THE LAND OF MANY MAJORITIES

It was probably 1972-73 or a year later. The East Zone Inter University Cricket tournament was being hosted by Patna University .  Semi finals. Patna University versus Sagar University ,Madhya Pradesh.  The hosts usually played at the Engineering College ground. Sagar 114 all out in the first innings, Patna falling a run behind. The partisan crowd became restless, umpires were threatened, and when Patna batted in the second innings, the crowd ate up a couple of meters of ground inside the boundary to make it shorter and  intimidate the opposition fielders . Patna finally won, actually they even went on to beat Calcutta University in the finals for the first time though later when the All India Inter Zonal matches were played, Patna were thrashed by Bangalore University who rode on a stylish century by Michael Dalvi. Probably Delhi University , captained by Mohinder Amarnath won the Rohinton Baria Trophy. 

To  come back to the Patna- Sagar clash. It was rumoured that the visitors  went back  not only with a defeat but also with a lot of black-eyes, bruises and gashes for having had the gall to overtake Patna in the first innings.  This wasn’t quite contrary to the image one had of Patna University guys, I never thought there were bigger rangbaajs among students than the bhaiyyas of Patna University. However, a year later,  when Patna University went to Ravi Shankar University to play the inter university hockey tournament,  the honours were returned with interest . I remember spotting Mohan Bhaiya, the Big Dada  of our mohalla , returning with his right eye bandaged, the left hand in in a sling  and in acute and embarrassing pain as the knife inflicted wounds on the haunches had not healed for quite some time. This was my first lesson in the shifting world of home advantage which one sees all around.

Take the case of the position of the Governor of a state  in the pecking order or what is also phrased with that militaristic pomp - Warrant of Precedence. As the Governor moves from his state to another, he slips from fourth to a lowly eight, from being above the Lok Sabha Speaker and ex- President down to  even below the Leader of opposition in the two Houses of Parliament. Now this is pretty bad considering that the post of the Leader of opposition has become so cattle class-ish that the Lok Sabha is not even having one! The India Test cricketers get whitewashed  abroad, but in India the Board prepares such turners that beating them in home conditions is, in the words of the most successful captain in cricket’s history , Steve Waugh, almost an insurmountable “final frontier”. Of course, Waugh would not bat an eyelid when curators in  his country prepare hard tops to play chin music on visiting teams, especially from the sub continent.

Home advantage is not just about territory, it is also about ganging up in numbers. After getting repeatedly walloped by the Asian giants, the European constituents,  who were in a majority in International Hockey Federation,  used the advantage of numbers to introduce such changes that totally altered the game from being skill centric to stamina intensive. Since 1972 , no Asian nation has won the gold in at the Olympics except India in 1980 in the much boycotted Moscow Olympics, and now after a judgement of the Hon’ble Mumbai High Court blazing a glorious trail of judicial empathy, it seems that the game may not be played at all on the water guzzling astro turfs in large parts of the country.

Nowhere the game of numbers is as dominant as it is in the world of  Indian politics, that wonderful vocation which, through a white khadi  membrane, osmotically acquires all that it reaches out to in the  Survival of the Craftiest. Numbers have given rise to such props like Majority and Minority that politics  would be nakedly incomplete without them, as it  would be without Swiss banks and vote banks. For far too long  these props have been used as fixed, cast-in-stone, frozen- in- time -and-space constructs by a large majority of political commentators - be they of the old EPW or Seminar type or of the burgeoning ranks of paid media or even celebrities from the world of cinema, award returnees and academia. For long unchallenged, there is now a frontal assault on them,especially after demographic changes resulted in majoritarianization of minorities in large parts of the country, from Right- wing and socially conservative intellectuals and many what have been dubbed as fringe elements, khaki knickerwalas ( who could be undergoing a sartorial revolution in a short while to a become full patloonwalas) , Akhand Bharat dreamers and the back- to- the- Vedas and put-the -clock-back scientists.The latter argue that majority and minority are a matter of context in terms of time and space, almost like the shifting sand dunes - what is a majority at the national level may not be so at the state or district levels.

The country continues to undergo convulsions as its many " local" majorities unleash a wide array of centrifugal forces . Affluent caste reservationists, majorities against a uniform civil code, majorities who want to ban beef, majorities who are sharminda because Afzal Guru's qatils are zinda, majorities of moral policemen and policewomen, the prove-your-patriotism Bharat Mata ki jai majorities, the azadi majorities, the colour majorities of left, tricolour, blue and saffron in universities, the majorities of the Lok Sabha, the majorities of the Rajya Sabha, majorities of tax evaders and loan defaulters, majorities of land grabbers, majorities of land encroachers and proxy voters , you name it, there are majorities everywhere , of all types- you can add as many as an innovative chef does to a sizzler. And if you feel stifled by being in the party with a majority because your vocal chords are not exercising enough, you can always lose elections and join the opposition to block the Parliament and the GST to give the new majority a taste of its own medicine.

The train was filled with kar sevaks returning from Ayodhya when a few bogies were burnt by a riotous mob of Muslims at Godhra. The other day I was reading an extract from Bhisham Sahini’s We Have Arrived In Amritsar in my friend Amitava Kumar's column in the magazine Brunch about a frail and nervous- looking babu. Having tolerated  barbs and jibes by three Pathan traders while the train was passing through predominantly Muslim areas , he takes out an iron rod in vengeance and hits a poor Muslim trying to enter the train which had by now reached Sikh Amritsar. The Sonbhadra Express in 1982-83 , on way to Patna after yet another vacation in Delhi University had begun , was filled up with Patna- bound students from a Delhi college founded by Late Shri Krishan Dassji Gurwale, just across the street in front of St. Stephen’s College. A few boys picked up a small fight with someone  from Aligarh. It was a kind of moving home advantage for the Patna- bound guys but they had miscalculated. This person from Aligarh who was neither  Muslim nor homophobic, managed to send word to Aligarh . When the train stopped at Aligarh, the Bihari boys were given a sound thrashing, the stories told with much mirth and glee by the other Biharis who had managed to escape detection, either by hiding inside the toilets or switching from hum to mai .

In all the three cases, despite the huge numbers inside, the home advantage lay with those who were in a majority outside.When the train starts from Howrah, local pressures pounce upon it. The Bengali dadas flex their muscles till Asansol only to respectfully leave the seats they have forcibly occupied from cowering Biharis and Upites as soon as the train enters Dhanbad. The Biharis have a field day, but only  till Mughalsarai. So great is the fear that as soon as the train crosses Kanpur,  the Bihari mastaans even shift  their  haunches to accommodate the Aligarh, Mathura, Agra and Tundla locals. And yes, no one fights with the vendors who can wake you up at any odd hour and pull the chain to disembark at unscheduled stops. Actually the journey in long distance trains in India, marked by the surge and ebb of home advantages of various groups, could probably symbolise  the journey of our Constitution. As the trains pass through the Gangetic countryside, diseases of sexual inadequacy, night fall, erectile dysfunction and low sperm count appear scrawled in lime on red brick walls all along the countryside the trains pass through - kamzori, swapnadosh, sheegrahpatan, nil shukranu . These could be as well termed "constitutional" diseases ! India is , indeed, a land of many majorities, now left with a very small, silent and subdued minority.