It was difficult finding Rushi Naaz's house in the cramped gullies of Jafrabad. But we made it somehow. Each time I went to their place, there would be happy chatter, and they'd show me new clothes. Rushi was going to college and it was a proud moment for the family. It was an act of courage on part of Nafeesa Begum, the mother, to defy conventions and send Rushi to college. With eight members in the family and a meagre income, it was an act that required guts. But Nafeesa is clear in her head. She couldn't go to college and was trapped in a marriage she didn't like. But she had no option.
It was emotional at times like when Nafeesa told me her story. But it was also fun looking at their clothes, and capturing their excitement.
An edited verison of the article appeared in the Indian Express on July 12, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, July 9, 2009
The rattle of the sewing machine on which her mother Nafeesa Begum is stitching clothes for her, is broken only by the quiet, hushed tones in which Rushi Naaz, talks about her hopes, and her nervousness of attending college far from the familiar surroundings.
The 17-year-old, who passed out of an Urdu medium school in Jafrabad and scored 76 percent, has enrolled into Zakir Hussain College under Delhi University where she will study political science. And that’s a big leap for the family.
“I am happy I am going to study but I feel lost. Everything is so different there,” Rushi said. “All is new. I don’t know if I will fit in. But I will give it all I have.”
So dreams are shaping, stretching beyond the mass of narrow streets, lackluster homes huddled together in the narrow gullies of the migrant neighborhood, and past the river, into the city.
Rushi was born in the Walled City, and then moved to the slum colonies in North East Delhi, in a 25 square yard house you reached after crisscrossing the numerous narrow streets off the main road, and in some regards is prey to the penetrating undercurrents of conformity and self-doubt. Thin and frail, she leaned against the lamppost, sweat running down her face, looking dejected after she didn’t make the cut for Ramjas College in the first list. Rooma Naaz, her sister, who also looked uncomfortable in her black synthetic churidar, tugged at her sleeves and told her she needn’t lose heart. With that kind of percentage, you’d get in anywhere, she said to her sister.
“This is just the start. You will be fine,” Rooma said.
For months now, the mother and daughters have been preparing for Rushi’s college. A pair of sandals with fake Chanel logo on them is neatly packed along with dozens of kurtas and salwars in a rusty steel box. It’s as if there’s a wedding and a trousseau is being put together.
But on the first day of college on July 16, Rushi will don a pair of jeans. Perhaps that would be an act of some daring in a locality that doesn’t take kindly to such acts but as her mother who defied traditions by stepping out of the house, and working to provide for the family, Rushi too will follow in the footsteps. A few days ago, she was little reluctant. But it is in defiance that her future lies, Rushi said.
“I used to care. But we have to get out and we have to catch up with the rest of the world,” she said.
***
Coming from an Urdu medium school, Rushi grappled with the typical problems – lack of textbooks, teachers and infrastructure. She had to translate notes from Hindi to Urdu to prepare for her Class 12 examinations. Books weren’t available. But teachers were forthcoming and helped, and Rooma, who studied from Hindi medium, also sat down with her sister helping her with words. She didn’t want to become yet another stereotype, and so she worked hard, Rushi said.
“They say that Urdu medium girls can’t make it. We are looked down upon,” she said. “I want to show we are no less. So what if we had problems.”
After years of poor performance, Urdu medium schools in the state have picked up, scoring an overall pass percentage of 88 percent in the CBSE Class XII board examinations despite all the odds – lack of trained teachers, textbooks and infrastructure. A few years ago, the pass percentage in Class X and XII board examinations fluctuated between 30 to 40 percent. But schools have fared better recently though school officials say it is also because there is no science or commerce stream in Class 12 for the girls.
"If they had maths and science, the results would have been bad. We don't have trained teachers in maths and science. Even in Class X, we have to teach those in English," Shabana Nazir, principal of Jama Masjid No. 2 school said.
The Zeenat Mahal Government Sarvodaya Girls Senior Secondary School is better known in the parts as the “tent-wallah” school because the school bursting at its seams with too many students and ramshackle infrastructure held classes in a tent. The roofs still leak and there aren't enough classrooms to fit in the 3,500 odd students in the school.
Jafrabad, where most settlers are poor migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, is a predominantly Muslim area where most girls give up on further studies after high school. According to a school official, who did not wish to be named, only about one percent of the girls attend college.
But Razia Begum, the principal of the school, can see a shift in the mindsets. As a community member, she has tried hard to convince parents that girls’ education should be a priority.
“Most of these girls are first-generation learners. If some parents are sending their girls to college, it is a big achievement. We are a community that has lagged behind. We are poor,” she said. “Here, we mostly have unskilled workers who are not exposed. Situation is changing but it is a slow process and need-based education should be imparted in schools to uplift the community's social and economic conditions."
Another school official said that the government wasn’t doing enough. There are no colleges nearby. Many parents, because of deep-rooted mindsets, are not willing to send their daughters to colleges that are far.
According to the Rajinder Sachar Committee, appointed by the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, that prepared a report on the social, economic and educational status of the Muslim community of India, in the field of literacy, the rate among Muslims is below than the national average. Around 25 per cent of Muslim children in the 6-14 year age group have either never attended school or have dropped out, which also explains why so few women go on to college.
"They need vocational training and more girls' schools here. There should be more colleges here," the school official said.
Rubeena, a young teacher at the school and a Jafrabad resident, said she wasn't surprised. In 2003, when she passed out of the Zeenat Mahal school, she was among a handful of girls who went on to college.
"It happens. It is the mindset here. They fear if the girl is more educated then it will be difficult to find a match for her," she said. "I could study because my parents let me. But that's not the case with everyone."
***
Nafeesa had sold her earrings to put her first-born in school. Her husband no longer had his motor mechanic job. The garage he worked at closed down. Money was tight, but for Nafisa education was a priority. Married off at a young age, Nafisa’s own ambitions had been sidestepped. She recalled writing short stories in school at an Urdu medium school in old Delhi.
“My heart hurt easily. I was emotional and all that came out in my writing,” she said. “I thought I could become a writer. But a woman’s life is attached to a man’s life. If he is weak, then the woman breaks. I won’t let my daughters break. I will give them my life.”
Bent on the sewing machine, as the morning light flooded the small room, Nafeesa stitched her own dreams on the fabric of her daughter’s future. When she saw the slightly wrinkled hands of her husband on her wedding day 20 years ago, she hadn’t dared to look up. Her husband was 15 years elder to her. But she accepted her fate, working through the night, embroidering clothes, and saving money. When Rooma was born, and then a year later, Rushi followed, Nafisa said she didn’t want them to be crippled like her.
As she wipes the tears off her cheeks, Nafeesa draws her face close to the mirror for a minute, scanning the wrinkles, and the puffy eyes. She might have been summing up her life. She had spent it crouched in a corner, needle in hand, embroidering flowers. Or at the markets, bargaining for cheap deals.
“I still cry in the nights. My life is done. I didn’t look like this. I used to be beautiful once,” she said. “I just became another stereotype.”
In the papers, Nafeesa had read about the Sachar Committee report and wondered if things would improve. She had enrolled her daughters into a English medium school – Oracle Public School – in Jafrabad but she couldn’t afford to teach all four daughters in the elite English medium school. So the girls switched to the Zeenat Mahal School in Jafrabad.
But Nafeesa isn’t the kind to blame her community for the mindsets that got her life dead-ended. True that the Muslims were a community that lagged behind socially and economically. But the fault also lied in her own complicity, she said.
***
In the days leading up to college, while she waited for the results, Rushi enrolled in a private institute to learn English. It didn’t cost much. A mere Rs. 300. She stammered, and struggled through the first few days trying to introduce herself in the language. But cramming words didn’t help much. So, she quit after a month. In the evenings, leaning against the machine, she reads through “A Course in General English” by SJB Mathur in preparation for college.
Barring one or two occasions, where she ventured out of the ghetto in Jafrabad, Rushi has never been in the city. On the day she tagged along with her elder sister, dolled up in a garish, embroidered turquoise kurta, to look at the cut-off results for Delhi University, her face dropped after she saw the girls dressed in designer clothing, carrying branded bags, and walking in their stilettos. And she looked at her cheap sandals her mother got from Gandhinagar, and said she felt out of place.
Then she came back and told her mother the clothes she was making for her - the gaudy, embroidered kurtas – weren’t what they wore at the campus. She wanted more jeans. So Nafeesa went to Gandhinagar again and brought jeans and shirts. Her daughter should look splendid when she enters the college gates because she is a product of her mother’s dreams. She should shine, Nafisa said.
“I have kept our tradition,” Nafeesa said. “I don’t want a bad name, I have told them if they get boyfriends, I will stop their studies. But I know they won’t. They have seen me struggle.”
At Zakir Hussain College, where she made it in the first list, Rushi has chosen English as her medium of instruction. No doubt she will hit the roadblocks ever so often, and words will make her dizzy, but Rushi is determined to make it work.
“I want to become a lawyer. I want to do something for my mother,” she said. “I have problems with the language but I am working hard. Next month when we shift to a different house near the main road, I will join an English coaching institute.”
Rooma, the eldest daughter of the family, is pursuing her Bachelor’s through a distant learning program. The first in her family to study beyond Class 12, Rooma paved the way for her sister.
While the two sisters chat in excited tones about the latest fashion, and tell their mother to introduce an extra frill on the kurta, Annie, the youngest daughter sits next to her mother. In a few years, she too will be the center of attention, and it will be her turn to go to college.
And for Nafeesa, it will yet another victory.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Tracking lives - dreams cut short
I have known Daniya Alvi for months now. I remember the first time I went to her place clutching a piece of paper where I had scribbled her address in Kalamahal that her teachers at the Jama Masjid No. 2 school gave me. She came downstairs to see who had come looking for her. She had been preparing for her Class 12 board examinations and I thought she'd get anywhere. She had been struggling to fund her studies then. And then I met her a second time when the results came. And her mother told me she was planning to get Daniya married. And then I kept going to their little quarter, spending time with the family, noting down the frustration in Daniya's life, and convincing them this wasn't the best decision. On the last day of our visit, when we were sitting in her grandmother's room, Asifa Alvi said in a flat tone that Daniya woldn't be studying further, that it wasn't the tradition in their family for girls to go for higher studies because eventually they had to look after their families.
And Daniya's face dropped. My photo editor kept the camera aside. The revelation was too much for me, too. I tried reasoning, keeping aside the principles of journalism that I had crammed at the university that you shouldn't get involved, and that you are an observer and you need to record things as they happened.
An edited version of the article appeared in the Indian Express on July 12, 2009.
I hope Daniya can still make it. I hope she can study.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, July 9, 2009
There she stands, on the dark stairs, perched between the two dreams. Seventeen-year-old Daniya Alvi could choose to run down the broken steps, break free, and be a rebel. If she could have spoken out, brighter paths would have opened.
Alvi passed the Class XII examinations from the Jama masjid Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya No. 2, an Urdu medium school, in the Walled City, scoring 68 percent. She had hoped to go to college, and eventually become a teacher.
But she turned back, her small silhouette pronounced in the evening light that seeped in through the narrow opening, the one that took her home, to the confines of the one-room tenement she shared with her family, where she played the obedient daughter, the one who feigned happiness, and showed off her new clothes that are part of her trousseau with a hesitant smile, her hazel brown eyes restless. Here, she was living her family’s dreams.
But if you looked close enough, these were the eyes that conveyed a certain tenacity, even as they projected a sadness that perhaps captured her subdued dreams. She likes to think she’d still be able to study, that marriage isn’t an impediment, and that it is a necessary evil. She never mentions marriage, as if the plans they made about her and discuss so enthusiastically, doesn’t really involve her, or include her.
“What will be, will be. It’s okay. Maybe things will change and they will let me go to college,” she said.
In the stack of clothes, she pulls out from the almirah, there’s a blue sequinned kurta, a white lehenga, and a bright green silk kameez. Her father is stitching these for the daughter. When the results had come and he thougth Daniya would go to college, he had stitched a white kameez for her to wear to college. The purpose had changed now.
Alvi, who likes rock climbing and was a kabbadi champion at school, and participates in street theatre and mushairas, wrote her first poem on her mother Ruby Anwar, praising her for the hope she gave her daughters.
“She had to get married one day. The offer came and we said yes. I have faith in the boy,” Ruby said.
If Alvi had deviated from the destiny her family chose for her, she would be denounced, and tagged as the daughter who betrayed the family’s will, her grandmother’s wish that she be married off at an early age. Offers were pouring in, and life looked promising enough. Alvi didn’t protest. Not even a word. With her large brown, and translucent eyes, she just looked at her grandmother Asifa Alvi when she said that it wasn’t the family tradition for women to go for higher studies. Daniya had done her bit. It was now time for real responsibilities, Asifa said.
“Girls in our family don’t study beyond Class XII. She has learned her letters. The fate of a woman is to attend to her house. What is the point of collecting degrees when at the end, you have to cook and look after your children,” the 75-year-old grandmother said.
Alvi’s father Anwar Nafees just looked away. If he could, he would have sent her to college. But that afternoon, when the heat was oppressive, almost cruel, and there was stillness in the air, as he sat at the corner of the bed, his daughter by his side, he was helpless. His eldest daughter Arisha too had been married off after she passed her Class XII examinations.
“We obey our mother. My own limitations are such that I can’t do what I want,” he said.
The matriarch who lives downstairs, mostly sprawled on the bed on the side of the hall, draped in her white dupatta, not a strand of hair to be seen, is the one in command, and who decreed that the granddaughter be married to a young man, known to the family, and working as a travel agent. This was a seemingly good prospect for the family that fell on bad times after Alvi’s father lost his job, and then after a heart surgery had to give up on a food stall he ran near the family’s modest quarters in Daryaganj.
Now, the father, a poet at heart who can recite Urdu poetry penned down by the known and revered poets of the older times, as well as those written by his own uncles, while he stitches more new clothes for his daughter – a green satin churidar with sequins, a blue brocade kurta with frills, and a white salwar with pleats. After his ailment limited his options at earning a livelihood, he switched to tailoring and spends most of afternoons bent over a sewing machine, the fan whirring, and the television blaring news. He had wanted Alvi to become a news anchor. She is his chosen one, she is the one who completes the couplets as he recites them, and she is the one with a sweet voice, and an impeccable diction. Alvi is the one who can pronounce the Urdu words effortlessly, as if they came pouring out from her soul. And she is the one who has memorized all her father’s favorite poems.
Alvi hasn’t seen the prospective groom’s photographs. In front of her parents, under her mother’s stare, she doesn’t say much. Alvi, with her dark brown eyes, and long-flowing hair, isn’t curious either. It doesn’t become her to ask for it. That would be against the family traditions. When life throws surprises at you, you take it as you go, full of hope, and prayers.
“Inshallah, they will let me study,” she says.
They have told her the boy’s family would let her continue her studies. And the promise lingers in her imagination.
When they made the plans for her, they didn’t accommodate her own dreams. Alvi had battled the odds to pass the examinations through the results disappointed her. She had wanted more. But then, the circumstances had been such. Two of her family members died while the examinations were on and the family had too many visitors and too many obligations. She stayed up late in the nights, cramming from textbooks, translating notes from Hindi to Urdu, in the little kitchenette while the family slept in the adjoining room. Until the day her examinations began, she was taking tuitions. The Rs. 1,500 she brought home monthly was a relief. Because she was the eldest, and she was supplementing the family’s modest income, she had wanted to continue in the role. Her two siblings are still in school.
Alvi filled up the forms for admissions to the B. El. Ed. course in colleges. Her teachers had told her it was a safe bet and she would have no difficulty finding jobs after the course. A teaching job, with limited work hours, was something her family would let her take up, too.
These were human aspirations. College was the hope. She didn’t fill the admissions forms at Delhi University. At Jamia Millia Islamia, she didn’t get through.
“My name wasn’t there,” she said. “Other colleges I couldn’t check.”
Her mother said she wasn’t able to see the cut off lists while Alvi was out of town with her aunt. It just slipped off her mind.
And it didn’t matter now, she said.
Meanwhile Alvi stands between the dreams of two lives, awaiting the day these will unfold. She wasn’t happy then, while she sat next to her grandmother, listening to her as she charted her future. But she thought she might be someday. Who could tell?
"Destiny can surprise," she said. "It always does."
And Daniya's face dropped. My photo editor kept the camera aside. The revelation was too much for me, too. I tried reasoning, keeping aside the principles of journalism that I had crammed at the university that you shouldn't get involved, and that you are an observer and you need to record things as they happened.
An edited version of the article appeared in the Indian Express on July 12, 2009.
I hope Daniya can still make it. I hope she can study.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, July 9, 2009
There she stands, on the dark stairs, perched between the two dreams. Seventeen-year-old Daniya Alvi could choose to run down the broken steps, break free, and be a rebel. If she could have spoken out, brighter paths would have opened.
Alvi passed the Class XII examinations from the Jama masjid Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya No. 2, an Urdu medium school, in the Walled City, scoring 68 percent. She had hoped to go to college, and eventually become a teacher.
But she turned back, her small silhouette pronounced in the evening light that seeped in through the narrow opening, the one that took her home, to the confines of the one-room tenement she shared with her family, where she played the obedient daughter, the one who feigned happiness, and showed off her new clothes that are part of her trousseau with a hesitant smile, her hazel brown eyes restless. Here, she was living her family’s dreams.
But if you looked close enough, these were the eyes that conveyed a certain tenacity, even as they projected a sadness that perhaps captured her subdued dreams. She likes to think she’d still be able to study, that marriage isn’t an impediment, and that it is a necessary evil. She never mentions marriage, as if the plans they made about her and discuss so enthusiastically, doesn’t really involve her, or include her.
“What will be, will be. It’s okay. Maybe things will change and they will let me go to college,” she said.
In the stack of clothes, she pulls out from the almirah, there’s a blue sequinned kurta, a white lehenga, and a bright green silk kameez. Her father is stitching these for the daughter. When the results had come and he thougth Daniya would go to college, he had stitched a white kameez for her to wear to college. The purpose had changed now.
Alvi, who likes rock climbing and was a kabbadi champion at school, and participates in street theatre and mushairas, wrote her first poem on her mother Ruby Anwar, praising her for the hope she gave her daughters.
“She had to get married one day. The offer came and we said yes. I have faith in the boy,” Ruby said.
If Alvi had deviated from the destiny her family chose for her, she would be denounced, and tagged as the daughter who betrayed the family’s will, her grandmother’s wish that she be married off at an early age. Offers were pouring in, and life looked promising enough. Alvi didn’t protest. Not even a word. With her large brown, and translucent eyes, she just looked at her grandmother Asifa Alvi when she said that it wasn’t the family tradition for women to go for higher studies. Daniya had done her bit. It was now time for real responsibilities, Asifa said.
“Girls in our family don’t study beyond Class XII. She has learned her letters. The fate of a woman is to attend to her house. What is the point of collecting degrees when at the end, you have to cook and look after your children,” the 75-year-old grandmother said.
Alvi’s father Anwar Nafees just looked away. If he could, he would have sent her to college. But that afternoon, when the heat was oppressive, almost cruel, and there was stillness in the air, as he sat at the corner of the bed, his daughter by his side, he was helpless. His eldest daughter Arisha too had been married off after she passed her Class XII examinations.
“We obey our mother. My own limitations are such that I can’t do what I want,” he said.
The matriarch who lives downstairs, mostly sprawled on the bed on the side of the hall, draped in her white dupatta, not a strand of hair to be seen, is the one in command, and who decreed that the granddaughter be married to a young man, known to the family, and working as a travel agent. This was a seemingly good prospect for the family that fell on bad times after Alvi’s father lost his job, and then after a heart surgery had to give up on a food stall he ran near the family’s modest quarters in Daryaganj.
Now, the father, a poet at heart who can recite Urdu poetry penned down by the known and revered poets of the older times, as well as those written by his own uncles, while he stitches more new clothes for his daughter – a green satin churidar with sequins, a blue brocade kurta with frills, and a white salwar with pleats. After his ailment limited his options at earning a livelihood, he switched to tailoring and spends most of afternoons bent over a sewing machine, the fan whirring, and the television blaring news. He had wanted Alvi to become a news anchor. She is his chosen one, she is the one who completes the couplets as he recites them, and she is the one with a sweet voice, and an impeccable diction. Alvi is the one who can pronounce the Urdu words effortlessly, as if they came pouring out from her soul. And she is the one who has memorized all her father’s favorite poems.
Alvi hasn’t seen the prospective groom’s photographs. In front of her parents, under her mother’s stare, she doesn’t say much. Alvi, with her dark brown eyes, and long-flowing hair, isn’t curious either. It doesn’t become her to ask for it. That would be against the family traditions. When life throws surprises at you, you take it as you go, full of hope, and prayers.
“Inshallah, they will let me study,” she says.
They have told her the boy’s family would let her continue her studies. And the promise lingers in her imagination.
When they made the plans for her, they didn’t accommodate her own dreams. Alvi had battled the odds to pass the examinations through the results disappointed her. She had wanted more. But then, the circumstances had been such. Two of her family members died while the examinations were on and the family had too many visitors and too many obligations. She stayed up late in the nights, cramming from textbooks, translating notes from Hindi to Urdu, in the little kitchenette while the family slept in the adjoining room. Until the day her examinations began, she was taking tuitions. The Rs. 1,500 she brought home monthly was a relief. Because she was the eldest, and she was supplementing the family’s modest income, she had wanted to continue in the role. Her two siblings are still in school.
Alvi filled up the forms for admissions to the B. El. Ed. course in colleges. Her teachers had told her it was a safe bet and she would have no difficulty finding jobs after the course. A teaching job, with limited work hours, was something her family would let her take up, too.
These were human aspirations. College was the hope. She didn’t fill the admissions forms at Delhi University. At Jamia Millia Islamia, she didn’t get through.
“My name wasn’t there,” she said. “Other colleges I couldn’t check.”
Her mother said she wasn’t able to see the cut off lists while Alvi was out of town with her aunt. It just slipped off her mind.
And it didn’t matter now, she said.
Meanwhile Alvi stands between the dreams of two lives, awaiting the day these will unfold. She wasn’t happy then, while she sat next to her grandmother, listening to her as she charted her future. But she thought she might be someday. Who could tell?
"Destiny can surprise," she said. "It always does."
Sunday, July 05, 2009
The man behind Mayawati's statues
I stumbled upon this man while researching for my article and called him. He wouldn't talk much but then he opened up after a while.
An edited verison appeared in the Indian Express on July 5, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, July 3, 2009
When he chips away at the marble or casts the molten bronze in a mould to make the many Dalit leaders’ statues that are slowly becoming part of Lucknow’s identity, Shraavan Parajapati has to be precise. He can’t deviate from the drawings handed over to him by the Chief Minister Mayawati. There’s no scope for liberties, and no room for an artist’s own vision.
That is frustrating at times. He isn’t a babu used to the orders. And at these moments, the artist in him takes over.
“It is odd at times. It hurts when I can’t introduce my creativity there,” he said. “But then, what can you do?”
Prajapati comes from a family of sculptors, his own claim to fame being a number of bronze statues he made for the late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, including the one that was pulled down by the American troops in Baghdad’s Firdos Square. He had even met the slain leader in 1997, he said.
So when people say that statues of living leaders is an unknown phenomena, he simply dismisses those.
“In foreign countries, they do that. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher also got her statue made. Saddam Hussein too,” he said. “The leaders like to be venerated. As long as you say yes to all they say, you are fine.”
Another grievance he has is the tight deadlines. If it weren’t for the rushed orders, he could have given the European statues that are now housed in the Lucknow Museum at the zoo a tough competition.
“Only if we had more time, we could have done the intricate work these statues have,” he said.
But Prajapati isn’t complaining. He has delivered 28 statues for the new projects, including nine of Mayawati herself. When Mayawati rode to power in 2007, clinching the majority of seats in the country’s most populous state, she engaged in an unchecked fantasy of constructing gargantuan new projects made of the pink dholpur stone, and marble statues, almost out of a vengeance. Before her arrival on the scene, BR Ambedkar’s statues were generally confined to Dalit bastis where they were made of the cheap clay and were painted in garish colors. The sophistication and splendor of marble was lacking. Most of the orders for these statues went to Prajapati, who said that he carves the statues himself, allocating two months on each of them on an average.
Now, Prajapati is on top of the list of the sculptors in the culture department of the Uttar Pradesh government bagging most of the orders for statues, one of which cost roughly Rs. 4.5 lakhs. The 18-feet high statues cost double the amount, he said.
When Mayawati wanted a 12-feet bronze statue of Ambedkar in 12 days, he was the one to take up the challenge and delivered on time. That’s why he has been the chosen one for the projects, he said.
In fact, he had already begun work on the 165-feet tall bronze statue of Ambedkar, an ambitious project that would have been taller than the Statue of Liberty and was expected to cost more than Rs. 200 crores. But when the Supreme Court orders came, the project was stalled.
“The elephants are the reason. There were too many of them and that caused the uproar. Otherwise the work would have gone on,” he said. “Haathi ne kaam bigad diya.”
In the work commissioned to him the BSP Supremo, he allegedly needs to make her statue look thin and also without double chin.
But a strange paradox is that Saddam Hussein's statue, one of the world's most famous for the fate that it met, is also Prajapati's most famous work. The artist claims he made six statues for Hussein and the one that became famous for its destruction was commissioned to him in 1995. But these are his claims only. Another sculptor who has laid the same claims is a Baghdad-based professor. Khalid Ezzat too has no paperwork to prove his claims, according to reports.
Also, since SP leader Mulayam Singh has indicated he would bulldoze some of the statues, this one too might get famous not for its artistic value but for the fate it meets.
An edited verison appeared in the Indian Express on July 5, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, July 3, 2009
When he chips away at the marble or casts the molten bronze in a mould to make the many Dalit leaders’ statues that are slowly becoming part of Lucknow’s identity, Shraavan Parajapati has to be precise. He can’t deviate from the drawings handed over to him by the Chief Minister Mayawati. There’s no scope for liberties, and no room for an artist’s own vision.
That is frustrating at times. He isn’t a babu used to the orders. And at these moments, the artist in him takes over.
“It is odd at times. It hurts when I can’t introduce my creativity there,” he said. “But then, what can you do?”
Prajapati comes from a family of sculptors, his own claim to fame being a number of bronze statues he made for the late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, including the one that was pulled down by the American troops in Baghdad’s Firdos Square. He had even met the slain leader in 1997, he said.
So when people say that statues of living leaders is an unknown phenomena, he simply dismisses those.
“In foreign countries, they do that. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher also got her statue made. Saddam Hussein too,” he said. “The leaders like to be venerated. As long as you say yes to all they say, you are fine.”
Another grievance he has is the tight deadlines. If it weren’t for the rushed orders, he could have given the European statues that are now housed in the Lucknow Museum at the zoo a tough competition.
“Only if we had more time, we could have done the intricate work these statues have,” he said.
But Prajapati isn’t complaining. He has delivered 28 statues for the new projects, including nine of Mayawati herself. When Mayawati rode to power in 2007, clinching the majority of seats in the country’s most populous state, she engaged in an unchecked fantasy of constructing gargantuan new projects made of the pink dholpur stone, and marble statues, almost out of a vengeance. Before her arrival on the scene, BR Ambedkar’s statues were generally confined to Dalit bastis where they were made of the cheap clay and were painted in garish colors. The sophistication and splendor of marble was lacking. Most of the orders for these statues went to Prajapati, who said that he carves the statues himself, allocating two months on each of them on an average.
Now, Prajapati is on top of the list of the sculptors in the culture department of the Uttar Pradesh government bagging most of the orders for statues, one of which cost roughly Rs. 4.5 lakhs. The 18-feet high statues cost double the amount, he said.
When Mayawati wanted a 12-feet bronze statue of Ambedkar in 12 days, he was the one to take up the challenge and delivered on time. That’s why he has been the chosen one for the projects, he said.
In fact, he had already begun work on the 165-feet tall bronze statue of Ambedkar, an ambitious project that would have been taller than the Statue of Liberty and was expected to cost more than Rs. 200 crores. But when the Supreme Court orders came, the project was stalled.
“The elephants are the reason. There were too many of them and that caused the uproar. Otherwise the work would have gone on,” he said. “Haathi ne kaam bigad diya.”
In the work commissioned to him the BSP Supremo, he allegedly needs to make her statue look thin and also without double chin.
But a strange paradox is that Saddam Hussein's statue, one of the world's most famous for the fate that it met, is also Prajapati's most famous work. The artist claims he made six statues for Hussein and the one that became famous for its destruction was commissioned to him in 1995. But these are his claims only. Another sculptor who has laid the same claims is a Baghdad-based professor. Khalid Ezzat too has no paperwork to prove his claims, according to reports.
Also, since SP leader Mulayam Singh has indicated he would bulldoze some of the statues, this one too might get famous not for its artistic value but for the fate it meets.
Mayawati's Lucknow - A city in transition, and a city in defiance
We went to Lucknow after we were sort of thrown out of the Kanpur-Delhi train on Saturday night. So we took a bus and spent the Sunday cursing our stars for not being able to attend the Gay Pride March in Delhi. Since the flight was in the evening, we spent the day driving around the city, looking at Mayawati's structures. An edited version of the article appeared in the Indian Express on July 5, 2009.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/lucknow-and-then/485100/
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/the-men-and-women-at-work/485098/1
Chipping away at Lucknow/A changing Lucknow
While Mayawati’s memorials and statues alter Lucknow’s landscape, The Sunday Express discovers a Lucknow that has been through such changes before but has held on. Will it do so this time around?
By Chinki Sinha
ON the banks of the Gomti, where now Mayawati’s pink and peach sandstone and marble dreams define the skyline of Lucknow (and cower over everything else. The banks of Gomti is also the site of the multi-crore Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar Samajik Parivartan Sthal), there used to be an open ground. Squeezed in between the river bank and the Dariya Wali Masjid and across from the King George's Medical College (now called Chhatrapati Shahuji Maharaj Medical University), this was where kite fliers of repute would tug at their strings and fight fierce and colourful battles in the skies. Jafar Mir Abdullah would often stop by at the ground on his way home from La Martinere, where he studied at the time, to see the spectacle. Kan kauwe bazi or kite flying was a favourite sport in Lucknow. As a 10-year-old in 1952, he loved looking at the horizon that was painted in different hues in the twilight hour, the war cries resounding for miles. He loved watching the kite runners as they ran through the labyrinthine streets to grab fallen kites, raising dust as they sprinted.
The dust still fills the skies. Not because of the kite runners but because thousands of workers are busy carving memorials and statues that Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati has decreed.
In a city that has pushed some of its past to the confines of the Lucknow Museum--where stone statues of Queen Victoria and members of her court languish--a new reality is emerging: the kind that’s cast in marble. These statues of Mayawati and her mentor Kanshi Ram--different in detail and intricacy from the ones the Europeans built--dot the landscape and occupy the spots that the British once claimed.
But though the statues belong to different eras, they serve a similar purpose--an assertion of power and of politics. In today’s times, as they stand tall at various intersections and inside memorials, the statues, all of them made under tight deadlines, symbolise Mayawati’s infatuation with her self and a statement of her Dalit politics.
While Lucknow still conjures images of the Bara Imambara, the Chhota Imambara and the famous Bhool Bhulaiya maze, Mayawati’s elephants and pink stupas have encroached upon that imagination.
***
The Buddha Park that stands on the ground Abdullah, now a businessman, remembers with much nostalgia was made in the early 1980s. This was before Mayawati started her mammoth construction and, as many old timers say, started altering the soul, the spirit and the character of the city that has always been referred to as a city of monuments and parks. But then, those parks aren’t the kind the BSP supremo is pushing for. The new ones are typically bereft of trees and celebrate Dalit leaders, including herself, by erecting huge statues of theirs. They intimidate as much as inspire awe.
At another Buddha Park near the Kanshi Ram memorial, the one the Dalit icon is building, a statue of Buddha is flanked on either side by a statue of Mayawati holding her famous bag and a statue of a safari-suit clad Kanshi Ram. A guesthouse and a public library are also being built at the site. A guard, who doesn’t want to be named, says labourers are working overtime to finish the project. But like many in the city, he can’t see the point of it all. “If she is building parks, then there has to be some grass for us to walk on. This is all stone and the feet burn when you step on it. This is such a waste,” he says.
Across the road, clouds of dust part to reveal another memorial. Being built on a war footing on a 30-acre piece of land, this one is dedicated to Kanshi Ram, who discovered Mayawati in a nondescript colony in Noida and installed her in the corridors of power. The dome resembles that of the US Capitol Hill and two giant elephants guard the entrance. But as with her all other structures, awe-inspiring and intimidating, this one looks misplaced too.
“Whatever she is making, it doesn’t match Lucknow’s character,” says Abdullah. “What is the point of 100 elephants and seven-foot statues? It has no relevance. Haathi was a vehicle of the nawabs. What does she want to show?”
The cost of the entire exercise in pink sandstone isn’t known. Some peg it at Rs 2,000 crore, others say it is much more, close to Rs. 6,000 crores in Lucknow alone. The scale is huge too--there are at least nine memorials being built in Lucknow, including the Kanshi Ram Memorial, and the Buddha Stahl in Alambagh. Elephants are omnipresent but in the Kanshi Ram Memorial, across the road from the Buddha Sthal, the dome is built on the lines of the Capitol Hill dome in Washington. When she would have finished, Mayawati’s structures in Lucknow would have left behind the ones in United States, including the 46.5 meters Statue of Liberty in New York designed by the French sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi . She had already commissioned a 165-feet tall Ambedkar statue that would have cost more than Rs. 200 crores to Shraavan Parajapati, the artist who has made most of the statues lining the streets of Lucknow. This one was to be installed at the Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar Samajik Parivartan Sthal, which is under construction after the BSP leader razed Ambedkar Sahitya Sansthan and Museum, Satkar Bhawan and the adjacent Ambedkar Stadium, which was previously called the Gomti Nagar Stadium, to accommodate the ambitious project estimated to cost around Rs. 560 crores.
Public Interest Litigations have been filed, the Supreme Court recently issued notices to Mayawati and the state government, and politicians have criticised the way money meant for development had been wasted, but an unabashed Mayawati pushed for her agenda. She set tight deadlines for the sculptors, luring them, even daring them. Shraavan Parajapati, one of the two sculptors the BSP leader has sourced the work to, finished a 17-ft bronze statue of Ambedkar in XXX in 15 days flat. Even the Gomti looks subdued, its course thinning as it passes by Mayawati’s ambitious 130-acre BR Ambedkar Park that is being built to honour the man who she calls the “true leader of the Dalits”.
Architect and author Gautam Bhatia absolves Mayawati of any blame for celebrating, through architecture, her community’s rise in the Indian political system. But, he feels, the construction is designed to glorify her and is an exercise in megalomania. And the uniqueness and the scale of it all indicate how she is trying to create an architecture that is new and has no connection to the past. Through this, she is breaking conventions. “This is what Hitler did and Mussolini did. You make such grand gestures that people would remember,” says Bhatia.
By installing her own statues and placing them with Ambedkar’s and Kanshi Ram’s, she is also deviating from tradition that memorial parks are built to honour the dead. But then, Mayawati is a non-conformist. Unfettered by criticisms, she has gone on, inaugurating statues, pumping even more money into the parks, razing them and redoing them, trying out her grand experiment of might in Lucknow.
In 2007, when she once again became chief minister of Lucknow and this time with an overwhelming majority, Mayawati seized the opportunity to etch her name in history--and change the city once again.
****
Perhaps there was a never a point in the city’s life when it was complete. It was always changing, incorporating bits of history in its houses, its gardens, and its streets. The nawabs built their Imambaras and their masjids. Then the Europeans came and razed at least two-thirds of the city’s fine, old buildings and erected their structures. And then, successive governments chipped away at Lucknow’s legacy. But a fundamental core stayed, a part that hasn’t been breached. Here, in the city’s old colonies like Kaiser Bagh and Aminabad, where the latticework on the balconies is still intact and where a mellifluous, old language is spoken, Mayawati’s elephants haven’t yet marched in. And that’s where the heart of Lucknow still beats.
At least that’s what Abdullah feels. An old timer, he has seen the city change. Much of the change was inevitable—the malls in their glass and steel opulence, the apartment buildings where the migrants lived and the new colonies that the housing department built on land that was once part of villages bordering Lucknow. Much of Mayawati’s grand plan is being played out in these parts where there is the space to accommodate her mammoth structures. The rest of the city remains cramped, squeezed in, and only a faint reflection of its former self.
One architect who is defying the winds of change is S.M. Zafar. Zafar grew up in Lucknow and worked abroad but is now trying to bring back the old glory of Lucknow in his buildings. He has some contracts to build residential units and is trying to style those to resemble some of the fast-fading nawabi architectural style. It’s with nostalgia and disgust that Zafar refers to the newer parts of the city, including Gomti Nagar, that came up 25 years ago on a landfill.
“Where they have placed the elephants, there used to be a dhobi ghat and people used to fly kites. There also used to a swimming institute that was free for all,” he says. “I don’t know what her intention is. At one point, Rumi Darwaza was the entrance to the city. I am trying to keep the old architecture, at least the physical aspect of it in my buildings.”
Disgusted he is, but Zafar can understand why Mayawati is doing what she is doing. “She is sentimental. I agree she was oppressed, her community was oppressed. But by building elephants, their problems will not go away,” he says.
Like many in the old city, Zafar zealously guards the older parts of the city. “Our culture will not go away. The people who are the bearers of this culture live in the old city. Those in the new parts are the migrants, the industrialists, the powerful,” Zafar says.
As more elephants and statues come up in Lucknow, life goes on in the old city. The residents only stop to sigh at the sight, and then return to the familiar parts, away from the grand stupas, away from the colossal elephants and away from the noise. And they hope Lucknow will yet again defy the change.
In case you want
A photographer who has documented Lucknow in his works said what Mayawati was doing was incomparable. But the credit goes to her for the development of the city, for building roads and keeping the city clean.
“I am no advocate of hers. But she has developed the city,” he said.
But Abdullah, who lives in the older parts near Kaiser Bagh, said the development was only in the stupas. As with Mayawati’s memorials that need space and can’t penetrate the narrow streets of old Lucknow, development too has been kept out of it.
“Has anyone ever asked us what are our problems,” he said. “She is the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. Not just of her clan.”
Some of the projects
Manyawar Kanshi Ram Memorial
Rs 110 crore spent on project, another Rs 125 crore needed
This memorial is coming up on 42 acres on Jail Road, Alambagh.
Kanshi Ram Museum
The 140-foot-high structure built on 11 acres will cost over Rs 100 crore
It is a 140-foot-high structure, being built inside the Kanshi Ram Memorial.
Kanshi Ram Bahujan Nayak Park
Bungalow, which housed BSP headquarters, demolished for park
This park is being developed in the memory of the late Kanshi Ram on South Avenue.
Ramabai Ambedkar Rally Maidan
Developed on 51 acres of land acquired from villagers
Kanshi Ram Sanskritik Sthal
Over 100 acres carved out of a memorial for Kargil martyrs
Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar Samajik Parivartan Prateek Sthal
The Lucknow Development Authority has developed this on a two-acre area on the Gomti embankment, adjacent to the Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar Samajik Parivartan Sthal.
Manyawar Kanshi Ram Yaadgar Vishram Sthal
The government is developing a guest house named after Kanshi Ram on Mall Avenue, which was initially allotted to Mayawati as a former chief minister.
Buddha Sthal and Sharda Canal Front Development
This monument is coming up on 6,000 sq metres of land on VIP Road in Alambagh, at a cost of Rs 90 crore.
Samtamulak Chauraha and Ambedkar Chauraha
The Public Works Department is developing two roundabouts and two triangular crossings at Samtamulak Chauraha, earlier known as Uptron crossing.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/lucknow-and-then/485100/
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/the-men-and-women-at-work/485098/1
Chipping away at Lucknow/A changing Lucknow
While Mayawati’s memorials and statues alter Lucknow’s landscape, The Sunday Express discovers a Lucknow that has been through such changes before but has held on. Will it do so this time around?
By Chinki Sinha
ON the banks of the Gomti, where now Mayawati’s pink and peach sandstone and marble dreams define the skyline of Lucknow (and cower over everything else. The banks of Gomti is also the site of the multi-crore Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar Samajik Parivartan Sthal), there used to be an open ground. Squeezed in between the river bank and the Dariya Wali Masjid and across from the King George's Medical College (now called Chhatrapati Shahuji Maharaj Medical University), this was where kite fliers of repute would tug at their strings and fight fierce and colourful battles in the skies. Jafar Mir Abdullah would often stop by at the ground on his way home from La Martinere, where he studied at the time, to see the spectacle. Kan kauwe bazi or kite flying was a favourite sport in Lucknow. As a 10-year-old in 1952, he loved looking at the horizon that was painted in different hues in the twilight hour, the war cries resounding for miles. He loved watching the kite runners as they ran through the labyrinthine streets to grab fallen kites, raising dust as they sprinted.
The dust still fills the skies. Not because of the kite runners but because thousands of workers are busy carving memorials and statues that Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati has decreed.
In a city that has pushed some of its past to the confines of the Lucknow Museum--where stone statues of Queen Victoria and members of her court languish--a new reality is emerging: the kind that’s cast in marble. These statues of Mayawati and her mentor Kanshi Ram--different in detail and intricacy from the ones the Europeans built--dot the landscape and occupy the spots that the British once claimed.
But though the statues belong to different eras, they serve a similar purpose--an assertion of power and of politics. In today’s times, as they stand tall at various intersections and inside memorials, the statues, all of them made under tight deadlines, symbolise Mayawati’s infatuation with her self and a statement of her Dalit politics.
While Lucknow still conjures images of the Bara Imambara, the Chhota Imambara and the famous Bhool Bhulaiya maze, Mayawati’s elephants and pink stupas have encroached upon that imagination.
***
The Buddha Park that stands on the ground Abdullah, now a businessman, remembers with much nostalgia was made in the early 1980s. This was before Mayawati started her mammoth construction and, as many old timers say, started altering the soul, the spirit and the character of the city that has always been referred to as a city of monuments and parks. But then, those parks aren’t the kind the BSP supremo is pushing for. The new ones are typically bereft of trees and celebrate Dalit leaders, including herself, by erecting huge statues of theirs. They intimidate as much as inspire awe.
At another Buddha Park near the Kanshi Ram memorial, the one the Dalit icon is building, a statue of Buddha is flanked on either side by a statue of Mayawati holding her famous bag and a statue of a safari-suit clad Kanshi Ram. A guesthouse and a public library are also being built at the site. A guard, who doesn’t want to be named, says labourers are working overtime to finish the project. But like many in the city, he can’t see the point of it all. “If she is building parks, then there has to be some grass for us to walk on. This is all stone and the feet burn when you step on it. This is such a waste,” he says.
Across the road, clouds of dust part to reveal another memorial. Being built on a war footing on a 30-acre piece of land, this one is dedicated to Kanshi Ram, who discovered Mayawati in a nondescript colony in Noida and installed her in the corridors of power. The dome resembles that of the US Capitol Hill and two giant elephants guard the entrance. But as with her all other structures, awe-inspiring and intimidating, this one looks misplaced too.
“Whatever she is making, it doesn’t match Lucknow’s character,” says Abdullah. “What is the point of 100 elephants and seven-foot statues? It has no relevance. Haathi was a vehicle of the nawabs. What does she want to show?”
The cost of the entire exercise in pink sandstone isn’t known. Some peg it at Rs 2,000 crore, others say it is much more, close to Rs. 6,000 crores in Lucknow alone. The scale is huge too--there are at least nine memorials being built in Lucknow, including the Kanshi Ram Memorial, and the Buddha Stahl in Alambagh. Elephants are omnipresent but in the Kanshi Ram Memorial, across the road from the Buddha Sthal, the dome is built on the lines of the Capitol Hill dome in Washington. When she would have finished, Mayawati’s structures in Lucknow would have left behind the ones in United States, including the 46.5 meters Statue of Liberty in New York designed by the French sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi . She had already commissioned a 165-feet tall Ambedkar statue that would have cost more than Rs. 200 crores to Shraavan Parajapati, the artist who has made most of the statues lining the streets of Lucknow. This one was to be installed at the Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar Samajik Parivartan Sthal, which is under construction after the BSP leader razed Ambedkar Sahitya Sansthan and Museum, Satkar Bhawan and the adjacent Ambedkar Stadium, which was previously called the Gomti Nagar Stadium, to accommodate the ambitious project estimated to cost around Rs. 560 crores.
Public Interest Litigations have been filed, the Supreme Court recently issued notices to Mayawati and the state government, and politicians have criticised the way money meant for development had been wasted, but an unabashed Mayawati pushed for her agenda. She set tight deadlines for the sculptors, luring them, even daring them. Shraavan Parajapati, one of the two sculptors the BSP leader has sourced the work to, finished a 17-ft bronze statue of Ambedkar in XXX in 15 days flat. Even the Gomti looks subdued, its course thinning as it passes by Mayawati’s ambitious 130-acre BR Ambedkar Park that is being built to honour the man who she calls the “true leader of the Dalits”.
Architect and author Gautam Bhatia absolves Mayawati of any blame for celebrating, through architecture, her community’s rise in the Indian political system. But, he feels, the construction is designed to glorify her and is an exercise in megalomania. And the uniqueness and the scale of it all indicate how she is trying to create an architecture that is new and has no connection to the past. Through this, she is breaking conventions. “This is what Hitler did and Mussolini did. You make such grand gestures that people would remember,” says Bhatia.
By installing her own statues and placing them with Ambedkar’s and Kanshi Ram’s, she is also deviating from tradition that memorial parks are built to honour the dead. But then, Mayawati is a non-conformist. Unfettered by criticisms, she has gone on, inaugurating statues, pumping even more money into the parks, razing them and redoing them, trying out her grand experiment of might in Lucknow.
In 2007, when she once again became chief minister of Lucknow and this time with an overwhelming majority, Mayawati seized the opportunity to etch her name in history--and change the city once again.
****
Perhaps there was a never a point in the city’s life when it was complete. It was always changing, incorporating bits of history in its houses, its gardens, and its streets. The nawabs built their Imambaras and their masjids. Then the Europeans came and razed at least two-thirds of the city’s fine, old buildings and erected their structures. And then, successive governments chipped away at Lucknow’s legacy. But a fundamental core stayed, a part that hasn’t been breached. Here, in the city’s old colonies like Kaiser Bagh and Aminabad, where the latticework on the balconies is still intact and where a mellifluous, old language is spoken, Mayawati’s elephants haven’t yet marched in. And that’s where the heart of Lucknow still beats.
At least that’s what Abdullah feels. An old timer, he has seen the city change. Much of the change was inevitable—the malls in their glass and steel opulence, the apartment buildings where the migrants lived and the new colonies that the housing department built on land that was once part of villages bordering Lucknow. Much of Mayawati’s grand plan is being played out in these parts where there is the space to accommodate her mammoth structures. The rest of the city remains cramped, squeezed in, and only a faint reflection of its former self.
One architect who is defying the winds of change is S.M. Zafar. Zafar grew up in Lucknow and worked abroad but is now trying to bring back the old glory of Lucknow in his buildings. He has some contracts to build residential units and is trying to style those to resemble some of the fast-fading nawabi architectural style. It’s with nostalgia and disgust that Zafar refers to the newer parts of the city, including Gomti Nagar, that came up 25 years ago on a landfill.
“Where they have placed the elephants, there used to be a dhobi ghat and people used to fly kites. There also used to a swimming institute that was free for all,” he says. “I don’t know what her intention is. At one point, Rumi Darwaza was the entrance to the city. I am trying to keep the old architecture, at least the physical aspect of it in my buildings.”
Disgusted he is, but Zafar can understand why Mayawati is doing what she is doing. “She is sentimental. I agree she was oppressed, her community was oppressed. But by building elephants, their problems will not go away,” he says.
Like many in the old city, Zafar zealously guards the older parts of the city. “Our culture will not go away. The people who are the bearers of this culture live in the old city. Those in the new parts are the migrants, the industrialists, the powerful,” Zafar says.
As more elephants and statues come up in Lucknow, life goes on in the old city. The residents only stop to sigh at the sight, and then return to the familiar parts, away from the grand stupas, away from the colossal elephants and away from the noise. And they hope Lucknow will yet again defy the change.
In case you want
A photographer who has documented Lucknow in his works said what Mayawati was doing was incomparable. But the credit goes to her for the development of the city, for building roads and keeping the city clean.
“I am no advocate of hers. But she has developed the city,” he said.
But Abdullah, who lives in the older parts near Kaiser Bagh, said the development was only in the stupas. As with Mayawati’s memorials that need space and can’t penetrate the narrow streets of old Lucknow, development too has been kept out of it.
“Has anyone ever asked us what are our problems,” he said. “She is the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. Not just of her clan.”
Some of the projects
Manyawar Kanshi Ram Memorial
Rs 110 crore spent on project, another Rs 125 crore needed
This memorial is coming up on 42 acres on Jail Road, Alambagh.
Kanshi Ram Museum
The 140-foot-high structure built on 11 acres will cost over Rs 100 crore
It is a 140-foot-high structure, being built inside the Kanshi Ram Memorial.
Kanshi Ram Bahujan Nayak Park
Bungalow, which housed BSP headquarters, demolished for park
This park is being developed in the memory of the late Kanshi Ram on South Avenue.
Ramabai Ambedkar Rally Maidan
Developed on 51 acres of land acquired from villagers
Kanshi Ram Sanskritik Sthal
Over 100 acres carved out of a memorial for Kargil martyrs
Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar Samajik Parivartan Prateek Sthal
The Lucknow Development Authority has developed this on a two-acre area on the Gomti embankment, adjacent to the Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar Samajik Parivartan Sthal.
Manyawar Kanshi Ram Yaadgar Vishram Sthal
The government is developing a guest house named after Kanshi Ram on Mall Avenue, which was initially allotted to Mayawati as a former chief minister.
Buddha Sthal and Sharda Canal Front Development
This monument is coming up on 6,000 sq metres of land on VIP Road in Alambagh, at a cost of Rs 90 crore.
Samtamulak Chauraha and Ambedkar Chauraha
The Public Works Department is developing two roundabouts and two triangular crossings at Samtamulak Chauraha, earlier known as Uptron crossing.
Dissecting jeans after colleges in Kanpur banned the dreaded apparel - The arrival of jeans in small-town India
So I was sent to Kanpur to do a story on the nuances of jeans ...
An edited version http://www.indianexpress.com/news/a-fitting-reply/484625/ appeared in the Indian Express on July 5.
Chinki Sinha
Kanpur, July 1, 2009
“Blue, blue jeans I wear them every day
There’s no particular reason to change.” Blur
Nancy Parihar’s rebellion starts from her head. The 20-year-old ‘s curls are streaked a bold blonde, and then are tight-fitting jeans are the perfect badge of nonconformity in a Kanpur, a late-starter when it comes to adopting jeans. Only recently, some colleges banned jeans on campus though when women protested, the ban was lifted.
Her streaked hair, with golden specks scattered through the mass of curly hair, flying, and the world looking less menacing through the tinted sunglasses that she wore, Nancy Parihar rides through the shanty towns where men turn to stare at her, through upscale neighborhoods where she perfectly fits in, by the glittering mall at the intersection of the modern and the old parts of the city where the mannequins reflect her aspirations, and through the mean, narrow streets, into an alley. And the world changes drastically.
Certainly, this isn’t the neighborhood where cigarette jeans or the knee-length denim capris would go unnoticed. But Nancy is unfazed. She is the small town girl getting ready to take on the world like millions of others in thousands of smaller cities and towns and even villages in India where denim has come to them through the television screens, globalization working its way through the layers, tempting them to break free.
Denim’s association with a “sexy rebelliousness” started almost half a century ago when the hippies took to denim and made it a symbol of protest, of anti-establishment. Then, through the years, jeans became mainstream alternating between comfort wear to fashion wear, pushing through the mindsets with a vengeance.
In fact, in the last couple of years, the sale of western clothes in Grade B and C cities like Kanpur has been phenomenal, according to industry experts.
“It is under 20 percent but that’s huge. Western wear is the fastest-growing segement in the garment industry. Most of the demand is coming from smaller cities. Kanpur is one of the fastest-growing cities in terms of western clothing, including jeans,” Rakesh Vaid, Chairman of the Apparel Export Promotion Council, said.
“The world is changing. Who wants the behenji look? We didn’t wear jeans until Class 10th here. But in 2006 when Kareena Kapoor wore those bell bottoms in Mujhse Dosti Karoge, I had to get those,” Nancy said. “We have evolved. We are getting there.”
And the tight-fighting midnight blue jeans Nancy sported was playing its due role in the young rebel’s life.
Nancy is fashion-forward and checks out the latest trends online. Her jeans must convey a carefully crafted image. She is someone with some disposable income, a modern, liberated young woman, and one who knows that other women will be checking out her butt.
But then, as with any change, denim’s entry in small-town India hasn’t been without its hitches. It was frowned upon, it was dismissed as a symbol of warped mentality, and it was denounced as being against the Indian culture. And the women, dreamy-eyed and totally in love with what denim promised were pitched in a battle with those that guarded the culture so fiercely.
Nancy doesn't want to closeted into roles. When she wore jeans and looked at the reflection of herself into the mirror, she saw a woman who was strong, and who dared to dream. Her mother Mandeep Kaur never wore jeans in her life but she did buy jeans for her daughters, dressing them up in the garb that she had been beyond what she could have even dreamed of in a small village in Jalandhar.
“Everyone wears them. Let them go with the flow,” she said.
Once a neighbor had come to Kaur, demanding she ask her daughters to be “decent” and give up on jeans. Those things don’t like nice in this area, they had said.
“But we didn’t bother. Mother told us to wear long kurtas with capris. We did. But that became a trend, too,” Nancy said.
In Shastri Nagar, Nancy was the first to wear the dreaded apparel that sort of jolted the conservative quarters and pushed it in times much ahead of what the residents would have been comfortable with.
Kanpur, city that’s catching up
Navin Market has all the trappings of modernity. A group of teenagers in embroidered jeans gather in front of the mall, scanning the jeans on display in store windows. Levis, and Lee, and all others have made it to Kanpur.
In a city hit by the jeans wave, where billboards with women sporting knee-length denim capris, or tapered, and low-waist jeans dominate the landscape and tailors are busy flipping pages of latest style books, deciphering how to make those cool jeans, denim is more than just a stylish, comfortable piece of clothing. Inherent in it is an attitude, a struggle, an aspiration, and even a tinge of rebellion.
A lone cow walked by Nancy’s gate. An old woman looked up from where she was sitting, her nose wrinkling, a disapproving look on her face, but Nancy didn’t care. Stares, smirks, taunts, and plenty of them came her way, was part of the deal.
In the family’s modest quarters, in a little space, squeezed in between the living room, and the kitchen, is where Nancy’s denim treasure lies. This is the sum total of her aspirations, and her investments. And when she pulls them out, you can’t miss the glint in her eyes.
She pulled out the first pair, a flared bell bottoms with trappings and buckles. She was in Class 6 when she bought those. Those were in vogue then –high waist and sung fit and elephant flares. Then she gently tossed the grayish, slim fit jeans on to the chair. And then, it was the turn of the hippie-style ones with embroidery and torn finish, inducted into the collection three years ago. And they got bolder with years. When Nancy entered college, she bought a pair of black low-waist jeans from Fade Out, a shop known in those days as the most up-to-date when it came to stocking the latest denim wear. It cost her much of her savings. Nancy had been saving pocket cash for months.
Even now, Nancy, who earns Rs. 7,000 per month, invests much of what is left over from contributing to the household expenses, in her denim dreams.
But now she frequents Chandu’s Western Wear for Women near Swaroop Nagar where she can get what she wants for a small sum. She stumbled upon the little tailor shop and wanted everything they made.
But denim dreams aren’t just for Nancy.
Chand Alam keeps away from sermonizing to his customers about modesty. When the women push the fashion magazines in front of him, asking him to stitch the ultra low-waist jeans that barely have an inch-long zip, he tries keeping a straight face. But he can’t always help smirking. No point converting the dreamy-eyed girls who want to look like poster girls, he said.
“If you try to impose length, then customers won’t like it. They want to look like film stars. It is the start of a revolution here. Now girls here can’t do without jeans. Everything is fine when it comes to fashion,” he said. “Ban or no ban, jeans will still sell.”
A year ago, Alam didn’t have such dilemmas. He used to stitch men’s trousers then. But a year ago, when everywhere he looked, he saw women wearing jeans, he decided to switch from tailoring men’s pants to exclusively cutting out denim for women. And his little store became an instant hit.
That was the decisive moment. Alam the future was in jeans. A year ago, he took the plunge and switched over from stitching men’s clothes to exclusively cutting out denim for women.
But even in a year’s time, the jeans have themselves have undergone transformation. Here women set new bars for waist every day, he said.
“Those just get lower,” Alam said.
When Alam betrayed his kind to tailor jeans for the fairer sex, he was the first tailor in Kanpur to take the plunge. And it was worth taking the risk. He and Abdul Rauf, the other tailor in the shop, have a deluge of orders. When Nancy walked into the shop that evening, Rauf was trying to beat the heat off, fanning himself.
“We get at least five orders a day,” Rauf said, as Nancy walked into the store, magazine in hand.. “There’s no time to even relax.”
And in that intersecting point in their lives, it was jeans that became the focal point of aspiration. For one, it was a symbol of liberation from the stereotype of a small town girl, and for the other, a means to get a better life, a better future, a livelihood that paid better.
Jeans is everywhere
When four colleges banned jeans on campus in the city recently, women were out on the streets, protesting the move, demanding the authorities to scrap the “unreasonable” order that only victimized them and justified men’s eve-teasing. College principals, sitting in their office, had drafted the guidelines because it was the need of the hour. When girls wore the tight-fitting jeans, showing off the curves, so tight that it could rip in the middle if you had to bend, principals said, the men taunted them, and eve-teased them. Women had to be modest, and wear clothes that didn’t get them in trouble was the classic argument that the principals offered.
After all Kanpur isn’t Mumbai or Delhi. It is slowly awakening as most of the Tier B and C cities, and will take its time. Mindsets didn’t change overnight, they said.
But they underestimated the power or the penetration of denim. In their heydays, the hippie era that the Vietnam War had galvanized, they too had rebelled. Or at least they sported the era’s clothing – the granny sunglasses, the bell bottoms, and the frayed denim pants.
In the old parts of the city, where the muezzin calls are duly heard five times a day and where mosque ramparts are visible from a distance, and veiled women hurry past the shops, and disappear into the narrow gullies, the dreaded jeans, a symbol of western decadence for most of the old timers, has made an appearance. In Colonelganj, in tucked-away lanes, little manufacturing units, the sweatshops where thin, emaciated men are bent over the machines stitching jeans, stand neck to neck.
In these cramped quarters, signs of change aren’t hard to find. A tailor shop advertises its skills in making the most trendy, western wear for women, including jeans. It is called “Naughty Girl”. Yet another shop is named “A touch of New Feeling.”
Across the street, on a clothesline, a woman’s jeans are drying. In another quarter of the city called Chamanganj, where women drift in and out of henna and bangle shops, their burquas swishing as they move about, a shopkeeper claimed he had seen denim and not salwars underneath some of those long-flowing veils.
In Shukla Ganj, on the other side of the river, Shiraz Ahmed looked up at a woman who was wearing jeans and a short top on a rickshaw and looked away.
“It doesn’t look good at all,” he said. “It is a bubble, a myth. It will burst. It is fashion mania. Why take it seriously? It will go. They will come back to senses.”
Ijaz Ahmed can go on and on about the side effects of jeans. A resident of Bacpn Ganj in Kanpur and driver by profession, Ahmed feels the jeans is the biggest vice to have befallen the city of his ancestors.
“This is destroying our society. When they see women in jeans, men can be tempted to imagine their bodies. But what can you do. Even in Muslim areas, women are wearing jeans. They wear in under the burquas or carry it to their friend’s house in the city and change into them,” he said. “Recently, some women eloped with men. The women were the jeans-wearing type.”
Class Act
Ajanta Chadha, principal of SN Sen Balika PG College where jeans have been banned for the last six years, said it wasn’t as if Kanpur suddenly woke up to jeans. They wore it in their time, too, but then not in college where the focus should be on studies and not on fashion, she said.
Also, denim used to be an elite wear. Only women from the posh areas wore them. But now denim has transcended class barriers in the city with too many shops selling denim. But then, these women travel in rickshaws and not in cars, and live in conservative neighborhoods.
“Even the servant class is wearing jeans now. But Kanpur is an industrial city. The working class mentality is different,” she said. “The spirit nowadays is all about asserting identity. Hum barabar hai. But jeans don’t liberate you. The change has to be slowed down.”
While the ban was lifted in the colleges after Mayawati government issued a statement saying she would take action if the colleges didn’t turn around, principals are now considering an alternative.
“We are thinking about introducing uniform in colleges,” another principal said. “Let’s just root out the problem. I have seen men leching at women wearing jeans outside college. On television they said we have issued a Taliban like diktat. But we are moral guardians. It is for their good.”
The day the ban was lifted, defiance was evident in students’ attitude. Most came to the colleges to see the admissions list wearing jeans, and teachers frowned. But stayed mum.
Dr. Kshama Tripathy, of the Dayanand Girls College that was the first among the four colleges to ban the jeans, sat in the administrative office looking at the women who queued up to submit the forms.
“These days, they wear vulgar tops. The tops are going up and up, and the jeans is getting lower and lower,” she said. “What can we do? We can’t be America. They all want to show they are modern but then the jeans are so low, you can almost see the divider. We thought if we stop them from wearing jeans, then automatically the vulgar tops will go away.”
Outside the hall, on the notice board, the order that asked girls to keep off from wearing jeans on campus hadn’t been taken off. But that didn’t scare the girls. They had read about the lifting of the ban in the papers.
Ria Tiwari, a master’s student at the college, said she was angry that the college had even thought of such a thing.
“Jeans are so comfortable. We are happy the government sided with us,” she said.
At the gate, gatekeeper Shekhar Saini almost stopped a woman in short cropped hair and snug jeans from entering the premises.
“I thought he was a man. We couldn’t recognize. These days, you can’t even make out,” he said.
Sonika, 21, who hails from Fatehpur in Uttar Pradesh, started wearing jeans when she came to Kanpur around four years ago. As with her transition from a village to a city, her new attire symbolized freedom from the past.
“I don’t wear it in when I am in my village. We have to follow rules there. But here I am free,” she said.
In her grey, embroidered jeans, and black top, Sonika, who kept pulling the top, embodied the city’s dilemma. She couldn’t let go of the traditions. She was too grounded in those, shackled almost. But modernity beckoned, too. She was tempted.
The year was 1972, the year when jeans first hit Kanpur. Keshav Jashnani, a businessman, could predict the potential of jeans in his native city and he traveled to Mumbai and stocked Kalpana, a known store, with denim.
“Back in those days, only fashion-conscious women used to come to the store. And they were the ones who wore it everywhere. Slowly, the jeans started catching up in Kanpur,” he said. “Girls came to us from Etawa, Kalpi, even far-flung villages to buy jeans. Jeans is localized now. There’s no stopping it.”
The legendary store, which is shutting in a few days, was among the first few stores to sell jeans in Uttar Pradesh, where jeans became popular in the last decade, blurring class barriers, and infusing women with dreams that they too could dress like the big-city women, be modern, and challenge the norms.
Outside PPN College in Kanpur, a bunch of young men stood, helping out newcomers with forms. Satish Kumar Gupta, 22, and a student, banning jeans in colleges was no solution to social ills like rape and molestation. Women can’t be reined in just because men could be provoked by their dress, he said.
“What if someone asked us to wear dhotis? This is outrageous,” he said. “We don’t agree.”
Nancy couldn't care less. Often her mother tells her to wear salwar kurtas and give up on jeans. She is growing up and the neighbors are talking.
"So what? I will wear jeans. They make me feel confident. It's me when I am in jeans," she said. "Let them talk. Let them ban jeans. I will still wear it."
BOX on jeans
But jeans wasn’t always the coveted wear, at least not for women. When it first arrived more than a century and a half ago, it was as workmen’s clothing, its rough fabric perfect for wear and tear.
Then it was exported around the world. It became a symbol of civilization and then slowly, fashion houses picked up the fabric and burned the runway with super models sashaying down the ramp in denim pants, shirts, and even skirts.
From its humble origins as work pants, jeans have come a long way, penetrating societies that have adopted it as its own.
For women, too, the jeans stood for a sort of liberation. The feminist movement demanded a change from the cumbersome Victorian era dresses like the corsets to clothing women could wear to work, and break from the society had then earmarked for them.
Jeans Market in India
It was in the sixties that jeans came to India. At first, imported jeans were in demand but then after the 1970s the jeans market has expanded substantially. With globalization and satellite media penetrating the nooks and corners of the country, jeans are everywhere.
While until about 17 years ago, the jean market in India was dominated by unbranded jeans, customers have now become brand conscious and from a casual, comfortable clothing, it has now become a revolution where the apparel itself symbolizes the aspirations of small-town India, waking up, and trying to catch up with the cosmopolitan, urban and fashionable cities.
Because jeans are not classifed seperately and are merged with trousers, statistics are not available on the number of jeans sold in India.
But industry insiders say that denim have also spread to rural areas. The proportion of jeans in urban and rural areas is expected to be about equal.
In 2007 -08, the number of trousers in the domestic market were estimated to be around 308 million pieces for men and 324 million pieces for women, according to M K Panthaki, director of the Clothing Manufacturers Association of India.
An edited version http://www.indianexpress.com/news/a-fitting-reply/484625/ appeared in the Indian Express on July 5.
Chinki Sinha
Kanpur, July 1, 2009
“Blue, blue jeans I wear them every day
There’s no particular reason to change.” Blur
Nancy Parihar’s rebellion starts from her head. The 20-year-old ‘s curls are streaked a bold blonde, and then are tight-fitting jeans are the perfect badge of nonconformity in a Kanpur, a late-starter when it comes to adopting jeans. Only recently, some colleges banned jeans on campus though when women protested, the ban was lifted.
Her streaked hair, with golden specks scattered through the mass of curly hair, flying, and the world looking less menacing through the tinted sunglasses that she wore, Nancy Parihar rides through the shanty towns where men turn to stare at her, through upscale neighborhoods where she perfectly fits in, by the glittering mall at the intersection of the modern and the old parts of the city where the mannequins reflect her aspirations, and through the mean, narrow streets, into an alley. And the world changes drastically.
Certainly, this isn’t the neighborhood where cigarette jeans or the knee-length denim capris would go unnoticed. But Nancy is unfazed. She is the small town girl getting ready to take on the world like millions of others in thousands of smaller cities and towns and even villages in India where denim has come to them through the television screens, globalization working its way through the layers, tempting them to break free.
Denim’s association with a “sexy rebelliousness” started almost half a century ago when the hippies took to denim and made it a symbol of protest, of anti-establishment. Then, through the years, jeans became mainstream alternating between comfort wear to fashion wear, pushing through the mindsets with a vengeance.
In fact, in the last couple of years, the sale of western clothes in Grade B and C cities like Kanpur has been phenomenal, according to industry experts.
“It is under 20 percent but that’s huge. Western wear is the fastest-growing segement in the garment industry. Most of the demand is coming from smaller cities. Kanpur is one of the fastest-growing cities in terms of western clothing, including jeans,” Rakesh Vaid, Chairman of the Apparel Export Promotion Council, said.
“The world is changing. Who wants the behenji look? We didn’t wear jeans until Class 10th here. But in 2006 when Kareena Kapoor wore those bell bottoms in Mujhse Dosti Karoge, I had to get those,” Nancy said. “We have evolved. We are getting there.”
And the tight-fighting midnight blue jeans Nancy sported was playing its due role in the young rebel’s life.
Nancy is fashion-forward and checks out the latest trends online. Her jeans must convey a carefully crafted image. She is someone with some disposable income, a modern, liberated young woman, and one who knows that other women will be checking out her butt.
But then, as with any change, denim’s entry in small-town India hasn’t been without its hitches. It was frowned upon, it was dismissed as a symbol of warped mentality, and it was denounced as being against the Indian culture. And the women, dreamy-eyed and totally in love with what denim promised were pitched in a battle with those that guarded the culture so fiercely.
Nancy doesn't want to closeted into roles. When she wore jeans and looked at the reflection of herself into the mirror, she saw a woman who was strong, and who dared to dream. Her mother Mandeep Kaur never wore jeans in her life but she did buy jeans for her daughters, dressing them up in the garb that she had been beyond what she could have even dreamed of in a small village in Jalandhar.
“Everyone wears them. Let them go with the flow,” she said.
Once a neighbor had come to Kaur, demanding she ask her daughters to be “decent” and give up on jeans. Those things don’t like nice in this area, they had said.
“But we didn’t bother. Mother told us to wear long kurtas with capris. We did. But that became a trend, too,” Nancy said.
In Shastri Nagar, Nancy was the first to wear the dreaded apparel that sort of jolted the conservative quarters and pushed it in times much ahead of what the residents would have been comfortable with.
Kanpur, city that’s catching up
Navin Market has all the trappings of modernity. A group of teenagers in embroidered jeans gather in front of the mall, scanning the jeans on display in store windows. Levis, and Lee, and all others have made it to Kanpur.
In a city hit by the jeans wave, where billboards with women sporting knee-length denim capris, or tapered, and low-waist jeans dominate the landscape and tailors are busy flipping pages of latest style books, deciphering how to make those cool jeans, denim is more than just a stylish, comfortable piece of clothing. Inherent in it is an attitude, a struggle, an aspiration, and even a tinge of rebellion.
A lone cow walked by Nancy’s gate. An old woman looked up from where she was sitting, her nose wrinkling, a disapproving look on her face, but Nancy didn’t care. Stares, smirks, taunts, and plenty of them came her way, was part of the deal.
In the family’s modest quarters, in a little space, squeezed in between the living room, and the kitchen, is where Nancy’s denim treasure lies. This is the sum total of her aspirations, and her investments. And when she pulls them out, you can’t miss the glint in her eyes.
She pulled out the first pair, a flared bell bottoms with trappings and buckles. She was in Class 6 when she bought those. Those were in vogue then –high waist and sung fit and elephant flares. Then she gently tossed the grayish, slim fit jeans on to the chair. And then, it was the turn of the hippie-style ones with embroidery and torn finish, inducted into the collection three years ago. And they got bolder with years. When Nancy entered college, she bought a pair of black low-waist jeans from Fade Out, a shop known in those days as the most up-to-date when it came to stocking the latest denim wear. It cost her much of her savings. Nancy had been saving pocket cash for months.
Even now, Nancy, who earns Rs. 7,000 per month, invests much of what is left over from contributing to the household expenses, in her denim dreams.
But now she frequents Chandu’s Western Wear for Women near Swaroop Nagar where she can get what she wants for a small sum. She stumbled upon the little tailor shop and wanted everything they made.
But denim dreams aren’t just for Nancy.
Chand Alam keeps away from sermonizing to his customers about modesty. When the women push the fashion magazines in front of him, asking him to stitch the ultra low-waist jeans that barely have an inch-long zip, he tries keeping a straight face. But he can’t always help smirking. No point converting the dreamy-eyed girls who want to look like poster girls, he said.
“If you try to impose length, then customers won’t like it. They want to look like film stars. It is the start of a revolution here. Now girls here can’t do without jeans. Everything is fine when it comes to fashion,” he said. “Ban or no ban, jeans will still sell.”
A year ago, Alam didn’t have such dilemmas. He used to stitch men’s trousers then. But a year ago, when everywhere he looked, he saw women wearing jeans, he decided to switch from tailoring men’s pants to exclusively cutting out denim for women. And his little store became an instant hit.
That was the decisive moment. Alam the future was in jeans. A year ago, he took the plunge and switched over from stitching men’s clothes to exclusively cutting out denim for women.
But even in a year’s time, the jeans have themselves have undergone transformation. Here women set new bars for waist every day, he said.
“Those just get lower,” Alam said.
When Alam betrayed his kind to tailor jeans for the fairer sex, he was the first tailor in Kanpur to take the plunge. And it was worth taking the risk. He and Abdul Rauf, the other tailor in the shop, have a deluge of orders. When Nancy walked into the shop that evening, Rauf was trying to beat the heat off, fanning himself.
“We get at least five orders a day,” Rauf said, as Nancy walked into the store, magazine in hand.. “There’s no time to even relax.”
And in that intersecting point in their lives, it was jeans that became the focal point of aspiration. For one, it was a symbol of liberation from the stereotype of a small town girl, and for the other, a means to get a better life, a better future, a livelihood that paid better.
Jeans is everywhere
When four colleges banned jeans on campus in the city recently, women were out on the streets, protesting the move, demanding the authorities to scrap the “unreasonable” order that only victimized them and justified men’s eve-teasing. College principals, sitting in their office, had drafted the guidelines because it was the need of the hour. When girls wore the tight-fitting jeans, showing off the curves, so tight that it could rip in the middle if you had to bend, principals said, the men taunted them, and eve-teased them. Women had to be modest, and wear clothes that didn’t get them in trouble was the classic argument that the principals offered.
After all Kanpur isn’t Mumbai or Delhi. It is slowly awakening as most of the Tier B and C cities, and will take its time. Mindsets didn’t change overnight, they said.
But they underestimated the power or the penetration of denim. In their heydays, the hippie era that the Vietnam War had galvanized, they too had rebelled. Or at least they sported the era’s clothing – the granny sunglasses, the bell bottoms, and the frayed denim pants.
In the old parts of the city, where the muezzin calls are duly heard five times a day and where mosque ramparts are visible from a distance, and veiled women hurry past the shops, and disappear into the narrow gullies, the dreaded jeans, a symbol of western decadence for most of the old timers, has made an appearance. In Colonelganj, in tucked-away lanes, little manufacturing units, the sweatshops where thin, emaciated men are bent over the machines stitching jeans, stand neck to neck.
In these cramped quarters, signs of change aren’t hard to find. A tailor shop advertises its skills in making the most trendy, western wear for women, including jeans. It is called “Naughty Girl”. Yet another shop is named “A touch of New Feeling.”
Across the street, on a clothesline, a woman’s jeans are drying. In another quarter of the city called Chamanganj, where women drift in and out of henna and bangle shops, their burquas swishing as they move about, a shopkeeper claimed he had seen denim and not salwars underneath some of those long-flowing veils.
In Shukla Ganj, on the other side of the river, Shiraz Ahmed looked up at a woman who was wearing jeans and a short top on a rickshaw and looked away.
“It doesn’t look good at all,” he said. “It is a bubble, a myth. It will burst. It is fashion mania. Why take it seriously? It will go. They will come back to senses.”
Ijaz Ahmed can go on and on about the side effects of jeans. A resident of Bacpn Ganj in Kanpur and driver by profession, Ahmed feels the jeans is the biggest vice to have befallen the city of his ancestors.
“This is destroying our society. When they see women in jeans, men can be tempted to imagine their bodies. But what can you do. Even in Muslim areas, women are wearing jeans. They wear in under the burquas or carry it to their friend’s house in the city and change into them,” he said. “Recently, some women eloped with men. The women were the jeans-wearing type.”
Class Act
Ajanta Chadha, principal of SN Sen Balika PG College where jeans have been banned for the last six years, said it wasn’t as if Kanpur suddenly woke up to jeans. They wore it in their time, too, but then not in college where the focus should be on studies and not on fashion, she said.
Also, denim used to be an elite wear. Only women from the posh areas wore them. But now denim has transcended class barriers in the city with too many shops selling denim. But then, these women travel in rickshaws and not in cars, and live in conservative neighborhoods.
“Even the servant class is wearing jeans now. But Kanpur is an industrial city. The working class mentality is different,” she said. “The spirit nowadays is all about asserting identity. Hum barabar hai. But jeans don’t liberate you. The change has to be slowed down.”
While the ban was lifted in the colleges after Mayawati government issued a statement saying she would take action if the colleges didn’t turn around, principals are now considering an alternative.
“We are thinking about introducing uniform in colleges,” another principal said. “Let’s just root out the problem. I have seen men leching at women wearing jeans outside college. On television they said we have issued a Taliban like diktat. But we are moral guardians. It is for their good.”
The day the ban was lifted, defiance was evident in students’ attitude. Most came to the colleges to see the admissions list wearing jeans, and teachers frowned. But stayed mum.
Dr. Kshama Tripathy, of the Dayanand Girls College that was the first among the four colleges to ban the jeans, sat in the administrative office looking at the women who queued up to submit the forms.
“These days, they wear vulgar tops. The tops are going up and up, and the jeans is getting lower and lower,” she said. “What can we do? We can’t be America. They all want to show they are modern but then the jeans are so low, you can almost see the divider. We thought if we stop them from wearing jeans, then automatically the vulgar tops will go away.”
Outside the hall, on the notice board, the order that asked girls to keep off from wearing jeans on campus hadn’t been taken off. But that didn’t scare the girls. They had read about the lifting of the ban in the papers.
Ria Tiwari, a master’s student at the college, said she was angry that the college had even thought of such a thing.
“Jeans are so comfortable. We are happy the government sided with us,” she said.
At the gate, gatekeeper Shekhar Saini almost stopped a woman in short cropped hair and snug jeans from entering the premises.
“I thought he was a man. We couldn’t recognize. These days, you can’t even make out,” he said.
Sonika, 21, who hails from Fatehpur in Uttar Pradesh, started wearing jeans when she came to Kanpur around four years ago. As with her transition from a village to a city, her new attire symbolized freedom from the past.
“I don’t wear it in when I am in my village. We have to follow rules there. But here I am free,” she said.
In her grey, embroidered jeans, and black top, Sonika, who kept pulling the top, embodied the city’s dilemma. She couldn’t let go of the traditions. She was too grounded in those, shackled almost. But modernity beckoned, too. She was tempted.
The year was 1972, the year when jeans first hit Kanpur. Keshav Jashnani, a businessman, could predict the potential of jeans in his native city and he traveled to Mumbai and stocked Kalpana, a known store, with denim.
“Back in those days, only fashion-conscious women used to come to the store. And they were the ones who wore it everywhere. Slowly, the jeans started catching up in Kanpur,” he said. “Girls came to us from Etawa, Kalpi, even far-flung villages to buy jeans. Jeans is localized now. There’s no stopping it.”
The legendary store, which is shutting in a few days, was among the first few stores to sell jeans in Uttar Pradesh, where jeans became popular in the last decade, blurring class barriers, and infusing women with dreams that they too could dress like the big-city women, be modern, and challenge the norms.
Outside PPN College in Kanpur, a bunch of young men stood, helping out newcomers with forms. Satish Kumar Gupta, 22, and a student, banning jeans in colleges was no solution to social ills like rape and molestation. Women can’t be reined in just because men could be provoked by their dress, he said.
“What if someone asked us to wear dhotis? This is outrageous,” he said. “We don’t agree.”
Nancy couldn't care less. Often her mother tells her to wear salwar kurtas and give up on jeans. She is growing up and the neighbors are talking.
"So what? I will wear jeans. They make me feel confident. It's me when I am in jeans," she said. "Let them talk. Let them ban jeans. I will still wear it."
BOX on jeans
But jeans wasn’t always the coveted wear, at least not for women. When it first arrived more than a century and a half ago, it was as workmen’s clothing, its rough fabric perfect for wear and tear.
Then it was exported around the world. It became a symbol of civilization and then slowly, fashion houses picked up the fabric and burned the runway with super models sashaying down the ramp in denim pants, shirts, and even skirts.
From its humble origins as work pants, jeans have come a long way, penetrating societies that have adopted it as its own.
For women, too, the jeans stood for a sort of liberation. The feminist movement demanded a change from the cumbersome Victorian era dresses like the corsets to clothing women could wear to work, and break from the society had then earmarked for them.
Jeans Market in India
It was in the sixties that jeans came to India. At first, imported jeans were in demand but then after the 1970s the jeans market has expanded substantially. With globalization and satellite media penetrating the nooks and corners of the country, jeans are everywhere.
While until about 17 years ago, the jean market in India was dominated by unbranded jeans, customers have now become brand conscious and from a casual, comfortable clothing, it has now become a revolution where the apparel itself symbolizes the aspirations of small-town India, waking up, and trying to catch up with the cosmopolitan, urban and fashionable cities.
Because jeans are not classifed seperately and are merged with trousers, statistics are not available on the number of jeans sold in India.
But industry insiders say that denim have also spread to rural areas. The proportion of jeans in urban and rural areas is expected to be about equal.
In 2007 -08, the number of trousers in the domestic market were estimated to be around 308 million pieces for men and 324 million pieces for women, according to M K Panthaki, director of the Clothing Manufacturers Association of India.
Friday, July 03, 2009
Delhi High Court legalizes homosexuality - Gay couple decides to meet the parents
I missed the Gay Pride Parade in the city because I was stuck in Lucknow. But then when the High Court upheld gay rights, I went along with our photo editor to Jantar Mantar looking for a story to tell, a personal tale. It was fun seeing the supporters and the LGBT community members congratulate each other, tears streaming down their cheeks. It was emotional. It was a moment of defiance.
An edited version appeared in the Indian Express on July 3, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, July 2, 2009
There was never much of a plan. There couldn’t be. They lived in the shadow of Section 377, always careful, watchful, and only danced with abandon at a couple of “gay-friendly” nightclubs that would let two men enter as a couple on some nights. On other days, and in public places, they'd be reserved, and mum about their relationship.
But after the Delhi High Court legalized homosexuality, Rahul Singh, a gay rights activist, is planning and plotting a surprise visit to his parents in Lucknow. And he is taking his partner of three years along.
Not that the landmark judgment would change mindsets overnight. Miracles don’t happen that easily but at least some sanction came with the ruling. Anything more than that at the moment would be asking for too much, he said.
“This means a lot to me,” he said. “This is the first step. The sanction has come from the law. Now we can be together. But it is a long battle, and we have just won the first in the series.”
At Jantar Mantar, the designated protest spot in the capital, four days ago, supporters and members of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community had rallied at the Gay Pride march, denouncing the draconian Section 377.
On Thursday, they came to the protest street again. But this time, they came to celebrate their rainbow identity. “Make a Wish” etched on Gunjan Sharma’s hand bag symbolized the optimism, and the gratitude. For months, the case had been pending in the court. But the activists never let their hopes down. On July 2, when the Delhi High Court decriminalized homosexuality, that long-standing wish had been granted.
Sharma is a queer rights activist at TARSHI (Talking about Reproductive and Sexual Health Issues).
“Of course we are happy,” she said, embracing a fellow activist.
On the wall in the background, a slogan “Love is not about gender” shouted out loud.
Standing on the sidelines, Arpit Goel stood, smoking, and smiling profusely.
“This is a big day for us,” he said.
Nienke Boer, a South African volunteer, was taking in all the excitement. She had witnessed history and she was brimming with excitement.
"It is historical. South Africa has legalized gay marriage but then we are a conservative society, too. This is just a begining," she said.
Singh came too, television crews zeroing upon him. While the court’s order will not change the daily life of the many queer Indians, it will certainly give them the dignity they had long been asking for. Of course, the battle is long. Civil unions and gay marriages are on the radar, too, he said.
But the first challenge is the government reaction, he said.
When he had introduced his boyfriend to his parents, Singh told them he is a “good friend.”
For the 32-year-old the “illegal” tag attached to his relationship with his partner stripped it of its dignity, and he never felt comfortable talking about his relationship with his family. But Thursday was a proud moment for him. It was like coming out of the closet the second time and the feeling was liberating.
“My dignity as a gay man has been reaffirmed,” Singh said. “I will be in a position to talk to my family. We have a stable relationship and I want them to know that.”
Years ago, when he came out to his parents, it had been under pressure. They didn’t know about his sexual orientation and like so many other parents wanted him to get married. So Singh had to tell them he liked men instead. Parents reacted, and there were tears, and emotional dialogues. But then the doors had swung open.
It hadn’t been easy for Singh, who earlier worked with the Naz Foundation and in January started the Pahal Foundation. He is also a counselor at the Pahal Beauty Parlour in Faridabad, which is also India’s first gay beauty clinic.
He felt isolated when other boys discussed women at school. He jut wasn’t interested. At the time, the thought that he could be gay crossed his mind but he dismissed it. Maybe with time, he would eventually marry a woman and have children and live a normal life like most men did, he said.
“I kept all of it to myself. I thought with time, it will go away,” Singh said.
But flipping through a magazine once, he stumbled upon an article on homosexuality and that was when he realized he could be gay. He visited psychiatrists, hoping they would not confirm it.
“It was a struggle. I realized it was orientation and if I didn’t accept it, I’d be betraying myself,” he said. “But for a long time, I wasn’t able to talk about it.”
Singh met Yash, who works in the private sector, at one of the discotheques in the city. They danced, talked and exchanged numbers. Singh wasn’t expecting too much out of it. But then, Yash, 30, called. And then over coffee and dates, the couple committed. They live together now.
Singh will take Yash to meet his parents at the end of this month. He has booked the tickets, he said.
Yash is nervous about meeting Singh's parents. Legal sanction doesn't always translate into social or cultural sanction. But yes, he will take the plunge.
"I am a little jittery but I am looking forward to the meeting," he said. "Today, we overcame one hurdle. That's a good thing."
But in all this celebration, Upendar Mahto, a papad seller, looked misplaced. He came to the protest street after he saw the crowd, hoping to do good business.
“I think this is a rally. But these are high-class people. They won’t buy my stuff,” he said. “I don’t know what has happened. I just see too many colors.”
Across the street, some policemen stood watching the activists and the LGBT members break into a dance.
They were amused.
“At least one good thing comes out of it. The population will not go up,” one home guard joked.
An edited version appeared in the Indian Express on July 3, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, July 2, 2009
There was never much of a plan. There couldn’t be. They lived in the shadow of Section 377, always careful, watchful, and only danced with abandon at a couple of “gay-friendly” nightclubs that would let two men enter as a couple on some nights. On other days, and in public places, they'd be reserved, and mum about their relationship.
But after the Delhi High Court legalized homosexuality, Rahul Singh, a gay rights activist, is planning and plotting a surprise visit to his parents in Lucknow. And he is taking his partner of three years along.
Not that the landmark judgment would change mindsets overnight. Miracles don’t happen that easily but at least some sanction came with the ruling. Anything more than that at the moment would be asking for too much, he said.
“This means a lot to me,” he said. “This is the first step. The sanction has come from the law. Now we can be together. But it is a long battle, and we have just won the first in the series.”
At Jantar Mantar, the designated protest spot in the capital, four days ago, supporters and members of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community had rallied at the Gay Pride march, denouncing the draconian Section 377.
On Thursday, they came to the protest street again. But this time, they came to celebrate their rainbow identity. “Make a Wish” etched on Gunjan Sharma’s hand bag symbolized the optimism, and the gratitude. For months, the case had been pending in the court. But the activists never let their hopes down. On July 2, when the Delhi High Court decriminalized homosexuality, that long-standing wish had been granted.
Sharma is a queer rights activist at TARSHI (Talking about Reproductive and Sexual Health Issues).
“Of course we are happy,” she said, embracing a fellow activist.
On the wall in the background, a slogan “Love is not about gender” shouted out loud.
Standing on the sidelines, Arpit Goel stood, smoking, and smiling profusely.
“This is a big day for us,” he said.
Nienke Boer, a South African volunteer, was taking in all the excitement. She had witnessed history and she was brimming with excitement.
"It is historical. South Africa has legalized gay marriage but then we are a conservative society, too. This is just a begining," she said.
Singh came too, television crews zeroing upon him. While the court’s order will not change the daily life of the many queer Indians, it will certainly give them the dignity they had long been asking for. Of course, the battle is long. Civil unions and gay marriages are on the radar, too, he said.
But the first challenge is the government reaction, he said.
When he had introduced his boyfriend to his parents, Singh told them he is a “good friend.”
For the 32-year-old the “illegal” tag attached to his relationship with his partner stripped it of its dignity, and he never felt comfortable talking about his relationship with his family. But Thursday was a proud moment for him. It was like coming out of the closet the second time and the feeling was liberating.
“My dignity as a gay man has been reaffirmed,” Singh said. “I will be in a position to talk to my family. We have a stable relationship and I want them to know that.”
Years ago, when he came out to his parents, it had been under pressure. They didn’t know about his sexual orientation and like so many other parents wanted him to get married. So Singh had to tell them he liked men instead. Parents reacted, and there were tears, and emotional dialogues. But then the doors had swung open.
It hadn’t been easy for Singh, who earlier worked with the Naz Foundation and in January started the Pahal Foundation. He is also a counselor at the Pahal Beauty Parlour in Faridabad, which is also India’s first gay beauty clinic.
He felt isolated when other boys discussed women at school. He jut wasn’t interested. At the time, the thought that he could be gay crossed his mind but he dismissed it. Maybe with time, he would eventually marry a woman and have children and live a normal life like most men did, he said.
“I kept all of it to myself. I thought with time, it will go away,” Singh said.
But flipping through a magazine once, he stumbled upon an article on homosexuality and that was when he realized he could be gay. He visited psychiatrists, hoping they would not confirm it.
“It was a struggle. I realized it was orientation and if I didn’t accept it, I’d be betraying myself,” he said. “But for a long time, I wasn’t able to talk about it.”
Singh met Yash, who works in the private sector, at one of the discotheques in the city. They danced, talked and exchanged numbers. Singh wasn’t expecting too much out of it. But then, Yash, 30, called. And then over coffee and dates, the couple committed. They live together now.
Singh will take Yash to meet his parents at the end of this month. He has booked the tickets, he said.
Yash is nervous about meeting Singh's parents. Legal sanction doesn't always translate into social or cultural sanction. But yes, he will take the plunge.
"I am a little jittery but I am looking forward to the meeting," he said. "Today, we overcame one hurdle. That's a good thing."
But in all this celebration, Upendar Mahto, a papad seller, looked misplaced. He came to the protest street after he saw the crowd, hoping to do good business.
“I think this is a rally. But these are high-class people. They won’t buy my stuff,” he said. “I don’t know what has happened. I just see too many colors.”
Across the street, some policemen stood watching the activists and the LGBT members break into a dance.
They were amused.
“At least one good thing comes out of it. The population will not go up,” one home guard joked.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Taking up the thread to blur caste barriers - Dalits wear Janau to elevate their status
On a Sunday morning, my photo editor Neeraj Priyadarshi and I got lost while trying to find Ghanta Ghar and the little colony where Dalits were to be invested with the sacred thread in a religious ceremony that would as they said challenge the caste oppression. The pink tents weren't hard to spot after we had turned into a narrow street in North Delhi and then as we entered the community hall, we were surprised to see the enthusiasm as young boys and men tied their dhotis and prepared to rise above the caste barriers. The thread to them was means to gain respect and equality, and they would flaunt it, they said.
An edited version of the article appeared in the Indian Express on June 19, 2009. This is the original version that I filed.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, June 14, 2009
Akshay Valmiki, a Dalit boy, held the white, coarse janau or the sacred thread, an upper-caste symbol, in his hands, running his fingers through the three strands, sorting them. At first he wore it around his neck like a garland. But the priest shook his head in disapproval. Confused and shy, Akshay tried the second time and the priest smiled from the other side of the ritual fire that separated the two. This time, he had got it right.
Twelve-year-old Akshay, who belongs to the Valmiki community that engages in scavenging and cleaning and is one of the oppressed communities, jumped in excitement, the knots of his dhoti coming off as he showed off the white janau that hung loosely over his shoulders. It was the first time he wore the thread in his family.
The youngest among the 251 Valmiki caste members who participated in an Upnayan or the scared thread-binding ceremony organized by the Delhi-based Swaraj group on Sunday at Aryapura, Akshay didn’t quite get the symbolism of the event or of the thread. All he knew was that the thread was something he could flaunt at school, something that would elevate his status. It was sort of a rite of passage, he said.
In the background, a statue of Saint Valmiki, the patron of the community which sees him as the incarnation of Brahma, set up on a pedestal with Lord Ram occupying the lower rung, set the tone for the ceremony. The Valmikis rever Ram’s teacher who is said to have written the epic Ramayana.
“I don’t know what it is,” he said. “But I know it has something to do with Valmiki and Brahmins.”
The event on Sunday is the first in a series of 100 such ceremonies planned across Delhi NCR region. There are also plans to hold such ceremonies where Dalit community members can adopt upper caste norms throughout the country. The project would cost about Rs. 1 crore, members said.
“These people have not been allowed to venture into the Indian culture,” Dr. Sambit Patra, the founder and president of the organization, said. “They are equals. This may not being any change in the near future but definitely it will help Dalits to come into the mainstream. This is nothing short of a social revolution.”
As the conch shell blew on Sunday, and chanting took on a feverish pitch, a Brahmin priest stood on the side of the ritual fire, holding a bunch sacred threads in his hands. On the other side of the flames, men and children belonging to the Dalit community sat with expectant eyes and outstretched hands, waiting to cross over. They didn’t want to miss the bus.
For them, the thread that they would sling across their shoulders and thus imitate an upper-caste symbol was a way of challenging the caste hierarchy. The thread would blur the caste barriers.
While the first ceremony was targeted at the Valmikis, a sub-caste in northern India, whose members are mostly scavengers and cleaners, other Dalit communities would soon be brought into the folds, Patra said.
Such ceremonies aren’t unusual. Popularized as Sanskritization by the sociologist MS Srinivas, it implies a process by which lower castes claim a higher position in the caste hierarchy by emulating the practices and rituals like vegetarianism of the dominant castes.
But Patra said Sunday’s ceremony wasn’t aimed at legitimizing Brahmin supremacy but a reassertion of the right accorded to all by the Vedas.
Vishnu Prapanna, a Brahmin priest who presided over the ceremony, said while the religious texts invested the right of wearing the thread to all, all four sects of the Varna system look up to the Brahmins as the bearer of knowledge and as such aspire to be Brahmins.
“This is how we try to elevate them. Whoever learns the culture and the texts can become a Brahmin,” he said.
Next to him, Ranjan Chaudhary, a Valmiki, intervened.
“We have lagged behind. We follow Saint Valmiki, who was Ram’s teacher. It is a paradox then that we are at the lowest rung of the society,” he said. “This ceremony is a similar to passing. We don’t want to hold the broom, but hold a pen. To be a Brahmin means development of mind.”
But wearing the janau isn’t the ticket to an elevated status in the society for many Valmikis who refused to participate in the ceremony.
Every morning, Amit Birla, a sweeper, goes about cleaning the streets, broom in hand, and seldom looking up to match the gaze of those that are from the upper castes. When he is thirsty, he reaches out for a glass, usually kept near the entrance of a house, and the owner pours it from a height. That’s when he is reminded of his place and that’s where he belongs, he said,
“I can’t and won’t wear it because I am a sweeper. They will kill us if they see us wearing what is theirs. They don’t even let us enter their homes,” he said. “I don’t know what Patra ji was thinking. I am sure it is a good thing but who will save us when the Brahmins and the upper castes get angry.”
Days before the thread-binding ceremony, Sarvesh Mawana, another Valmiki, was told by some priests they would take offence if he were to take on the thread.
“I am not convinced if I should wear it. I need my job. I need to feed my family. I don’t want to be scorned for wearing it and lose my job,” Mawana said.
Most cleaning jobs in the country are still done by members of the Valmiki caste and while other Dalit group members have sort of moved on, most Valmikis have stuck to the work assigned to them centuries ago.
Though many would agree that caste is a given and such symbolic acts are a leveller, Dalit leader and President of Indian Justice Party Udit Raj said that such ceremonies only symbolized the stratification of the society further and can in no way bring about Dalit emanicipation.
"Why should they wear janau? Even if they do wear the sacred thread, they will still be outcaste nd history is witness to that. Even after departing from Hindu religion, the caste stigma has not left them. Caste has followed them everywhere," he said. "This is no social revolution. If they have to do something, they should give up the broomstick. Valmiki was a writer. The community should hold pens."
In most Valmiki households, the jobs of cleaners are passed down the generations.
But because caste is a given fact and there is no option but to imitate the culture of the Brahmins in order to elevate one’s status, the emphasis here is not to cross the caste boundaries but get respect, Patra said.
While such ceremonies have happened in the past too, this is the first time, an organized approach is being taken towards investing the Valmikis with the janau. In 2007, a similar ceremony was organized in Delhi where more than 500 Valmikis had taken on the janau, Patra said.
Around five percent of Delhi's population is Valmikis, members said.
For Sunny Mangeram, a Valmiki caste member who works at Delhi University, revolution by wearing the prohibited dress and symbols of the Brahmins didn’t mean they were abandoning their caste. They were proud to be Valmikis and he saw the thread as an equalizer, he said.
In 1995, when he was traveling to Bulandshahar in Uttar Pradesh for a wedding, they had stooped at a dhaba for refreshments and chai was handed to them in porcelain cups.
“They thought, looking at our clothes that we probably were elite or something,” he said, as he changed into a dhoti for the ceremony. “When we were asked our caste, and we said Valmiki, they took away the cups and gave chai in clay bowls. That was crushing and demeaning. Now, I will walk into the campus, my shirt unbuttoned, flaunting the thread.”
But not all who wore the thread on Sunday and fed the ritual fire with offerings understood the nuances.
Sunil Parcha, 30, would give up on non-vegetarian food. The thread meant purging of self. The Brahmins too abstain from meat, he said.
“We want to be like Brahmins,” he said. “I will not do any wrong. This thread will give me respect and acceptance. People look down on me; they are disgusted because I am a Dalit.”
In many ways, the ceremony reflected the aspirations of an oppressed group. While they said they revered their Saint, they also wanted to discard the Dalit tag, and clamber out of their squalor.
As Ashish Dhaiya, 18, wore the thread, he smiled, clutching the three strands.
“I am wearing it for the first time. I feel good. I feel like a Brahmin,” he said. “I will never remove it now.”
An edited version of the article appeared in the Indian Express on June 19, 2009. This is the original version that I filed.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, June 14, 2009
Akshay Valmiki, a Dalit boy, held the white, coarse janau or the sacred thread, an upper-caste symbol, in his hands, running his fingers through the three strands, sorting them. At first he wore it around his neck like a garland. But the priest shook his head in disapproval. Confused and shy, Akshay tried the second time and the priest smiled from the other side of the ritual fire that separated the two. This time, he had got it right.
Twelve-year-old Akshay, who belongs to the Valmiki community that engages in scavenging and cleaning and is one of the oppressed communities, jumped in excitement, the knots of his dhoti coming off as he showed off the white janau that hung loosely over his shoulders. It was the first time he wore the thread in his family.
The youngest among the 251 Valmiki caste members who participated in an Upnayan or the scared thread-binding ceremony organized by the Delhi-based Swaraj group on Sunday at Aryapura, Akshay didn’t quite get the symbolism of the event or of the thread. All he knew was that the thread was something he could flaunt at school, something that would elevate his status. It was sort of a rite of passage, he said.
In the background, a statue of Saint Valmiki, the patron of the community which sees him as the incarnation of Brahma, set up on a pedestal with Lord Ram occupying the lower rung, set the tone for the ceremony. The Valmikis rever Ram’s teacher who is said to have written the epic Ramayana.
“I don’t know what it is,” he said. “But I know it has something to do with Valmiki and Brahmins.”
The event on Sunday is the first in a series of 100 such ceremonies planned across Delhi NCR region. There are also plans to hold such ceremonies where Dalit community members can adopt upper caste norms throughout the country. The project would cost about Rs. 1 crore, members said.
“These people have not been allowed to venture into the Indian culture,” Dr. Sambit Patra, the founder and president of the organization, said. “They are equals. This may not being any change in the near future but definitely it will help Dalits to come into the mainstream. This is nothing short of a social revolution.”
As the conch shell blew on Sunday, and chanting took on a feverish pitch, a Brahmin priest stood on the side of the ritual fire, holding a bunch sacred threads in his hands. On the other side of the flames, men and children belonging to the Dalit community sat with expectant eyes and outstretched hands, waiting to cross over. They didn’t want to miss the bus.
For them, the thread that they would sling across their shoulders and thus imitate an upper-caste symbol was a way of challenging the caste hierarchy. The thread would blur the caste barriers.
While the first ceremony was targeted at the Valmikis, a sub-caste in northern India, whose members are mostly scavengers and cleaners, other Dalit communities would soon be brought into the folds, Patra said.
Such ceremonies aren’t unusual. Popularized as Sanskritization by the sociologist MS Srinivas, it implies a process by which lower castes claim a higher position in the caste hierarchy by emulating the practices and rituals like vegetarianism of the dominant castes.
But Patra said Sunday’s ceremony wasn’t aimed at legitimizing Brahmin supremacy but a reassertion of the right accorded to all by the Vedas.
Vishnu Prapanna, a Brahmin priest who presided over the ceremony, said while the religious texts invested the right of wearing the thread to all, all four sects of the Varna system look up to the Brahmins as the bearer of knowledge and as such aspire to be Brahmins.
“This is how we try to elevate them. Whoever learns the culture and the texts can become a Brahmin,” he said.
Next to him, Ranjan Chaudhary, a Valmiki, intervened.
“We have lagged behind. We follow Saint Valmiki, who was Ram’s teacher. It is a paradox then that we are at the lowest rung of the society,” he said. “This ceremony is a similar to passing. We don’t want to hold the broom, but hold a pen. To be a Brahmin means development of mind.”
But wearing the janau isn’t the ticket to an elevated status in the society for many Valmikis who refused to participate in the ceremony.
Every morning, Amit Birla, a sweeper, goes about cleaning the streets, broom in hand, and seldom looking up to match the gaze of those that are from the upper castes. When he is thirsty, he reaches out for a glass, usually kept near the entrance of a house, and the owner pours it from a height. That’s when he is reminded of his place and that’s where he belongs, he said,
“I can’t and won’t wear it because I am a sweeper. They will kill us if they see us wearing what is theirs. They don’t even let us enter their homes,” he said. “I don’t know what Patra ji was thinking. I am sure it is a good thing but who will save us when the Brahmins and the upper castes get angry.”
Days before the thread-binding ceremony, Sarvesh Mawana, another Valmiki, was told by some priests they would take offence if he were to take on the thread.
“I am not convinced if I should wear it. I need my job. I need to feed my family. I don’t want to be scorned for wearing it and lose my job,” Mawana said.
Most cleaning jobs in the country are still done by members of the Valmiki caste and while other Dalit group members have sort of moved on, most Valmikis have stuck to the work assigned to them centuries ago.
Though many would agree that caste is a given and such symbolic acts are a leveller, Dalit leader and President of Indian Justice Party Udit Raj said that such ceremonies only symbolized the stratification of the society further and can in no way bring about Dalit emanicipation.
"Why should they wear janau? Even if they do wear the sacred thread, they will still be outcaste nd history is witness to that. Even after departing from Hindu religion, the caste stigma has not left them. Caste has followed them everywhere," he said. "This is no social revolution. If they have to do something, they should give up the broomstick. Valmiki was a writer. The community should hold pens."
In most Valmiki households, the jobs of cleaners are passed down the generations.
But because caste is a given fact and there is no option but to imitate the culture of the Brahmins in order to elevate one’s status, the emphasis here is not to cross the caste boundaries but get respect, Patra said.
While such ceremonies have happened in the past too, this is the first time, an organized approach is being taken towards investing the Valmikis with the janau. In 2007, a similar ceremony was organized in Delhi where more than 500 Valmikis had taken on the janau, Patra said.
Around five percent of Delhi's population is Valmikis, members said.
For Sunny Mangeram, a Valmiki caste member who works at Delhi University, revolution by wearing the prohibited dress and symbols of the Brahmins didn’t mean they were abandoning their caste. They were proud to be Valmikis and he saw the thread as an equalizer, he said.
In 1995, when he was traveling to Bulandshahar in Uttar Pradesh for a wedding, they had stooped at a dhaba for refreshments and chai was handed to them in porcelain cups.
“They thought, looking at our clothes that we probably were elite or something,” he said, as he changed into a dhoti for the ceremony. “When we were asked our caste, and we said Valmiki, they took away the cups and gave chai in clay bowls. That was crushing and demeaning. Now, I will walk into the campus, my shirt unbuttoned, flaunting the thread.”
But not all who wore the thread on Sunday and fed the ritual fire with offerings understood the nuances.
Sunil Parcha, 30, would give up on non-vegetarian food. The thread meant purging of self. The Brahmins too abstain from meat, he said.
“We want to be like Brahmins,” he said. “I will not do any wrong. This thread will give me respect and acceptance. People look down on me; they are disgusted because I am a Dalit.”
In many ways, the ceremony reflected the aspirations of an oppressed group. While they said they revered their Saint, they also wanted to discard the Dalit tag, and clamber out of their squalor.
As Ashish Dhaiya, 18, wore the thread, he smiled, clutching the three strands.
“I am wearing it for the first time. I feel good. I feel like a Brahmin,” he said. “I will never remove it now.”
Sunday, May 31, 2009
"It's like living in a graveyard."
In Haryana, we couldn't find decent chai. The tea we were served at the district court and the dhabas were sweet, milky variety. And we couldn't refuse. So, by the time we finished with the interviews, we were stuffed with the chai that locals descibed as "takatwar". And then, at a dhaba we stopped to file the story, we had them make our kind of chai and they were pretty amused.
"That is no tea," the guy said. "That's boiled water."
When my editor told me he wanted me to go to Hisar to track down Relu Ram Punia's surviving family members, we thought Hisar was just two-and-a-half hours away. As it turned out, it was almost a five-hour drive and then getting to Litani took another hour. When we saw the house where the daughter killed eight members of her family and is now on death row in the Ambala Central Jail, we could feel the chill. It was an eerie feeling.
An edited verion of the article appeared in the Indian Express on May 31, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
Hisar, May 30, 2009
From a distance of 400 meters, from where the road cuts into the narrow Litani bend, the Punia Farmhouse looms large, perhaps the only thing you could see for miles.
This is the dream house that former MLA Renu Lal Punia built for himself. He wanted to retire there, see from the terrace the sprawling 100 acres of farmland that he had bought with all the money he made in the oil business, though illegally.
And this is the same kothi where he was beaten to death along with seven other family members by his own daughter Sonia and son-in-law Sanjeev on the night of August 24, 2001.
Now grass grows tall in the lawns, the chandeliers inside the house have layers of dust on them as if someone forgot to switch them on in years, the swimming pool has no water, and the paint is peeling off the walls. It’s the same kothi that his daughter, who Punia named after his favourite politician Sonia Gandhi, wanted, and killed for. She and her husband killed them one by one, at first sneaking on the terrace where Renu Lal slept, then killing the mother, and then others. The murders went on for hours, locals said.
Except for the ground floor, the other parts of the house are seldom used now. The rooms, where the brutal killings took place eight years ago, are latched.
Ram Singh Punia, who lives here now with his son and nephews, didn’t repaint the house. Nor did he take down the pictures of Lokesh, the one-and-a-half year old grandson, who too was clubbed to death while he slept with his grandmother on that night.
“It is like a graveyard,” he said. “She (Sonia) turned it into one. She wanted this house. Renu Lal didn’t want to give it to her.”
As he opened the room where Shakuntala, the daughter-in-law, was murdered with her two daughters Shivani and Preeti by the same iron rod, Jitender Singh Punia stopped by the door, reluctant. A faint smell - that of old clothes, of old pictures and of dried, rotten blood - lingered in the room. Yes, the bedcover that was soaked in blood when the three were killed as they slept on that August night lay on the floor, bundled. The smell was the strongest there, perhaps it emanated from the crumpled covers.
For the nephew, who was in Class X the year the murders send shockwaves around the region and made headlines, living in the same house is like inhabiting a graveyard. Memories and visages of the past do not leave you so soon, he said.
On the ceiling of the room, blood stains are still visible. On the bed, amid thousand other little things that Lokesh played with, a soft toy stands out.
“We can’t forget it. Sometimes, a little noise here and there, in the middle of the night, scares us,” he said.
On the winding steps, Mala, the domestic help, stood, watching.
“I had been with the family for years. That year, I had taken off. After the murders, I was scared of coming here for almost a year,” she said. “Imagine ... eight murders ... all in one night.”
For three years after the gruesome murders, the house, famous in the parts for its stylish architecture, complete with a ramp where you could drive a car on to the first floor terrace, was closed. When it was opened in 2004, Ram Singh Punia, the only surviving brother, moved in. They threw out the rotting furniture on the ground floor and burnt all of Sonia’s possessions, including her pictures. They called it purging.
The wayward daughter, who married the man of her choice, and who smoked and drank whiskey and beer, is only present in the house through others, through what she did on the night of August 24.
On a table in the hallway on the first floor, photographs of Renu Lal Punia, his second wife Krishna, son Sunil, his wife Shakuntala, and their three children, and Sonia’s sister Pammi, who were murdered in cold blood, with a toplink Sonia picked up from the garage on that night when the servants slept outside, and the crackers burst, to drown the shouts of those who were being clubbed to death by the daughter of the house, are stacked. Sonia’s pictures were disposed off long ago.
“She took away everything from us,” Ram Singh Punia said. “We have kept nothing of hes. She has left us nothing that belonged to us.”
The milkman had come running to Ram Singh Punia’s house, around three kilometres away from the kothi, panting, out of breath on the morning on August 25. When nobody had responded to the knocks, he had ventured inside the house. On the first floor, he saw blood on the floor. He didn’t wait. The chowkidar Amar Singh, a key witness who also filed the FIR with the police, too had seen the blood splattered on the floor before he rushed to the get the police.
When Punia and his elder son Nonia Singh rushed to the kothi, around 30 people from the area had already assembled. Police was there, too.
Sonia too was there, frothing at the mouth, a suicidal note in hand. She claimed she had killed her father because he didn’t love her. After all she was a stepdaughter.
“We would have killed Sonia if we would have known. But she was already in custody,” Nonia Singh said. “She came with her husband Sanjeev to kill them. Then she dropped off Sanjeev and he caught a bus to Saharanpur.”
Ram Singh had met his brother the day before he was murdered. They had talked about work, and other usual things. Of course, none of them knew.
For many months, the Punia deaths were the talk of the town. Eight years later, villagers in Hansi, 87 kilometers away, still remember the killings and are curious to know what happened to Soina, who is lodged in the Ambala Jail, waiting for the President’s decision on her letter.
“In our parts, we love our daughters. Then a daughter does this and other girls start to threaten their families that if they don’t get share in the property, Renu Lal episode would be repeated. It set such a bad example. How can we trust daughters now?,” Ram Singh Punia said. “She should be hanged. We need to show them all that bad deeds don’t go unpunished.”
Sonia was the daughter of Renu Lal Punia’s second wife Krishna, who he married after his first wife Om Devi died. He had a son with Om Devi. Krishna had two daughters – Sonia and Pammi.
Family members said Renu Lal loved Sonia but when she married Sanjeev who she met on one of her sports trips outside the city, he was upset. Sonia kept demanding money from her father, which he obliged at first, but then as his business suffered, he had to say no to Sonia.
The tipping point reached when Sonia asked for the Punia Farmhouse, Ram Singh said.
“Most of this stuff is in Sonia’s confessions, too,” he said. “As family, we too know.”
Allegedly Sonia and her mother Krishna didn’t want Sunil to inherit all of Renu Lal’s property, pegged at crores of rupees, including two houses in Delhi and Faridabad.
They had even filed a court case against Punia, Lal Bahadur Khowal, who knows the family well and even fought the case with the prosecutor SK Pandhir in the high court, said.
It was Khowal’s first case as a legal assistant Pandhir, who took up the case when the Panchayat urged him to get the eight victims justice.
Sonia had been claiming she was not of sane mind, yet another one of her ploys, Pandhir said.
The Punia murders was perhaps the toughest case because it was based on circumstantial evidence and all loopholes had to be covered. They had more than 109 witnesses and they examined 66 of those. The files too ran in hundreds of pages, Pandhir recalled.
“We had clinching arguments that why Pammi was called from her hostel that night. Only a family member could do it and Sonia brought her home that night. The chowkidar had seen them both come in,” he said. “It was an emotional case. Sonia had killed the suckling child of Sunil.”
Pandhir had first anticipated that the court might extend a life sentence to Sonia because Sonia had a young son.
“But we countered it by saying Shaunktala too had a suckling baby. Ek baccha ko teen bacche se kata,” he said. “And then she was a female who killed three other females.”
For Khowal, who argued the case in the Supreme Court for almost 17 days that it went on for, it was the case that made him the lawyer he is today.
“It was an unusual case, a high-profile one, one that was charged with too much drama,” he said. “No, Sonia wasn’t schizophrenic as she pretended. She was weird and she was wild.”
On trial days, Sonia would come to the court decked up in matching salwar kurtas and jewelry, her lips painted red with lipstick, and she would laugh, Pandhir said.
“As a prosecutor, I never met her. But I saw her. She was beautiful. But looking at her, you wouldn’t know she was accused of murdering her own father. She laughed and smiled,” Pandhir said.
Sonia had left her son at Saharanpur where her in-laws lived and had come that night to Litani to celebrate Lokesh, the one-and-a-half year old grandson’s birthday, with crackers.
“It was all planned. Why would she leave her son otherwise,” Khowal said.
Sonia was just out of school when she married Sanjeev. A beautiful woman, who trained in Judo and Taekwondo, Sonia was known in the town for her wild ways. In fact, when she was in jail in Hisar, she picked up fights with other inmates. A case was booked against her, too, the lawyers said.
Now that Sonia has written to the President asking her to expedite her death, the lawyers are happy. So is Ram Singh, who doesn’t want to talk about the murders anymore. It is enough living in the tomb, he said.
“All I want is that she should be hanged for what she did,” he said. “I lost my brother. The village and all of us want justice. It has been eight long years.”
The house, where death descended one night when a daughter struck her own, remains in a limbo. There are five dogs, but they too are silent as the family.
The cobwebs hang in the rooms that once housed the dead.
In the foyer, servants loiter around. Inside the main hall, family members sit and chat. But nobody takes the staircase to the first and the second floors where Sonia had once roamed, iron rod in hand.
"That is no tea," the guy said. "That's boiled water."
When my editor told me he wanted me to go to Hisar to track down Relu Ram Punia's surviving family members, we thought Hisar was just two-and-a-half hours away. As it turned out, it was almost a five-hour drive and then getting to Litani took another hour. When we saw the house where the daughter killed eight members of her family and is now on death row in the Ambala Central Jail, we could feel the chill. It was an eerie feeling.
An edited verion of the article appeared in the Indian Express on May 31, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
Hisar, May 30, 2009
From a distance of 400 meters, from where the road cuts into the narrow Litani bend, the Punia Farmhouse looms large, perhaps the only thing you could see for miles.
This is the dream house that former MLA Renu Lal Punia built for himself. He wanted to retire there, see from the terrace the sprawling 100 acres of farmland that he had bought with all the money he made in the oil business, though illegally.
And this is the same kothi where he was beaten to death along with seven other family members by his own daughter Sonia and son-in-law Sanjeev on the night of August 24, 2001.
Now grass grows tall in the lawns, the chandeliers inside the house have layers of dust on them as if someone forgot to switch them on in years, the swimming pool has no water, and the paint is peeling off the walls. It’s the same kothi that his daughter, who Punia named after his favourite politician Sonia Gandhi, wanted, and killed for. She and her husband killed them one by one, at first sneaking on the terrace where Renu Lal slept, then killing the mother, and then others. The murders went on for hours, locals said.
Except for the ground floor, the other parts of the house are seldom used now. The rooms, where the brutal killings took place eight years ago, are latched.
Ram Singh Punia, who lives here now with his son and nephews, didn’t repaint the house. Nor did he take down the pictures of Lokesh, the one-and-a-half year old grandson, who too was clubbed to death while he slept with his grandmother on that night.
“It is like a graveyard,” he said. “She (Sonia) turned it into one. She wanted this house. Renu Lal didn’t want to give it to her.”
As he opened the room where Shakuntala, the daughter-in-law, was murdered with her two daughters Shivani and Preeti by the same iron rod, Jitender Singh Punia stopped by the door, reluctant. A faint smell - that of old clothes, of old pictures and of dried, rotten blood - lingered in the room. Yes, the bedcover that was soaked in blood when the three were killed as they slept on that August night lay on the floor, bundled. The smell was the strongest there, perhaps it emanated from the crumpled covers.
For the nephew, who was in Class X the year the murders send shockwaves around the region and made headlines, living in the same house is like inhabiting a graveyard. Memories and visages of the past do not leave you so soon, he said.
On the ceiling of the room, blood stains are still visible. On the bed, amid thousand other little things that Lokesh played with, a soft toy stands out.
“We can’t forget it. Sometimes, a little noise here and there, in the middle of the night, scares us,” he said.
On the winding steps, Mala, the domestic help, stood, watching.
“I had been with the family for years. That year, I had taken off. After the murders, I was scared of coming here for almost a year,” she said. “Imagine ... eight murders ... all in one night.”
For three years after the gruesome murders, the house, famous in the parts for its stylish architecture, complete with a ramp where you could drive a car on to the first floor terrace, was closed. When it was opened in 2004, Ram Singh Punia, the only surviving brother, moved in. They threw out the rotting furniture on the ground floor and burnt all of Sonia’s possessions, including her pictures. They called it purging.
The wayward daughter, who married the man of her choice, and who smoked and drank whiskey and beer, is only present in the house through others, through what she did on the night of August 24.
On a table in the hallway on the first floor, photographs of Renu Lal Punia, his second wife Krishna, son Sunil, his wife Shakuntala, and their three children, and Sonia’s sister Pammi, who were murdered in cold blood, with a toplink Sonia picked up from the garage on that night when the servants slept outside, and the crackers burst, to drown the shouts of those who were being clubbed to death by the daughter of the house, are stacked. Sonia’s pictures were disposed off long ago.
“She took away everything from us,” Ram Singh Punia said. “We have kept nothing of hes. She has left us nothing that belonged to us.”
The milkman had come running to Ram Singh Punia’s house, around three kilometres away from the kothi, panting, out of breath on the morning on August 25. When nobody had responded to the knocks, he had ventured inside the house. On the first floor, he saw blood on the floor. He didn’t wait. The chowkidar Amar Singh, a key witness who also filed the FIR with the police, too had seen the blood splattered on the floor before he rushed to the get the police.
When Punia and his elder son Nonia Singh rushed to the kothi, around 30 people from the area had already assembled. Police was there, too.
Sonia too was there, frothing at the mouth, a suicidal note in hand. She claimed she had killed her father because he didn’t love her. After all she was a stepdaughter.
“We would have killed Sonia if we would have known. But she was already in custody,” Nonia Singh said. “She came with her husband Sanjeev to kill them. Then she dropped off Sanjeev and he caught a bus to Saharanpur.”
Ram Singh had met his brother the day before he was murdered. They had talked about work, and other usual things. Of course, none of them knew.
For many months, the Punia deaths were the talk of the town. Eight years later, villagers in Hansi, 87 kilometers away, still remember the killings and are curious to know what happened to Soina, who is lodged in the Ambala Jail, waiting for the President’s decision on her letter.
“In our parts, we love our daughters. Then a daughter does this and other girls start to threaten their families that if they don’t get share in the property, Renu Lal episode would be repeated. It set such a bad example. How can we trust daughters now?,” Ram Singh Punia said. “She should be hanged. We need to show them all that bad deeds don’t go unpunished.”
Sonia was the daughter of Renu Lal Punia’s second wife Krishna, who he married after his first wife Om Devi died. He had a son with Om Devi. Krishna had two daughters – Sonia and Pammi.
Family members said Renu Lal loved Sonia but when she married Sanjeev who she met on one of her sports trips outside the city, he was upset. Sonia kept demanding money from her father, which he obliged at first, but then as his business suffered, he had to say no to Sonia.
The tipping point reached when Sonia asked for the Punia Farmhouse, Ram Singh said.
“Most of this stuff is in Sonia’s confessions, too,” he said. “As family, we too know.”
Allegedly Sonia and her mother Krishna didn’t want Sunil to inherit all of Renu Lal’s property, pegged at crores of rupees, including two houses in Delhi and Faridabad.
They had even filed a court case against Punia, Lal Bahadur Khowal, who knows the family well and even fought the case with the prosecutor SK Pandhir in the high court, said.
It was Khowal’s first case as a legal assistant Pandhir, who took up the case when the Panchayat urged him to get the eight victims justice.
Sonia had been claiming she was not of sane mind, yet another one of her ploys, Pandhir said.
The Punia murders was perhaps the toughest case because it was based on circumstantial evidence and all loopholes had to be covered. They had more than 109 witnesses and they examined 66 of those. The files too ran in hundreds of pages, Pandhir recalled.
“We had clinching arguments that why Pammi was called from her hostel that night. Only a family member could do it and Sonia brought her home that night. The chowkidar had seen them both come in,” he said. “It was an emotional case. Sonia had killed the suckling child of Sunil.”
Pandhir had first anticipated that the court might extend a life sentence to Sonia because Sonia had a young son.
“But we countered it by saying Shaunktala too had a suckling baby. Ek baccha ko teen bacche se kata,” he said. “And then she was a female who killed three other females.”
For Khowal, who argued the case in the Supreme Court for almost 17 days that it went on for, it was the case that made him the lawyer he is today.
“It was an unusual case, a high-profile one, one that was charged with too much drama,” he said. “No, Sonia wasn’t schizophrenic as she pretended. She was weird and she was wild.”
On trial days, Sonia would come to the court decked up in matching salwar kurtas and jewelry, her lips painted red with lipstick, and she would laugh, Pandhir said.
“As a prosecutor, I never met her. But I saw her. She was beautiful. But looking at her, you wouldn’t know she was accused of murdering her own father. She laughed and smiled,” Pandhir said.
Sonia had left her son at Saharanpur where her in-laws lived and had come that night to Litani to celebrate Lokesh, the one-and-a-half year old grandson’s birthday, with crackers.
“It was all planned. Why would she leave her son otherwise,” Khowal said.
Sonia was just out of school when she married Sanjeev. A beautiful woman, who trained in Judo and Taekwondo, Sonia was known in the town for her wild ways. In fact, when she was in jail in Hisar, she picked up fights with other inmates. A case was booked against her, too, the lawyers said.
Now that Sonia has written to the President asking her to expedite her death, the lawyers are happy. So is Ram Singh, who doesn’t want to talk about the murders anymore. It is enough living in the tomb, he said.
“All I want is that she should be hanged for what she did,” he said. “I lost my brother. The village and all of us want justice. It has been eight long years.”
The house, where death descended one night when a daughter struck her own, remains in a limbo. There are five dogs, but they too are silent as the family.
The cobwebs hang in the rooms that once housed the dead.
In the foyer, servants loiter around. Inside the main hall, family members sit and chat. But nobody takes the staircase to the first and the second floors where Sonia had once roamed, iron rod in hand.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Rampur's Azam Khan calls the shots on polling day
Azam Khan changed poll equations in Rampur, which shot to fame after the Samajwadi Party's Muslim leader rebelled against the induction of Kalyan Singh into the party. When I toured the city, people shouted Azam Khan's name, called him the "true leader" and that they would teach Mulayam Singh a lesson for sidelining Azam Khan.
When I met Azam Khan in his office on election day, he seemed to be in control, happily giving interviews. He had already caused damage to Jayaprada so much so that she never entered the city limits.
An edited version of the article appeared in the Indian Express on May 14, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
Rampur, May 13, 2009
In Rampur, Azam Khan, the rebel leader, called the shots on polling day.
As he sat in his office giving interviews to the media, supporters walked past his house chanting “Azam Khan ki baat par, mohar lagegi haath par.”
No pretensions. No fear. After all they were only showing their allegiance to their leader.
But the rebel leader and the Muslim face of Samajwadi Party only smiled, dismissing speculations that he would quit and join Congress. No, he wasn’t leaving the party he had founded. He was just upset over the betrayal, he said.
But his anger, which he hid under his calm demeanour, calling Jayaprada a senior leader, spilled over on to the streets, where young and old, congregated at street corners, at the chai stalls, and talked about how Azam Khan, their true leader, had been sidelined. And they would not take the betrayal easy.
And as they showed the ink mark on their fingers, they also said how they vindicated themselves by voting for the Congress, because Mulayam Singh must know that it wasn’t about the party ideology, or about the star factor in Rampur, it was all about their Muslim leader, who had done so much for them, and now was betrayed by his own friends.
“We aren’t Congresswadi or Samajwadi. We are Azamwadi. Azam Khan is the poor people’s saviour,” Faraz Khan, a local, said. “How can you insult out own leader on his turf? We will not tolerate it. Kalyan Singh is a murderer, he demolished the house of Allah.”
Another local, Irfan Khan, said they voted for Jayaprada because Azam Khan was with her.
"She is an actress. She should go back to that," he said. "We only tolerated her because of Azam Khan."
Inside his office, surrounded by the television crew, and party workers, Khan looked as if he was in control. He adjusted his hair often, gestured quite a bit but never raised his voice once. Over the phone, he chided his supporters for taking too many chai and cigarette breaks.
“You should get the people to vote,” he said.
All day, he kept to his house, with police vans parked outside, fielding questions. A bronze-colored cycle, the SP’s election symbol, lied on the floor, near his legs rested.
“I am just upset. But I am not leaving the party. Par man nahi lag raha hai ab,” he said. “They have called me names, they asked for my house arrest. What wrong did I do?”
Khan said his issue was with the party ideology. When Mulayam Singh took Kalyan Singh in, that’s when the fissures started to erupt. It was about his own faith, and his community’s sentiments.
“I have done a lot for the party. Twenty-five years I have worked for it and now they ban me from campaigning,” Khan said, his eyes scanning the room, straying outside the window, taking in the scene on the narrow street outside his office.
“No, I haven’t asked anyone to vote for the Congress. I am sitting here. How can I?,” Khan said. “But how can we vote for Kalyan?”
And while he sat, and played down his role, in Rampur on Wednesday, the poll equations had changed.
SP candidate Jayaprada toured the outskirts, remaining on the fringes of the town, asking her supporters to stand by her, using the glamour to the hilt, and evoking sympathy. But like the lipstick on her lips towards the evening, her appeal as a film star had sort of faded.
The polarization of votes in Rampur on religious lines
In 2004, Azam Khan and Jayaprada campaigned together in an open jeep. Emotions ran high then. Khan was the one who introduced Jayaprada to the town, and all welcomed her, even voted her to power. Extravagant road shows, and movie screenings of old Jayaprada’s hits like Sharabi were part of the strategy. People still remember those days when crowds lined the streets to have a glimpse of the famous star. But that was five years ago.
So much stands changed now.
This time around, theatres didn’t run Jayaprada’s films.
This time around, Azam Khan didn’t pose for the shutterbugs with her.
This time around, she was fighting alone to keep her seat, desperate and tired. And this time, they were pitched in a battle. Jayaprada referred to Khan as her rakhi brother, perhaps trying to undo the wrong. But Khan called her a “guest”, indicating she was an outsider.
In Western Uttar Pradesh, the elections have always been fought on caste and religion lines. But the fissures along the religious lines were never so apparent as on Wednesday. The voter turnout was about 52 percent.
As the Muslims united, hurt at their leader’s betrayal, angered by the induction of Kalyan Singh, the Hindus mobilized too. Much of the BJP votes went to Jayaprada. It didn’t remain an issue of candidates, or parties, or local problems. On the polling day, it was all about Hindu and Muslim votes even though many locals didn’t want it to go that way.
In Milak, minutes before Jayaprada’s cavalcade arrived, Matin Nawaz ruminated over the sad reality of the elections in Rampur.
There are more than 13 lakh voters in the five constituencies that make up the Rampur Lok Sabha seat. Incidentally, Rampur also has the largest percent of Muslim voters – about 55 percent as against the 45 percent Hindus and Sikhs combined - in the whole of Uttar Pradesh, which is also why Azam Khan can tilt equations.
“Now, when Azam Khan has the Muslim vote, the Hindus too got polarized. We don’t like it but it is the reality,” Nawaz said. “Last time, they played her songs. This time Azam Khan didn’t give her the naulakha.”
Across the street, Rakesh Kumar Goswami, starined his neck to catch a glimpse of the 1970-80s Bollywood star.
“Hindu will vote for the cycle,” he said. “I am a BJP supporter but when BJP has no chance here and when the fight is between SP and Congress, we will support Jayaprada.”
But in his car, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, was fuming.
“Jayaprada is a terrorist,” he roared, as his SUV rolled out of sight.
And all this while, Khan sat in his office, going out to cast his vote only an hour before the polling closed.
Meanwhile the ladies of Rampur kept to their turfs, never venturing into the marked territory of the other. Only Azam Khan crossed over.
When I met Azam Khan in his office on election day, he seemed to be in control, happily giving interviews. He had already caused damage to Jayaprada so much so that she never entered the city limits.
An edited version of the article appeared in the Indian Express on May 14, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
Rampur, May 13, 2009
In Rampur, Azam Khan, the rebel leader, called the shots on polling day.
As he sat in his office giving interviews to the media, supporters walked past his house chanting “Azam Khan ki baat par, mohar lagegi haath par.”
No pretensions. No fear. After all they were only showing their allegiance to their leader.
But the rebel leader and the Muslim face of Samajwadi Party only smiled, dismissing speculations that he would quit and join Congress. No, he wasn’t leaving the party he had founded. He was just upset over the betrayal, he said.
But his anger, which he hid under his calm demeanour, calling Jayaprada a senior leader, spilled over on to the streets, where young and old, congregated at street corners, at the chai stalls, and talked about how Azam Khan, their true leader, had been sidelined. And they would not take the betrayal easy.
And as they showed the ink mark on their fingers, they also said how they vindicated themselves by voting for the Congress, because Mulayam Singh must know that it wasn’t about the party ideology, or about the star factor in Rampur, it was all about their Muslim leader, who had done so much for them, and now was betrayed by his own friends.
“We aren’t Congresswadi or Samajwadi. We are Azamwadi. Azam Khan is the poor people’s saviour,” Faraz Khan, a local, said. “How can you insult out own leader on his turf? We will not tolerate it. Kalyan Singh is a murderer, he demolished the house of Allah.”
Another local, Irfan Khan, said they voted for Jayaprada because Azam Khan was with her.
"She is an actress. She should go back to that," he said. "We only tolerated her because of Azam Khan."
Inside his office, surrounded by the television crew, and party workers, Khan looked as if he was in control. He adjusted his hair often, gestured quite a bit but never raised his voice once. Over the phone, he chided his supporters for taking too many chai and cigarette breaks.
“You should get the people to vote,” he said.
All day, he kept to his house, with police vans parked outside, fielding questions. A bronze-colored cycle, the SP’s election symbol, lied on the floor, near his legs rested.
“I am just upset. But I am not leaving the party. Par man nahi lag raha hai ab,” he said. “They have called me names, they asked for my house arrest. What wrong did I do?”
Khan said his issue was with the party ideology. When Mulayam Singh took Kalyan Singh in, that’s when the fissures started to erupt. It was about his own faith, and his community’s sentiments.
“I have done a lot for the party. Twenty-five years I have worked for it and now they ban me from campaigning,” Khan said, his eyes scanning the room, straying outside the window, taking in the scene on the narrow street outside his office.
“No, I haven’t asked anyone to vote for the Congress. I am sitting here. How can I?,” Khan said. “But how can we vote for Kalyan?”
And while he sat, and played down his role, in Rampur on Wednesday, the poll equations had changed.
SP candidate Jayaprada toured the outskirts, remaining on the fringes of the town, asking her supporters to stand by her, using the glamour to the hilt, and evoking sympathy. But like the lipstick on her lips towards the evening, her appeal as a film star had sort of faded.
The polarization of votes in Rampur on religious lines
In 2004, Azam Khan and Jayaprada campaigned together in an open jeep. Emotions ran high then. Khan was the one who introduced Jayaprada to the town, and all welcomed her, even voted her to power. Extravagant road shows, and movie screenings of old Jayaprada’s hits like Sharabi were part of the strategy. People still remember those days when crowds lined the streets to have a glimpse of the famous star. But that was five years ago.
So much stands changed now.
This time around, theatres didn’t run Jayaprada’s films.
This time around, Azam Khan didn’t pose for the shutterbugs with her.
This time around, she was fighting alone to keep her seat, desperate and tired. And this time, they were pitched in a battle. Jayaprada referred to Khan as her rakhi brother, perhaps trying to undo the wrong. But Khan called her a “guest”, indicating she was an outsider.
In Western Uttar Pradesh, the elections have always been fought on caste and religion lines. But the fissures along the religious lines were never so apparent as on Wednesday. The voter turnout was about 52 percent.
As the Muslims united, hurt at their leader’s betrayal, angered by the induction of Kalyan Singh, the Hindus mobilized too. Much of the BJP votes went to Jayaprada. It didn’t remain an issue of candidates, or parties, or local problems. On the polling day, it was all about Hindu and Muslim votes even though many locals didn’t want it to go that way.
In Milak, minutes before Jayaprada’s cavalcade arrived, Matin Nawaz ruminated over the sad reality of the elections in Rampur.
There are more than 13 lakh voters in the five constituencies that make up the Rampur Lok Sabha seat. Incidentally, Rampur also has the largest percent of Muslim voters – about 55 percent as against the 45 percent Hindus and Sikhs combined - in the whole of Uttar Pradesh, which is also why Azam Khan can tilt equations.
“Now, when Azam Khan has the Muslim vote, the Hindus too got polarized. We don’t like it but it is the reality,” Nawaz said. “Last time, they played her songs. This time Azam Khan didn’t give her the naulakha.”
Across the street, Rakesh Kumar Goswami, starined his neck to catch a glimpse of the 1970-80s Bollywood star.
“Hindu will vote for the cycle,” he said. “I am a BJP supporter but when BJP has no chance here and when the fight is between SP and Congress, we will support Jayaprada.”
But in his car, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, was fuming.
“Jayaprada is a terrorist,” he roared, as his SUV rolled out of sight.
And all this while, Khan sat in his office, going out to cast his vote only an hour before the polling closed.
Meanwhile the ladies of Rampur kept to their turfs, never venturing into the marked territory of the other. Only Azam Khan crossed over.
The tale of two women of Rampur
We left for Rampur in Western Uttar Pradesh at 9 p.m. on May 12, traveling over bumpy, dusty roads and reached at around 2:30 a.m. and checked into a hotel, a shady one, and our only option. All others were booked to capacity.
At 7 a.m., we were up and trailing the two women through the narrow alleys and into the interiors of the constituency. Tiring but fun. The edited version appeared in the Indian Express on May 14, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
Rampur, May 13, 2009
On Wednesday, the two ladies of Rampur never crossed each other’s paths.
Seventy-year-old Begum Noor Bano, the Congress candidate, drove around the city, halting and rolling down her silver Tata Safari’s windows often to talk to people, sometimes getting off the car, splendid in her white saree, her diamonds and pearls glittering, and walked to the polling booths as people thronged to see her.
“I have never seen the Begum. I have lived here all my life,” Praveen Chaurasia, a resident of Kaith Wali Masjid, said, sarcasm evident in his voice. “But she lives in palaces. She doesn’t need to come here.”
But the Begum, unfazed, undaunted and always smiling, drove on.
On the sidewalk, Farhana Begum stood, her gaze trailing the silver vehicle.
“She is beautiful. Yes, I voted for Noor Bano,” she said.
In another part of the constituency, Jayaprada rode in another silver-colored SUV trudging along the dusty, narrow roads, right into the interiors of her constituency. It was here, on the fringes of the constituency that Jayaprada is still a star. Little children ran after her vehicle, shouting, and alerting villagers that “Jayaprada” had come. And people gathered, hundreds of them, defying the sun, and waited patiently to get a glimpse of her.
She never entered the city. And Noor Bano never ventured into the villages.
But the battle never played out between the two anyways. In Rampur, the war is between Samajwadi Party leaders Azam Khan and Amar Singh. And while Jayaprada finds herself dragged into the dirty fight, desperately pleading her constituents to vote for her, for Noor Bano, it is all playing out in her favour.
As the polling closed, Congress workers were optimistic.
“It is a 60-40 ratio. Noor Bano is winning,” KD Mathur, a Congress supporter, said.
In 2004, the Bollywood star defeated the royal family’s daughter-in-law by 85,000 votes, of which 55,000 votes had fallen in her kitty because of Samajwadi Party leader Azam Khan’s support in the city areas. Five years later, the equations had changed and the star was pitched in a battle against her own mentor, who said she was friendly with the RSS.
However, on Wednesday Bano kept to the sidelines, never lashing out against Jayaprada or Azam Khan, who she said she had made amends with.
Sitting in Noor Mahal’s visiting area where incidentally the shelves are lined with Mayawati’s pictures (Noor Bano’s son is a BSP MLA), Noor Begum reminisced about the years gone by, and how her husband told her she had to take care of her people. This is her fifth election.
“Last time I lost because I never considered SP as a contender. The fight was between the BJP and the Congress. It was unexpected,” she said. “She just came. There were singing and dancing. 35 Bollywood stars came to campaign for her. People here had never seen anything like that. They were charmed.”
Noor Bano has never met her opponent. Only once, they came face to face with each other when both had gone to the beauty salon in Le Meridian in Delhi. That was three months ago.
She only knows her through her films.
“She doesn’t ;live here,” she said. “I am in touch with the people.”
But the locals think otherwise.
“She goes to Paris, London. What does she know about us,” Geeta Rani, another voter said. “At least Jayaprada has done development here.”
But Ikram Khan won’t betray his first lady. He has forgiven her.
“She is our sympathiser,” he said, as he queued up to talk to Noor Bano. “Jayaprada is only film, only glamour. Begum has said she will be with us forever now. May God bless her.”
Noor Bano needed the blessings. At 4:45 a.m. when she woke up, she kneeled down in prayers, and then went out to vote.
Outside her residence, a Sufi saint stood, counting the beads.
Along the battle lines, Gods were invoked often.
On Wednesday, Jayaprada, the star, consulted her stars often. Over the phone, astrologers told her it was an auspicious day and she needn’t worry.
At 8 a.m., when she emerged out of her bedroom, dressed in a cream suit, the dupatta draped over her head, she folded her hands in supplication and prayed to the deities lined up on the side table.
Then her family prayed as extra security personnel gathered outside the emperor’s suite at Modipur Hotel, which is about five kilometres away from the city. They weren’t taking any chances after her hotel room was raided Monday night and there were rumurs that Azam Khan’s supporters might attack her.
“I am scared. But I am hopeful,” Jayaprada said, as she got out of the suite.
A quick stop at the temple and then it was the turn of the far-flung villages like Shahbad, Milak, and Dharampur.
The Rampur fight has become quite a pot-boiler with high drama preceding the election day. After Azam Khan rebelled, Jayaprada found herself in a fix, desperately seeking votes to keep her seat.
In the last few days, she has kept busy, dodging rumurs, clarifying that the CDs with her nude pictures on it were morphed, and constantly touching on the fact that a woman being maligned isn’t good politics.
But she still called Azam Khan her brother.
Khan, meanwhile, refused allegations that he had circulated the CDs.
“Where are the CDs? I want to see one and I want to know where she got it from if she has one,” he said. “I wouldn’t do such a thing. I am a simple man. I respect women.”
And while the city turned against her, and the Azam Khan factor weaned away the Muslim votes, her work – 13 bridges, a culvert, schools - brought her the votes.
In a polarized election such as this one, BJP and even a few BSP votes have come to her rescue. Most of the Lodh Rajput community are supporting Jayaprada. And in view of the Muslims coming together in Azam Khan’s support, some BJP supporters have also thrown their weight behind Jayaprada.
For more than a month, Jayaprada has been camping in Rampur, canvassing with her family.
On Wednesday, as the daughter got out of her suite, she stooped to touch her mother’s feet. Neelaveni hugged her daughter tight. Barefoot, the mother followed Jayaprada to the foyer.
At Noor Mahal, a mother prepared for a day out in the constituency, as her daughter, Saman Ali Khan, ushered Noor Bano into the car.
At 7 a.m., we were up and trailing the two women through the narrow alleys and into the interiors of the constituency. Tiring but fun. The edited version appeared in the Indian Express on May 14, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
Rampur, May 13, 2009
On Wednesday, the two ladies of Rampur never crossed each other’s paths.
Seventy-year-old Begum Noor Bano, the Congress candidate, drove around the city, halting and rolling down her silver Tata Safari’s windows often to talk to people, sometimes getting off the car, splendid in her white saree, her diamonds and pearls glittering, and walked to the polling booths as people thronged to see her.
“I have never seen the Begum. I have lived here all my life,” Praveen Chaurasia, a resident of Kaith Wali Masjid, said, sarcasm evident in his voice. “But she lives in palaces. She doesn’t need to come here.”
But the Begum, unfazed, undaunted and always smiling, drove on.
On the sidewalk, Farhana Begum stood, her gaze trailing the silver vehicle.
“She is beautiful. Yes, I voted for Noor Bano,” she said.
In another part of the constituency, Jayaprada rode in another silver-colored SUV trudging along the dusty, narrow roads, right into the interiors of her constituency. It was here, on the fringes of the constituency that Jayaprada is still a star. Little children ran after her vehicle, shouting, and alerting villagers that “Jayaprada” had come. And people gathered, hundreds of them, defying the sun, and waited patiently to get a glimpse of her.
She never entered the city. And Noor Bano never ventured into the villages.
But the battle never played out between the two anyways. In Rampur, the war is between Samajwadi Party leaders Azam Khan and Amar Singh. And while Jayaprada finds herself dragged into the dirty fight, desperately pleading her constituents to vote for her, for Noor Bano, it is all playing out in her favour.
As the polling closed, Congress workers were optimistic.
“It is a 60-40 ratio. Noor Bano is winning,” KD Mathur, a Congress supporter, said.
In 2004, the Bollywood star defeated the royal family’s daughter-in-law by 85,000 votes, of which 55,000 votes had fallen in her kitty because of Samajwadi Party leader Azam Khan’s support in the city areas. Five years later, the equations had changed and the star was pitched in a battle against her own mentor, who said she was friendly with the RSS.
However, on Wednesday Bano kept to the sidelines, never lashing out against Jayaprada or Azam Khan, who she said she had made amends with.
Sitting in Noor Mahal’s visiting area where incidentally the shelves are lined with Mayawati’s pictures (Noor Bano’s son is a BSP MLA), Noor Begum reminisced about the years gone by, and how her husband told her she had to take care of her people. This is her fifth election.
“Last time I lost because I never considered SP as a contender. The fight was between the BJP and the Congress. It was unexpected,” she said. “She just came. There were singing and dancing. 35 Bollywood stars came to campaign for her. People here had never seen anything like that. They were charmed.”
Noor Bano has never met her opponent. Only once, they came face to face with each other when both had gone to the beauty salon in Le Meridian in Delhi. That was three months ago.
She only knows her through her films.
“She doesn’t ;live here,” she said. “I am in touch with the people.”
But the locals think otherwise.
“She goes to Paris, London. What does she know about us,” Geeta Rani, another voter said. “At least Jayaprada has done development here.”
But Ikram Khan won’t betray his first lady. He has forgiven her.
“She is our sympathiser,” he said, as he queued up to talk to Noor Bano. “Jayaprada is only film, only glamour. Begum has said she will be with us forever now. May God bless her.”
Noor Bano needed the blessings. At 4:45 a.m. when she woke up, she kneeled down in prayers, and then went out to vote.
Outside her residence, a Sufi saint stood, counting the beads.
Along the battle lines, Gods were invoked often.
On Wednesday, Jayaprada, the star, consulted her stars often. Over the phone, astrologers told her it was an auspicious day and she needn’t worry.
At 8 a.m., when she emerged out of her bedroom, dressed in a cream suit, the dupatta draped over her head, she folded her hands in supplication and prayed to the deities lined up on the side table.
Then her family prayed as extra security personnel gathered outside the emperor’s suite at Modipur Hotel, which is about five kilometres away from the city. They weren’t taking any chances after her hotel room was raided Monday night and there were rumurs that Azam Khan’s supporters might attack her.
“I am scared. But I am hopeful,” Jayaprada said, as she got out of the suite.
A quick stop at the temple and then it was the turn of the far-flung villages like Shahbad, Milak, and Dharampur.
The Rampur fight has become quite a pot-boiler with high drama preceding the election day. After Azam Khan rebelled, Jayaprada found herself in a fix, desperately seeking votes to keep her seat.
In the last few days, she has kept busy, dodging rumurs, clarifying that the CDs with her nude pictures on it were morphed, and constantly touching on the fact that a woman being maligned isn’t good politics.
But she still called Azam Khan her brother.
Khan, meanwhile, refused allegations that he had circulated the CDs.
“Where are the CDs? I want to see one and I want to know where she got it from if she has one,” he said. “I wouldn’t do such a thing. I am a simple man. I respect women.”
And while the city turned against her, and the Azam Khan factor weaned away the Muslim votes, her work – 13 bridges, a culvert, schools - brought her the votes.
In a polarized election such as this one, BJP and even a few BSP votes have come to her rescue. Most of the Lodh Rajput community are supporting Jayaprada. And in view of the Muslims coming together in Azam Khan’s support, some BJP supporters have also thrown their weight behind Jayaprada.
For more than a month, Jayaprada has been camping in Rampur, canvassing with her family.
On Wednesday, as the daughter got out of her suite, she stooped to touch her mother’s feet. Neelaveni hugged her daughter tight. Barefoot, the mother followed Jayaprada to the foyer.
At Noor Mahal, a mother prepared for a day out in the constituency, as her daughter, Saman Ali Khan, ushered Noor Bano into the car.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Meeting Bunty Chor ...
For two months, we kept trying to meet, even see Bunty Chor. When I first started out, I didn't know who this Bunty Chor was. But over chai and internet searches, I heard numerous tales about Bunty from fellow crime reporters.
The whole story was reported over the course of two months, while I continued doing other stories. A few times I got lucky but most of the time was spent waiting, hoping that prison officials would let me see Bunty.
Meanwhile, we talked to the police, to the neighbors who had never seen Bunty but sort of seemed happy that Bunty was a star, and to jail officials.
The story is a reconstruction of all that they said.
We also got to meet Bunty. I just kept calling the Tihar Jail to fix an appointment and finally one Monday morning, I got lucky. I saw him finally in Tihar jail and the story could have been nothing but about the process of meeting him, and demystifying the super chor.
An edited version was published in the Sunday Section in the Indian Express on April 26, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
Through the maze of dangling cobwebs, and through the dusty iron grilles in the dimly-lit prison cell, Bunty Chor smiled, hesitantly, the corners of his mouth stretching slowly, unsure at first, and then came the full smile.
He didn’t ask me who I was, or why I came. He just began talking, explaining he wasn’t the famous Super Chor, the man who gave Delhi police sleepless nights, and who stole with such efficiency and charm that the cops love him, and the journalists are smitten by him.
Outside, the sun shone a pale yellow. Some of that light filtered in through the door at the back and the corridor smelt like damp, dusty book covers.
Against the light, Devender Sharma, 38, looked tired. He is balding, his cheeks have sunk deeper than what his picture in the police files showed them, and his collarbone is prominent. And he looks far from the image we had of him, an image that was constructed through conversations with the police and the reporters – a good looking thief who spoke fluent English, could imitate accents and had a girlfriend who was so pretty that she outshone even India’s most dazzling woman, Aishwarya Rai’s beauty.
On that Friday evening, when the sun beat down and the hours stretched endlessly, and the policemen stood around me, laughing, Bunty Chor almost convinced me he was a rambling madman.
After all, Bunty Chor, a Class IX dropout, is a conman, master at it, too, and I was just beginning. I did not know how to talk with him. At first, I treated him like Bunty Chor himself, asked him about why he did what he did, if life in prison was tough, to which he of course said “yes”, so that by getting familiar with him, I might get him to narrate his life freely. I asked him about the UTV film, asked him if he indeed asked for compensation, but the look of bewilderment on his face, wasn’t encouraging at all. So, I asked him what did heaven look like.
“It’s peaceful. You don’t feel hungry there. I have been there many times. The entrance is through a man’s body merged with a female’s body,” he said. “You see, it is inside me.”
The word heaven must have a consoling ring for him. He used it often. Maybe he was confused by the horror of what was ahead. Or perhaps, he was just pretending to be insane, carefully sticking to his convoluted conversation, not digressing even once.
Then he began to ramble, his eyes shifting, dancing, wild, yet tragic.
At first he told me he wanted to build a submarine. Yes, that’s what he wanted to do after he got out of the prison. Then, he whispered that the submarine would fly too, crisscrossing the skies, free in its path, chasing its destinations – London, America, Africa, everywhere.
”No, don’t call me Bunty. Bunty is dead. I am 130 years old. I have no name,” he said, his eyes scanning the faces of the policemen standing across him. “They are all against me,” he said.
He was caught in Chennai. They called him Hari Thapa. He had romped and kicked but no, Rajinder Singh, the SHO of Lodhi Road police station, kidnapped him, brought him to Tihar’s high security prison because the they were all conspiring against him, in fact the whole universe had turned against him, and they didn’t believe in
extraordinary powers of producing gem stones.
He doesn’t like the prison life, he said.
“It is uncomfortable. It is confining. And I have other things waiting. I want to build an aeroplane, a submarine,” he said.
Around me, the policemen laughed. But Bunty held his ground. His imagination never shorted out. In the dark, narrow cell bound by rusted iron rods, he gave his dreams too much running room. In between his submarine dreams and the lament over his stolen Kohinoor diamonds, Bunty had created a happy conspiracy for himself out of which he doesn’t want to step out.
Except at love perhaps, Bunty was lucky at everything else. He had amassed huge wealth, tagged at Rs. 6 crores, lived in expensive hotels, drove luxury cars, one of which fashioned like the famed Batman’s car where on pressing a remote control button, the backdoors opened and the seat pushed forward and he could stack his loot
effortlessly. He handled his money about as carelessly as he ran his life. And then he fell in love. He showered Jyoti with expensive gifts, including a diamond set that the police said they let her keep because nobody had come to claim it. But his beloved dumped him. And he was miserable, and cried often, Rajinder Singh said.
“If she would have stuck to him, he would have quit stealing. He told me when we talked about his life. He loved her,” he said.
But that afternoon, Bunty denied his love too. Yes, he had a Nepali wife, but he has to find her after he gets out of the prison, he said.
I had been warned that Bunty Chor was pretending to be insane, yet another of famed ploys to get out of jail. He had given the police a slip before on numerous occasions. In 1993, when he was arrested in New Delhi, he managed to run away from the office of Special Staff. In Chennai, where he was subsequently caught, he ate glass pieces in judicial custody and managed to get admitted in the government
hospital. Using a disposable syringe, he freed himself from the handcuffs. Twenty days later, at Chandigarh, he escaped by picking up a scooter of one of the sub-inspectors. Later he caught at Bangalore while trying to dispose off his loot and remained in custody until 1998 and then in Belgaon till October 2000. But he continued on the stealing spree, stealing anything he fancied, a dog, expensive
cutlery, watches, jewelry, anything. He didn’t need the money but he did it for the challenge or perhaps for the lack of anything better to do.
He was arrested later in 2002 after he committed more than 200 cases of theft. This was when Rajinder Singh first arrested him. And that’s when his girlfriend dumped him. That’s when Rs. 5 crores worth of goods were recovered.
Rajinder Singh can never forget the little auction they had at the police station when the victims came to claim their loot.
“Bunty remembered each loot, where it was from, who owned it before he did and he distributed it all himself,” he said. “He had such sharp memory.”
For two months, we had been trying to meet the famous Bunty Chor. The press had written about him in great detail. They made him a star, made him the enigmatic figure who stole because he needed to. His first theft was a loaf of bread. He was hungry then, and young too, a fellow journalist said.
“Then it became a habit, almost an obsession as if he was trying to prove himself,” he said.
But then, Bunty Chor sort of faded from public memory. Well, not exactly. Script writers came scouting for his story. Then Bunty Aur Babli was released. And then came Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! where the thief has an uncanny resemblance to Bunty Chor and the cop is Rajinder Singh somewhat.
“That’s his story. No two ways about it,” Rajinder Singh said.
But in the last one-and-a-half years, Bunty who is in Tihar’s Jail No. 4, a high security prison, since 2007, nobody came to see him.
“I can let you see Afzal Guru, but I can’t let you see Bunty Chor,” the Director General of Prisons BK Gupta said when we first approached him, flashing our press cards, requesting him to let us see him once, if only for a few seconds.
We hit the wall. We tried everything from sending in questions to jail officials to touring the city, hoping to find Bunty in people’s stories, neighbors’ tales, anywhere.
In Vikaspuri, where Bunty’s mother lived years ago, a group of children were playing cricket. When they heard “Bunty Chor”, they started humming songs from the film Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, the movie that police claim is based on Bunty’s life.
“Yes, he is from here. But we have never seen him. So what? We have seen the film,” a boy, hardly 10-years-old, said. “He is the super chor.”
And they giggled. They seemed proud of his feats. It made the cramped middle-class locality, one of the many in the ever-sprawling Delhi, famous/infamous.
Bunty has more than 550 cases of theft and burglaries against him.
Like Robin Hood, the archetypal thief in English folklore, Bunty Chor is almost a legend. Over tea, inside police stations, or outside newspaper offices, he is talked about often.
“Bunty stole for the kick of it. He picked out his car, and if it was in between two cars, he would break into the other two, park them on the side, then drive the favorite one out, park it, then park the other two in their spots, and drive away,” Rajinder Singh said. “That is how he was. He was stylish.”
Once, at Taj Hotel in Mumbai, he joined a foreigner at the hotel’s discotheque and picked up his laptop, documents and $1,500 while he was busy reading newspaper. He once attempted to steal a Rolex watch worth more than Rs. 9 lakhs from a five-star hotel in Bangalore. In yet another incident, when confronted with a Rottweiler, a ferocious dog, he threw chunks of chicken at the dog. The dog kept to his food. The man, who owned it, later lamented saying the dog was no good.
And once, attempting to break into a house, he saw the daughter watching porn on her laptop. He told her, hanging from the window, that it wasn’t right. The girl, ashamed, let him steal.
Such tales are numerous.
On that afternoon, while we waited to see our Robin Hood, we negotiated with the constables to let us in without proper ids. When I flashed my New York State driver’s license, they thought I was an advocate. They let me in, spoke with me in broken English, and made fun of my name. When Zahid Rafiz, another reporter, shoed his J&K election card, they dismissed it. But they relented.
We sat there waiting for the man to open the cell. A Sikh man, who sang “Singh is King” walked up to us. He looked like he knew the prison well. He looked comfortable there. We had just taken to a corner.
“You are new here,” Jujhar Singh said.
Of course we were. He had spent seven years in Tihar’s Jail No. 2 for a murder case, he told us.
We asked him how it was inside the jail.
“Oh, there is television, there’s everything,” he said. “But I don’t miss it.”
We askd him if he saw Bunty Chor ever.
“Who is he? The Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! guy?,” he asked.
“Yes, yes,” we said.
“You know him? How?,” he threw another question at us.
“Yes, I am his childhood friend,” I said.
Then, we walked to where Bunty was lodged. And we paced up and down, in anticipation, studying the visitors, though there weren’t many of them, trying to accustom our eyes to the dim lighting.
“Bunty Chor aa gaya,” someone shouted.
And then we see the man we have been chasing ever since. I take out the crumpled paper from my pocket and attempt to scribble. But his rambling is too suave, too fast, too smart for me to arrest it all on paper.
“Madam, tell them to release me. I have to go to London. That’s where I am from,” he said. “Give me you number. I will call once I am out of here.”
He never asked my name.
Form the police office - the view from the other side
“Bunty is a Super Chor. I am the Super Cop.”
Bunty Chor, a Class IX dropout, got lucky once with Lodhi Road SHO Rajinder Singh.
In 2002, the Delhi police had formed special teams, relied on surveillance cameras, and informers throughout the NCR region. When they finally got him, it was almost by fluke. Bunty slammed the door on them. It was a tip off by some neighbor in Noida that there is this businessman who goes out only in the nights and the police went
knocking on the door. When he shut the door, the police got suspicious and broke into the house but not before the super thief had called the 100 number saying that strange men were there to get him.
So they got him. Bunty then served his full conviction. But through his term, he struck a bond with Singh, who still swears by Bunty’s good character.
Leaning against the chair in his office, with coffee in tiny bone china cup in one hand, Singh’s eyes wander, then rest upon the window on the other side of the room, a strange glimmer in them, as he sets out to narrate his tryst with the city’s most-loved thief. The coffee gets cold, the layers form on the froth, but Singh doesn’t notice.
“He was totally a different character. He had a typical style. He stole only what he liked,” he said. “But he was such a humane character. I was never disgusted with him. And let me add, very intelligent too. When you deal with a genius thief, you got to plan. It was a great challenge for us.”
But Bunty got him too. They had long conversations. They discussed his style, his passions, his girlfriend, everything. He accepted his crime, confessed too. The police never had to raise their hands.
And the more they discussed, the more Singh got to like him, or so he thought. When Bunty got out of the prison in 2006, he had promised Singh that he would lead a straight life.
Then, one day, Bunty called Singh to tell him he was going to Mumbai to try his luck in Bolllywood. Singh was happy. Finally, the thief was converting.
But no, the super chor gave him the slip.
The Defence colony car thefts happened and Singh knew by instinct it was Bunty who was behind the thefts and the chase began. Yet, Bunty kept calling him, and the two kept talking, one running from the other, the other out to get him. In many ways, it was an ego thing.
Bunty had told Singh he wanted to help the police, that he had found enlightenment. But of course, none of this was true. Bunty was at its classic best, Singh said.
Incidents of thefts of luxury cars from Deefnce Colony, New Friends Colony, Hauz Khas and Malviya Nagar were reported.
“It was in the typical Bunty style. He had a thing for nice cars, the luxury cars, all good things in life,” he said. “You should have seen his girlfriend. She looks better than all the Bollywood women. She can put them to shame.”
He even went to Nepal, found himself a girlfriend, and met Charles Shobhraj. Meanwhile the police, led by Singh, fretted, drew plans, and hoped to nab him once again.
Delhi police and the South District put together all their resources, and sent out teams all over India, tracking his movements.
Bunty Chor was last released from jail in October 2006 for 42 cases of burglaries. After getting out, he spread his network to different cities in India and even abroad.
But on April 6, 2007, he came to Delhi from Chennai at 5 p.m. intending to commit crime and was arrested. The police recovered a Rado watch, four stolen laptops, clothes, diamond and gold jewelry, and one passport in the name of Hari Thapa.
“See Bunty was too smart,” Singh said. “But we were smarter. And by 2007, he was a spent cartridge.”
Singh has it all by heart. And he begins to list the interesting cases. Bunty Chor once stole a Honda Civic and fixed a red light that belonged to another car, and fixed it on top of the stolen car and crossed the Gujarat border and stole the Rado watch and an ATM card from which he withdrew Rs. 35,000. But when he went to withdraw more to another booth, the owner turned up.
“Bunty told him to register a complaint with the police when the owner told him about the theft. And then left the car there and boarded a three-wheeler and escaped,” Singh said. “He never lost his calm.”
That’s why perhaps it was difficult to catch him.
When they met in 2007, Singh and Bunty exchanged glances. The game was over for Singh. He got him once again.
But in court, Bunty, the conman, played yet another trick. To a crowd of young girls who wanted to have a glimpse of the handsome thief, of journalists, and of police, he acted bizarre to prove he had an unstable mind.
A journalist who was there at Patiala Court at the time, said, she almost believed him. But the police knew better. Bunty Chor still has many cases pending against him. According to prison records, there are at least 12 cases against him.
He spends his time reading the Geeta and other texts and talks philosophy.
Long ago, his parents disowned him. The police never knocked at their doors again.
Every night, Bunty shouts in the cell, asking for help. He blames the police for attempting to kill him, and writes a letter to the judge at Patiala Court everyday seeking respite. But then, the cops are done with it. They send him for regular check ups to the hospital.
And they still discuss his thefts, and laugh at the helpless man, who rambles.
“He is trying too hard,” Singh said. “We won’t be hoodwinked this time.”
For Singh, the chase has ended for now. And he gets back to his coffee.
“There would be no other like him,” he said. “It was fun catching him.”
But as Bunty once told the court.
"Police and I are pitched in a football game. Sometimes they score the goal. at other times, I win."
The whole story was reported over the course of two months, while I continued doing other stories. A few times I got lucky but most of the time was spent waiting, hoping that prison officials would let me see Bunty.
Meanwhile, we talked to the police, to the neighbors who had never seen Bunty but sort of seemed happy that Bunty was a star, and to jail officials.
The story is a reconstruction of all that they said.
We also got to meet Bunty. I just kept calling the Tihar Jail to fix an appointment and finally one Monday morning, I got lucky. I saw him finally in Tihar jail and the story could have been nothing but about the process of meeting him, and demystifying the super chor.
An edited version was published in the Sunday Section in the Indian Express on April 26, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
Through the maze of dangling cobwebs, and through the dusty iron grilles in the dimly-lit prison cell, Bunty Chor smiled, hesitantly, the corners of his mouth stretching slowly, unsure at first, and then came the full smile.
He didn’t ask me who I was, or why I came. He just began talking, explaining he wasn’t the famous Super Chor, the man who gave Delhi police sleepless nights, and who stole with such efficiency and charm that the cops love him, and the journalists are smitten by him.
Outside, the sun shone a pale yellow. Some of that light filtered in through the door at the back and the corridor smelt like damp, dusty book covers.
Against the light, Devender Sharma, 38, looked tired. He is balding, his cheeks have sunk deeper than what his picture in the police files showed them, and his collarbone is prominent. And he looks far from the image we had of him, an image that was constructed through conversations with the police and the reporters – a good looking thief who spoke fluent English, could imitate accents and had a girlfriend who was so pretty that she outshone even India’s most dazzling woman, Aishwarya Rai’s beauty.
On that Friday evening, when the sun beat down and the hours stretched endlessly, and the policemen stood around me, laughing, Bunty Chor almost convinced me he was a rambling madman.
After all, Bunty Chor, a Class IX dropout, is a conman, master at it, too, and I was just beginning. I did not know how to talk with him. At first, I treated him like Bunty Chor himself, asked him about why he did what he did, if life in prison was tough, to which he of course said “yes”, so that by getting familiar with him, I might get him to narrate his life freely. I asked him about the UTV film, asked him if he indeed asked for compensation, but the look of bewilderment on his face, wasn’t encouraging at all. So, I asked him what did heaven look like.
“It’s peaceful. You don’t feel hungry there. I have been there many times. The entrance is through a man’s body merged with a female’s body,” he said. “You see, it is inside me.”
The word heaven must have a consoling ring for him. He used it often. Maybe he was confused by the horror of what was ahead. Or perhaps, he was just pretending to be insane, carefully sticking to his convoluted conversation, not digressing even once.
Then he began to ramble, his eyes shifting, dancing, wild, yet tragic.
At first he told me he wanted to build a submarine. Yes, that’s what he wanted to do after he got out of the prison. Then, he whispered that the submarine would fly too, crisscrossing the skies, free in its path, chasing its destinations – London, America, Africa, everywhere.
”No, don’t call me Bunty. Bunty is dead. I am 130 years old. I have no name,” he said, his eyes scanning the faces of the policemen standing across him. “They are all against me,” he said.
He was caught in Chennai. They called him Hari Thapa. He had romped and kicked but no, Rajinder Singh, the SHO of Lodhi Road police station, kidnapped him, brought him to Tihar’s high security prison because the they were all conspiring against him, in fact the whole universe had turned against him, and they didn’t believe in
extraordinary powers of producing gem stones.
He doesn’t like the prison life, he said.
“It is uncomfortable. It is confining. And I have other things waiting. I want to build an aeroplane, a submarine,” he said.
Around me, the policemen laughed. But Bunty held his ground. His imagination never shorted out. In the dark, narrow cell bound by rusted iron rods, he gave his dreams too much running room. In between his submarine dreams and the lament over his stolen Kohinoor diamonds, Bunty had created a happy conspiracy for himself out of which he doesn’t want to step out.
Except at love perhaps, Bunty was lucky at everything else. He had amassed huge wealth, tagged at Rs. 6 crores, lived in expensive hotels, drove luxury cars, one of which fashioned like the famed Batman’s car where on pressing a remote control button, the backdoors opened and the seat pushed forward and he could stack his loot
effortlessly. He handled his money about as carelessly as he ran his life. And then he fell in love. He showered Jyoti with expensive gifts, including a diamond set that the police said they let her keep because nobody had come to claim it. But his beloved dumped him. And he was miserable, and cried often, Rajinder Singh said.
“If she would have stuck to him, he would have quit stealing. He told me when we talked about his life. He loved her,” he said.
But that afternoon, Bunty denied his love too. Yes, he had a Nepali wife, but he has to find her after he gets out of the prison, he said.
I had been warned that Bunty Chor was pretending to be insane, yet another of famed ploys to get out of jail. He had given the police a slip before on numerous occasions. In 1993, when he was arrested in New Delhi, he managed to run away from the office of Special Staff. In Chennai, where he was subsequently caught, he ate glass pieces in judicial custody and managed to get admitted in the government
hospital. Using a disposable syringe, he freed himself from the handcuffs. Twenty days later, at Chandigarh, he escaped by picking up a scooter of one of the sub-inspectors. Later he caught at Bangalore while trying to dispose off his loot and remained in custody until 1998 and then in Belgaon till October 2000. But he continued on the stealing spree, stealing anything he fancied, a dog, expensive
cutlery, watches, jewelry, anything. He didn’t need the money but he did it for the challenge or perhaps for the lack of anything better to do.
He was arrested later in 2002 after he committed more than 200 cases of theft. This was when Rajinder Singh first arrested him. And that’s when his girlfriend dumped him. That’s when Rs. 5 crores worth of goods were recovered.
Rajinder Singh can never forget the little auction they had at the police station when the victims came to claim their loot.
“Bunty remembered each loot, where it was from, who owned it before he did and he distributed it all himself,” he said. “He had such sharp memory.”
For two months, we had been trying to meet the famous Bunty Chor. The press had written about him in great detail. They made him a star, made him the enigmatic figure who stole because he needed to. His first theft was a loaf of bread. He was hungry then, and young too, a fellow journalist said.
“Then it became a habit, almost an obsession as if he was trying to prove himself,” he said.
But then, Bunty Chor sort of faded from public memory. Well, not exactly. Script writers came scouting for his story. Then Bunty Aur Babli was released. And then came Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! where the thief has an uncanny resemblance to Bunty Chor and the cop is Rajinder Singh somewhat.
“That’s his story. No two ways about it,” Rajinder Singh said.
But in the last one-and-a-half years, Bunty who is in Tihar’s Jail No. 4, a high security prison, since 2007, nobody came to see him.
“I can let you see Afzal Guru, but I can’t let you see Bunty Chor,” the Director General of Prisons BK Gupta said when we first approached him, flashing our press cards, requesting him to let us see him once, if only for a few seconds.
We hit the wall. We tried everything from sending in questions to jail officials to touring the city, hoping to find Bunty in people’s stories, neighbors’ tales, anywhere.
In Vikaspuri, where Bunty’s mother lived years ago, a group of children were playing cricket. When they heard “Bunty Chor”, they started humming songs from the film Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, the movie that police claim is based on Bunty’s life.
“Yes, he is from here. But we have never seen him. So what? We have seen the film,” a boy, hardly 10-years-old, said. “He is the super chor.”
And they giggled. They seemed proud of his feats. It made the cramped middle-class locality, one of the many in the ever-sprawling Delhi, famous/infamous.
Bunty has more than 550 cases of theft and burglaries against him.
Like Robin Hood, the archetypal thief in English folklore, Bunty Chor is almost a legend. Over tea, inside police stations, or outside newspaper offices, he is talked about often.
“Bunty stole for the kick of it. He picked out his car, and if it was in between two cars, he would break into the other two, park them on the side, then drive the favorite one out, park it, then park the other two in their spots, and drive away,” Rajinder Singh said. “That is how he was. He was stylish.”
Once, at Taj Hotel in Mumbai, he joined a foreigner at the hotel’s discotheque and picked up his laptop, documents and $1,500 while he was busy reading newspaper. He once attempted to steal a Rolex watch worth more than Rs. 9 lakhs from a five-star hotel in Bangalore. In yet another incident, when confronted with a Rottweiler, a ferocious dog, he threw chunks of chicken at the dog. The dog kept to his food. The man, who owned it, later lamented saying the dog was no good.
And once, attempting to break into a house, he saw the daughter watching porn on her laptop. He told her, hanging from the window, that it wasn’t right. The girl, ashamed, let him steal.
Such tales are numerous.
On that afternoon, while we waited to see our Robin Hood, we negotiated with the constables to let us in without proper ids. When I flashed my New York State driver’s license, they thought I was an advocate. They let me in, spoke with me in broken English, and made fun of my name. When Zahid Rafiz, another reporter, shoed his J&K election card, they dismissed it. But they relented.
We sat there waiting for the man to open the cell. A Sikh man, who sang “Singh is King” walked up to us. He looked like he knew the prison well. He looked comfortable there. We had just taken to a corner.
“You are new here,” Jujhar Singh said.
Of course we were. He had spent seven years in Tihar’s Jail No. 2 for a murder case, he told us.
We asked him how it was inside the jail.
“Oh, there is television, there’s everything,” he said. “But I don’t miss it.”
We askd him if he saw Bunty Chor ever.
“Who is he? The Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! guy?,” he asked.
“Yes, yes,” we said.
“You know him? How?,” he threw another question at us.
“Yes, I am his childhood friend,” I said.
Then, we walked to where Bunty was lodged. And we paced up and down, in anticipation, studying the visitors, though there weren’t many of them, trying to accustom our eyes to the dim lighting.
“Bunty Chor aa gaya,” someone shouted.
And then we see the man we have been chasing ever since. I take out the crumpled paper from my pocket and attempt to scribble. But his rambling is too suave, too fast, too smart for me to arrest it all on paper.
“Madam, tell them to release me. I have to go to London. That’s where I am from,” he said. “Give me you number. I will call once I am out of here.”
He never asked my name.
Form the police office - the view from the other side
“Bunty is a Super Chor. I am the Super Cop.”
Bunty Chor, a Class IX dropout, got lucky once with Lodhi Road SHO Rajinder Singh.
In 2002, the Delhi police had formed special teams, relied on surveillance cameras, and informers throughout the NCR region. When they finally got him, it was almost by fluke. Bunty slammed the door on them. It was a tip off by some neighbor in Noida that there is this businessman who goes out only in the nights and the police went
knocking on the door. When he shut the door, the police got suspicious and broke into the house but not before the super thief had called the 100 number saying that strange men were there to get him.
So they got him. Bunty then served his full conviction. But through his term, he struck a bond with Singh, who still swears by Bunty’s good character.
Leaning against the chair in his office, with coffee in tiny bone china cup in one hand, Singh’s eyes wander, then rest upon the window on the other side of the room, a strange glimmer in them, as he sets out to narrate his tryst with the city’s most-loved thief. The coffee gets cold, the layers form on the froth, but Singh doesn’t notice.
“He was totally a different character. He had a typical style. He stole only what he liked,” he said. “But he was such a humane character. I was never disgusted with him. And let me add, very intelligent too. When you deal with a genius thief, you got to plan. It was a great challenge for us.”
But Bunty got him too. They had long conversations. They discussed his style, his passions, his girlfriend, everything. He accepted his crime, confessed too. The police never had to raise their hands.
And the more they discussed, the more Singh got to like him, or so he thought. When Bunty got out of the prison in 2006, he had promised Singh that he would lead a straight life.
Then, one day, Bunty called Singh to tell him he was going to Mumbai to try his luck in Bolllywood. Singh was happy. Finally, the thief was converting.
But no, the super chor gave him the slip.
The Defence colony car thefts happened and Singh knew by instinct it was Bunty who was behind the thefts and the chase began. Yet, Bunty kept calling him, and the two kept talking, one running from the other, the other out to get him. In many ways, it was an ego thing.
Bunty had told Singh he wanted to help the police, that he had found enlightenment. But of course, none of this was true. Bunty was at its classic best, Singh said.
Incidents of thefts of luxury cars from Deefnce Colony, New Friends Colony, Hauz Khas and Malviya Nagar were reported.
“It was in the typical Bunty style. He had a thing for nice cars, the luxury cars, all good things in life,” he said. “You should have seen his girlfriend. She looks better than all the Bollywood women. She can put them to shame.”
He even went to Nepal, found himself a girlfriend, and met Charles Shobhraj. Meanwhile the police, led by Singh, fretted, drew plans, and hoped to nab him once again.
Delhi police and the South District put together all their resources, and sent out teams all over India, tracking his movements.
Bunty Chor was last released from jail in October 2006 for 42 cases of burglaries. After getting out, he spread his network to different cities in India and even abroad.
But on April 6, 2007, he came to Delhi from Chennai at 5 p.m. intending to commit crime and was arrested. The police recovered a Rado watch, four stolen laptops, clothes, diamond and gold jewelry, and one passport in the name of Hari Thapa.
“See Bunty was too smart,” Singh said. “But we were smarter. And by 2007, he was a spent cartridge.”
Singh has it all by heart. And he begins to list the interesting cases. Bunty Chor once stole a Honda Civic and fixed a red light that belonged to another car, and fixed it on top of the stolen car and crossed the Gujarat border and stole the Rado watch and an ATM card from which he withdrew Rs. 35,000. But when he went to withdraw more to another booth, the owner turned up.
“Bunty told him to register a complaint with the police when the owner told him about the theft. And then left the car there and boarded a three-wheeler and escaped,” Singh said. “He never lost his calm.”
That’s why perhaps it was difficult to catch him.
When they met in 2007, Singh and Bunty exchanged glances. The game was over for Singh. He got him once again.
But in court, Bunty, the conman, played yet another trick. To a crowd of young girls who wanted to have a glimpse of the handsome thief, of journalists, and of police, he acted bizarre to prove he had an unstable mind.
A journalist who was there at Patiala Court at the time, said, she almost believed him. But the police knew better. Bunty Chor still has many cases pending against him. According to prison records, there are at least 12 cases against him.
He spends his time reading the Geeta and other texts and talks philosophy.
Long ago, his parents disowned him. The police never knocked at their doors again.
Every night, Bunty shouts in the cell, asking for help. He blames the police for attempting to kill him, and writes a letter to the judge at Patiala Court everyday seeking respite. But then, the cops are done with it. They send him for regular check ups to the hospital.
And they still discuss his thefts, and laugh at the helpless man, who rambles.
“He is trying too hard,” Singh said. “We won’t be hoodwinked this time.”
For Singh, the chase has ended for now. And he gets back to his coffee.
“There would be no other like him,” he said. “It was fun catching him.”
But as Bunty once told the court.
"Police and I are pitched in a football game. Sometimes they score the goal. at other times, I win."
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