[Reader-list] Denizens of darkness BISHWANATH GHOSH

[Vinay Baindur]

http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-sundaymagazine/article2884459.ece



Denizens of darknessBISHWANATH GHOSH


As Uttar Pradesh goes to the polls, Bishwanath Ghosh revisits its biggest
city, Kanpur, and speaks to a disillusioned citizenry that knows nothing is
going to change — even if the mills have given way to malls. As Uttar
Pradesh goes to the polls, Bishwanath Ghosh revisits its biggest city,
Kanpur, and speaks to a disillusioned citizenry that knows nothing is going
to change — even if the mills have given way to malls.
[image: Witness to a city's fortunes:The historic Sarsaiyya Ghat on the
banks of the Ganga.Photos: Bishwanath Ghosh]
Witness to a city's fortunes:The historic Sarsaiyya Ghat on the banks of
the Ganga.Photos: Bishwanath Ghosh
RELATED
PHOTOS[image: Gone silent:The Muir Mills, one of the many that have shut
down.]<http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-sundaymagazine/article2884459.ece?viewImage=1>[image:
New landmark:Bara Chauraha, the nerve centre of Kanpur. In the background
is Z Square, the city's newest
mall.]<http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-sundaymagazine/article2884459.ece?viewImage=2>[image:
Does anyone really care?Staging a sit-in outside the Elgin Mill gate. The
board shows it is the 3,176th day of their sit-in;Having dosa at Parade
Chauraha.]<http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-sundaymagazine/article2884459.ece?viewImage=3><http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-sundaymagazine/article2884459.ece?viewImage=4>

Ifound it a little strange at first to hear the name of Kanpur being
announced at the Delhi airport. I had never flown to Kanpur before, even
though I was born in the city 41 years ago, and spent the first 22 years of
my life there and after that have been paying the annual visit home. Kanpur
is a city you take the train to — that's how I always saw it — and now, for
the first time, I was flying into it.

The New Delhi-Kanpur-New Delhi service of Air India was started in 2005 at
the initiative of Union Minister Sriprakash Jaiswal, who represents Kanpur
in the Lok Sabha. But the sector turned out to be far from lucrative — on
the inaugural day, I am told, only two people flew from Kanpur to Delhi,
one of them being Jaiswal himself — and since then, from time to time, the
service has either remained suspended or the sector altered in the hope of
attracting more passengers.

So when the familiar female voice at New Delhi's T3 announced, ‘Air India
announces the departure of its flight to Kanpur', a part of me kept
wondering if this was real. My doubts were firmly laid to rest once I
boarded the bus to the tarmac: the man standing next to me fished out a tin
box of *pan masala* from his pocket, tore open the metal seal and threw it
on the floor of the bus, and dropped two large spoonfuls of the contents
into his eagerly-open mouth. In the plane, he used the sick bag as a
spittoon. I knew I was going to Kanpur.

*The more things change*

Kanpur is the city of *pan masala* . Every other moment you see someone
tearing open a pouch of *pan masala* and emptying the contents into his
mouth — just like the autorickshaw driver did when I approached him after a
longish walk out of the airport, after having personally extricated my bag
from the belly of the aircraft. My father, when he heard I was flying down,
had asked me, “Should I send the car? I am not sure if you will find
transport from the airport.” Not wanting to bother him, I had replied,
“Don't worry. I am sure there will be taxis.” He was so right: no conveyor
belt, no taxis. I did, however, spot a couple of Mercedes, three SUVs, and
several cars fitted with the red light on their roofs — all waiting for
passengers who had just travelled with me. Kanpur treats the moneyed and
the powerful quite well. The lesser mortals have to fend for themselves —
including finding a transport even at the airport.

Once upon a time there were mills, now there are malls. The malls stand
like mirages on the mess that Kanpur is today. Roads are stripped of
asphalt, power-supply is erratic, almost all the industries that the city
took pride in have shut down, crime rate is high, traffic is chaotic,
pollution at its peak. But people no longer complain. They have long grown
inured to hardships. And this is Kanpur, the largest city of Uttar Pradesh,
the state that has given seven Prime Ministers to India.

“Earlier, people voted for candidates. Now they vote for the caste of the
candidates. A Yadav votes for the Yadav, a Brahmin votes for the Brahmin, a
Thakur votes for the Thakur. No one talks about development — it does not
seem to matter anymore,” Anil Khetan, who runs Current Book Depot on Mall
Road, tells me.

Anil, who is 53, has seen better days in Kanpur. His father, Mahadeo
Khetan, started the bookshop in 1952: back then, Kanpur was the Manchester
of the East and a citadel of the trade union movement. In fact, the
Communist Party of India was born in this city, on December 26, 1925. For
four terms until 1977, Kanpur was represented in the Lok Sabha by a trade
unionist, S.M. Banerjee. “Even when Banerjee babu went to file his
nomination papers, fifty to sixty thousand workers would march behind him.
Today you won't find more than ten thousand people in Rahul Gandhi's
meetings,” Khetan said.

Khetan's father was associated with the Communist movement all his life and
Current Book Depot was the sole distributor, in Uttar Pradesh, of Mir
Publishers of the erstwhile USSR. The printed-in-USSR books have long
disappeared from its shelves: I managed to find a collection of Chekhov's
stories back in 1999. “Globalisation destroyed Kanpur,” Khetan said, “it
led to the closure of all the mills, which in turn led to unemployment and
illiteracy — political parties are now feeding on them. Today if you take
the IIT out of it, Kanpur will have nothing to boast of.”

The presence of the Election Commission is being felt strongly in Uttar
Pradesh — in the absence of political posters and banners. If you don't
read the papers, you won't even know the state is going to elections. The
walls are clean; no booths playing speeches or campaign songs. The most
colourless elections the state has ever seen.

“Without the posters and banners, most people don't even know who the
candidates are,” Kumar, the veteran press photographer, told me. “One good
thing about this is that candidates who have been visible in the public for
five years will have an advantage. Those who show their faces only during
elections will have a tough time.”

I met Kumar at the Kanpur Press Club. In 1993, when I started my career as
a journalist in the city, I had voted in the office-bearers' election.
Kumar is now the secretary of the club, and every journalist walking in
stops by to touch his feet: it's the Kanpur culture, to touch the feet of
seniors. Since I am a visitor, I am served with tea.

*Perennial issue*

People like Kumar know Kanpur and its politics like the back of their
hands. Yet, when I ask him what this year's *chunavi mudda* — election
issue — was, he falls silent and starts thinking.

“There is no issue as such,” he tells me.

“Still, the candidates must be making promises?”

After thinking for a while again, he says: “Usually they talk about getting
the mills reopened.”

All the five mills run by the National Textiles Corporation (Swadeshi
Cotton Mills, Muir Mills, Victoria Mills, Atherton Mills and Laxmi Ratan
Mills) and three run by British India Corporation (Elgin Mills 1 and 2, and
Kanpur Textiles) have long shut. Only the BIC-run Lal Imli manages to keep
up five per cent production.

“When Atal Behari Vajpayee came here before he became the Prime Minister,
he said, in his inimitable style, that the day his government came to
power, smoke would rise out of the chimneys with the first ray of the sun.
Nothing of that sort happened,” Kumar smiles.

The mills began to close at a time when a bigger movement was sweeping
through Uttar Pradesh — the Bharatiya Janata Party-supported movement for
the construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya. It was to alter political
agenda in the state for the next two decades, brushing aside the issue of
closure of mills and the plight of workers rendered jobless. Today, it is
too late: even workers laugh when they hear promises about restarting the
mills.

*Everyone is guilty*

“Not only Vajpayee, even Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh — they all made the
same promise about smoke rising from the chimneys,” says Prakash Chandra,
who once worked as a weaver in Elgin Mill No. 1. “Chimney *se to dhuaan
nikla nahin, hamara dhuaan nikal gaya* ” (Smoke never came out of the
chimneys, but our life went up in smoke.)

Prakash Chandra, now 48, pulls a cycle-rickshaw for a living. When he has
earned enough for the day, he parks the rickshaw at home and comes to the
mill, where, outside the gate, he and his fellow workers have been staging
a sit-in for many years now. ‘3176 days', says a signboard indicating the
duration of their ongoing protest.

“Each time Sriprakash Jaiswal (the Union Minister and MP from Kanpur) wins
an election, he comes here to receive garlands and make promises. And then
he disappears for the next five years. He is going to come again very soon,
along with the candidate from this constituency. And then he will disappear
again,” Prakash Chandra says.

Mohammad Naseem, a fellow protestor, chips in: “We gave our best years to
this mill. When it closed down, we had young children at home to feed. I
made my son work even when he was a child, when he should have been out
playing. But I had no choice; we needed that extra money to survive.”

He continues: “Now what is left of my life? I am 55 now. Even if the mill
restarts, I won't have many years. Many of the workers have died over the
years. Some died while they were sitting right here. One day, I will also
die like that.”

**

*Kanpur treats the moneyed and the powerful quite well. The lesser mortals
have to*

*fend for themselves.*