Lucknow’s blue mood

Last week when I left Lucknow, where I had been invited for a book launch, the sense of ‘abandonment’ was even more pronounced. The city was in the grip of rallies and counter-rallies and they had been given such names as would make all the elegance Lucknow has been associated with stand on its head.

‘Thu-thu’ is the sound of spitting. Now, spitting, as you know, ought to be a private emission. Indeed, in a culture where paan-chewing was acceptable, spittoons with floral designs were an essential part of the furniture. But spitting was a private act, neck turned away from the gathering, noiselessly into the spittoon.

But for the Samajwadi Party to have organised a ‘Thu-thu’ rally, a brazen advertisement for mass spitting against whatever it was that arch rival BSP leader Mayawati was doing, was to have paved the way for emissions from sundry orifices as the legitimate vocabulary of street demonstrations.

Just imagine, thousands on the streets of a city once known for its language and culture making in loud unison the ‘thu-thu’ sound or actually spitting in total violation of municipal cleanliness.

The provocation for the ‘Thu-thu’ rally was a BSP rally, only a shade less inelegant, because it was given the name ‘Dhikkar’ rally. The word ‘dhikkar’ is not easy to translate. It is a jumble of an expletive, a curse, a nasty exclamation. Actually, it is just a little short of ‘thu-thu’, except that the ‘thu-thu’ sound can be made with a straight face. For an effective ‘dhikkar’, one would have to register a grimace.

What was the occasion for these rallies? Even though the Saraswati Shishu Mandir is supposed to determine the educational graph of rural Uttar Pradesh, the dominant presence in every mofussil town is the statue of Dr Ambedkar. This is consistent with the exponential growth of the Bahujan Samaj Party, since the mid-eighties, when it started as a movement of the lower castes for government jobs.

Even though some people might quibble that the jacket on Dr Ambedkar’s frame in all the statues, without exception, ise so high that it looks like waistcoat, it is possible to dismiss such observations as superfluous because in these days of egalitarian revolutions, sartorial aesthetics are hardly of consequence.

Whatever flaws there may have been in the quality of the Ambedkar statues in the mofussil areas, Mayawati, the BSP chief minister of UP, is determined to make no mistakes on that score in Lucknow. With a vision only she is capable of, Mayawati has embarked on expanding, building, decorating in Lucknow, an Ambedkar Memorial Park, so grand in scale as to make the world sit up and take note of the march of the ‘Bahujan Samaj’, the lower castes, from Lucknow to Delhi in search of political power.

Piqued at Mayawati’s alleged expansionism, the indomitable leader of the Samajwati Party, Mulayam Singh Yadav, articulated the view that Mayawati was doing little else in UP other than expanding an ‘aiyashi ka adda’, or pleasure garden.

The word ‘pleasure’, in this context, stands for dissipation. Mayawati was livid with rage over this. How dare Mulayam describe a memorial to Ambedkar as a garden for dissipation. With a wave of the wand, a ‘Dhikkar’ rally was ordered.

All approaches to Lucknow are today painted in ink blue, a symmetrical pair of blue elephants, Mayawati, Kanshi Ram and Advani, in that order — all one big splash of blue. It would have been politically incorrect of Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani not to have attended what was billed as the biggest ever rally in Lucknow.

Once Mayawati’s slogan was: ‘Tilak, tarazu aur talwar/Maro inko joote chaar’ (vermillion on the forehead of a Brahmin, the scales in the hand of a Bania and the sword in the hand of a Rajput — all upper castes — were worthy of being beaten with shoes.) Look how caste arithmetic in UP is mellowing everybody. Yesterday’s untouchable is today’s senior partner.

And watch Mulayam’s nimble-footedness. Remember he blocked Sonia Gandhi’s ascension to the Delhi gaddi in 1998. Chivalry has returned today. BSP’s appropriation of land — once earmarked for the glory of Indira Gandhi — causes the SP to express uncontrollable anger against Mayawati.

This truly is the march of democracy, indeed, the miracle of democracy. And if I feel a sense of being ‘abandoned’ by the city of my childhood, it is clearly old habits, tutored aesthetics, standing in the way of an inescapable adjustment with the future.