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Journalism of Courage
Masterjee cycles in waving a Sirsa newspaper which says Chief Minister Om Prakash Chautala’s prospects are improving, that his party with the chashma (glasses) symbol might scrape through in 30 seats. Thirty means a lot in these depressing times. With a few Independents here, and a few BJP MLAs there, he might touch the magic majority mark of 46. And then the kursi in Chandigarh is his again.
If you want to experience uninterrupted power supply in rural India, come to village Chautala. Since the time the chief minister deposed Bansi Lal in 1998, prosperity has walked in through every door. The chief minister was born here and has even borrowed his name from the village. The sprawling school buildings share their boundary walls with an industrial training institute imparting quality vocational education.
Chautala may have started reforms but in his own village he has gifted freebies. Welcome to the only village in the country blessed with as many as three drinking water storage facilities, a treatment plant, a booster station while irrigation water flows through the canals. The chief minister runs the village like a caring patriarch, a benevolent dictator.
There is no political compulsion. Chautala himself fights his electoral wars elsewhere in Haryana. His son, Ajay, is an MP from Bhiwani. Chautala, the village, survives like a bastion of the Devi Lal brand of feudalism, a relic of the medieval ages.
There is also a lively evening life. Sultan, the mumphali-seller taps electricity from overhead cables and lights a 60 watt bulb in his kiosk. The barber shop is open till 10 pm. The village elders discuss welfare issues in brightly lit rooms of the panchayat building. Women trudge in groups towards the temple for aarti. It is the ghunghat falling below the chin which still rankles. Plenty has not changed values. Women still have no say.
And the loyal subjects of this fiefdom are not bothered about the opulence of the Chautala family’s ancestral estate only six km away at Terja Khera. Poplars stand like sentinels outside a grey fortress. The ramparts hide the exquisitely designed sandstone palace. Armed sentinels will not let anyone pass beyond the pruned rose bushes.
It is in Terja Khera that Devi Lal was born. This is where the four sons of the deputy PM have been bequeathed their Jat legacy.
In Chautala village, Jetharam brushes aside the uncomfortable question on the CM’s affluence and their relative backwardness. ‘‘He should get more, so that we too can get more.’’ The village wants this relationship of landlord and vassal to continue. They want the CM’s cavalcade to drive through the new Devi Lal Gate. Prayers for Chautala’s victory rise, beyond the evening mist.
