this time, says journalist Haider Hossein.

“It is the entry of leaders from the Congress (Sarma) and AGP (Sonowal) that filled the leadership void in the BJP and helped it sharpen its strategy. From the beginning, they positioned themselves as the protectors of the Khilonjia (indigenous Assamese) identity and thus appealed to both Hindus and Muslims. The BJP also made astute use of the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF) by whipping up the scare of its leader Badruddin Ajmal. They spoke about how he could become a powerful player in the state and insinuated that the Congress would be a willing collaborator with him. That had an effect in Barak Valley, where Hindus voted en masse for the BJP,” says Hossein.

The split in the Muslim vote, in constituencies where the community has a substantial presence, too worked for the BJP. For example, in Bilasipara east, while the Congress and AIUDF cut into each other’s Muslim base, the BJP’s Ashok Kumar Singhi won comfortably.

However, much after the euphoria of its momentous win subsides, the BJP will have to grapple with a question that is already being asked in hushed tones. Can two swords remain in one sheath? How will the BJP accommodate the aspirations of Sarma and Sonowal?

Political observers say Sarma, who has been number two in the Gogoi cabinet for years, certainly did not walk out of the party to play second fiddle once again.

One solution is already being talked about. There is speculation about who will replace Sonowal in Parliament. That could be Sarma.

Also Read: ‘We started working on Assam even before 2014 polls’

Price of nepotism?

What cost the Congress this election? Was it a “wave” in favour of change or was it CM Tarun Gogoi’s over-reliance on his son that did the party in? These are questions that will linger for some time now.

What is clear from the election results is that the Congress found it hard to shrug off charges of nepotism. Assam PCC president Anjan Dutta’s daughter Angkita lost Amguri by 1,620 votes; Diganta Barman, minister Bhumidhar Barman’s son, lost in Barkhetry by 8,613 votes; Bharat Narah, husband of Rajya Sabha MP Ranee Narah, bit the dust in Dhakuakhana by 24,542 votes; Lok Sabha MP Sushmita Dev’s mother Bithika lost Silchar by 39,920 votes; and former central minister Paban Singh Ghatowar lost Moran by 16,231 votes. His wife Jibantara was the sitting MLA from the constituency.

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Clik here to view.The Congress’s Pranab Gogoi, the speaker in the outgoing state Assembly who managed a win from Sivasagar, says, “There were many acts of omission and commission by the government that the people did not approve of. There were grievances of the people that were not addressed. That is what the BJP took advantage of. It is too early to start analysing what really went wrong and it would not be appropriate to do so right away.”

Pranab Gogoi will feel vindicated. He had to fight it out for his ticket given his less than congenial equation with Chief Minister Gogoi and considering that PCC president Anjan Dutta had hoped to keep the Sivasagar constituency for himself.

“There were many things that went wrong. The large numbers of relatives who were accommodated, right from the top… In fact, had it not been for the CM’s insistence on accommodating his son in the party, this may have been a respectable result for us because then Himanta would not have quit the party and the workers’ morale would not have been hit. I believe many Congress workers actually voted for the BJP,” says a Congress insider not willing to be named.

Some within the party talk of Gogoi’s Koinadhora hilltop residence as a metaphor for his disconnect with the real world. His unwillingness to heed advice, they say, not only hit the party hard but was also the reason for his misplaced confidence about a fourth term on election eve, when all indicators were that Congress was going down a very slippery slope.

Assam Pradesh Congress Committee general secretary Anil Raja is not willing to count Sarma as one of the factors that cost the Congress this election. “The arrogance cost us, the syndicate raj and corruption cost us… How can one say that his (Sarma’s) being around would have changed everything? Even now, his contribution to the BJP’s win is not more than 20 per cent.”

There is no dearth of Congressmen here or in Delhi who disagree, among them general secretary Digvijaya Singh. “That single action of driving (Sarma) out took away 10-15 seats from the Congress’s kitty,” Digvijaya has said.

Why Ajmal failed to fire

It is not good publicity for a peer (holy man) who claims to turn water into panacea by spitting on it to lose his own Assembly constituency by 16,723 votes.

On Thursday evening, as news of his loss trickled in, AIUDF chief Ajmal invited all and sundry to his quarters in the MLA hostel — B6 allotted to his son — as his aides distributed sweets. “Sweets do not necessarily come with a win. Come and eat sweets for my loss,” he said.

It was perhaps this flamboyance that misled many to believe that the perfume baron, an MP from Dhubri, would be the most important factor this election.

As the BJP positioned itself as the guardian of the Assamese identity, Ajmal came to symbolise the “other” — people from across the border who are “infiltrating” the state. That he made several tall claims of being the kingmaker — “nobody will be able to form a government in Assam without me,” he had said — worked in the BJP’s favour, pushing those suspicious of him to the BJP.

Even on the eve of the results, he had maintained that his AIUDF would be the single largest party in the 126-member Assembly with 46 seats. The party won 13 seats, five down from its earlier tally, with a vote share of 13 per cent.

“The explosion in the number of illegal immigrants was an important issue this election and Ajmal was the face of that. Of the 65 seats in Upper Assam, the Congress got only six because it was a mandate against illegal migration. There was that panic factor that Ajmal would emerge kingmaker if the mandate was not decisive enough. That is why neither the AIUDF nor the Congress benefited,” says Nanigopal Mahanta, head of the Department of Political Science in Gauhati University.

The Congress’s dogged refusal to ally with the AIUDF was perhaps a recognition of this fact. It was not for nothing that Gogoi made his famous “Who is Badruddin” remark in 2011.

He tried the same line on Thursday during his brief press conference, but this time, the zing was gone.

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How did you repackage BJP for Assam?

Each state is different. It’s not about re-packaging the party but devising the right strategy for a given state. We devised a strategy for Assam keeping in mind the existing political situation and realities in the state.

Did you tone down your Hindutva agenda?

In Assam, we found that the people of Assam were worried about the lack of development by the Congress government. We made that one of our main issues. Second, there is a feeling among the Assamese that both their identity and honour have come under severe threat due to the large population of illegal migrants. We assured the people that we would bring development and do everything possible to secure Assam’s honour and identity.

What were the factors that worked to your advantage?

First, it was the coalition we cobbled up. It was a good mix… a wonderful rainbow coalition. It had representatives from every constituent of Assamese society — Bengali Hindus, Assamese Hindus, tea garden workers, Rabhas etc. Assam has seen such a broad coalition for the first time.

The second factor is that unlike in other elections, we did not allow this election to be influenced by national issues; we concentrated on state issues. The Congress tried to shift the discourse — they had more posters of Kanhaiya Kumar than of Rahul Gandhi. We refused to accept that and consistently brought back attention to local issues. They were so desperate that they even had photos of the Gujarat riots there. Our consistency and resolve not to get distracted helped us.

Third, the onus of the campaign was on local leaders. Of course, we had the Prime Minister, party president and Union ministers Rajnath Singh, Sushma Swaraj and Nitin Gadkari. But the star campaigners were Sarbananda Sonowal and Himanta Biswa Sarma. We tried our best to do everything at the right time. We have not committed any mistake during the campaign. One mistake could have cost us the election.

The RSS has been active on the ground in Assam for many years. Has it helped the BJP?

The RSS has been actively working in the Northeast for many decades, but in social and service areas. They don’t do politics. But the RSS’s association with every section of society helped us. There were many social organisations and groups that helped us and some of these were RSS-backed.

How far did Himanta Biswa Sarma’s entry help the BJP?

It helped us in two ways: first, his deserting the Congress substantially weakened that party. He was singularly responsible for the Congress’s victory in 2011. Sarma is hard working and is knowledgeable about Assam. He has worked very hard, untiringly.

Will you repeat your Assam strategy in other states?

Each state is different. You cannot have your Delhi strategy in Assam or anywhere else.

There have been many reasons attributed to the Congress’s debacle. What is it about the Congress that helped you?

Not many people know that we started working on Assam even before the general election of 2014. Our first success was when we won seven seats in that election. From there, continuously and consistently, the Congress has been weakened. Gogoi is a grassroots leader, but he could not sense the mood of the people. He was left alone and he had no one to bank on. In his 15 years of rule, Gogoi has left nothing for the Congress. The state’s human resource indices have gone from bad to worse. The Congress’s defeat was imminent.

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At Hindustan Mineral Products, one of 20 quartz crushing factories in Godhra, every breath comes at a price. Ramu Mahavir, all of 5 feet tall, knows this only too well. So he has his gear in place — a cotton face-mask and a multi-coloured synthetic handkerchief.

The white dust produced from quartz crushing, also referred to as the “powder of death” in these parts, is known to cause the incurable and irreversible respiratory disease silicosis. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court directed the Gujarat government to release over Rs 7 crore as compensation to the families of 238 workers who have died of silicosis after working in Godhra’s quartz and stone-crushing units.

Securing the handkerchief around his mask, Mahavir says, “It’s very dusty. Without this mask (a yellow pad), it is difficult to stand here. Although there is no way to stop breathing dust, the mask helps me to a great extent. I am fit and fine, so far.”

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While Mahavir, the only worker at the factory besides two maintenance staff, is well aware of the risks, the work at the factory “is a good way to provide for his family”, he says. “I have managed to build a house in my village, buy two motorcycles — one for my parents in the village — and have also paid off all my debts,” says Mahavir, 35, who belongs to Ramsagar village in Dhar district of Madhya Pradesh.

Mahavir reports to work by 10 am. His wife Poona, daughter Maya, 6, and son Rohit, 3, stay with him in his one-room quarter on the factory compound.

“Since my family is here, I feel more at home and do my work better. My wife takes care of the meals and I can see my children grow up, unlike the other migrant workers who have left their families behind,” he says. “My parents and two siblings look after our fields in the village.”

Around noon, two trucks filled with white quartz stones, all mined from the Dahod-Santrampur belt in the eastern part of the state, arrive at the Godhra factory. Mahavir’s job involves overseeing the entire process from here on — unloading the stones to crushing and finally packing the white dust.

Mahavir begins by supervising the offloading of the stones into large conical iron units, where they are stored before being fed into a mechanised unit for processing. After ensuring the transfer of all the stones, Mahavir proceeds to the next step: switching on the conveyor belt connected to the conical units. The stones slide onto the narrow belts, which are surrounded by muddy white mounds of quartz dust.

The conveyor belt is connected to a motor-operated crusher, which has a large iron wheel that breaks down the stones into smaller pieces. As the stones return to the conveyor belt after their first stint inside the crusher, Mahavir checks their size with his hands — he has no gloves on. The cycle continues till the quartz blocks are reduced to a fine glistening white powder. At times, he climbs onto a stool to get to the conical unit and spread out the stones.

It is 3.30 pm, and Mahavir continues with his rounds between the conveyor belt and the crusher, leaving footprints on the thick layer of white powder slathered on the factory floor. It is this fine dust that contains the deadly silica, which has caused silicosis to many workers in these factories, including several from Mahavir’s district in Madhya Pradesh. In fact, it’s from residents of his village that he first heard about the job opportunity at the “Godhra wali factory”.

“The others from my village came here, worked for a few months, earned money and returned,” he says. “I earn Rs 15,000 a month. No job in my village can help me earn this much,” he explains.

But what about the health risks? “I am a poor farmer. We own about 4 bighas in the village where we grow soyabean. But when the crops fail, we have to look for other avenues to provide for the family. What other option do I have?” he says.

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By now, the dust from the crusher has collected in gunny bags and Mahavir has to seal them. This is considered the most hazardous of the processes. At this factory, while the gunny bags are filled automatically, the sealing is done manually. Today, Mahavir’s wife Poona is helping him out. Dressed in a printed sari with a handkerchief tied around her face, Poona helps Mahavir check each sack before sealing them. They then arrange the gunny bags in neat stacks in a corner of the factory.

The gunny bags are later dispatched to glass companies and silicate industries that provide raw material for manufacture of steel, cast iron, aluminium alloys, ceramics, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals, among other things.

“Unlike the other tribal members of my village, I did not have to pay dowry to my wife’s father. Many of my friends are forced to take up jobs in the city to pay back the money they borrowed for their dowry, sometimes as high as Rs 1.5 lakh. Since my father-in-law didn’t take any money, Poona and I can save whatever we make here,” Mahavir says. He has been working at the factory for a year-and-a-half, with half-yearly breaks in between to return to his village for farming.

Over the past few months, he has learnt a smattering of Gujarati. “Everyone here speaks Hindi. I don’t have too many interactions with people outside the factory, except for the truck drivers. I manage that,” he smiles.

However, he hasn’t struck up many friendships, “just two other workers who take care of the maintenance of the plant”. “I talk to my employers often,” he adds.

At 2 pm, after a quick lunch, Mahavir prepares to return to the factory to oversee another round of crushing and packaging.

The talk returning to labourers who have fallen to the deadly disease, he says, “So far, I have not faced any health problems. The owner gets my health checked routinely.”

Suman M, the owner of the factory, claims he has taken all the precautions for his workers. “There is no risk of silicosis in my factory. I have done all this work myself in my early days. Workers usually develop silicosis because of their other vices.”

As he walks back, dragging his feet on the thick white dust, Mahavir doesn’t take any chance. Fixing the mask and handkerchief around his face, he says, “I make it a point to not leave it uncovered inside the factory.”

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It’s 10 am and the office traffic in the East Kolkata locality of Phoolbagan is an organised mess. Autorickshaws sneak past rickety buses, taxis slow down teasingly near commuters before zooming away, pedestrians negotiate dug-out roads. In any other city, the morning rush hour is not the ideal time to stop a pedestrian and ask for directions, but this is Kolkata. And after a heated election.

“Are you sure you want to go to the Beleghata CPM party office?” asks a young man, before giving us the directions. Straight and then a left turn, opposite the Divine Nursing Home, it’s a red building with glass doors. In a city awash with the Trinamool Congress blue and white, here is a rare red.

Since May 19, when the West Bengal election results were announced, 14 CPM regional offices in the Beleghata constituency have allegedly been occupied by TMC workers. The TMC’s Paresh Paul won from here against the CPM’s Rajib Biswas by 26,179 votes.

One can find Biswas at the Beleghata CPM office, among the few to have escaped the TMC’s wrath in the constituency. Four policemen sit on guard at the entrance.

Inside, the three-room office is strewn with party banners, flags and boxes full of documents. “Sorry about the mess. Stuff from most of our other offices in the area has been shifted here because Trinamool workers have occupied our buildings,” says Biswas.

There are only two other cadres present, pouring over a pile of Bengali newspapers.

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Biswas makes space for us to sit in the “inner chamber of the office”. A wall bears mould-ridden pictures of Marx, Lenin and Stalin. However, the most weather-beaten image is that of Buddhadeb Bhattacharya. A network of damp patches criss-crosses the face of the CPM’s last chief minister, who held all of two reluctant rallies in the recent polls.

Glancing at Bhattacharya’s photo, Biswas smiles wearily, “The damp weather has no mercy”.

Diagonally across hangs a shiny laminated photograph of Jyoti Basu, who didn’t live to see the CPM’s decline after his heady, 23-year reign.

Since the results were announced a week ago, Biswas says, he has not been able to “sleep properly”. “We have been in hiding. Yesterday, my home was attacked by Trinamool workers. My election agent is in hiding. His house was burnt down a few days ago.”

“Even a fortnight ago, the place was buzzing with energy,” Biswas adds.

The policemen outside sip tea, offered around the office by party members.

Biswas was contesting for the first time. Slowly slipping from his cup, he says that in his campaign, he focused on infrastructural development and employment opportunities that he could bring to the largely middle-class constituency. “I was convinced that we would win because the sitting MLA had hardly done any work.”

On the morning of May 19, when it became increasingly clear that he was going to lose, Biswas called an urgent meeting with his cadres in this very office. “The regional office near my house was already taken over, we treated this as a safehouse,” he says.

There is a sense of post-poll fatigue about the office, Biswas corroborates. “We ran a gruelling campaign. I went to almost all the houses of the area asking for votes. Now an almost crippling tiredness has taken over.”

Around him, sheafs of documents flutter under the fan, as the rising pitch of a television anchor provides a lulling background score. Biswas keeps checking text messages on his phone intently, while the other CPM leaders remain buried in newspapers.

Around 1 pm, Biswas gets up to go home for lunch. “It’s a 15-minute walk, I live in a slum,” he says. “You can stay in the office, it will be kept open.”

Mainak Das is having biscuits and tea, and waves us over. The 62-year-old remembers the glory days of the party. “I was a big admirer of Jyoti Basu. One of my most cherished moments is when I met him in the 1990s. He was such a gentleman, never compromised on his dignity even in the direst of times,” says Das.

He has been a party member since he was a teenager, he adds. What does he think was the reason for the party’s crushing defeat? “I feel people were not very convinced about our jote with the Congress. We should have declared the alliance at least a year back. Also, we didn’t have a definite CM candidate.”

Today, he made his way to the party office early in the morning, Das says. “I left before the Trinamool guys could spot me and I will leave before sundown.”

He has “never seen this kind of violence”, Das adds. “I have sent my wife and children to my in-laws’ place. They (the Trinamool men) are not only targeting CPM supporters, but their families too. I don’t know why, they have won overwhelmingly.”

The only other CPM leader at the office, Swapan Saha, also 62, a zonal committee member, says his house was attacked by a mob of 30 TMC workers on the night of May 19. “They pelted my house with stone and bricks, most of my windows were broken.”

Most junior members of the party have stopped visiting the office, Das adds. “Auto drivers who are aligned to our party have been asked to join the Trinamool. Hawkers are being asked to join victory marches.”

The lunch hour extends leisurely to 2 pm, and the office still has no visitors.

At about 2.15 pm, Sulagna Maity, 31, walks in to do the cleaning. This has been an afternoon ritual for about five years. Does she see any change in the office? “There are no people around,” she smiles shyly.

The floor, covered with boxes and papers, doesn’t have much space for her to broom and mop. Yet, like the devoted cadres around her, she perseveres.

At about 3 pm, Biswas walks back in. “I have heard that one of our party members, whose sister died a day ago, had returned to attend her last rites but Trinamool party workers asked him to leave as soon as possible. This is the atmosphere we live in,” he says agitatedly.

Have they lodged a police report? “What report can be made? These are covert threats,” says Biswas.

Late in the night, he will have another meeting with party workers. “They are requesting me to join the Trinamool to stop all this madness, but I will not let this bog me down,” he asserts.

It’s 5 pm and a salmon pink dusk descends upon Kolkata. Biswas, Saha and Das are ready to lock up the office. “We will come back tomorrow. We have to keep the red flag flying high,” says Biswas.

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Everyone knows the Savlas now. On May 16, from a house where they had lived in for at least 13 years in Mumbai’s suburb Mulund West’s Guide Society, officials took out eight truckloads of waste and an 86-year-old woman lying unconscious on plastic bottles. Another house rented by them, and located minutes away, was found to be as filled with garbage.

But who did know the Savlas?

In this corner of one of the world’s most densely populated cities, the family and its garbage remained an open secret till the rats got too much. Since officials came and went, the neighbours have retreated into their homes, and the four Savla siblings into theirs. The 86-year-old mother, Maniben Savla, is the only one to have left, and doctors at the civic-run hospital say she will recover.

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The siblings roam aimlessly between their two houses, in tattered clothes and grey hair, carrying with them an unmistakable stench of decay. The Guide Society house, as the one in Dedhia Niwas, has no light bulb, though working fans. The windows are kept shut, even partially boarded.

The family may have had an LPG connection once, but it has been cut for long, as the Savlas don’t cook any more. “They eat either at a thrice-a-week community lunch in the neighbourhood or beg for food. A lot of families leave out leftovers for them,” says Raju Gupta, a neighbour at Dedhia Niwas.

Paresh Rambhiya, who lives next door to the Savlas at Dedhia Niwas — the ageing chawl a lane away from Guide Society — tries to explain it. “They are like Jain sadhus and sadhvis,” he says. “Their bodies have become used to living like this.”

Doctors have diagnosed Maniben, who can’t see or hear very well, as suffering from severe weakness and “altered sensorium”, a medical condition in which a person is unable to think properly owing to a state of semi-consciousness.

Rambhiya, who was among those who watched as the BMC removed window grills to force entry into the Savlas’ house at Guide Society, after the front door was found blocked by garbage, claims to have known them the longest. And nearly not enough.

The cloth merchant says Maniben and husband Virjibhai migrated to Mumbai nearly 70 years ago from Gundala village in Kutch, Gujarat. Virjibhai found work as an accountant at a firm and his oldest son Chimanlal, now 68, followed in his footsteps.

Nearly 50 years ago, the family moved to Mulund West, renting the 300-sq ft house on the first floor of Dedhia Niwas, a one-storey building where 20 residents live as permanent tenants. Over time, the couple had six children and rented an identical flat in Guide Society.

Of the six siblings, four now survive. Chimanlal and younger brother Harilal work as grain dealers at the Agriculture Produce Marketing Committee Market (APMC) in Vashi. Sisters Hemlata and Jayashree, both in their late 40s, though educated, never worked. Rambhiya claims Chimanlal got married several years ago but his wife left him “seeing the condition of the house”. None of the other siblings got married.

The visible poverty is at odds with hushed accounts of wealth, “stored between the garbage”. Neighbours at Dedhia Niwas talk about “three apartments” in Mulund and others in Vashi. “Their godown in the APMC market is also very valuable,” says Rambhiya.

Chimanlal, dressed in an oversize purple T-shirt and brown shorts, is sobbing about some of this “treasure”. “The BMC took away our gold and silver and Rs 1 lakh in cash that we had kept aside for buying medicines and to pay bills,” he says.

Harilal claims over the phone that neighbours in both buildings are eyeing their flats. “We haven’t committed any crime. We are poor people threatened by the society, police and BMC,” he says.

No one knows for sure when they started collecting garbage, but Rambhiya claims it began at least 30 years ago. First everyone treated it as just a compulsive habit. “They would stay out of home all day and most of the night, picking up things. It was alright when they just kept it at their homes, but then they began piling it in the corridors,” he says.

Another neighbour, Bhakti Manek, says the stink was overpowering. “The only way to keep it out was to lock our doors.”

The children had stopped playing near the house at Guide Society.

Once, when the garbage spilled over to the awning of the house at Dedhia, the neighbours took matters in own hands. “We picked up the garbage and set it on fire. It burned for two days,” says Rambhiya.

“Holi ke jaise kachra jala diya (burnt it like on Holi day),” chips in a young fruit-seller, who claims to have seen at least 10 such bonfires of the Savlas’ garbage.

Over the past few years, even the siblings had taken to sleeping outside the house, perhaps driven out by the smell. “The sisters sleep here,” says Dedhia Niwas’s Prachi Mogre, pointing to a landing outside their door.

The brothers slept on a grassy patch outside a nearby clothes shop. Chimanbhai admits that’s true, but adds, “We do sleep outside when we reach home late.”

By around a decade ago, the Dedhia neighbours had ensured that the Savlas didn’t dump the garbage outside their home.

At Guide Society, a group of retired bank employees kept urging the BMC to clear the Savla home. The secretary, Chirag Gandhi, claims to have contracted a skin infection due to the dumpyard. Finally, they approached local BJP activist Viral Shah.

When the BMC and police went in on May 16, out came mounds of plastic bottles, beer bottles, rotten food, plastic bags, countless pairs of footwear and assorted rubbish.

It was the discovery of a metal ‘No Parking’ sign that led Rajaram Vhanmane, a senior inspector at Mulund police station, to dub the family “psychos”. But while the residents of Guide Society quickly agreed, Rambhiya says he wouldn’t call them that. “Jo bhagwan ko maanta hai, wo bolta hai ki unko shaap hai. Koi bolta hai ki unke karm hain. Hum to bolte hain ye aadat hai. Yeh aadat hai, jo kabhi jayegi nahi (Some say they have been cursed, others say it is their karma. We say it is a habit, which will never go away).”

It was the discovery of unconscious Maniben that was the real shock for the neighbourhood. At Guide Society, no one remembers having seen her in all the time the Savlas have been here. At Dedhia, they say, they kept thinking she lived in the other house.

Only two rooms were cleared last week. Sisters Hemlata and Jayashree sit on the floor in a dark bedroom amidst the garbage that still remains, stuffing plastic bottles into bags. The stench hangs like a curtain around.

As the sisters stay silent, Chimanlal tries to put up a defence. While police have decided not to act against the siblings, they are investigating whether they neglected Maniben. They have also served the BMC a notice to clear the rest of the house.

Chimanlal speaks in a tone as indignant as it is pleading. “My mother is old-fashioned. She doesn’t like to throw away things. We bought things cheap and when they got old, we bought new ones,” he says.

Wheezing, the 68-year-old pauses to catch his breath, before adding, “Can anyone keep garbage in their homes these days? I don’t know what smell they are talking about.”

Again he halts, the burst of speech tiring him. Hemlata, peeping out from behind a pillar, beckons wordlessly to him to come upstairs. Before he turns to follow her, Chimanlal blows his nose loudly.

“We only had a little garbage, you know,” he adds. “They have made it into a big issue.”

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As Delhi complains of the heat, try being in Riaz Khan’s shoes. His one inmate is used to -2 degrees Celsius, the other to 40-degree temperatures; the biggest weighs in at 2,500 kg, the smallest is lighter than 15 gm; one calls for wheelbarrow khichdi meals, the other for kheer. 176 acres, 1,500-plus creatures, 200 workers, and mercury grazing 50. If curator Khan is getting through his 29th summer at the National Zoological Park, New Delhi, it is on the strength of over 70 large coolers, 20 kg of glucose daily, some Ayurvedic medicines, and a “summer diet chart”.

2 elephants; 62,500 sq m area

Ideal temperature for Asian elephants: 21-28° C

It’s 7 am and Heera Gaj (50) and Rajalakshmi (35) have woken up to a stunning sunrise, visible over the ruins of the Delhi Old Fort. Soon the sun won’t seem as pleasant, but for now the two 10-ft tall elephants are taking a leisurely stroll, ears flapping, trunks swaying, through a verdant patch. ‘Mahaut’ Kuliemimboro accompanies the two largest mammals at the zoo in their morning exercise. The walk, usually an hour long, has been cut to 45 minutes because of the heat.

By the time they return to the elephant enclosure, a “light breakfast”, of 8 kg bananas, is ready. As Kuliemimboro explains, “The bananas help maintain the water balance in body and protect Heera and Rajalakshmi from heat stroke.” With experience, zoo officials know that keeping the stomach light is the best trick for summer.

In cooler times, the elephants are fed bucket-loads of un-ripe amla, which is rich in Vitamin C and builds immunity.

Like the other zoo supplies, bananas are delivered daily by a supplier who got the contract via a tender.

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Around 9 am, the elephants are led for a bath, where they are hosed down with special pressure pipes. As he ensures water washes every part of their body, Kuliemimboro says, “The shower is not just to keep them cool. It is to know whether they are keeping well in the heat. Are they energetic and sprightly? Or do they appear tired? The morning shower answers these questions. It also creates trust. When they are scrubbed, they love it.”

While Heera appears to be enjoying his bath, Rajalakshmi stands quietly under an umbrella-shaped shelter. Kuliemimboro doesn’t think there is any cause for worry. The elephants, brought to the zoo 30 years back from Kanpur, have not reported any illness this year. Originally from Assam, Kuliemimboro himself has been here only a year and earns Rs 15,000 a month.

To be a keeper for elephants or the big cats, one needs to be at least Class X pass and have minimum three years of “skilled experience”. Kuliemimboro, who also looked after elephants back home, is a permanent employee, which means his salary is indexed to the Pay Commission and he gets Central government dearness allowance. Many of the employees, like Kuliemimboro, live in staff quarters on the premises.

Satisfied all is well, Kuliemimboro next leads the elephants to a big, open sand pit where Heera and Rajalakshmi roll around in the mud, to cool their thick skin that has started heating up.

Heera again seems to be having the most fun. Visitors have started trickling in by now, and as they watch him, he scrubs himself and deposits sand onto his back with his trunk.

“In summer, the number of sand pits is increased. The dust also guards the elephants from harmful sun rays and prevents itching,” says Kuliemimboro.

A diet chart for the summer has been put up in a 10×10 ft room located around 500 metres away. Kuliemimboro goes by it to prepare the meal for the elephants with the help of two others.

Again, in concession to the weather, it is mostly “khichdi” these days. About 30 kg of rice is made separately and mixed with 10 kg of moong dal and mustard oil. The cooking starts at 11 am, for the khichdi to be ready before 2 pm. It is then transferred to a special wheelbarrow-like trolley, where it is kept for cooling for three hours. “Only at five, after the zoo is closed for visitors, will the meal be served,” says Kuliemimboro.

As evening sets in, Heera and Rajalakshmi retire to a semi-conical enclosure, open on one side. There is a partition in the middle to ensure they don’t fight at night. By now the weather is cool enough for them not to need any special arrangements — making them an exception for the zoo.

2 adult tigers, 4 cubs; 22,500 sq m area

Ideal temperature for white tigers: 20-35° C

On September 24 last year, Vijay had grabbed headlines for mauling to death a 20-year-old man who had fallen into his enclosure. This summer, all efforts have been put in place to ensure that the 200-kg white tiger remains calm.

Since the incident, Vijay, who was born at the zoo in 2008 — in a case of mating the officials are proud of — has fathered four cubs. In the mornings, it is Kalpana and the cubs who are let out into the open space in the enclosure for public viewing. Once the temperature starts dipping by 2 pm, Vijay comes out. Care is taken to ensure that the cubs do not make any contact with the father.

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Says caretaker Yameen, “Vijay can get aggressive in summer. This is to ensure that the four cubs do not get intimidated by him.”

His enclosure, with 20-ft high walls on three sides, is the only one in the zoo to be monitored with a CCTV camera. Besides, a private guard has been delegated at the spot from where the public views him.

Four desert coolers operate round the clock in the area where he rests. On hotter days, Vijay can wade into a V-shaped artificial pond with a cement boundary. Water mixed with glucose is fed into the pool, where the tiger also drinks from, to keep him hydrated.

Kalpana and the cubs stay in separate steel cages, each one with a cooler. While the female cubs are called Meeta, Neeta, Rita, the male bears a more majestic name, Tipu.

Fateh Singh, 55, has been taking care of the tigers for 30 years. He says it is a skilled job, requiring “special training”, and that there are risks. However, working with the tigers doesn’t get him any extra perks. Yameen, 27, joined Fateh recently as there are two enclosures to look after.

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At 12.30 pm, the tigers are served their only meal of the day. Ten kilogrammes of buffalo meat is divided and kept in each of their enclosures — 2 kg less in summers than the rest of the year. “I have to leave for namaz by 1.30 pm,” Yameen says, adding that apart from lesser red meat, they also add white meat to the tiger meal in summers.

The meat is delivered to the zoo by suppliers by 8 am everyday. At the meat house on the premises, it is segregated for different enclosures. It is then weighed and transferred into plastic buckets for transporting.

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Naresh, 28, divides the meat while P C Ray, who has been working with the zoo for 20 years, delivers it to the enclosures. Naresh is not a permanent employee as yet.

Outside, Kalpana and her cubs are playing in a 50-m-long pool designed for the summer. After some minutes, they sit down, only their necks visible above the water.

Glucose again comes in handy. “When the four come inside with their mother, we first give them glucose-mixed water in stone bowls. It is only after this that they are served the meal. They munch the meat for over four hours,” Yameen says.

Friday, when the zoo is shut, is one day of the week when the animals aren’t fed red meat.

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1 leopard; 2,000 sq m area

Ideal temperature for leopards: 20-30° C

The other big cat at the zoo, a leopard is said to not need too much water and live off the moisture of its prey. However, it’s too hot for that law of nature to work.

So, like the tigers, six-year-old Salman, who was born at the zoo, is also given glucose. Plus, its food has been rationed to 5 kg of buffalo meat daily, from 7-8 kg at other times.

Apart from a cooler, a special green shade blocks the sun and provides Salman respite from the heat, while also giving the animal that is known to be very shy a feel of wilderness. Such special arrangements have also been made for jackals and hyenas — two other creatures of the night.

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“The shade keeps out 75 per cent of the sun rays. You will never find a leopard in the desert, which has no green cover. This green shade helps it feel at home even during the dry summers in Delhi,” says Balle Ram, who has been guarding this enclosure for over two decades.

The 50-year-old is a father of two, both of whom work as daily wagers, and says he won’t be happy to retire. Pointing out that he has seen at least a dozen leopards come and go, he remarks, “Sirf mausam badla hai, aur kuchch nahin (Only the weather has changed, nothing else).”

1 sloth bear and 6 Himalayan Black Bears: 20,000 sq m area

Ideal temperature for sloth bears: 20-30° C; for Himalayan bears: -2° to 18° C

Here is a wild one getting special attention these days since a fellow sloth bear, all of 6, escaped the Hyderabad Zoo a month ago. It was reportedly disturbed due to the extreme heat.

Riaz Khan says they can’t take things lightly with their own sloth bear now.

Known to be a reclusive animal, the Delhi Zoo sloth bear lives in an enclosure where two coolers work round-the-clock. But with its thick black fur still making the Capital heat almost unbearable, their diet has to be more closely monitored than that of others.

A special addition is bael, the Indian fruit known as wood apple, offered at regular intervals. “The wood apple controls excessive thirst. It also has medicinal value. Outdoor cooling can contribute only a little to maintaining the heat balance of the animal. It is only through diet that one can solve the problem of heat stroke,” says Khan.

Apart from bael, the bear is fed cucumbers, water melons, melons, cheeku and beetroot (around 2.5 kg of food in all daily). In winter, this is changed to a lot of sweet potato and singhara.

While bears are omnivores, the Delhi Zoo sloth bear is by now a “vegetarian”. However, notes Khan, it is given “kheer”, prepared in the pantry, and eggs.

Not in summer though. “The bread and milk content is being reduced. We have also stopped giving eggs, especially when the temperature is very high,” Khan says.

Apart from the tigers, Fateh Singh also takes care of the bear enclosure.

The enclosure for the Himalayan Black Bears, which have a similar diet, is nearby. It has four females, but the authorities haven’t been able to shift the two males in. Brought from Himachal Pradesh in March for breeding, they are still in a temperature-controlled room at the zoo’s veterinary hospital, slowly adapting to the climate.

During their first two weeks here, sources say, the Black Bears were kept at zero-degree temperature. The bears were then shifted to a “cool temperature”, maintained by desert coolers. Currently, they are in a room with fans. “We are slowly making them adapt to Delhi’s climate. They are responding well and should be out by the end of August. The females (who have been in the zoo for five years) will not get to see their male counterparts this summer,” a source laughed.

100 antelopes; 62,500 sq m area

Ideal temperature for deer: 25-30° C

In a first for the Delhi Zoo, the deer enclosure now has a 360-degree sprinkler. It is meant for the zoo’s most vulnerable species, the black buck, also known as the Indian antelope.

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Black bucks usually inhabit grassy plains and slightly forested areas. So this summer a hundred new plants were planned well in advance to make the enclosure greener.

“Due to their vulnerability, the special sprinklers are run once every two hours till the sun sets. So the enclosure is always moist and cool. After the installation, we have not received a single complaint from this enclosure during the summers,” Khan says.

The deer are fed green vegetables, bengal gram, wheat, maize and oats during the summer.

Despite the special arrangement, it is here that the officials have had their biggest scare this time. In the last three months, 16 spotted deer have died due to suspected rabies. The enclosure is now out of bounds, with over 30 employees who work with them also undergoing a rabies vaccination programme.

30 bird species; 8 cages

Ideal temperature for the birds: 20-30° C

Before the summer arrived, the bird enclave was given a complete makeover. This year the zoo has special glasshouses with agro net green shade. Besides, pipelines have been laid throughout to ensure that the water being delivered to the cages has glucose in it.

Home to exotic birds with glorious plumes, Delhi Zoo knows this is one of the favourite areas for its visitors, especially children. From the macaw, known to be extremely intelligent and curious as well as friendly, to the critically endangered Blue Edward Pheasant, Khan says, they can’t be too carefully with the diet of the birds.

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The Illiger’s Macaw, endangered in the wild due to deforestation, feeds usually on seeds, fruits and nuts. During the summer, special apples and water melons are provided to keep them cool.

For the Golden Pheasant, who usually live in small groups and are a hit as they prefer to run rather than fly, the diet is green vegetable salad, bread, chana sattu and gauva.

The macaw has been provided a special wooden area near the water to give it a feel of its natural habitat. “This is to ensure that they keep coming to drink water,” Khan says.

The curator says there is another reason he and his staff at the bird enclosure are excited this summer. The zoo is expecting eggs of at least 24 exotic birds to hatch soon. The arrival of these chicks is being monitored closely at the hospital. The Silver and Golden Pheasant have laid over a dozen eggs each, with an incubation period of 20 days.

“We must monitor the temperature as well as humidity levels,” smiles Khan.

200 employees

Over 50 of them work in the animal section, which is the lifeline of the zoo. They take care of the feed and wellbeing of the animals.

Close behind is the security section, including over 20 employees, who keep in touch over wireless as they guard the different enclosures. A supervisor heads the team and monitors the CCTV cameras.

The garden section has over 20 employees, responsible for greenery at the zoo. They also maintain the small vermin compost unit to meet the zoo’s manure requirements.

It is the garden section which has the oldest employee at the zoo. Mahender ‘Mali’, who is over 60 years of age, has been keeping this part of the Capital green for years. “For me, zoo is home,” says Mahender. “I will be retiring soon, but I wish to continue contributing.”

Around 4 pm, as the visitors hasten to catch their last glimpse of the animals before the zoo shuts its gates, Riaz Khan steps out of the office for his last round of checking. Over the next 30 minutes, he enquires about animals in 12 enclosures.

By 6 pm, before heading home, the staff has kept food in enclosures for the nocturnal animals, including foxes and hyenas.

On the eastern side, some soaked grams, fruits and vegetables have been left out in a bowl.

Before long, a porcupine emerges. As the zoo quietens, it is the hour of its largest rodent to feed.

Colombo to Hamburg

Indira Gandhi was part of an ad-hoc committee of some prominent nature lovers of Delhi, headed by the “chief commissioner”, which got down to giving Delhi a zoo in 1952.

Major Weinmann, Director of the Ceylon Zoological Garden, Colombo, was invited to help draw up a coordinated plan for development of the park. He submitted a report along with a preliminary plan. As he was not available for continued consultations, the committee approached Carl Hagenbeck, owner of the famous Animal Park at Hamburg, West Germany, who gave the idea of the open moat enclosures. He presented a preliminary report in March 1956 and provided a general layout plan of waterways, roads and paths, animal enclosures and sewage system.

The Government of India approved the final plan on December 31, 1956.

Even while the final touches were being given to the zoo, state government and individuals started gifting animals. The animals, including tigers, leopards, bears, foxes, deer and birds, were initially kept in temporary enclosures around Azimganj Sarai, a courtyard built for travellers during the Mughal days.

The park was formally inaugurated on November 1, 1959.

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Archaeology is rapidly maturing as a strongly multidisciplinary field. Traditional methods (digging, excavating, comparing artifacts, manual analysis) are increasingly being supplemented by a variety of modern technological tools.

But during this new phase of evolution, several concerns have been raised over possible damage to artifacts at the time of excavation. To help avoid the risk of losing knowledge permanently, our group at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) is developing non-invasive ways of conducting archaeological research.

Our basic tools are GPS (Global Positioning System) and remote sensing technology, together with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software — all of which are easily available. We extensively use open-source satellite-based imagery (available, for instance, on Google Earth and Bhuvan) for preliminary analysis. These services often have images for the past 10 years or so, enabling us to compare seasonal changes in the landscape around known (or suspected) sites. We follow this analysis with a more detailed study by analysing high-resolution, multi-spectral and stereo imagery.

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By studying the landscape near an archaeological site, we can see how humans have made modifications over the centuries, for instance by constructing forts, moats, road networks, settlements, canals, tanks, etc. We cannot study smaller archaeological objects like coins, pottery, inscriptions, etc, but technologies to better understand these traditional objects of archaeological interest are being developed by other researchers. For us, the surrounding landscape is the object of interest. As we go higher in the sky, cameras mounted on balloons, drones, aircraft or satellites can view larger areas.

Having acquired suitable imagery, our next task is to hunt for clues: things associated with a site that might help us understand it better? For example, a patch of particularly lush vegetation in a suspiciously geometric shape — a rectangle or a circle — could mark the location of a former water body. Similarly, a patch of stunted vegetation could suggest the presence of a structure buried below the surface (the roots of plants would be unable to penetrate deeply, leading to unhealthy growth). Naturally, these clues are not conclusive by themselves, but they can help with further ground-based investigations. By rapidly scanning large areas on our computer screens, we can identify promising sites more easily than if we had to visit each of them physically.

Our initial investigations have focused on sites known to contain archaeological remains. We have demonstrated that the information extracted through our methods correlates with what is already known about such sites. At most of these sites, however, our methods have also been able to discover associated features that have shed light on secrets lost over the years. As we fine-tune our tools and techniques, we plan to investigate many more archaeological sites, particularly the lesser known ones. We are currently studying five sites in Karnataka as part of an ongoing project. We have also begun investigations at Buddhist sites in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, as a follow-up to a recent study we conducted at Nalanda.

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What the 14-year-old always feared has come true. One of an astounding 887 failures this year in Class IX at Government Girls Senior Secondary School in Delhi’s Karawal Nagar — among the Capital’s most crowded government schools — she may not return to school. “My parents won’t send me to any other school, so I am at home now,” the girl says, refusing to be identified.

When the results came, she and her friends went on a rampage at the school. “Protest kiya, Education Department ko letter likhe, par mera result change nahin hua (We protested, wrote letters to the Education Department, but my result didn’t change),” she says.

The Capital has been witness to at least two similar protests this year by students who have failed in Class IX and XI. But, for the state Department of Education, the shocking pass percentage was not a surprise. “Because of the no-detention policy, students manage to make it past Class VIII, but standards IX and XI have tougher subjects. Some of them have submitted blank answer sheets. How can teachers give marks?” a senior officer asks.

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However, as the 14-year-old says, failure for her doesn’t just mean repeating a year. Most families with daughters like hers see it as a reason to discontinue studies.

Stemming such dropouts was the main reason the Right to Education Act included the no-detention provision, considered the law’s backbone. Amid reports of failures in Class IX and falling learning levels, it has now become the RTE’s most-contested provision.

As many as 18 state governments want this policy repealed. In its report on a new education policy submitted to HRD Minister Smriti Irani on Friday, a five-member committee headed by former Cabinet secretary T S R Subramanian suggested that the government bring back the pass-fail system from Class VI.

The no-fail provision, Section 16 of the Act, prohibits schools from detaining or expelling any student up to Class VIII. Compelling a child to repeat a class, it was felt, was demotivating, often forcing him or her to abandon school learning altogether. Similarly, the notion of “expulsion”, the architects of the legislation felt, was not compatible with the concept of “right”.

The public and political sentiment at that time, Professor Krishna Kumar recalls, was enthusiastic. “This (no-detention) was one of the points on which there wasn’t much disagreement. The idea was to have a minimum educated citizenry,” says the former NCERT chief who was on the team of academicians entrusted by the UPA government to draft the law.

“No child is a failure at everything. This is based on sound principles of pedagogy, recognised world-wide. You and I could be good in English, but bad at mathematics. The rationale was to allow each student to excel at his or her forte in those eight years of elementary education,” he adds.

Moreover, the concept of no-detention wasn’t alien to schools at the time. As many as 28 states were already following it in some form or the other. For instance, West Bengal, Tripura and Punjab were not detaining students up to Class IV when the Act kicked in, and Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttarakhand and Jharkhand up to Class V. Andhra Pradesh had introduced no-detention up to Class VI as early as 1975 and extended it to Class IX well before the RTE.

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But by 2012, voices against no-detention had started rising. At the 59th meeting of the Central Advisory Board for Education (CABE) held in 2012, under the chairmanship of then HRD minister Kapil Sibal, states collectively registered their dissent saying schools were reporting huge failure rates in Class IX. The ministry set up a sub-committee headed by then Haryana education minister Geeta Bhukkal to look into their concerns. The panel submitted a report in 2014 and had recommended a phase-wise roll out of the no-detention policy; its findings though were put on the back burner after the change of government.

The HRD ministry instead sought feedback on the no-detention policy last year and of the 22 state governments which wrote back, 18 — including Delhi, Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana — sought a review. Only Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Karnataka were in favour of it. Rajasthan and Delhi have also passed Bills to reverse the no-detention policy. These are waiting for the governor’s assent.

“The state is suffering ever since it (the no-fail policy) was implemented. Earlier we never faced complaints about Class VI and VII students being unable to read and write simple sentences,” says Gujarat Education Minister Bhupendrasinh Chudasama, pointing to the state’s poor show in Class X state board exams. Pass percentage this year stood at an embarrassing 55 per cent.

Gujarat backs its claims with the findings of its Gunotsav survey, which revealed that nearly six lakh students in Class VI, across all its government primary schools, failed to write words and simple sentences in their mother tongue, Gujarati.

Says Delhi Education Minister and Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia, “In 2015-16, 36.68 per cent of Class VI students were promoted under the no-detention policy even though they didn’t score the minimum 33 per cent pass marks. They shouldn’t have been in Class VII. No-detention is a noble way of teaching, but it’s not a very practical one”. His advisor and AAP leader Atishi Marlena feels no-detention has dented accountability. “You now have a system where students don’t come to school regularly and where parents are given the impression that their child is learning because he has gone to the next class. And then, they get the shock of their lives when their child fails Class IX. By doing away with detention, you have also removed the system by which you judged the accountability of teachers. If you have to detain a child in Class IX, why this criticism of detaining him earlier?”

The Geeta Bhukkal panel of 2012 acknowledged some of the above concerns. It observed that the no-detention policy had exacerbated the challenge of motivating students and teachers as well as affected the “the drive to excel or perform”.

In words that get repeated again by again by experts, the panel said the policy was “implementable in an ideal system” but not immediately in the current circumstances.

But the answer isn’t as simple, say other teachers and principals. Instead of one or two exams, what the no-detention policy entailed was regular assessment of the child, so as to identify those who needed help and to motivate them. Many schools misinterpreted the policy to mean “No assessments” or “No relevance of assessment”. HRD Ministry officials who spoke to The Sunday Express on condition of anonymity clarified that Section 30 (1) of the RTE Act, 2009, states that “No child shall be required to pass any Board examination till completion of elementary education”. In other words, the law prohibits only examination by a State/ UT level Board, not evaluation by the school.

In fact, Section 29 (2) (h) of the Act makes comprehensive and continuous evaluation (CCE) mandatory, wherein schools are expected to use test results to improve teaching and learning of the child. Unlike traditional board examinations, the CCE visualises evaluation as a diagnostic tool to improve learning. “It is critical to measure learning outcomes to improve the quality of education. You can’t improve what you don’t measure,” says an official.

The Centre reiterated this to all state governments in a circular sent last month.

Abhijit Banerjee, Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the directors of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), says, “Detention can be good for the child but in a different pedagogic system, where you identify and help him. There have to be tests, assessments at different levels. The US, for instance, has them. The point of these tests is not to shame the child, but to identify schools that do well. It’s a way to monitor the system. There’s no reason for testing to be punitive”.

The CCE system poses another challenge in a government school environment, where crowded classrooms and stretched teachers don’t always make it possible. Mani Sharma, vice-principal of a government school in Rohini, Delhi, says that for no-detention to work, schools such as hers need certain “minimum requirements”. “The pupil-teacher ratio and classroom sizes are huge factors. The ideal classroom strength is 35 or 40, but here you have teachers handling up to four classes, each with 50 to 60 students. It’s almost impossible then to do any kind of assessment, forget CCE of the child”.

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The principal of a leading private school in Delhi, with 1,160 students, agrees, “Is education just about sending a child from Class I to VIII or is it about equipping them with certain essential skills? What stops that from happening in government schools is the resources and numbers they deal with”.

Schools like hers, she says, let teachers work on children who are falling behind. “We would have identified such a child by July and would have given him special papers, re-exams.”

What the debate also misses out on is how, in a country of unequal opportunities, detention could be another scale weighing down the under-privileged — those who send their children to government schools that are low on resources and resolve.

“If you bring back detention and make such a student repeat a grade, there’s a strong chance he or she will discontinue learning. Also, there is no research anywhere in the world which establishes that repeating a year helps children perform better. But research does say that repeating has adverse academic and social effects on a child,” says Professor Kumar.

The annual dropout rate for primary education, in fact, has dropped considerably since the Act kicked in, from 9 per cent in 2009-10 to below 5 per cent in 2013-14.

Andhra Pradesh, which implemented the no-detention provision way back in 1975, in its feedback to the HRD Ministry, has argued for the policy on the same lines as Kumar, saying that scrapping this rule would lead to a spike in dropout rate and, therefore, hurt the aim of universalising education.

In fact, even the argument of huge failure rates in Class IX and deteriorating results of Class X Board exams doesn’t hold water against government data. An analysis of the District Information System for Education (DISE) findings of 2011 and 2015 for the 20 largest states of the country shows that with the exception of Himachal Pradesh and Chhattisgarh (see box), the remaining have witnessed a decrease in the percentage of students made to repeat Class IX.

Similarly, for Class X, with the exception of Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Himachal and Assam, the remaining states saw an increase in pass percentage from 2011 to 2015.

As for falling learning levels, Kumar argues, the onus should not be on students but state governments, for not addressing the acute shortage of teachers. “State governments need to ask themselves how did they create such a huge backlog of learning? When we drafted the law, the country was short of around 12 lakh teachers, but nobody expected the states to neglect this problem for another five years after that. Take Delhi. The AAP government hasn’t recruited permanent faculty for its schools. What good are CCTV cameras when teacher recruitment is not being expedited?”

Nandita Banerjee, head of Capacity Building at ASER Centre, the research wing of Pratham, makes the same argument. “The demand of scrapping no-detention stems from poor management. So while most states have taken care of the infrastructure mandated under the rules — toilets, classrooms — there is still no process to monitor teachers on a daily basis,” Banerjee says. An autonomous body, ASER is the only source of current data on schooling and learning for all states in India.

Even as the debate rages, some state governments have undertaken course correction. Since late last year, Chhattisgarh has started holding “assessments” in government schools. “These are quarterly, half-yearly and final assessments, but not examinations. Students are not held back based on these results. However, it helps them experience what is it to sit for an examination, gives them an idea of where they stand, and a record is maintained,” says Subrat Sahoo, Chhattisgarh Education Secretary.

Punjab, too, has once again started ‘external’ exams as part of a ‘Learning Outcome Evaluation System (LOES)’ for Classes V and VIII under the State Council of Educational Research and Training.

The HRD Ministry is yet to take a call on whether no-detention should stay or go. According to sources, the government will study recommendations of the TSR Subramanian panel on reinstating detention beyond Class V before taking any decision.

The ministry has also sought Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi’s opinion on whether the government can issue orders under the RTE Act to ensure students meet some ‘Minimum Standards of Academic Performance (MSAP)’, prescribed in all subjects from Classes V to VIII, before they can be promoted to Class IX.

The ministry’s note proposes that students be assessed through CCE from Classes V to VIII and, at the end of each year, schools award a certificate stating whether he/she has attained the MSAP for the particular class.
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No child, the note adds, would be detained for not meeting the MSAP and the backlog would be carried over to the next year till Class VIII. Such students will receive additional instructions from teachers to cope with the backlog of learning. However, promotion to Class IX will only be possible if the student has completed his/ her backlog of learning.

Kapil Sibal, under whose tenure the RTE came into force, wishes the Act is seen beyond “the prism of the no-fail policy”. “The Act made a whole range of other promises such as upgrading infrastructure, upgrading quality of teaching and regular assessment through CCE. It has to go hand in hand. You can’t implement only the no-detention in letter and spirit and not adhere to other parameters. If the understanding of the Act remains limited to ‘pass and fail’ then all states will continue to face problems and learning levels are bound to go down,” he says

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In Rajpur Khurd in the Capital where attacks on Africans happened, prompting the MEA to step in, there are few meeting points between the villagers and their new neighbours. As Africans recede into anger and silence, Ankita Dwivedi Johri walks the faultlines for 24 hours. Photographs: Tashi Tobgyal

Baljit Singh has contemplated leaving Rajpur Khurd at least on two occasions. Zu Zan Hmos Osycal has considered the idea multiple times in the past one month. But this wasn’t the plan the two men started out with. Rajpur Khurd is a crammed urban village in South Delhi’s Chhatarpur district, an address better known for its opulent farmhouses and grand weddings. In the past five years, close to a thousand men and women from African nations have made it their home. In the events of the past fortnight, the faultlines between them and the ‘Rathi’ Jats in the village lie in the open.

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A week after Congolese national Masonda Ketada Olivier was beaten to death in neighbouring Vasant Kunj, four cases of attacks on African nationals were reported from the twin villages of Rajpur Khurd and Maidan Garhi. Following the attacks, over 15 African nations raised concerns over safety of their citizens in India. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and MEA officials had to step in to promise better security.

Flanked by high walls, Rajpur Khurd faces power-cuts, water shortage and bumpy roads. The chasm between its old residents and new neighbours is the biggest hurdle of them all. There are few meeting points, and open racism and distrust.

7 am

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“Woh das baje se pehle nahin uthte, raat bhar ghoomte rehte hain (They don’t wake up before 10 am, they roam the streets all night),” complains a girl collecting garbage, knocking loudly on the main door of a three-storey building, using a derogatory term for Africans. After 10 minutes, a slightly groggy African woman steps out and hands her a big black bag full of trash. Relieved, the garbage collector dumps the bag onto her cart and moves to the next apartment.

The term the girl uses is Arabic for Abyssinian, a nationality known as Ethiopian today. The term was used to describe the Africans who came to live in India in the pre-British era, arriving as merchants, fishermen and slaves. After Independence, it simply became a derogatory word, to describe anyone with a dark complexion and a thick mane of braided hair. In Rajpur Khurd, which houses a growing number of Africans, mostly Nigerian men looking for business opportunities, it is a term thrown about often.

As the sun grows strong, the narrow lanes of the village, lined with general stores, repair shops and food stalls, leisurely come to life. At this early hour, there are few signs of the new residents among Rajpur Khurd’s 5,000-odd Jats. “It’s too early, wait for a few more hours,” says a shopkeeper near a branch of Syndicate Bank in the village.
Some time passes before Mike Enumah, a 36-year-old Nigerian ‘garment businessman’, appears. “I buy clothes from markets in India and sell them in my country,” says Enumah, who came to India in 2010, to do his Bachelors in Business Administration at the University of Mumbai. He moved to Rajpur Khurd in 2013 to live with his cousin.

Today, as he visits the local store to get supplies for the day, Mike seems angry. “Why do we suddenly have all these cameras in our faces? These images will be broadcast in my country, what will my family think?” he says. “I heard the news of the attacks on Africans, but I did not see them. It doesn’t affect me, man,” he shrugs.

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But the anger is hard to hide. “Indians own all the big companies in my country, they are treated with respect. But here… ,” he stops mid-sentence. His landlord Ashok Rathi jumps in to finish the line. “The ruckus is created by Africans who visit from Malviya Nagar and Dwarka areas. My tenants don’t even drink and smoke. Here no panga, no tension,” he quips.

Ashok Rathi, who owns four buildings in the area, has reasons to be happy with tenants such as Mike. Rajpur Khurd is believed to have been set up by Raj Singh Rathi, a Jat farmer who came to Chhatarpur over 900 years ago. All residents of the village are considered his descendants, hence the surname ‘Rathi’ on a majority of the nameplates outside houses. “We were all farmers, but around 2008, the government started acquiring our land. So many of us built multi-storey houses on our plots to save our land. But no one was willing to rent and the flats remained unoccupied for over two years. That is when we opened our doors to the Africans. They paid more rent, Rs 12,000 to Rs 14,000 a month,” says Ashok Rathi.

Mike again insists things are fine. “I came to India, leaving behind my wife and children, to make a living. I was told 60-70 per cent people speak in English in India. I haven’t picked up any Hindi, but haven’t had a problem. Go find those who have had a problem.” Then, he objects, “No pictures. Keep the camera away!”

Noon

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“Africans are not evil, man, they are simple, just like the Americans,” Michael Chema proclaims to the room, which right now has his “business partner” Louzi and a few “hungry men”, flipping through English entertainment channels on television.

Chema, a Nigerian, arrived in India in September 2014, after brief visits to Vietnam and Thailand. “I am an international businessman… Louzi cooks the best food in Rajpur. We began this kitchen service,” says Chema, sitting in the living room of his three-room apartment. The house has the basics: an old couch, a few cushions, a mattress on the floor in the bedroom and an air-conditioner. “All my friends come to my home because of the air-conditioner,” he smiles.

It’s 10 minutes past noon, and the two have just woken up. Louzi heads straight to the small, cluttered kitchen, with a microwave and several large bowls. She hurriedly empties a packet of rice flour into a huge aluminium bowl, adds a little water, and then begins stirring the batter over high flame till it gets the consistency of dough. She then pulls out two large plastic boxes from the freezer. “This is chicken curry and the kidney bean soup she made in the night,” says Chema. But just as Louzi tries to explain the recipe, Chema interjects, “You ask me the questions.”

The food prepared and re-heated, Chema settles down on the couch with the rice dough and chicken curry. Louzi heads back to the kitchen, to prepare food for the 20 customers who will come in the next hour. “Life is very simple for me here. Language is a problem but I try to begin my sentence with bhaiyyaji (brother)… That works most of the time,” he laughs, dunking the dough into the curry and taking large bites. “If Africans are involved in a fight, we try to go for peace always. But the ones who fight… The hardships in India make African men very sad, angry — rents are high, food is expensive… Maybe that is why they get into fights. But I want to live long, get married…” he says, talking about the recent attacks.

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As he works his way through the chicken curry, the other “tensions” begin pouring out. “People stare at me all the time, but I guess that is because I have a great fashion sense. Indian men… they are heartless, jealous, and the girls are shy… That leads to some tension,” he says, spitting out bones into a bowl.

“But here in Rajpur Khurd, it is all good. The Rathis protect us. They have lawyers and policemen in the family… Once some men followed me from Malviya Nagar, but this old Rathi woman threatened to attack them with sticks. They fled immediately,” he says, handing over the dishes to Louzi.

As his friends begin trickling in for lunch, sold at Rs 200 a plate, the mood in the house gets “lighter”. A group of men head straight to the room with the air-conditioner, beer cans in hand. The others join their friends in the TV room. Louzi is hard at work in the kitchen. A few men light up, and a waft of sticky rubber-like smell fills the house. “I am very popular,” continues Chema. “These are my friends, this is my iPhone, I have made a lot of money… worked hard. We don’t create any trouble… the ones who do are the Africans from Malviya Nagar.”

There is a knock on the door, it’s his landlord. Louzi peers through the wooden door, not opening the iron gate just yet. “Where is the money? You need to give Rs 6,000 for the AC,” he demands.

2 pm

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A distant relative of Baljit Singh belongs to the Rathi family. In 2000, on the advice of the relative, he left Sonepat with his wife and came to Rajpur Khurd. He runs a tuition centre on the ground floor of his house and has two children — a daughter, 7, and a 10-year-old son. In the past one-and-a-half years, he has made two changes to his house: put up CCTV cameras outside his balcony and a thick wooden stick at the entrance.

“In Africans ko chot lagne se bohot darr lagta hai (These Africans are scared of injuries). They feel if they bleed, their wounds won’t heal in the Indian weather. So everytime they create a ruckus, I just threaten them with my stick and they flee,” he says.

The CCTV, now outside many homes in the village, is for “proof”, Baljit adds. “They get drunk at night and relieve themselves outside my house. They have these gang wars and hurl abuses. But everytime I went to police with complaints, they asked for proof. That is why I have installed the CCTVs.”

Baljit also worries about the “influence” on his children. “I am scared to even let them out in the balcony. The African women move around with alcohol. Sometimes at night we see men thrashing their wives or, I don’t know, live-in partners, on the street. Even police are intimidated. They say embassy ka issue ho jayega. I have lost 20 per cent of my students because of this ruckus,” he complains.

Dariya Singh, a retired BSF officer, links the growing numbers of Africans in Rajpur Khurd to the other flashpoint involving the community in Delhi, the Khirki Extension episode of January 2014. “It is our fault we let them invade this area. There is no unity in us. When we tell landlords to not keep them as tenants, they say ‘You give Rs 10,000 a month’,” he says, adding that the Africans get drunk and drive around without helmets. “All their cars have dark glasses, but police say nothing.”

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“They drive around in fancy cars, buy clothes from malls, where do they get the money from?” adds Baljit. “One day they beg shopkeepers to give them some food, the next day they turn up with bundles of cash. We all know the work they do… Why else does this place become a taxi stand at night? They all head to farmhouses and we know what happens there.”

For Zu Zan Hmos Osycal, it is such “stereotyping” that is responsible for the recent attacks. Pursuing his MA in Clinical Research from Punjab Technical University, Osycal claims his house was raided four days back “for drugs”. “I understand this is not Vasant Kunj, this is a village, people are conservative… but they can at least respect us. I want to have intellectual conversations with them, but no one wants that in Rajpur,” he says, sitting in the small shoe and clothes shop which he runs with his wife.

The 32-year-old from Liberia came to India five years back to study. He stayed in many parts of the capital before moving to Rajpur Khurd two years ago. But he is a minority in the village: an African student who lives with his wife.
“We hardly step out, just to Sarojini Nagar and Uttam Nagar to get clothes and shoes, and sometimes to INA market to buy some food. We don’t interfere in anyone’s life. But then why does police come unannounced to my house? Why do villagers break into my shop and steal? I just want to finish my studies and go back,” he says.

His wife Mahrovia refuses to talk. “I am not comfortable speaking about these issues,” she says, arranging a few dresses. “And don’t take my picture!” Samuel Joseph, a 64-year-old Nigerian and a pastor at a local African church, explains the community’s reluctance to getting “noticed”.

“Rajpur Khurd is the heart of African settlements in India, but the villagers here are very hostile to them… After the recent attacks, cameras scare them, they feel any kind of pictures can be used against them,” says Joseph, who sells dried fish to the local African kitchens in the village.

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“Indians here feel the Africans have no homes… Some of them hold their noses when they pass by an African… These things have created a big rift, and the issues can’t be resolved overnight. It is true that a majority of the Africans in Rajpur Khurd have no jobs, they get into risky, illegal jobs for money, but that is true for Indians in this village too,” he argues. “It is the 21st century, Indians need to have good relations with foreigners.”

Though there is little fraternising between the Jats and Africans, there are a few exceptions. Like the 30-year-old Jamia Hamdard University student, who is helping a dhobi iron clothes. Like many in the village, she does not wish to be identified or photographed, but the dhobi’s assistants vouch for her. “Thoda darawane dikhte hain, par baat karne par theek hain. Masti zyaada karte hain (They look intimidating, but once you talk to them, they are fine. They just fool around a lot),” says one of the helpers.

“I often come here to help them out. We have good relations with Indians on a one-to-one basis… But please don’t ask me about the attacks, no one understands what we go through here,” says the girl.

5 pm

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As the harsh afternoon sun wanes, more Africans faces are seen outside shops, in markets, at salons, but the boundaries are clearly marked. Chika Mariamo, 32, has stepped out to visit the salon. “Only an African can style our hair, Indians don’t know what to do with it,” smiles Mariamo. There are few salons in the area run by African women. A Cameroon national, Mariamo has been in India for eight months. “I came here to earn a living, I had heard about Delhi from my friends. I am still looking for a job,” she says.

Talking about “the lack of English-speaking people in the village”, Mariamo points to her pink tights and a fitted tank top, and adds, “People here are extremely racist. Look how I am dressed now, is there a problem? I don’t understand what the men say about me, but I am not a fool, their expression says it all.”

Mariamo is among the few African women who speaks about issues faced by the community, the others are happy to let the men do the talking. “How will they talk? People here think the worst of them. We go out in the evening to meet friends, but we all know the rumours. Look at how they treat their own women. I have rarely heard any of the Indian women in the village complain about us, it is always the men,” she says.

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Baljit Singh and Ashok Rathi are also out for a stroll, but Baljit has instructed his children to stay indoors. “They (Africans) have a few places where they gather in the evening. The landlords say they are students, but I have never seen a book in anyone’s hand. They are just middle-aged men with nothing to do,” says Baljit. Ashok Rathi again tries to put up a defence. “Their day begins in the evening. What is wrong with that?”

Mentioning the “good” things, he says, “Once I had viral fever. One of my tenants gave me this tonic made out of whiskey and neem leaves. I was cured overnight. Most of my tenants make their own medicine. It is just like our Ayurveda.”

Around 6 pm, Mike Enumah and his brother, a few other African residents and some landlords, including Ashok Rathi, head to the sensitisation conference organised by the Delhi Police at a nearby resort since the attacks of May 28. The two groups get into different vehicles and sit in separate rows at the conference.

While Mike claims to be “assured” after the meeting, his brother feels “more needs to be done”. “Why take steps only after a tragedy? They need to do more in the village,” he says, adding he does not wish to be named. He adds a request: “Ignore the man from the afternoon who said he will break your camera. People here are just scared… they are angry.”

9 pm

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“My friends are all out already, I will shut my salon by 10 and see if I want to join them,” says Frank Okezie, a 34-year-old from Nigeria. Surrounded by posters of Will Smith in a small hair salon, Okezie is trimming the hair of one of his friends.

Okezie came to Rajpur Khurd two years back and while he too claims to be a ‘garment businessman’, styling people’s hair helps him “make some extra money”. His wife and two children are back home. “I want to grow my business. I have pitched several ideas to the Indians in the village but you guys don’t like foreigners. Indians need exposure; there is no cultural exchange in the village,” he complains.

Okezie’s decision to come to India went beyond work though. “I grew up watching Bollywood films in Nigeria; I was fascinated about the country.”

On his way to Rajpur Khurd from the airport, he says, he was amused to see so many cows on the streets. Now applying some gel on his client’s hair, he points out, “But we accept all that. We are big, we look different, speak a little aggressively, but we mean no harm.” Maybe a few pictures before he downs the shutters? “No,” he says firmly.

Midnight

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There is no power, darkness descends on the village. A string of autorickshaws begin ferrying groups of Africans to the main road outside. Baljit and a few of the neighbours gather on one terrace, a vantage point that helps them keep an eye on them. PCR vans and policemen on bikes begin nightly rounds. It’s quite hot but the men don’t “allow” the women and children onto the terrace.

“Hamare gaon ko auto, taxi stand bana diya hai (They have made our village an auto, cab station),” says one of Baljit’s friends. A group of African men, including Mike and his brother, meet up near the bank branch. There are some visitors from outside too, including just one non-African. As the group talks, their voices sometimes rising, Baljit’s friend says, “After the attacks, they are careful, you should have seen earlier.” He shows a video of what seems like a fight between two African women.

On the street, the group seems aware of being watched. Some of them begin speaking in hushed tones, the others disperse everytime they see a police vehicle. There are three other “spots”, the villagers say, where the Africans gather every night. But the “spots” are vacant tonight. “If only the policemen were this vigilant on other days,” says Baljit.

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As the night progresses, more cabs arrive. The autorickshaws too continue their trips. There is a minor fight between two Africans, which the villagers watch intently. “Ye drugs ke paise ke liye hoga (It must be for drug money),” says one of them. But soon, it’s all calm. Some African men continue to roam the streets till 3 am, some play music on their phones. The ones visiting from outside begin dispersing.

It seems like a regular night, but the villagers are not convinced. “Agle hafte aana, zyaada din shaant nahin rahenge (Come next week. They won’t remain quiet for long),” says Baljit, as he and the others leave.

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13,300 people, 500 trucks, 1 lakh files, 1 lakh weapons, 342 km. Exactly two years after it split, Andhra Pradesh has begun the process to move into its new capital. SREENIVAS JANYALA adds up the costs

Located near Vijayawada, the sleepy and dusty Velagapudi village of 3,000 is buzzing these days. On one side, work is on to ready five one-storey blocks, spread over 1 lakh sq ft each, to house a transitional Andhra Pradesh secretariat. On the other, landlords are modifying, renovating or adding new floors to their houses, to give them out on rent. Velagapudi has been chosen for the transitional secretariat as it is within a five-kilometre radius of the region where the new capital city of Amaravati is to come up.

The secretariat will be spread over 45 acres — 27 acres for the buildings and the rest for public amenities — and is being built at a cost of Rs 180 crore. More than the money, it is other changes that have left Thota Balaji Reddy bewildered. “It is a culture shock. I have never seen so many Hindi-speaking people here,” Reddy, who sells SIM cards, says.

As the Sachivalayam canteen churns out food for nearly 2,000 workers, K Balakrishna, one of the site in-charges, says, “Work goes on 24/7. The structures will be ready in another two weeks.” Over at Hyderabad, B Sirisha Reddy, a senior stenographer in the Human Resource Management Department at the Andhra Secretariat, fiddles with a note pad as she ponders over how life will change. Andhra Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu has set a deadline of June 27 for all officials to start functioning from government offices at Velagapudi, Vijayawada and Guntur.

While Velagapudi will house the transitional secretariat, a number of employees will move into nearby Vijayawada and Mangalagiri in Guntur. Sirisha says it took some time for reality to sink in. “Hyderabad is good. My husband and I are settled here, our children are going to school. But we have to shift. It is inevitable and the sooner we do it, the better.”

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The CM is already working from his temporary office at Vijayawada, along with most of his Cabinet colleagues, who come to Hyderabad only occasionally. In offices in the six buildings housing the Andhra Pradesh Secretariat at Hyderabad, staff members have been packing files, office equipment and furniture. “We are waiting for the written communiqué to start shifting,” says Murali Krishna of the Andhra Non-Gazetted Officers’ Association.

Starting from the second week of June, 122 Andhra departments functioning from Hyderabad are to start moving to Vijayawada, says the man in-charge of the shifting, Lingaraj Panigrahi, Special Secretary, Guidelines and Procedures Manual, Administrative Reforms, Accommodation and Human Resource Management. “All the department heads have been told to hire trucks. Each department is responsible for moving its assets, each employee responsible for the files and papers that are on his desk on the day of shifting.”

Panigrahi is also sure that come June 27, “all employees will have to do is report to work at their specified office locations”. The teething problems, in the hot and humid Vijayawada and Guntur, will be more basic, he believes —“lack of air-conditioners or fans”.

*****

For nearly two years, officials have been at work digitising files for this transfer. Over one lakh files at the Secretariat, running into over 70 lakh pages, have already been scanned and will be transferred electronically. “But there are still thousands of paper files to be carried manually,” says Parakala Prabhakar, advisor to the Chief Minister. These files will be transported in secure containers, escorted by at least one person from the department concerned and would be delivered to the new premises the same day.

Among the departments whose files are not being digitised are Revenue, running into 1,500 to 2,000 pages each, and the equally bulky files of the Vigilance and Home Departments.

Over at the Andhra Police Headquarters at Lakdikapul in Hyderabad, the transfer to a new office near the transitional secretariat at Velagapudi isn’t as simple. Nearly one lakh weapons, including grenades, as well as ammunition are to be shifted over a period of one week from Hyderabad to strong rooms that are being built at existing police buildings, including the Andhra Special Police 6th Battalion Headquarters at Mangalagiri.

Director General of Police J V Ramudu says only buildings with certain specifications can be used for police purposes, especially for establishing various equipment, strong rooms etc, and these are not yet ready anywhere in the capital region. “There are some new buildings which according to the Capital Region Development Authority (CRDA) can be used by police. But these buildings have to meet specifications,” says the DGP.

Besides, some 500 police officers from various departments, including specialised ones such as Greyhounds and Octopus, will move to Vijayawada by June end. After the weapons are shifted, the Andhra Police must ensure that its communication network and forensic labs are up and running at the earliest. “Moving the forensic lab is itself a difficult task,” the DGP says.

*****

In anticipation of the demand for housing both offices and staff, the rent and land rates have been going up in Vijayawada. The rate per square feet in many areas went up from Rs 7 to Rs 15 between 2008 and 2014. Once bifurcation happened and CM Naidu called for shifting the capital by June end, the rate doubled.

Panigrahi says the shifting may not cost the state government much — he is reluctant to give an estimate — but that housing the departments in complexes and highrises on rent in Vijayawada or Guntur will cost a fortune. “In Hyderabad, most of the departments are on government-owned premises. But that is not going to be the case there. From July, 95 per cent of each department’s expenses will be rent,” Panigrahi says.

“In 2008, when we were looking for space to start one of our coaching academies in Vijayawada, we negotiated a rate of Rs 7 per sq ft. Now, when we are scouting for office spaces, owners are quoting Rs 28 per sq ft,” says P Narayana, Minister, Municipal Administration & Urban Development, Urban Water Supply and Urban Planning. He is also the founder of the premier Narayana Group of Educational Institutions.

An official says landlords tried to “hoodwink” them, but that the problem had been sorted. “They created a scenario of dearth of office space as the demand for commercial space is very high in Vijayawada. That was until the district collector conducted a survey and found that an additional 8 lakh sq ft space was available.”

The Velagapudi transitional headquarters will house the Chief Minister’s Office, offices of the Council of Ministers, the Legislative Assembly, and Departments of Information and Public Relations, Pay and Accounts. “The model of the five buildings is such that, after the departments shift to the new capital at Amaravati, they can be given to IT companies or corporates or multiplexes and malls,” says CRDA Commissioner N Srikanth.

Separate surveys were conducted for available rental accommodation for officials. “We found that more than 10,000 houses would be easily available for rent. Expecting the influx of employees and new migrants, many have already constructed new houses or raised additional floors. Employees won’t face any problem regarding housing,” says Panigrahi, adding that as per their estimate, of the 13,000-odd employees shifting, at least 10,000 will need bachelor accommodation initially, with their families staying back in Hyderabad.

Andhra Non-Gazetted Officers’ Association chief Ashok Babu fears that the employees who would be affected the most are those with elderly parents receiving treatment in Hyderabad or those with children in colleges.

*****

As his counterparts searched for space at reasonable cost, the Director of School Education at Vijayawada has been on another job for six months. On May 15, he issued a circular to all schools in the district to be lenient in giving admissions to children of government employees shifting from Hyderabad.

In Vijayawada, there are 125 English-medium schools, 14 of them missionary schools, which are the top choice for most employees. A cell has been started at the office of the Director of Schools at Vijayawada to assist employees to get admission at short notice.

A similar circular has been issued to schools in Guntur, especially in Mangalagiri area, where a number of employees may take up residence. “The government has identified two batches of employees who have school-going children, 81 employees who were recruited in 2008 and 45 in 2013,” says Education Minister G Srinivasa Rao. “If necessary, permission will be given by the government to start additional classes at these schools.”

Other measures have been taken to ease the shift. “We have declared a five-day week as of now for all employees shifting from Hyderabad, where they have a six-day week. Many of them with families will be commuting to and from Hyderabad over weekends. HRA has been increased to 30 per cent. Those employees who have government accommodation in Hyderabad and do not shift their families will still get 10 per cent HRA. A majority of the employees will commute. We may request waiving off of road toll tax for them,” says Panigrahi.

Adds minister Narayana, “When the employees’ union asked for these benefits, the government did not bargain or negotiate. CM Naidu accepted whatever was demanded.”

*****

In Mandadam village, 1 km from the Velagapudi transitional secretariat, anticipation has been building up — visible even in pamphlets littered across the village road offering various kinds of “services”. Earlier, Mandadam was famous for its fruit and flower crops, and almost everyone was a farmer. After they gave up all their land to the state government under the land-pooling scheme for the new capital, most of them introduce themselves as “real-estate agents” or “businessmen”. One advertises “comfortable hostel accommodation for working men” at affordable rates. Another promises to deliver bottled water at doorstep. Autorickshaw drivers advertise their phone numbers to take employees to and from the transitional secretariat. New ‘To Let’ boards hang outside many houses.

“Depending on the size of rooms, the rates range from Rs 7,000 to Rs 12,000, which includes breakfast, lunch box delivered to office, and dinner. All rooms are air-conditioned,” rattles off Venkat Reddy, who has converted the first floor of his house into a hostel.

An overpowering aroma rises from ‘New Amaravati Hotel’, a rudimentary structure that attracts many people, most of them truck drivers carrying equipment and steel supplies to the construction site at Velagapudi. A small board says ‘Meals Ready, Rs 30’.

“Between Mandadam and Velagapudi, at least 20 new shops and eateries have come up since construction started three months ago. We even have an Internet café now, though it is closed most of the time. Most of the new shops keep provisions like toothpastes, shampoos, SIM cards, etc and their customers are construction workers,” chuckles Bezwada Rajesh Babu, who is into real estate.

G Omkar, 42, who grew up in Velagapudi but now lives at Undavalli, is thrilled at the freshly laid two-lane road. “They are even laying pavements on both sides of the road leading to Velagapudi,” he gushes. His neighbour V Narendra says he spent Rs 70,000 redoing his bathroom, building an extra one, and laying marbonite tiles in the two-bedroom portion which he will let out.

*****

At the house of M Kishore, an assistant section officer in the Revenue Department at Hyderabad, the mood is sombre. Kishore, who has been living in Hyderabad since 1999, will move to Velagapudi while his wife Lata Sirisha and their daughter, a Class VIII student, stay back for now. Their son is doing B.Tech at Manipal University in Karnataka.

“I will think about shifting them in a year or so,” Kishore says. Apart from his daughter’s studies, he admits, he is worried about rumours of high rents in Vijayawada. “Landlords say when the government is paying you 30 per cent more HRA, why can’t you pay a little more to us.”

Others point out that they had bought property in Hyderabad, never anticipating they would have to leave the city. Many question the timing of the transfer. “Hyderabad is joint capital till 2024. What is the hurry in shifting just two years after bifurcation? That too just before the monsoon is to set in. The area where the government buildings are coming up is prime agriculture land and gets water-logged and there is no proper road connectivity,” says one employee. In fact, CM Naidu’s car had got stuck in the mud near the transitional headquarters a few days ago and a crane had to be called to pull it out.

Capital Amaravati itself will take another three to four years to be built, officials admit. A Japanese firm is finalising the designs of the crucial buildings and once Naidu okays them, construction will start. “The basic buildings, like the Secretariat, Legislative Assembly complex, high court, governor’s bungalow will take at least two years to build and construction may be completed by early 2019. All the offices that are being built now are temporary,” says Minister P Narayana.

Officials add that the reason for Naidu’s haste for the new capital is that he doesn’t want to depend for too long on Hyderabad, the capital of bickering sibling Telangana. “Once the capital shifts to temporary locations, focus can be on developing the state and also Amaravati. Now with head offices located 300 km away at Hyderabad, it is very inconvenient. The government is also spending a lot of money on airfare and travel expenses of officers making frequent trips between Hyderabad and Vijayawada,” an official says.

The June 27 deadline was announced primarily keeping in mind the reopening of schools in the first week of July after the summer vacations, the official adds. On Friday, Chief Secretary S P Tucker said officials could take time up to August.

B Sirisha, the stenographer in the Revenue Department, was one of the first government employees to scout Vijayawada and Guntur for accommodation, schools, transport, and other amenities. “My wife’s temporary office is coming up at Mandadam and it is equidistant from Vijayawada and Mangalagiri. We chose Mangalagiri because the rents are not very high, good 2BHKs are available and my wife’s native place is just 20 km away. Schools are nearby,” says Srinivas Reddy, Sirisha’s husband who works with a private firm in Hyderabad.

Reddy, who hails from Kadapa, adds, “I settled in Hyderabad 12 years ago and, like any place, it grows on you. We might leave Hyderabad with a heavy heart but there is the promise of AP’s new capital and going back to our state and contributing to rebuilding it.” This spirit is what the Naidu government is counting on.

Assures R Srinivas, an official at the Andhra Secretariat, “Leaving an urbanised and well-developed modern city to go to a set of buildings coming up near villages is definitely daunting. But I am sure the famous entrepreneurship of Andhra people will ultimately prevail. That is the confidence that Andhra workers and staff have.”

The Countdown

June 2, 2014: Andhra Pradesh with 13 districts comes into existence after united Andhra Pradesh is bifurcated into Andhra and Telangana.

Nov 2014: TDP government decides the region between Vijayawada and Guntur ideal for establishing a new capital city. Vijayawada already has a well-developed airport, and a major railway junction, river Krishna flows through the region, and the area is almost in the centre of the state.

April 2, 2015: Government announces Amaravati as new capital’s name. The historic Amaravati is 33 km from Vijayawada. The task of designing the capital is entrusted to Singaporean firm Surbana Jurong Private Limited.

July 2015: Surbana submits layouts of Amaravati.

Oct 22, 2015: Laying foundation stone, CM Naidu calls it ‘People’s Capital’

Jan 14, 2016: CM says will shift the capital to temporary location in Vijayawada, sets deadline for June.

The Count

* Amaravati expected to cover 217 sq km

* Capital Region Development Authority estimates budget of over Rs 50,000 crore

* Farmers give 34,000 acres in 31 villages under a land-pooling scheme for the capital

* 2,304 employees of 32 departments at the Andhra Secretariat, and 11,020 employees of 90 departments in Hyderabad to move

* 500 trucks to transport 1 lakh files, 11,000 -odd pieces of furniture

* The 300-km transfer to Vijayawada, Guntur or Velagapudi will cost around Rs Rs 5 crore

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Amarnath Prajapati says he cut his teeth making religious idols but made his mark only after he switched over to replicating his idol, B R Ambedkar. The 38-year-old sculptor, known in Uttar Pradesh for his installations of political leaders, calculates he has made over 400 Ambedkar statues, including a three-and-half-foot bronze one that he gifted to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Now, with Assembly elections looming in the state, Prajapati has become the first stop for BSP leaders looking to impress Mayawati: he has got orders from them for a total of 150 statues of their party supremo. Each sculpture, Prajapati says, will be 3-4 ft tall, made from bronze and weigh up to 100 kg. The cost will come to around Rs 50,000.

The work is keeping Prajapati busy at his new workshop-cum-office, in Lucknow’s Indira Colony, which stands out for its big statue of Ambedkar outside. He is in by 10 am daily.

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• The men and women at work

The first two rooms double up as Prajapati’s office. The walls are covered with photographs of him with UP’s current elite — from Governor Ram Naik to Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav — and one with Modi.

The two other rooms and a small roofed courtyard house his work or parts of them: old, and new, big and small, a few broken.

Prajapati has about 35 employees in his three workshops — the two others are on Faizabad road, about 10 km away — and there are only two at the Indira Colony one today. The others, he says, are at the other workshops as he is swamped with orders.

In one corner of the courtyard, worker Prakash is rubbing a knife over a clay hand. “It is a part of the Mayawati statues. She is holding her famous handbag,” he smiles.

Prajapati admits his BSP clients don’t want to be named, fearful of Mayawati’s wrath. Mindful of all the criticism she faced on that count, she has declared she will not commission new statues, memorials or parks if she returns to power in 2017. Other BSP leaders though have said that her wish doesn’t extend to lower ranks of the party.

Prajapati lets out though that most of his BSP clients are ticket aspirants for the 2017 elections. The Mayawati sculptures are for their offices or residences.

Leaving the Mayawati work to Prakash, Prajapati walks past a half-built bust of a Delhi-based businessman, whose name he can’t remember, and focuses on a huge figure of the Buddha in padmasana, which is in its final stage. The statue has been ordered by the Bihar government and is to be installed in Buxar; it is to be delivered in a month.

As Prajapati begins to work on the Buddha’s face with a brush, he explains the nuances of sculpting.“The first thing is to fashion an iron structure of the desired size; all measurements are pre-determined. The face is divided into three equal parts: one from the chin to nose, the other from nose to eyes and the third is the forehead. Similarly, the legs are divided into two equal parts — below the knees and above. The upper body is one part. After the iron structure is in place, we fill it with clay on the second day. It takes nearly a month to refine the clay work. Then the sculpture goes for dyeing, after which it takes a further two-and-a-half months for the final product,” Prajapati says.

The sculptor works on a project till the clay structure is complete. His workers help him with the dyeing and the final touches.

Prajapati learnt sculpting from his grandfather at their family home in Aishbagh locality in the old city rather than taking any formal training. Some of his workers though have degrees in fine arts. His beginnings were more to do with the divine than the doctrinal, he adds. “I carved hundreds of statues of gods and goddess after I started out in 1998. But I rarely got any attention. It was only after I built Ambedkar statues that people began noticing me.” Prajapati now calls himself an Ambedkarite and runs the Bharat Ratna Babasaheb Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar Samajik Trust. However, he says, he is not affiliated to any party.

While much of his bigger projects are commissioned by governments, that has its downside, Prajapati says. Putting his brush aside, he points to a black bust covered in white dust: it is of a Samajwadi Party leader’s father, who had ordered it when he was a minister in the Mulayam Singh Yadav government a decade ago. No one has come to claim it since. Then there is a life-size Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel statue, which Prajapati says was commissioned by the last BJP government in the state. “It cost me Rs 2.5 lakh at that time, in 2002.”

At around 2 pm, he leaves for his Faizabad road workshops on his way home in Gomti Nagar. Sometimes, he visits sites where his work is to be installed. “There is very little time to spare. Although most clients don’t insist on a one-to-one meeting, some of them, especially those in the government, call me to their offices,” he says.

After a two-hour break at home, Prajapati returns to his Indira Nagar colony workshop. Working on the businessman’s bust, he asks Tiwari to bring his photograph. “Look at this photo and this statue, don’t they look alike? There is 70 per cent similarity now and I will have to make that 100 per cent,” he says.

After an hour, he turns to a faceless Mayawati sculpture. Tiwari gets him the statue’s head. After a detailed inspection, Prajapati remarks, “I examined nearly 150 photographs of hers before I decided on the face. These statues will depict her present features, not those when she was younger. I have decided to show her moving forward, with one leg ahead of the other. It could be a symbol of her marching towards power,” he says.

While he has built statues of Congress and BJP leaders and several others, the Mayawati statues are his bread-and-butter these days. “She is an icon for many and her party leaders like to have her statues. These days, sculptures of others are not in demand; I have not built a Mahatma Gandhi replica in almost a decade,” he says.

But the demand from even those once aligned with the BSP is not likely to dry up soon. “I will start work on a Kanshi Ram statue soon,” says Prajapati. “All former BSP leaders who have developed differences with Mayawati want to reclaim his legacy.”

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As the sun pales on a sweltering summer day, sharecropper Raju Charola, 33, his wife Champa and mother Labhu quickly tuck into their dinner of potato curry, chapati and mango pickle, inches from their makeshift chullah, at a farm in Ambardi village in Dhari taluka of Amreli.

Darkness descends quickly, with the eight-hour agricultural power supply to these parts snapped at 7 pm. The water of the Shetruji river laps nearby, but the three hold their ears out for what lies just beyond — the 400-hectare dry deciduous wilderness of Ambardi reserve forest in Gir East, where lives the only population of wild lions in the world outside of Africa.

It’s Raju’s sister Nandu, 55, and husband Pancha Parmar, 60, who look after this farm. However, Raju, Champa and Labhu have abandoned their own hut in the neighbouring farm and moved here for the past few days, since teenager Jayraj Makwana was mauled to death by allegedly a pride of Asiatic lions, a few fields away.

Over the last 23 years, there have been 18 instances of lions killing humans in Gir and its adjoining areas. This year, six incidents have been reported in the first five months alone: three in Gir East, and one each in Rajkot, Junagadh and Gir West divisions.

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The attacks in Gir East have occurred in the Ambardi-Bharad group panchayat area. All the three victims were labourers. While Jayraj (14) was killed on May 20, Labhu Solanki (60) was attacked on April 10. The death of Zeena Makwana (54), killed in Ambardi on March 19, has worried experts, as reports indicate he had been eaten by the lions, which is extremely rare.

Following the incidents, for the first time in Gir’s history, a pride of lions, including 13 members, was caged. A number of labourers have fled the farms surrounding Gir. Former state agriculture minister and senior BJP leader Dilip Sanghani, a native of Amreli, has written to the state forest minister demanding that farmers be allowed to shoot lions and leopards in self-defence.

***

The Gir protected area, consisting of Gir National Park and Sanctuary, Paniya Wildlife Sanctury and Mitiyala Wildlife Sanctuary, is spread over 1,412 sq km. As per the 2015 census, it has 523 lions. But a number of them now live outside the protected area.

While the Forest Department has been preparing the Barda Wildlife Sanctuary in Porbandar district, west of the Gir forest, as a possible second habitat for lions for years, the growing carnivore population has moved east to Amerli and Bhavnagar districts. Forest officers estimate that lions now roam an area of 22,000 sq km.

In fact, the discovery in 2001, during the five-yearly census, that a few of them had settled permanently in Paniya area of Amreli had been a cause of much elation. The development marked a paradigm shift, indicating that the lions had set out to recapture lost territory after once being reduced to a few dozen prides in ravines deep inside the Gir forest.

Now this spectacular comeback is posing new questions, including for people of the area, such as Raju and family.

Since the 2001 census, the lion population in Amreli has increased leaps and bounds, to 174 by 2015, with lions being sighted in five of its 11 talukas. For the territorial animals, forest officers say, Amreli’s hillocks and the plains of the rivers Shetrunji and Dhatarwadi, covered with thickets, offer a good habitat. Apart from a source of water in the summer, the rivers also draw nilgais (blue bulls) and spotted deer — a natural prey for the lions.

In the 2015 census, only Junagadh had better lion numbers, at 203, of all the four districts where the big cats have settled: Junagadh, Gir Somnath, Amreli and Bhavnagar.

Besides, of the 174 lions counted in Amreli, 45, or a little over 25 per cent, were found to be living in revenue areas — agricultural fields, villages and other areas of human habitation and activity. Again, only in Junagadh, do more lions (58) roam in revenue areas than in Amreli.

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Across the four districts now, the rising number of lions and their appearance in villages is a common story.

After the 2015 census revealed that 167 of the total 523 lions were living in revenue areas, the state government had formed a task-force for a management plan. The task-force has submitted its report, but its recommendations, including for a unified forest area, say sources, remain under “consideration”.

***

Raju’s fear notwithstanding, his brother-in-law Pancha points out that living next door to the big cats had never bothered the villagers, till now. “Lions are very sensible animals. They always respect our warning calls while they are on our fields. They would never attack a human being. I believe they must have been very hungry when they killed that boy (Jayraj),” says Pancha, who is illiterate.

The two-hectare farm he has been cultivating in Ambardi village for the past five years with wife Nandu is owned by Shantibhai Dobariya. Only two unfarmed fields, now run over by bushes, separate Dobariya’s farm from the reserved forest.

Ambardi has a population of around 1,800, a majority of them farmers. The Shetrunji river ensures rich harvest and almost every other landlord in the village engages labourers. It is these labourers who have fallen victim to lions.

Pancha’s native village Vekariyapara nearby is also part of lion territory. He talks of how, while other farmers complain of nilgais and wild boars destroying their cotton and groundnut crops, he has never faced such a problem due to his feline neighbours. “As the big cats do their rounds here, no other animal dares step in. One can grow as much crop as one wants,” he smiles.

Pancha, however, says all this comes with proper precautions. “If a lion enters my wheat field at night, I cannot irrigate the crop. So we switch off the motor-pump and go to sleep. Even if the next morning the landlord scolds us,” he says.

“Lions started visiting our village 15 years ago. Since then, farmers have stopped working on their farm at night unless unavoidable,” says Ramku Varu, sarpanch of Dholadri village in Jafrabad taluka, around 50 km away.

Bhawan Gohil of Jikadri village in the same taluka, who has 125 goats and sheep, says he is reconciled to losing three-four of his animals to “savaj (lions)” every year. “They even jump into the verandah and raid my herd in our presence,” Gohil says. According to Gohil, even taking his herd for grazing has been getting more difficult.

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“But I have no complaints. Lions take their share as alert as I may remain,” he says with a mild smile.

There are 54 colonies of maldharis or cattle herders, traditional forest dwellers, inside the Gir forest.

The Forest Department gives Rs 1,000 as compensation for a goat or sheep killed by a wild animal, Rs 10,000 for a killed bullock and cow and up to Rs 20,000 for a buffalo.

***

Still, the recent incidents have shaken this equanimity, particularly reports of lions eating humans. The three deaths in Gir East followed a similar pattern — lions attacked people sleeping out in the open and in the wee hours of the day.

Ambardi village sarpanch Najabhai Javandhra admits things have changed. The population of lions has seen a “huge jump over the past five years”, he says. “Labourers are fleeing.”

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Pancha’s own sons have survived attacks by the wild cats but no one has heard of lions eating people before. Pancha’s teenage son Ghugha, who is idling on quilts heaped in a corner, was attacked by a lioness last monsoon on the same farm where they are currently working, but escaped with minor claw marks as the family dogs raised an alarm. Pancha’s elder son Magan was attacked by a leopard a few years ago.

Raju, who also grew up next to Gir in village Dalkhaniya, says he had no choice but to move in with his sister. “The lions come near our farm to drink water. We spend nights at my sister’s place and work on our farm during the day,” he says.

Gohil’s grandfather Devshi talks about the old times when he would leave his herd without an enclosure. “They would rest in the open, even at night. But now despite creating enclosures, lions are killing our animals. The only option now is to keep our goats inside our living rooms.”

Vipul Bagda, a 30-year-old lion attack survivor from Nava Agariya village in Rajula taluka, is now too scared to cross the border of his small farm, on the banks of the Nahyo rivulet. He, his cousin Dipak Babariya and three others were chased by a lioness when they got too close to her cubs in March 2014. His cousin was killed, while another of his friends was injured. “I managed to climb up a neem tree. I was rescued after three hours,” he recalls. This lioness and her two cubs were caged after two-week-long efforts.

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In Dholadri village last year, a pride of lions raided and killed seven stray cows in one go. The village had also reported a lion attack, and the eating of a body, back in 2012. Bhura Parmar, a diamond-polisher based in Surat, had been home due to a slump in the industry when he was killed.

Residents of Bhad, a village on the border of the Mitiyala Wildlife Sanctuary, around 50 km from Amreli, have raised compound walls around their homes now, which are 10 feet or higher.

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“Over the last five years, lion movement has increased greatly. I used to take my cows and bullocks for grazing at 4 am. But now, it’s too risky to venture out before daybreak,” says Chhagan Akbari, a farmer.

However, the 65-year-old, adds, “Lions become violent only if harassed. I don’t bother them ever and they silently cross my field.”

Pancha, a lion veteran of as many years, also tries vouching for the animal again, saying lions generally leave if chased away with shouts and thumping of sticks. However, he is shouted down by his own family. Says wife Nandu, “The sight of the lions at night leaves me petrified. I am as jumpy as my goats inside the cottage.”

Raju wishes for something more substantial, like an axe, for protection. “But forest guards would suspect we are going to cut trees.”

***

Govind Patel, the former chief wildlife warden of Gujarat and former member of the National Board for Wildlife, says the problem is an “acid test” for the state. “Gujarat has never faced such a situation when lions have killed people and allegedly eaten them. Lions and maldharis have lived together inside Gir for centuries,” he says.

What has clearly changed is the growing lion population. As Patel says, “A lion pride requires, on an average, 40-50 sq km of area as its territory. Gir can accommodate only 270 lions. Therefore, new prides have made their homes outside the protected forest. We had floated the idea of developing the region as a Greater Gir Area.”

The Gujarat government has steadfastly opposed proposals to translocate the animals, despite a Supreme Court ruling against the state. The idea was first mooted when the lions existed in a sub-population in Gir and wildlife experts feared that any disease or natural calamity could wipe out the entire species.

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In 2013, the apex court gave Gujarat six months to begin the process to transfer lions to the Kuno Palpur Wildlife Sanctuary in Sheopur district of Madhya Pradesh. A committee was formed by the Centre, and the matter is still at the “planning stage”.

Early this year, Union Minister of State for Environment, Forest and Climate Change Prakash Javadekar said that the translocation would take about 25 years as lions would have to be moved in phases.

In another statement, in the Rajya Sabha last month, Javadekar said Gir had seen 91 lion deaths in 2015, compared to the average of 75 the previous two years. He said both natural and unnatural reasons had seen a rise, and that one of the reasons of the unnatural deaths was lions “falling in open wells in revenue areas”.

Gujarat is now constructing parapet walls around open wells, the minister said, as well as fencing accident-prone railway track stretches in Amreli.

Jamal Khan, Gujarat’s Principal Chief Conservator of Forests (Wildlife), warns against any quick conclusions for the lion attacks. Pointing out that Amreli has seen more deaths compared to Junagadh, which has a larger lion population in the revenue areas, he says, “The spurt as well as lions eating humans are very unusual. But there can be multiple reasons. One can be low availability of food, another could be the weather (the hot temperatures making lions irritable). Also, the incidents in Dhari (Amreli) have happened on the border of the forest. Lions are new to the area. Similarly, these animals are new for people too. So each feels the other is encroaching on their territory. There is no problem in Junagadh because lions have been there for centuries.”

Forest officers also note that those who have been attacked were labourers sleeping in the open, on the ground.

While acknowledging the “growing population of lions”, Aniruddh Pratap Singh, Chief Conservator of Forests, Junagadh wildlife circle, says, “A human being sleeping on the ground and wrapped in a quilt or shawl is confusing for the lions. At night, lions see almost every object as black. Many labourers come from areas which are not lion territories and therefore don’t understand lion behaviour. But those from the lion range also seem to be careless and negligent. We have written to village panchayats scores of times, held meetings with villagers and announced over loudspeakers that people must take basic precautions like not sleep in the open and on the ground etc, but still this keeps happening.”

Apart from loudspeakers mounted on vans informing villagers of the do’s and don’ts of living in lion territory, the Gir West division has distributed pamphlets among locals educating them about lion behaviour and the precautions to take. But with electricity cut in most areas at night and temperatures high, sleeping in the open remains attractive.

Forest officers also say the smell of non-vegetarian food draws the big cats, including leopards, to human habitations.

Other officers blame provocation by humans. “Unless harassed, lions never attack humans. All the incidents have taken place at night, so, we don’t know the circumstances. The heat could also have a role. In such a state, even minimal provocation can be costly,” says T Karuppasamy, Deputy Conservator of Forests of Gir East.

Hridaya Narayan Singh, a retired social researcher of Jawaharlal Nehru University who was one of the first people to study co-existence between maldharis and lions, also says human role shouldn’t be ruled out. “Lions by nature are neither maneaters nor do they prefer cattle normally. The fact that maldharis have been living with lions inside Gir for centuries proves this. The attacks could be due to some disturbance or human interference,” he says.

Ambardi sarpanch Javandhra blames “outsiders” who come to Ambardi to see lions — or what the locals have dubbed “lion shows”. “Because of the Shetrunji river, it is easy to locate lions. However, some of them harass the lions by chasing them with cars or ramming their vehicles into animals. While the outsiders leave, the agitated lions attack locals afterwards,” Javandhra says.

There have been instances of visitors throwing stones at lions or trying to get too close to them. Some try to click selfies.

***

In case of the recent killings, the first lion was caged days after it had killed Makwana, and sent to a rehabilitation centre in Sasan after excreta analysis confirmed it had eaten the man. A lioness was caged after Labhu Solanki’s death too but she has been since then let out in the wild as her stool samples did not contain any trace of human flesh.

Then, after Jayraj’s death, 16 lions, 13 of them from a single pride, were removed from Ambardi and caged at the Jasadhar animal care centre near Una in Gir Somnath district. Forest officers await laboratory results to determine if they had eaten the boy.

Ravi Chellam, a wildlife biologist and conservation scientist who is a member of the expert committee set up by the Centre to oversee the translocation of Asiatic lions, hopes the current panic doesn’t lead to any drastic steps. “Indians tolerate wildlife and celebrate nature. So you cannot take the strict position that lions and tigers should exist only within protected areas. That will be disastrous. There are bound to be problems, but you need to put them in context. The number of people knocked down by cars in a city is far more than the number going to be killed by lions in a year. That doesn’t stop us from stepping onto a road,” he says.

Bhushan Pandya, a member of the state board for wildlife who has documented the Gir forest and its wildlife for decades, also cautions that the “circumstances” of the lion deaths should be looked into first. “These are stray incidents and don’t point to any change in the behaviour of lions. Lions don’t become man-eaters by such incidents,” he says. Advising the Forest Department to not let the incidents pass without properly investigating the causes, he adds, “Just imagine if the lions develop a liking for human blood. It will be a nightmare.”

Noting that people have largely cared for and accepted animals in Amreli, Aniruddh Pratap Singh, Chief Conservator of Forests, Junagadh, says, “We are ready to help build sheds or tents so that labourers don’t have to sleep in the open.”

Govind Patel advises the Forest Department to also notify new lion corridors and deploy more manpower in Amreli, as well as minimise the man-animal conflict through public awareness.

However, he voices what many of them fear. “Whether people will accept the presence of lions now that they have started attacking humans is a big question.”

***

Over at Ambardi village, it is 8.30 pm, and Raju and family close the iron gates of their pucca cottage, locking in their dozen goats, a buffalo and Pancha’s dogs Kalo and Jado, while spreading their rugged quilts on the ground in the open.

They have no cots, Raju says, as he prepares for a nervous night in the open. Apart from them, the only ones out in the darkare the family’s seven chicken, huddled under a tarpaulin-covered structure.

A couple of such nights later, the entire family of six moves out.

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“We are making films without equipment. We have no weapons but we’re fighting a war. And winning it,” says a character in the critically-acclaimed 2012 documentary Supermen of Malegaon, as he describes the then thriving low-budget film industry in the little town in Nashik district. Four years on, however, increasing social media entertainment and video piracy have pushed Mollywood, Malegaon’s own little Bollywood, to the brink of losing that war: there has not been a single release from its celluloid depots for the past two years.

For Shakir Nasir, the industry’s poster boy, the prolonged hiatus has meant curtains on his 15-year film career, and on that of many others like him in the powerloom town.

The 38-year-old changed professions early last year and now runs ‘Hotel Prince’, a bustling restaurant adjacent to the Malegaon bus stop. He spends his days checking on customers, instructing waiters, preparing bills and offering namaaz — a far cry from shooting sequences on a camcorder mounted on cycles and trucks, among other things. “The entertainment industry is a tough one. You need to completely transform yourself to be a part of it. I could not match up to the demands it was placing on me and so decided to quit,” smiles Nasir, sitting at the counter of his restaurant.

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While he also blames increasing online entertainment options and video piracy for the losses faced by the industry, there is another factor that influenced his decision to quit. “I have transitioned from Mollywood to Maulviwood. Films gave me fame but they took me away from the purpose of my existence. Earlier I didn’t offer namaaz but now I get restless if I miss it… I am focusing on improving my akhirat (afterlife) now,” he says. “There was also some opposition to filmmaking from religious heads in the town,” he adds.

Before it hit the headlines for communal violence and blasts, Malegaon, about 250 km from Mumbai, had been churning out locally made films for years.

The town always had a healthy and vibrant cultural space, and the first low-cost indigenous film, Qatil Khazana, was shot in 1972. In recent times, men like Nasir kept the industry alive, releasing about a dozen-odd films a year, all shot with camcorders. The formula was simple: spoofs of mainstream Bollywood and Hollywood films on a shoe-string budget, with a rag-tag crew, actors from the town and scenes peppered with colloquial expressions. The result was films like Khandesh Ke Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, Koi Hil Gaya and Nasir’s 2011 hit Malegaon Ke Sholay, made on a budget of Rs 50,000, which grossed about Rs 2 lakh.

“I owned a small video parlour and learned about direction, camera and editing by watching films there. I was 20 when I directed my first film — a social thriller made in 1998 — but that didn’t work. So I decided to adapt commercially successful films to cater to local sensibilities,” recalls Nasir. He claims that some of his movies were even bought by Mumbai-based distributors, who would go on to sell their DVDs across India.

The industry began getting noticed when reporters converged on the town after the 2006 blasts. It really hit the big time after documentary filmmaker Faiza Ahmad Khan made Supermen of Malegaon, which chronicled Nasir working on his directorial venture, Yeh Hai Malegaon Ka Superman. The documentary went on to pick up laurels in film festivals from Rome to Durham and instantly shot Nasir to fame, even though Yeh Hai Malegaon Ka Superman remains unreleased.

“I got many awards and even landed a deal to direct a TV series, Malegaon ka Chintu. The show ran for three years and I even travelled abroad. But the good times have ended now,” Nasir says.

Malegaon still has close to 15 conventional theatres that screen Bollywood films, and 15 video parlours, where Mollywood films were the staple earlier. Even district headquarters Nashik, thrice the size of Malegaon, doesn’t have more theatres.

Then there are plays organised by the Malegaon Drama Art Culture Association. Its president Siraj Dular, a pioneer in the local filmmaking industry who was associated with Qatil Khazana, believes failure to reinvent was a major reason for Mollywood’s downfall. “With the limited resources, the boys did good work, they were technically sound. But artistically, they were not offering anything new to the audience. A certain degree of fatigue set in for viewers, which was never addressed,” Dular says.

“People like it when those on screen speak in their language. They lapped it up, the media lapped it up and we got famous. Come to think of it, we were given a status bigger than what we actually were,” observes Faroghue Jafri, who has written and directed over 15 Mollywood films.

He blames piracy and “jealousy on the part of city elders” for the industry’s collapse. “Piracy broke our back. Distributors who bought our films put the onus of checking piracy on us too. Imagine writing, directing, financing and then picking up fights on the streets to stop piracy,” Jafri says. “Then there were people in the village who just couldn’t handle our fame. There was an insidious campaign against us. There are at least four poets, two actors and one director under every roof in Malegaon, but the industry here is dying, ” he adds.

Disheartened by the turn of events, like Nasir, Jafri too has decided to switch professions. “ In 2010, I went to Mumbai to try my luck in Bollywood and made Rs 5,000 a month working for an Urdu newspaper. I couldn’t survive and decided to return to Malegaon. I am now completing the final draft of my Urdu novel,” he says.

Back at the restaurant, Nasir is busy tallying bills of the day. Between instructing the waiters, he says, “I think I got carried away with all the fame that came my way. I was happy then but I am happier now. There are no plans to make films anytime soon, but if I do, it will not be for commercial purposes. Everything is for Allah to decide now,” says Nasir.

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It’s a cloudy Wednesday morning and there is a flurry of activity at Capitol Complex. On June 21, the venue in Sector 1, Chandigarh, will host Prime Minister Narendra Modi and 30,000-odd participants for the Second International Yoga Day event. The man tasked with overseeing the arrangements, Executive Engineer Rakesh Bajaj, of the Union Territory’s Engineering Department, admits he is both “excited and anxious”.

“It’s a prestigious assignment,” mumbles the 59-year-old.

Dressed in a white shirt and black trousers, Bajaj arrives at the Le Corbusier-designed complex at 8 am prompt, and heads straight to ‘base camp’. The small, cordoned-off area on the 12 lakh square feet ground, where the Yoga Day event will be held, has over 30 supervisors and a contractor already, working for the one-hour event.

The event is being organised by the Chandigarh administration in collaboration with the state governments of Punjab and Haryana. The budget, provided by the Union Ministry of Ayush, is expected to be around Rs 8 crore.

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Bajaj begins by briefing the group and assigning them tasks for the day — levelling the ground, setting up the stage and finishing some paint work. Once the group disperses, Bajaj has a 30-minute meeting with Chief Engineer Mukesh Anand on the progress of the works.

“It has been three days since we started work and 70 per cent of the material, including mats and carpets, have arrived. For the implementation of all the tasks, I need to co-ordinate with three departments each day,” says Bajaj, who joined the Engineering Department in Chandigarh as a draftsman back in 1979 .

The 30,000 mats, each with the Yoga Day logo, and of the specified 5 mm thickness and 6X2 ft size, are being supplied by Arch Concept Private Ltd, the Delhi-based agency which made arrangements for the event in the Capital last year. The ground has been divided into eight blocks, where the mats, sourced by the company from different parts of the country, will be lined up on the day of the event. There have been strict instructions regarding that, after the mats at last year’s event were found to be Made in China.

Over 900 labourers are hard at work at the site putting up 40 LED lights, 300 prefabricated bio toilets, over 200 dustbins and several green-coloured carpets to cover around 10 lakh sq ft of area. These materials have also been supplied by the same Delhi-based company, and are being ferried to the Capitol Complex in trucks.

Ten spots have been identified for setting up security posts around the complex.

The area is a high-security zone, as it houses the Secretariat, Legislative Assembly and the Punjab and Haryana High Court, and entry to it is restricted. This has posed the biggest headache for Bajaj so far.

He must get daily permissions from the police for entry of the trucks bringing in the supplies. “It takes a lot of our time,” he complains. At least 15 supply trucks from Delhi enter the complex each day.

Around 10 am, Bajaj and sub-divisional officer Arman Singh begin their rounds of the site. The two stop at a few points to check on the progress of work and to instruct the labourers.

Soon a team of three members from the UT’s Health Department arrives to select spots for setting up medical booths for the day. After a 45-minute meeting with Bajaj, the team finalises 10 spots based on their accessibility from the eight blocks into which the ground has been divided.

An hour later, just when all seems to be on track, work gets disrupted by a sudden downpour. Bajaj and the over thousand members on the ground rush to take cover under make-shift camps erected in one corner of the venue. Rain continues to lash the complex for the next two hours, pushing the team behind schedule. Bajaj and a few of the other engineers decide to take a break for lunch — a simple meal of roti-subzi — at the UT Secretariat in Sector 9, 1.5 km away.

By 2 pm, the rain has subsided, and Bajaj returns to the ground, instructing labourers to make up for lost time. “Rain has hampered work for the past two days. The Met Department has predicted that there will be rainfall the next few days also. It is a big concern, there is very little time left,” worries Bajaj, who lives with his mother, wife and two children.

As the sun returns, workers swing back into action, now beginning work on the stage that incidentally will have a waterproof top. “The stage has to be set up according to the specifications of the Special Protection Group (SPG) and needs to have space for 20 people, including the Prime Minister. Once the stage is ready, we will need a structural stability certificate from the SPG and Chandigarh Police,” says Bajaj.

The SPG team is expected to visit the site in a few days.

Over where the stage is being constructed, with aluminium rods, there is a sudden commotion. One of the rods has fallen on a labourer and he has sustained injuries. There is some panic, till it is realised the injuries are minor. The worker is sent over for medical aid, and work resumes.

Bajaj says he and his team also have the responsibility of “beautifying” the venue. So in the coming days, around 4,000 ornamental plants — 200 each of Chandani Dwarf, Tecoma Stans, Hamelia Patens, Ficus Tall, Junipers and Areca Palm; 50 Golden Bottle Topiary and 2,000 Ground Covers — worth Rs 4.35 lakh in all, will be planted in the grounds. Another thousand earthen pots with different varieties of flowers in bloom will be placed across the venue.

By 5:30 pm, the levelling work is complete and the ground is ready for the plants. “We are waiting for suppliers to send over the plants now,” says Bajaj, examining the ground with his feet and instructing the labourers to be “careful”. “Capitol Complex is vying for World Heritage Site status and we need to be cautious not to cause any damage to the place,” he notes.

The venue needs to be handed over to security agencies by June 18. The main event on June 21 will be preceded by a two-day rehearsal on June 19 and 20. All the participants, barring the Prime Minister, will be present for the rehearsals.

Half-an-hour later, Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar and Health Minister Anil Vij arrive at the site. For the next 10 minutes, the two interact with Bajaj and other members of the staff. “He seemed satisfied with the arrangements so far,” smiles Bajaj.

After seeing off the CM, Bajaj rushes for his 6 pm appointment: the daily review meeting at the UT Secretariat. At the meeting, Bajaj tells Chief Engineer Mukesh Anand about the progress of the work and then the team of five men chalk out the plan for the next day.

“We will have all eyes on us, it is an international event and there is no room for error,” says Bajaj, the nerves again showing, as he walks out of the Secretariat.

It’s almost 8 pm now and beginning to get dark outside. But there is still a lot on Bajaj’s mind. “We need to coordinate with the road division of the engineering wing for making parking arrangements in areas adjoining the complex. No private vehicles will be allowed on the day and 10,000 participants each from Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh will be transported to the venue by buses. I will begin work on it tomorrow,” says Bajaj.
It will be a long day again tomorrow.

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Not far from where Mathura blew up on an unsuspecting administration’s face, lies a building in marble. It is perhaps fitting that a saga starring “god”, Subhas Chandra Bose and cheap petrol should include a “temple” aspiring to be Taj Mahal.

Inside, they pray for ‘Ghurelal Maharaj’, swear by vegetarianism, and rear cows.

As authorities try to join the dots between a self-professed godman called Baba Jai Gurudev, an orphan who amassed wealth amounting to a rumoured Rs 4,000 crore, a cult in Bose’s name and what happened in Mathura, they could turn here.

Or, to Khitora village in Etawah, over 170 km away, where it all began. Disciples at an ashram of Gurudev in the village say he was born to a landlord there in 1896, which would make him 116 when he died, and that his parents died early.

Villagers of Khitora talk about the orphaned seven-year-old setting out to “search for Lord Krishna”, “as told by his mother on her death bed”, and finding “Dada Guru”.

That was the name given to Ghurelal Maharaj, a spiritual guru known in these parts. Khitora has other stories, of the boy performing sadhna for over 20 hours a day, every day, for a year, till he achieved “non-attachment”. An impressed Ghurelal reportedly named him Tulsidas, after the poet-saint — others say that was the boy’s real name. In December 1948, Ghurelal breathed his last, reportedly directing Tulsidas to spread his message and to construct a “jhopdi (hut)” in Mathura, the birthplace of Lord Krishna. By 1952, Tulsidas had come to be known as ‘Baba Jai Gurudev’.

Mathura would eventually get a Ghurelal memorial, though it would not be a jhopdi but a marble temple and a 50-acre ashram. Back at Khitora, Gurudev’s family now lives in a double-storey house, the village’s most lavish, spread over several bighas. Two cars stand in the driveway.

A group of villagers gathered under a neem tree in Khitora get angry when asked about the connection between Gurudev and Ram Vriksha Yadav, the leader of the Swadheen Bharat Subhash Sena cult that clashed with police in Mathura on June 2, leaving 29 dead. A child rushes to the big house to call someone from the family of Sunil Yadav, the grandson of Gurudev. Sunil’s wife Gayatri Devi is currently the village pradhan.

Meanwhile, a tall man wearing a lungi and holding some chapatis, cutting short his lunch, runs over to the tree. Introducing himself as Gurudev’s cousin, Durga Prasad Yadav says, “Hum kisi Ram Vriksha ko nahin jaante. Baba ka naam kharab kar diya usne (We don’t know any Ram Vriksha. He has maligned the baba).”

As the child doesn’t return, Janvesh Singh Yadav, the only villager with a cellphone on him, places a call to Sunil Yadav. Sunil, it appears, is in Mathura with his family.

The villagers resume their telling of the Gurudev story. While they don’t know where he went to school, they say he was able to read and write, and penned “scripts” in Hindi.

“Guruji’s life was full of struggle. His parents died when he was young. He initially lived with his sister and later left to search for god,” says Nandan Singh Yadav. The villagers don’t know what happened to the sister.

There are some who say it was a “goat theft case” that forced Gurudev to leave the village, and that the details of the case dating back to 1900s are lodged at the Bakewar police station of Etawah. The inspector there, Dinesh Sharma, says he has heard of the case. But the records are in Urdu, which few know here how to read, and many pages of the register are torn, so no one can say for sure.

Nandan though believes what he has heard. And attests that having left for god, Gurudev “came back with lots of wisdom and changed our lives”. While he is fuzzy on that, in the shadow of the tree, the Gurudev ashram under construction nearby, and that house from where much power flows in Khitora, they all agree — “Baba was a great saint”.

As per accounts gleaned from villagers and officials, after he had set out following his guru’s death, Tulsidas first began preaching on the banks of the Ganga in Varanasi, in the early 1950s. At the time, he had just five disciples. In the next five years, the number grew to 5,000, across the entire Hindi heartland. Tulsidas himself metamorphosed into ‘Jai Gurudev’ —the name change explained as “liberation of soul from the clutches of negative powers kaal and maya”.

In 1952, recalling Ghurelal’s wish, Gurudev started building an ashram in Krishnagar in Mathura on Forest Department land. By 1961, that plot had been deemed too small, and Gurudev moved to where his present ashram is located, on the Delhi-Agra highway. It is now the Gurudev trust’s headquarters, with around 500 ‘sevadars’ at any time and 100-150 daily visitors.

The ashram has two main annual events — held during Holi and Guru Purnima. The current guru, Pankaj Yadav, a former driver of Gurudev, is at present on a 45-day country-wide tour, in the run-up to Guru Purnima.

“Over a lakh supporters are expected at the event in July. A satsang would be held in the memory of Jai Gurudev,” says Sumit Kumar Soni, the caretaker of the ashram.

According to a senior Mathura lawyer who has been closely involved with cases concerning Gurudev, and who doesn’t want to be named, it was once he moved to the Delhi-Agra highway that the encroachment of land began. “Hectares of forest land was occupied. Cases were filed, but the government remained a silent spectator,” says the lawyer.

Among those who filed complaints were farmers, he adds. “Over 150 hectares of farm land was forcefully taken over in the 1960s… Farmers knocked on the doors of court. Every single case is pending in courts.”

The farmers also filed over 20 complaints before the district magistrate. “Under political pressure, the DM submitted a report stating the matter was between the farmers and the ashram,” the lawyer adds.

Mohan Singh Gujar, a farmer of Navada village in Mathura’s Govardhan tehsil, says Gurudev’s trust illegally encroached several bighas owned by his father Maharaj Singh in 1967. “My father died fighting and I am still struggling to get back the land,” Gujar says.

Around 20 years ago, Government Museum, Mathura, authorities wrote to the state government complaining that Gurudev’s disciples had taken away statues of historical importance discovered during digging. A senior Mathura-based journalist, Vijay Kumar Arya Vidyarthi, recalls the director, Jitendra Kumar, writing to the state government on the matter.

Kumar refuses to talk now, while Charan Singh, the legal advisor with the Mathura ashram, dismisses the charge as rumours and says no such statues had been found.

During this time, Gurudev was also accused of usurping prime industrial land in Mathura. In 1973, when hundreds of acres that the Uttar Pradesh State Industrial Development Corporation Ltd (UPSIDCL) had acquired from farmers was also allegedly occupied by him, the state government finally took action. Sixteen cases were filed against the ashram by the UPSIDCL in the late 1990s, when the BJP was in power in the state, after then party MLA from Goverdhan (under which the Mathura ashram falls), Ajay Kumar Poeia, raised the matter in the Assembly.

Says Poeia, “An inquiry was set up by Rajnath Singh, which found that land belonging to the UPSIDCL and farmers had been encroached upon. The UPSIDCL fought many cases in court but lost.”

All the five special leave petitions filed by the UPSIDCL before the Supreme Court have since been dismissed. At present the Allahabad High Court is hearing a petition by the state government, and has ordered a stay.

Says Pradeep Kumar, Executive Engineer, UPSIDCL (Mathura), “They have encroached upon 200 acres of land. We will surely win.”

Charan Singh again denies the charges, claiming that it was actually land owned by the Gurudev trust that was lying with people. “Nothing will happen to this ashram as it has the blessings of Jai Gurudev,” he adds.

Late in 2011, Mathura City Magistrate Ram Araj Maurya released a report saying that of the 33 hectares-plus over which Gurudev’s ashram was spread, more than 13 hectares did not belong to it. Of this encroached land, it said, 11 hectares belonged to the UPSIDCL while the rest was common land owned by the local village council.

The ashram in Gurudev’s Khitora village, meant to be a replica of the one at Mathura, has been under construction since 2008. Caretaker Rajendra Pratap Singh says the huge agricultural land on which the ashram is spread, surrounded by fertile fields, had all been donated. Including a 2 bigha plot that changed hands reportedly for Rs 30,000 just a week ago. The cost of such land in Etawah is more than Rs 1 lakh per bigha.

Despite the controversies, there was no dent in Gurudev’s popularity. Photographs dating to the 1970s show the who’s who of Indian politics, including Indira Gandhi and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, with him.

During the Emergency though, the Indira Gandhi government jailed Gurudev. While no one is clear why, some say he had spoken up against the Emergency.

A follower, Param Lal Singh, says, “Babaji remained in jail for more than a year. He was released on March 3, 1977. Every year we celebrate this day as Mukti Divas, and fast.”

After he was released, Gurudev formed the Jai Gurudev Dharm Pracharak Sangh Trust, which now has over 200 ashrams. By the time he died on May 18, 2012, he was alleged to have assets worth Rs 4,000 crore.

After Gurudev’s death, a war of succession broke out beween three of his disciples —his driver Pankaj Yadav, ‘sevadar’ Ram Vriksha Yadav and a close aide, Umakant Tiwari.

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Charan Singh, the legal advisor, says Ram Vriksha was never really in the race, and had been expelled from the ashram by Gurudev. “Only now has Ram Vriksha’s name been associated with the ashram. Even the legal battle in the high court was between Tiwari, Guru Pankaj Yadavji and Ram Pratap, the then vice-president. Tiwari created a ‘false impression’ that the disciples backed him and even marched to the ashram to stake claim. ”

Charan Singh also remembers the time Ram Vriksha first raised the “unusual demand” of 60 litres of diesel and 40 litres of petrol for a rupee. “In March 2011, he began his protest from a petrol pump,” he recalls.

At the Khitora ashram, Rajendra Pratap attacks Umakant Tiwari as ambitious. “Tiwariji started giving spiritual teachings without the permission of Jai Gurudev. He wanted to grab all the property and fame,” he says.

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Tiwari, now ‘Sant Umakant Tiwari’, is based in Pingleshwar, on the outskirts of Ujjain. While he identifies himself as Gurudev’s “spiritual heir”, few people in Madhya Pradesh have heard of him, though almost everyone has come across the anti-cow slaughter messages bearing his name that are ubiquitous on walls across the state.

His supporters insist Gurudev named Tiwari, a homoeopath, as his heir in 2007. “He was mistreated and humiliated after Baba Gurudev’s death,” says Hanuman Sharma, who says “the Yadavs” took over the affairs at the Mathura ashram.

Rohitashwa Yadav, who helps manage affairs at the Pingleshwar ashram, also slams Ram Vriksha, saying he had been thrown out in 1993 itself by Gurudev because he was not spiritual and only eyed land and property.

At Pingleshwar, Tiwari’s followers purchased some land and got more from the state government, so while the ashram remains modest, it stands on a 100-acre area.

While around 150-200 people are believed to live at the ashram, it comes alive mostly during spiritual gatherings. The ashram’s biggest event is the three-day ceremony to mark the death anniversary of Gurudev, which draws thousands of supporters. Most of them come dressed in pink.

Rohitashwa Yadav says Gurudev had advised pink clothes, as they “protect from danger”. “Gurudev’s life was once saved because of his pink turban.”

One of the guests last year was Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, who sent much cheer through the gathering by declaring, “Koi mai ka lal pradesh me gau hatya nahi kar sakta (no one dare slaughter a cow in the state)”.

Lathi-wielding volunteers, including women, guard the events at the ashram, while Tiwari himself is a hard man to meet. He emerges only to give discourses every morning and evening, centring on vegetarianism, as well as abstention from liquor and tobacco. Tiwari also attributes climate change to the killing of animals, eating of meat and eggs, and “vices” like alcoholism, and tobacco and cigarette consumption.

At Gurudev’s main Mathura ashram, issues such as replacing Indian money with ‘Azad Hind Bank’ currency or settling the mystery surrounding Bose’s death — that the cult at Jawahar Bagh nearby claimed to be concerned about — are unheard of. Vegetarianism is again the main focus here.

“Guruji said human body is a rented house. Once the lease period is over, the body has to be vacated. He insisted in his preachings to be a vegetarian… The temple needs to be clean and pious, and one who is a vegetarian, his thoughts will be clean and pious. If we contaminate the body with blood and flesh, the thoughts are corrupted,” expounds caretaker Sumit Kumar Soni, standing at the temple. It is a tacky replica of the Taj Mahal and, as per the ‘sevadars’, has marble “of no less quality”.

The morning prayer at the ‘Nam Yog Sadhna Mandir’ invokes complete shunning of meat. “Babaji ka kehna hai, shakhahari rehna. Tan man karta kaun kharaab? Andaa machli maas sharaab. Kya khaane se hogi bhalai? Saag sabzi dhoodh malai (It is said by the baba that one has to be a vegetarian. What is the cause of illness? Egg, meat and liquor. What is beneficial to the body? Vegetables, milk and cream)” is repeated at least 10 times over.

Soni says the temple also takes donations “only from vegetarians”.

Apart from the temple, the ashram has a school up to Class IX with 800 students, a hospital, houses for sevadars, and a large gaushala (cow shed). Sevadars like Manoj look after the over 1,000 cows. “This is the main activity at the ashram,” he says.

No one really knows where between the strands of finding god, promoting vegetarianism and fighting cow slaughter, Subhas Chandra Bose fits in. In all his available photos, Gurudev in a turban, with his flowing white beard, pointed nose and crinkled eyes, is far from a likeliness of the freedom fighter.

Charan Singh, the legal adviser, claims that it was in 2001, during his protest for cheap fuel, that Ram Vriksha spread the rumour of Gurudev being a reincarnation of Netaji. “Everyone knows where Netaji is from and where Guruji is from. He spread false stories to gain some momentum,” says Singh.

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However, as per three persons associated with the ashram who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the Netaji connection, however tenuous, first surfaced long back. On January 23, 1975, on the occasion of Netaji’s birth anniversary, they say, some people organised an event at Phoolpur in Kanpur saying “Tulsibaba of Matia would appear and reveal himself to be Netaji”. Over one lakh people turned up. When it turned out to be a hoax, the crowd became violent and beat up the organisers.

“The organisers were arrested. Guruji had to escape from the spot,” says a member.

Charan Singh calls the incident a conspiracy against Gurudev. “On the invitation of the organisers, the guruji had gone to Kanpur. He was unaware of being called Netaji. He only shared the stage.”

“The mob pelted him with stones, forcing Gurudev to be rushed off,” remembers Vishnu Tripathi, a senior journalist from Kanpur who says he had attended the event.

Posters shared by Ram Vriksha’s group on social media have a photograph claiming to be that of Gurudev at that event.

In Khitora too, Gurudev’s fellow villagers say he was a spiritual man with no connection to Bose or politics. Though he floated a political party called Doordarshi, that unsuccessfully fought elections in the 1980s and ’90s, Charan Singh says its aim was to fight injustice and spread “the message of love”.

“Jai Gurudev made it mandatory that those fighting for MLA seat would not spend more than Rs 5,000 and those seeking to be MPs not more than Rs 10,000. He had other conditions for party members to make politics clean and people-friendly,” Singh claims, again asserting he never suggested a Bose link.

At Khitora, Janvesh Singh gives the matter a thought, and then observes, “Babaji used to tell us not to drink alcohol, not to eat non-veg food. His teachings were more like Gandhi and not like Bose.”

Expanding territory

1960s: Over 150 hectares of farm land on Delhi-Agra highway allegedly forcefully taken over. Farmers file 20 complaints before the DM, whose report later concludes that the “matter was between the farmers, ashram”.

1990s: Sixteen cases filed against Jai Gurudev’s ashram by the UPSIDCL for usurping prime industrial land in Mathura. All pleas in SC dismissed, the HC orders stay in one case.

1990s: Government Museum, Mathura authorities complain about Gurudev’s disciples taking away statues of historical importance.

2011: Mathura City Magistrate releases report saying that of the 33 hectares-plus over which Gurudev’s ashram was spread, more than 13 hectares do not belong to it. 11 hectares belong to the UPSIDCL, it says, while the rest is common land owned by the local village council

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The setting sun has turned the sea a deep orange. The view from his cabin at the office of the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) in Walkeshwar, south Mumbai, however, does little to calm Pahlaj Nihalani, who is furiously flipping through the pages of a few files on his desk. His brow furrowed, he picks up the phone and dials a number. It’s filmmaker David Dhawan on the other end. Dhawan and his producer Sajid Nadiadwala have submitted promos and a song from their movie for certification.

Nihalani tells them the Sikh community seems to have taken offence to what looks like a kirpan attached to the hero’s belt in a few scenes. The makers explain that the song has been shot in Morocco and what has been used isn’t a kirpan but a local weapon. “But darling… why don’t you do away with scenes that show it at all? It can unnecessarily turn into a controversy,” he argues. Dhawan, however, seems to stick to his ‘kirpan’.

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Watch Video: What’s making news

Nihlani’s scissor-happy ways, ever since he took over as CBFC chairperson in January 2015, have inspired dozens of memes and jokes on social media. But this time round, with the latest row over the Abhishek Chaubey-directed Udta Punjab, Nihalani may have cut just too deep. After the CBFC’s Revising Committee he headed asked for 94 cuts in the film, the Bombay High Court cleared it with one cut and a disclaimer.

Also read: Udta Punjab director Abhishek Chaubey – Regimes that curb the voices of artistes fail

Back in his office, Nihalani hangs up in annoyance. “I am trying my best to help them all out. But if they are adamant, what can I do?” he says, before adding, “I have been a producer and I know how things work.”

There is a fair amount of truth to that. If the number of years spent in the industry were a measure of a filmmaker’s competence, Nihalani would fare quite well. The 66-year-old began his career as early as 1954. One of the heirs of a rich Sion-based Sindhi joint family, which owned a number of businesses, including polythene and yarns, the young boy would take little interest in education. “Instead, I would skip school to watch 6 am shows of films at Lalbaug’s Jayant Cinema, which would open early because its key audience were the mill workers. The first film I saw was Madhumati. I watched that at Broadway in Dadar,” he recounts.

While movies were a hobby, Nihalani says it was his “passion for social work” that helped him find his calling. “I have been involved with charity work since the age of 10. I would actively help organise fund raisers for calamity-struck areas or other causes. It was for one such event that I sought the rights to show Chetan Anand’s Funtoosh (1956). This opened doors to film distribution,” he says.

Nihalani remained a small-time distributor for years, personally ferrying prints of Dara Singh’s action films and other popular releases from Naaz building in Mumbai’s Grant Road neighbourhood, once home to Bollywood’s most powerful distributors and financiers. In 1975, Nihalani launched his own distribution company and then branched out to produce films such as Shola aur Shabnam, Dil Tera Deewana, Aankhen and Andaaz. “It was one of my best decisions even though I ended up severing ties with my joint family… They were unwilling to back such a risk.”

Also read: Pahlaj Nihalani extends olive branch, wishes Udta Punjab film makers success

While today most of Nihalani’s films are considered B-grade Bollywood potboilers of the ’90s, Ratan Jain of Venus Worldwide Entertainment points out that he was one of the most successful producers then. “He was no Prakash Mehra but he has worked with some of the biggest names of the time, be it Dharmendra, Anil Kapoor or Karisma Kapoor. And he launched Govinda and Neelam, among others. He was among the most courted producers and Dhawan and Anees Bazmi started their careers directing films under his banner,” says Jain.

To understand his position, says a popular screenwriter, one also needs to understand that producers then were kings, with the kind of clout that studios enjoy today. “The market was driven by black money and funds from the underworld. There was very little white money involved and therefore, very little paperwork. So no director or actor had qualms working with a producer as long as the film was being financed by them. It all worked on verbal agreements,” he explains.

Those were times when the film’s mahurat would be done even before scripting started and a popular star came on board, not for the script but for the money offered or for personal obligations. The mahurat, in such a case, worked as an invitation to finance a film and get distributors. If the film was shelved at any point, no one bothered because it merely meant that the black money supply had run dry. “It is this era that Nihalani belonged to. And if you see him through that prism, it becomes easier to understand him,” says director Anees Bazmee.

Also read: Nihalani rejects role in Udta Punjab film leak

Nihalani speaks of those days fondly. “I never ‘signed on’ an actor or technician; my word was enough. We would pay them once the film had released and made money. A producer’s job wasn’t merely to finance a film but also to make sure he chose the right theatres because screening it at wrong places could lead to a film flopping,” he recounts, citing the example of films such as Geet Gaata Chal that released in Metro Cinema in Mumbai but became a blockbuster by word of mouth, eventually showing for 50 weeks. “The relationship between a distributor and exhibitor used to be crucial. A film was like a daughter and you had to find the right cinema to showcase it as if it were a groom. But today, all that has changed,” he rues.

The filmmaker’s biggest grouse is that “films now are made for money, not emotion, and no one cares for producers, only for studios… It’s because top stars have all become producers and their power is ultimate. They buy media so the publicity is always in their favour and they use their own face to market a film. Content has no value on its own,” says Nihalani.

Hearing Nihalani talk of the value of “content” may evoke sniggers from those who know his cinema. But he lashes out at those who call his films B-grade and worse and points out that his productions have mostly been “family entertainers” and big hits with top stars. “I have used some of the best talent for my films but truth is, I was a one-man army, who used to work on every aspect of the film — from story and scripting to direction and distribution. I have been an honest and hard-working man,” he says.

Nihalani’s experience with the CBFC also dates back to those days. A member of the industry, who does not wish to be named, remembers him as one of those few producers who would not employ an agent but show up personally at the CBFC office to have his films certified, waiting there for hours on end. “In fact, he once fought with the then CBFC chief to allow the use of a scene in Andaz (1994), in which cycling shorts worn by the heroine were visible under her skirt,” he says.

Also read: Now, Sikh body objects to Dishoom song, asks CBFC to delete Kirpan refrence

The song Sarkai lo khatiya from Raja Babu, laced with double entendre lyrics, which gets thrown at Nihalani every time he wields the Censor scissors, has its own story of a run-in with the CBFC — and the BJP. The censors objected to the alleged obscenity in the song but it was cleared when Nihalani approached the Film Certification Appellate Tribunal.

He recounts, “Shakti Samanta, who was head of the CBFC then, watched the film and gave it the green signal. But Gopinath Munde, the late BJP leader, was against it. He held protests for its ban and the issue went to the Mantralaya (the headquarters of the Maharashtra government). Though they didn’t object to my song, I told them that since it is such a bone of contention, I will voluntarily delete the song and I did so. Tell me, which filmmaker today will do that?”

His critics talk of the man’s convenient morals, but Nihalani says nothing about him has changed and that he has always been a “firm believer” that good films can be made without skin show or innuendos. He cites the example of his own Mitti aur Sona, “where the actor playing a prostitute didn’t have to take her clothes off”. “The message is what is important. As filmmakers, we have to be responsible,” he asserts.

Nihalani remains suspicious of the new wave of Indie cinema. He believes most of them are “making films for money and take up zero responsibility” for the losses that the distributors incur when their films fail. “Look at all of them who are accusing me of making B- and C-grade films. They have not delivered a single hit. Dubaa diya distributors ko (They have left distributors counting their losses).”

Nihalani lives in a bungalow in Bandra with his wife Neeta, three sons and their families. “All my sons are are in the film industry. One is a filmmaker while another has an agency that edits film promos. The third is a creative producer and found himself unnecessarily dragged into the Udta Punjab controversy,” he says. His son Chirag and daughter-in-law Radhika both work for Balaji Motion Pictures Ltd, which is one of the film’s producers. “We all live together but we never discuss work. In fact, my sons may still advise me on my films but I don’t know what is going on with their work,” he says, adding that he is likely to have five films released under his banner, Pahlaj Nihalani Films, next year, including one titled Sanskari or ‘cultured’. The word is a jibe that he encounters all too often, but that doesn’t bother him. “I take it as a compliment. ‘Sanskari’ is a good word, a good quality,” he says.

It’s the evening before Udta Punjab hits the screens and social media has already declared CBFC and Nihalani’s damaged ego guilty of leaking the film’s print. When he walked in late afternoon, Nihalani looked perturbed and harassed but now, with all the work he has to deal with, he doesn’t seem to care about the controversy.

“I am an honest man doing my job as I am supposed to. I was a founding member of the Association of Pictures and TV Programme Producers and chaired it for 29 years. I even led the fight against the underworld, helping those who received threats by getting them police security. I was threatened by underworld don Abu Salem and received police cover at one point. Why would I bother about what the world thinks of me?” he quips.

But the truth is, the world around him has undergone a huge change since he took over the CBFC post. As the nature of Bollywood changed in the late ’90s, Nihalani’s clout in the industry dimmed and he was left with fewer friends. Over these years, the generation gap between him and the industry seems only to have widened.

Nihalani’s friends such as Ratan Jain of Venus and filmmaker K C Bokadia believe he is a man caught between the industry and his duty towards the position he now occupies. Many others, however, believe the problem is chiefly rooted in Nihalani’s “obsession with power”.

“There have been other CBFC chiefs too and I have dealt with several of them in my three-decade-long career,” says filmmaker Subhash Saigal, whose film Yaara Silly Silly on prostitution was earlier approved by the CBFC Examining Committee but denied certification by Nihalani for its alleged cuss words. “When I met him to reason things out, he told me I can approach the court if I want but no authority in the world can get my film cleared,” says Saigal, who then approached the tribunal, which cleared the film. However, despite repeated attempts to reach Nihalani, Saigal has been unable to get the final certificate from CBFC.

More than one filmmaker spoke of how Nihalani seemed to revel in the authority his job as Censor chief gave him. Director Kanu Behl, whose Titli released late last year with several cuts and an ‘A’ certificate, says, “At one point, during a meeting to negotiate the cuts, he told us, ‘Ab main dikhaunga tum naye directors ko ki filmein kaise banayi jaati hain (I’ll show all you new directors how to make films)’,” Behl recounts.

Nihalani may not have too many friends within the CBFC either. “He has a coterie that functions as he likes. He handpicks the committee members and personally sits for most of the important promo and film certification screenings. This has never happened before because the job of a chairperson is to guide and shape the philosophy of the CBFC; not get involved with day-to-day functions.”

But to Nihalani, these accusations reek of “jealousy and helplessness”. Staring out of the window at the sea, he thinks for a moment before turning to say, “I have finished off corruption in the CBFC and I am playing by the rulebook. Those who are against me want me out because I am one man doing my job with honesty. Filmmakers can no longer get away with whatever wrong they were doing until now. I have the courage and might to take them on. Like one of my friends tells me, ‘Tu mard aadmi hai’. Yes, that’s me.”

Snip, snap

Set against the backdrop of communal riots, Mr & Mrs Iyer faced trouble in 2002 for a scene where the Muslim character is asked to drop his pants. Then CBFC chief Vijay Anand took a stand and cleared it. Considered the most liberal CBFC chiefs so far, Anand quit with members of the board after the I&B Ministry refused his proposal to allow select theatres to screen X-rated films.

Shekhar Kapoor’s acclaimed biopic of Phoolan Devi, titled Bandit Queen, was denied certification during Asha Parekh’s tenure. She objected to “nudity” in the film.

In 1998, during Shakti Samanta’s tenure as CBFC chief, Fire got an ‘A’ certificate and was released without any cuts. After violent protests, it was sent back to CBFC for revision but re-released without cuts in 1999. However, Mira Nair’s Kama Sutra wasn’t as lucky and faced a ban.

In 2004, both Anurag Kashyap’s Black Friday, based on the 1993 Bombay blasts, and Rakesh Sharma’s Final Solution on the Gujarat riots ran into trouble. The former, earlier cleared without cuts under Anupam Kher’s tenure, had to be kept on hold for three years till the TADA court gave its verdict. The ban on Sharma’s documentary was lifted after a sustained campaign.

Sharmila Tagore found herself accused of being too lenient towards Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara and allowing it with minimum cuts.

David Fincher withdrew The Girl with Dragon Tattoo from India after the CBFC, under Leela Samson, asked for 41 cuts.

In January 2015, CBFC refused to clear MSG: Messenger of God where the Dera Sacha Sauda chief was portrayed as god. Sampson, along with nine board members, quit after MSG was cleared by the tribunal.

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Shalini Nair travels to Rajasthan and Haryana, two states whose governments had made school education a prerequisite for those contesting the panchayat polls, and finds the new rules are pushing women, Dalits, Adivasis and minorities to the margins of the political process.

**Devi vividly remembers that day in 2010 when she got back home from work. She had barely put down her farm tools when the zamindar in her village in Bhilwara, Rajasthan, informed her that she must stand for the panchayat samiti election. The seat of the pradhan had been reserved for a Scheduled Tribe (ST) candidate and she, being more vocal than most Bhil men in her village, was a natural choice. A petrified Devi had protested vehemently. “As an NREGA labourer who earned Rs 100 a day, I didn’t know a thing about politics,” recalls Devi, who went on to leave her distinct mark in her five-year term as the pradhan in charge of 25 gram panchayats in Bhilwara district. In January 2015, when the post of the sarpanch for the Kaliyas gram panchayat in her own village was reserved specifically for an ST woman candidate, Devi saw in it her chance to work for her community. She had already won one battle for them when she forced open a nearby primary school attended by Bhil children after it was shut down by the state government to merge with another school much farther away. Destiny had other plans. Devi, a class two drop-out, found herself ineligible to contest the polls under the Rajasthan government’s new rules that made it mandatory for candidates to have certain minimum educational qualifications.

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**Some 500 km and a state border away, the village of Ranyali in Haryana’s Mewat district had voted in an all-woman panchayat in 2010, with 60-something Sarifan as one of the panch or ward members. Villagers say that electing a woman-only panchayat was a desperate attention-grabbing tactic so that they could get timely and ample funds released for the development of Ranyali’s 11,000-odd largely poor Muslim population. In the process, however, Sarifan admits she learnt valuable lessons on governance. Her accomplishments include the raising of the school boundary wall, paving the kutcha roads and rebuilding the decrepit panchayat bhawan. A mother of eight and grandmother to several more, she was also instrumental in getting officials to do away with the vapid staple of dahlia in the aanganwadi centre to include servings of poha, chana, dal kichdi, saag roti and suji halwa. However, when Haryana held its panchayat election in January 2016, Sarifan, who wasn’t fortunate enough to step inside a school as a child, found herself disqualified from contesting the elections for a second term.

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For Sarifan and Devi, education was never an entitlement. It was primarily the prerogative of the few forward caste men in their villages. The two had, however, managed to gain a foothold in the political power structures, another male preserve until over two decades ago. Today, however, Devi and Sarifan find themselves excluded from the political system because of rules that penalise them for not having a formal education.

In 1993, the 73rd constitutional amendment, which brought in the panchayati raj system, ensured one-third reservation for women and seats proportionate to their population for the Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST). But the decision by BJP governments in Rajasthan and Haryana to make education a prerequisite for those contesting the panchayat polls has effectively denied women, Dalits, Adivasis and minorities their basic right to political participation. The worst casualties are those at the intersectionality such as Devi and Sarifan.

In December 2014, days before the announcement of the panchayat polls, the Vasundhara Raje government issued an ordinance amending the Rajasthan Panchayati Raj Act. It set minimum educational qualifications for those contesting the local elections: Class X for a member of the zila parishad or panchayat samiti and Class VIII for sarpanch of gram panchayats. Less than a year later, the Manohar Khattar government passed a similar amendment to the Haryana Panchayati Raj Act.

Accordingly, general category candidates had to clear their Class X, women and SC candidates their class VIII and SC candidates for the post of panch their class V. In both states, candidates also had to have a functional toilet to be eligible to contest. Haryana imposed further property-based disqualifying factors such as failure to clear arrears due to electricity providers or agricultural cooperative banks.

When challenged in the courts, the constitutionality of the decisions were upheld by the Rajasthan High Court and, more recently in the case of Haryana, by the Supreme Court. A division bench of the apex court observed that “it is only education which gives a human being the power to discriminate between right and wrong, good and bad.”

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Data from the Rajasthan election commission shows that even after the panchayat poll in January 2015 and two by-elections thereafter, seven sarpanch posts in the state are vacant. Five of these are reserved for ST women and one for a woman in the general category. Due to lack of candidates who meet the education criteria, the number of sarpanch candidates who have been elected unopposed has more than doubled in the state as compared to the previous polls: 260 nirvirodh sarpanch now as against 97 in 2010.

In Haryana, where panchayat polls were held earlier this year, seats of 2,067 panch, 12 sarpanch and five panchayat samiti members, are vacant. As compared to the last term, when 39 per cent of the panch members were elected unopposed, this time, it has swelled to 64 per cent.

Behind these vacant seats and unopposed candidates lies the story of multitudes who have been excluded from the election process. Going by 2011 Census figures for literacy rates, over 70 per cent of the overall rural population over the age of 20 years have been barred from contesting the sarpanch elections in Rajasthan and the panchayat elections in Haryana. The degree of exclusion is highest for women belonging to the SC/ST category. More than 93 per cent of ST women over the age of 20 years in Rajasthan and 83 per cent of 20-plus SC women in Haryana have been disqualified.
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Sixteen months after the local elections and two by-polls later, the seat of sarpanch in Devi’s village in Bhilwara remains vacant as the village, with an abysmal female literacy rate of 40 per cent, doesn’t have a single ST woman who has been privileged enough to finish her Class VIII.

Devi’s 16-year-old daughter Lakshmi is the only Class VIII pass ST woman in the entire village that has 200-odd families. It will be another five years before she is old enough to contest the elections. For now, the village is paying the price of being headless. With no one to escalate their issues, for the last one year, the near-empty shell of a primary health centre is without a doctor. When pregnant women from the 40-odd nearby villages come here for their delivery, they are attended to by one of the three male compounders.

The complicated cases are referred to a hospital 50 km away in the district headquarters of Bhilwara. The government tankers stopped coming to the village last year and with the tubewells and dugwells dried up, women have to trek 4 km daily to fetch a few pots of water. “I may not be able to read or write but I am aware of what my village needs. Five years as a pradhan has taught me a lot about how and where to assert myself so as to get things done. Had I been the sarpanch, I would have gone to any length to get a doctor and tankers in order,” rues Devi.

While three gram panchayats reserved for ST women are without a sarpanch in Bhilwara district, Bundi has two such gram panchayats. Bundi’s barren landscape of sandstone quarries employ children as young as nine years old from the Bhil and Banjara communities. A UNICEF report states that children account for 20 per cent of Bundi’s mining workforce. Here, girls are married off even before they enter their teens. Gorulal, a Banjara, explains why children from his village don’t go to school. “What is the point of an education when there are no jobs in the village other than toiling away in the mines? A BA-pass works as an accountant in the mines and earns Rs100 a day. A child who chisels away at the sandstone earns almost the same amount,” he says.

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The male literacy rate here is 48 per cent and for women, it’s 20 per cent. The few who are sent to school don’t have it any better. The senior secondary school in Gopalpura gram panchayat has a 60 per cent vacancy for teachers. “For a year now, we have not had teachers for Hindi, science, history and drawing,” says principal Rajan Kumar.

The state had 84,000 schools when the Raje government took over in December 2013. According to an April 2016 Vidhan Sabha reply, the government has shut down 14,672 functional schools, citing lack of an adequate number of students, and merged it with the nearest school.

Gopalpura is one of the two gram panchayats in Bundi district that is unable to get any Class VIII pass ST woman for the post of sarpanch. Sarayu, who held the post of sarpanch the last time the seat was reserved for an ST woman, has gone back to working as a labourer in the mines since she was ineligible to contest this time.

Ramchandra Gujjar, a villager in Gopalpura, believes that as a voter, it is his right to decide who to vote for. “How does it matter whether our sarpanch is literate or not? What matters is whether he or she can get our work done, generate employment under NREGA, build roads and ensure water supply to our homes and fields. All such work has come to a halt now,” he said.
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A red-beacon car pulls in outside the three-storey BJP office in Nuh, the district headquarters of Mewat in Haryana, and Alam Mundal steps out. Its number-plate reads ‘Zila Pramukh’, a seat that is reserved for a woman candidate this term. However, it is Alam who is always spotted using the vehicle, attending the official meetings and taking most decisions. The locals have by now naturalised this incongruity.

They have never seen their pramukh, Anisha, Alam’s daughter-in-law — not before the elections and rarely after. It is no secret how Anisha became part of the Mundal family. Alam’s hunt for an educated bride for his son began soon after the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Haryana Panchayat Raj (Amendment) Act, 2015.

Alam, who contested and lost the last MLA elections, ensured that the nikah was solemnised just in time for the elections in January 2016. He himself has never been to school but he concurs with the government’s new rule while grudgingly admitting, “If not for the rule, maybe I would not have got my son married so hastily.”

Some 40 km away, the tiny village of Ranyali in Mewat, whose 140-odd families had voted in an all-woman panchayat in the 2010 election, finds half these seats vacant for want of a literate candidate even as all six former panch members, including Sarifan, were eliminated from the race as they were uneducated.

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“I grew up in a hilly belt in Rajasthan where there were no schools,” laments Sarifan. Not that things have changed for the better. The nearest secondary school is a good 8 km walk away and Ranyali has all of four women who have managed to complete their Class X.

Haryana is known for its sub-par social indicators for women. Of its 21 districts, Mewat, an 80 per cent Muslim-populated district, is at the bottom of the ladder. Only 36 per cent of the women in Mewat are literate as against 69 per cent of the men.

The government’s new norms have simply reinforced the gender imbalance further. Across the 316 gram panchayats in Mewat, there are 310 vacant seats. Eighty per cent of these vacant seats are reserved for women while another eight per cent are seats reserved for the backward castes. Like Sarifan, scores of women who have managed to take small strides on the path of political empowerment, have been left out of the fray. On the other hand, educated women like Anisha have been reduced to a front for furthering the political ambitions of the men in the family.

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An hour’s walk along a narrow dirt track from Ranyali is the hamlet of Madapur. Everyone here, as well as in the neighbouring villages, know of Shaukat Ali. He is the man who got his son Junaid remarried this January so that the family could have a literate candidate for the post of sarpanch. Najma, the new bride, was made to stand for elections only to lose. As a strong dust storm sweeps through the village, Shaukat turns belligerent at the mention of the elections. “Junaid’s wife is uneducated but Najma has cleared her class 12,” is all that he offers.

District Development and Panchayat Officer Rakesh Mor talks of the many cases where men got remarried only so that they could field an educated candidate in the panchayat elections. Legally speaking, the marriages as well as the candidatures, are valid. For now, Mor has to contend with a new problem that the rule has given rise to, an increasing number of cases filed against alleged fake education certificates being furnished by the elected representatives —34 and counting in Mewat alone.

It is not only the education rule that is a disqualifier. The new rules have also barred those without a functional toilet at home and those who have been unable to clear electricity or bank loan arrears.

Jamaluddin, 62, a two-time sarpanch of Ranyali, is among the many in his village who have not been able to clear a farm loan. He had taken Rs 45,000 from the cooperative bank over two decades ago but over the years, his three-acre farm had turned arid. “The water table has depleted severely. The wheat output has been reduced to a fraction of what it was earlier. Where do we get the money to repay the bank?” asks his son Nisar Ahmed.

Ranyali’s new sarpanch is the 23-year-old Nafeez Ahmad, who has a diploma in mechanical engineering from Gurgaon. He admits he lacks the experience that comes with age but says that on his priority list is “a secondary school for girls”. Despite being a political novice, he is not oblivious to the absurdity of a rule that makes education a precondition when there are no schools.

Takes on the new rule:

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Indira Jaising: Advocate, Lawyers Collective, who represented the petitioners challenging the rule in the Supreme Court

This judgment is elitist and constitutionally incorrect. The constitution doesn’t prescribe any kind of educational qualifications for MPs and MLAs, then why at the panchayat levels? We cannot make the lack of education, for not fault of the individual, a crime.

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Ruchi Gupta: In charge of the Congress’s SC department in Rajasthan

Earlier too, states such as Haryana and Rajasthan had introduced the two-child norm for panchayat candidates. But at least that didn’t result in such mass disqualification since it was imposed with prospective effect unlike the case of the education criteria. Contesting elections is a key citizenship right and it cannot be made contingent on other factors.

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Bezwada Wilson: National Convenor of the Safai Karmachari Andolan

The rule only mandates a ‘functional toilet’. Most of these toilets in villages are open pits or ones with septic tanks, which perpetuate untouchability as it is serviced by manual scavenging. About 1.5 lakh women clean human excreta in the country only because the state has failed to provide underground sewage in rural areas.

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Surendra Goyal: Minister of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj, Rajasthan

Educated candidates have common sense. We have not only got graduates and post graduates but also engineers and lawyers in our gram panchayats this time. This will ensure timely work gets done in villages, funds are utilised more effectively and accounts are maintained properly.

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OP Dhankar: Development and Panchayats Minister, Haryana

Women’s education is being given greater importance now due to the new rule. Men have started marrying educated girls without even taking dowry so that these women can stand for elections even from the general seats. The increase in the number of unopposed elected members shows this rule has led to creation of better consensus among people.

Barred: Going by 2011 Census figures for literacy rates, over 75 per cent of the overall rural population over the age of 20 years has been barred from contesting the sarpanch elections in Rajasthan and the panchayat elections in Haryana. The degree of exclusion is highest for women belonging to the SC/ST category. More than 93 per cent of ST women over the age of 20 years in Rajasthan and 83 per cent of 20-plus SC women in Haryana have been disqualified.

Photographs: Renuka Puri and Rohit Jain Paras

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