India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (32 page)

He didn’t feel bad about taking land away from wealthy farmers; they could afford it. But when he thought back to some of the smaller farmers, people who had lost everything they owned, it made him sad.

He talked about the piece of land we were sitting on. It had belonged to an older man. He was a simple, uneducated farmer. He hadn’t needed much convincing; Das and his partners had just sweet-talked him a little, and he’d been happy, eager even, to sell.

But now, Das said, the farmer had gone “crazy.” He sat around all day, depressed, not speaking to anyone, staring off into space. The land was all he had; he’d been a farmer his whole life. Das couldn’t help feeling that he was depressed because he’d lost his land. Sometimes, when Das drove or walked past the farmer, when he saw what had become of him, he felt maybe what they’d done hadn’t been right.

“So why did you do it?” I asked.

Das said: “When we did it, it was just business. I was thinking of the money. Now the owner of this land has fallen, he’s so weak. It’s a bit difficult to see him. Probably if I had been doing it on my own, I would have thought more carefully. But we were a group, and we didn’t think so much. It was a group thing—we were blinded by the money.

“You know, everything has a season. Now everyone is buying gold. But when we were selling these plots it was land season. Everybody just wanted to get a piece of land. Some of the people who bought these plots never even saw them. They just put their money down. They were like gamblers. It was that kind of season, and I suppose we were a little caught up in the season.”

Das talked about all that Kingmaker City had given him. He said Kingmaker City had changed his life. It hadn’t just given him financial security. It had also given him respect and status—status that his father never had, that it would have been unimaginable for a Dalit to claim fifteen or twenty years earlier.

“It gave me a new direction,” Das said. “Whatever I feel or say now, this project gave my family security. It made me who I am today. It gave me a kind of freedom.”

Das seemed tired. His speech was halting, and he seemed to be having trouble concentrating. I thought maybe the memories of putting Kingmaker City together had upset him, but he said his blood pressure was up. His sugar levels had also been out of control recently.

He’d been to see a doctor in Chennai a few days before; the doctor told him he needed to rest. He hadn’t wanted to go to Chennai. It meant missing the memorial service for a Dalit
murdered in a neighboring village. It was a big service; a Dalit leader from Chennai had visited and given a speech.

The murder had taken place six months earlier, during a bout of violence in the area. One caste had prevented another from carrying a corpse through their streets. In the ensuing riots, the murdered man was captured and had his head smashed in with a stone. It was done right by his house, in front of his wife and children. It was a ghastly killing.

Perhaps Das was tired, too, because another friend of his had been murdered just a few days before, in a nearby town. The friend was part of a gang of
goonda
s that extorted free food from a restaurant owner. They’d gone to the restaurant over and over, tormenting the owner, refusing his entreaties to leave him alone. Finally, the owner had taken matters into his own hands. He’d organized another group of
goonda
s to kill Das’s friend. There were around ten people in the owner’s group. They waited outside the restaurant, and they stabbed Das’s friend. He was rushed to the hospital, but it was too late. He bled to death.

“That’s a lot of death,” I said.

“We’re such emotional people,” Das said. “We hit without thinking, we murder without stopping.”

We stood up. Sathy showed me a water tank that farmers had used to irrigate their fields. It was empty; the concrete was cracking. “Agriculture is dead,” Sathy said. “The village is over. It’s all gone, and I’m helpless. What can I do? There’s no point in brooding. Come, Akash, let’s go.”

Leaving Kingmaker City, I asked Das why the restaurant owner hadn’t called the police before murdering his friend. Das said that in fact, he had, a couple times, but the police didn’t do
anything. His friend kept harassing the owner, showing up drunk, demanding free food, driving away customers with his behavior. Several people had asked him to stop; even Das had tried to talk to his friend. He’d told him he wasn’t behaving correctly.

Eventually, Das said, it had all been too much for the restaurant owner. He had felt humiliated. Das assumed he had to do something to prove himself.

“So do you think the murder was justified?” I asked.

“It’s difficult to say,” Das said. “One part of my mind says he shouldn’t have taken the law into his own hands. But if it was me, I also wouldn’t have tolerated it. I also would have murdered. He was my friend, but he did something wrong. I suppose I understand why the owner thought he had to kill him.”

When the law is insufficient, when the police are inadequate
, people take matters into their own hands. This is the essence of
goondagiri
—mobs taking the place of a weak state, greed and revenge and hurt pride standing in for justice.

Sathy and I were traveling along the East Coast Road one afternoon when we decided to take a break at a tea shop. Sathy recognized a man he knew from the area. His name was Dhanapal. His brother had been murdered recently. Sathy was helping the dead man’s daughter, Dhanapal’s niece, get married.

Dhanapal’s brother’s name was Kumar. He’d been a taxi driver. He had a bit of a drinking problem. Sathy said he warned Kumar many times not to drink and drive, but he never listened. One day Kumar was driving along the highway when he hit a woman
getting out of a bus. She died on the spot. She was in her early sixties.

A mob from the surrounding villages gathered and started beating Kumar. He managed to get away. He ran, with the mob in pursuit, into the house of someone he knew. Kumar thought his friend would protect him, but his friend didn’t want trouble. He asked Kumar to leave. Kumar ran out the back door.

The accident happened in the evening. Dhanapal heard about it soon after, and, with another brother, they went looking for Kumar. They couldn’t find him anywhere. They searched in the houses of friends, they searched along the highway, and they searched in the fields. They were still searching at night when it started raining. Dhanapal went to Kumar’s house, where his wife was waiting with their four children. She was crying; it wasn’t like her husband to stay away at night.

Dhanapal and his brother searched for three days. They went to at least twenty villages, asking everyone if they’d seen Kumar. No one had, but one man, an acquaintance of the brothers, said he’d seen Kumar’s blue shirt floating in a village tank. That got Dhanapal worried.

Finally, someone said he’d seen Kumar run into a eucalyptus forest by the road. Dhanapal and his brother went into the forest. They called Kumar’s name, they searched everywhere. They found him hanging from a tree. There were flies buzzing around his head and ants crawling on his body. Dhanapal noticed how dark his brother had become. In life, his brother had been handsome and fair-skinned; in death, Dhanapal thought he was ugly.

Dhanapal started to cry; he felt a wave of anger. He was convinced that his brother had been murdered. The woman who was
killed in the accident had powerful relatives. He’d heard about the mob. He started searching for clues; he wanted proof that his brother was killed. But his head was spinning, his ears were ringing, and he passed out.

When he came to, he called the police. They cut down the body and sent it to their station. From there, the police told Dhanapal, the body would be sent to the hospital for an autopsy.

I met Dhanapal more than a year after his brother died. He told me, in a husky voice, that he had yet to see the autopsy report. The police had refused to register a case. Every time he went to the station, they just told him his brother had committed suicide. But Dhanapal was convinced his brother hadn’t hanged himself. For one thing, he said, people who die by hanging always have their tongue sticking out; his brother’s tongue hadn’t been sticking out. Also, he said, when he found his brother, he noticed that he had taken a large thorn out of his foot; he saw the thorn on the ground. “Tell me,” Dhanapal asked me, “does a man intending to kill himself remove a thorn from his foot?”

There was one more thing: the man who told Dhanapal he’d seen his brother’s blue shirt later admitted it wasn’t true. There had been no blue shirt. Dhanapal felt he was just trying to send a message; the man knew that Kumar had been killed by the mob, but he didn’t dare tell Dhanapal directly.

Dhanapal said someone he knew had seen a friend of the dead woman’s family at the police station a couple times, talking to the police. He assumed they had been influenced. He felt they weren’t going to do anything to make sure his brother received justice.

Sathy asked Dhanapal what he was going to do next. Dhanapal said he was still thinking about it. When his brother’s body was
first found he’d come to Sathy for help, and Sathy had advised him against taking any action on his own. He’d told him to go to the police, and from there to leave matters in God’s hands.

But now, Dhanapal said, it was too much for him to bear, knowing that his brother’s killers were walking around, free, while his wife and kids suffered, no one to support them. He felt he couldn’t count on the police; maybe, he thought, God wanted him to act to ensure justice for his brother. He was thinking maybe he should hire some
goonda
s and get revenge. They were easy to find, and didn’t cost much. A man’s life was cheap these days.

Sathy sighed. He put his hand on Dhanapal’s shoulder and squeezed it. “See, this is how it goes,” he said to me. “Violence leads to more violence. People feel forced to take care of things themselves. This will become a cyclical thing. I’m afraid that many more people will have to die before this story is over.”

More than the violence, more than the lawlessness, Sathy was
upset about what all the real estate development was doing to agriculture. The escalating value of land was adding to the pressures on farming. Many farmers, struggling financially, heavily indebted after years of poor crops, were lured into selling. The money tided them over for a while; maybe it helped fund a daughter’s marriage. But soon the money ran out, and the farmers found themselves worse off than where they had started.

Even if the money lasted, they often found themselves unmoored, cut off from a way of life they had inherited from their ancestors.
It was a treacherous bargain; people were getting rich off real estate, but they were losing their heritage in the process.

Sathy took me one afternoon to meet a man from Molasur who had sold his fields. His name was V. Puroshothaman. He was forty years old, a former farmer, a man who had grown up working on land that had been farmed, too, by his father and grandfather. Puroshothaman was one of the lucky sellers. He had started a catering business with the proceeds from his land. He had done something productive with his money; he was much better off financially. Still, he told me that since he’d stopped farming, he felt like a part of himself was missing. If he ever made enough money, he said, he’d definitely buy his land back.

I met Puroshothaman on the four-and-a-half-acre property he used to farm. Once, we would have been surrounded by watermelons, rice, and chilies. Now the land was marked only by yellow stones that defined plots for sale. When he was a boy, Puroshothaman told me, that land had kept his family alive. It had fed, clothed, and educated him and his three brothers. But by the turn of the millennium, he could no longer afford to support even his single daughter off the land.

“I was helpless,” he said. “I couldn’t pay for my daughter’s tuition, I didn’t even have one good shirt. I was ashamed to go to family functions. I worked so sincerely, for so many years. I started at four in the morning and worked all day. But at the end of it all, I had nothing.”

Puroshothaman’s life was changed by the highway coming up along Molasur. When word got around that the government was planning to build that highway, Puroshothaman started noticing
men from the cities driving around in their air-conditioned Sumo jeeps, stopping every now and then to scout out pieces of land. One of Puroshothaman’s neighbors, also a farmer, sold his property. The man who bought it sold it to another man, and then that man developed plots and sold it on again. It was a like a chain of prosperity, with each link making more money than the previous one.