The Beautiful and the Damned (20 page)

A few months earlier, around 25,000 farmers in the villages surrounding Armoor had chosen to grow a crop called red sorghum or ‘lal jowar’. They had contracted their produce to the biggest of the local seed dealers, a man called Mahipal Reddy, who had offered them an exceptionally high price for red sorghum. When the farmers finished harvesting, however, Mahipal reneged on the deal and refused to take delivery of the red sorghum or to pay them. The farmers found themselves sitting on stocks of unsold red sorghum. The autumn planting season, the most important one in the year, was around the corner, but they didn’t have money to buy the ingredients needed for the autumn planting.

The farmers began to agitate, with men coming in from the villages
to demonstrate in Armoor as well as in Nizamabad town, the headquarters of Nizamabad district. They gathered outside the district collector’s office there, but as their agitation dragged on without any discernible result, they converged in Armoor early one morning in June for an all-out demonstration. Devaram, whose party had been instrumental in organizing the protests, enjoyed telling me about the chaos that had ensued that June day, starting with thousands of farmers bussing into Armoor at the beginning of dawn to gather outside the municipal office.

Around eight in the morning, nearly 10,000 farmers marched down the main road. There was a small contingent of police to monitor the situation, but they abandoned their jeep as the farmers converged on it. The men set fire to the police jeep and to two vehicles belonging to the Revenue Department. Then a group of people turned right off the main road, up a side street containing scattered houses, and stopped in front of the building that belonged to Mahipal, the seed dealer.

Mahipal did not live in his Armoor house. The farmers surrounded the house, and after allowing Mahipal’s tenants to leave, ransacked the place and set it on fire. At this point, the police tried to intervene. They were pelted with stones and bricks and took shelter behind a neighbouring house from where they fired at the crowd. One man got a bullet in his ribs, while three others were slightly injured. The mayhem continued. Some men advanced in a different direction from the main road, up a street to the other side of the town, where they set fire to a house belonging to a different seed dealer, a man called Anand Reddy. Then the farmers gathered at the edge of the town, where Highway 7 meets Highway 16, and sat down on the road to hold up traffic for the rest of the day.

Devaram had led me up to Mahipal’s house as we talked. It wasn’t a house but a mansion, standing three storeys high, with fluted pillars, marble floors, a sweeping staircase and numerous balconies. It was a Venetian merchant’s palazzo that had travelled to Armoor by way of suburban Florida, although Mahipal had apparently been inspired in the specific design by a mansion he had seen in a well-known Telugu film. The white walls were now blackened by fire, and where the doors and windows had once been, there were only gaping frames. The steel gate that had protected the house was gone,
carted away by angry men to be sold as scrap metal. The police had put up iron sheets around the mansion to protect it, securing the sheets with chains and locks.

It wasn’t just the gutted state of the mansion, with debris strewn everywhere, that made its aspirations so incongruous. The mansion seemed to have been airlifted on to the terrain, placed in the middle of nowhere. There were a few other houses nearby, smaller concrete structures that were scaled-down versions of Mahipal’s aspiring vision, but they were all islands of individual mobility floating in a sea of scrub and rock. There were no streets, no lights, no parks – and no town that was not simply a rough-and-ready, hardscrabble settlement emerging from the countryside.

The same was true, I saw, when we went to the other side of the road to Anand Reddy’s house. Its gates were still intact, and in the circular driveway of the house stood a black Ford Ikon car. The roof of the house was sloping, topped with red tiles, but here too the white of the walls was darkened by fire, the windows and doors gone. The only inhabitant of the mansion was an old, bearded man on the second-floor balcony, furiously dusting as if this was the best way to restore the gutted house.

The scale of aspiration in the houses of Mahipal and Anand made it easy to see the scale of the destruction. But there were, as always, smaller dreams also being destroyed. Devaram took me to a nearby tea shack, no more than a bench, a kerosene stove and a bag of supplies set amid the rubble of brick. The owner was a Dalit, who pumped his stove and conversationally said that he had had a proper shed until recently, when it was demolished by thugs hired by a man who owned a large building nearby.

‘He’s going to construct flats on the upper floors and shops on the ground floor, and he didn’t like the fact that my tea stall was so near to his building.’

I asked him who owned the land on which the tea stall was located.

‘It’s government land,’ he said. ‘But I have a permit from the government to have a stall here.’ His manner was calm and unsurprised, used to such arbitrary blows from the powerful. He wouldn’t take any money for the tea.

‘He’s my brother,’ Devaram said, by which he meant a brother in Dalit identity and in class struggle. ‘How can he take money from you?’

Soon after I arrived in Hyderabad, and before I knew anything about Armoor and red sorghum, I had met Vijay, a lecturer in economics at Hyderabad University. One Sunday, Vijay took me on a drive to a village called Qazipally. We travelled northwards out of Hyderabad, moving along a highway lined with restaurants and shops. Eventually, the urban sprawl gave way to a more ambiguous space where open stretches of land alternated with the walled and manicured complexes of pharmaceutical laboratories – segregated plots that consisted of little more than a brick wall, an iron gate and a security guard – and large construction sites where cement mixers and ashen-grey workers laboured to fill in the skeletal outlines of apartment buildings. Vijay’s small, battered Maruti car bounced furiously as we went uphill along a dirt track and then descended into a valley with clusters of huts lining the road, the land opening out behind the huts to rise towards a low hill.

The farmer Vijay was looking for was not at home, but Vijay knew his way around and led me behind the houses to a stretch of uneven, rocky land. He stopped when we came to a stream, a shallow strip of fluorescent green water. This had been a canal carrying fresh water, Vijay said, just as the land scattered with weeds and rocks had once been farming land. There was a shepherd grazing goats nearby, and he came closer when he heard Vijay. He had grown rice here, he said, until the land stopped being fertile and he had to resort to rearing goats. We walked parallel to the stream towards the hill I had seen earlier. The stench hit me when I climbed to the top. My nose and eyes started to burn. There was a lake of sorts below us, bubbling and brown, its surface indented with rocks, and although we were well away from the lake, the fumes coming from it were so strong that it was like standing over a vat of sulphuric acid. Vijay pointed to the horizon on the other side of the lake, where the factories releasing the effluents were located.

Afterwards, Vijay and I stood on the road talking to the villagers, who converged on foot and on motorcycles. They were very fond of Vijay because he had been with them from the beginning of their struggle, when they had tried to resist being encircled by the factories. The villagers had taken the polluting companies to court and had lost. They had held protests and been beaten up by hired thugs. They had seized trucks coming to the area to dump pollutants and had been arrested by the police while the truckers were released. They had asked the government to stop the pollution, but the state pollution control board had said that the land was clean. They had come together – across religion, caste and varying levels of affluence – to present a united front, but their village chief had been bought off by the companies and subsequently murdered by a rival. In fifteen years, the men around me had gone from growing rice to not being able to grow anything. Some had taken to grazing livestock, while others had sold portions of their land and built concrete houses on the remainder of their holdings, where they sat and waited for the city to expand and for tenants to show up.

But most of the men gathered there did not want to become landlords or move somewhere else to continue farming. Their families had been in Qazipally for nearly five centuries, and the polluted lake, called Qazi Talab, was 400 years old. It had once occupied forty acres. There were still the ruins of a hunting cabin near the lake where the feudal lords of the kingdom of Hyderabad had come to hunt deer. Blasts rippled through the air as the villagers spoke, shaking the ground we were standing on. They originated from stone quarries that had been set up five or six years earlier, unlicensed operations working with impunity on government land. From time to time, yellow trucks loaded with the quarried stone passed us, teenage boys covered with dust sitting next to the drivers.

As dusk came down on the land, Vijay and I left the chemical village of Qazipally behind and began making our way back along the unlit, unpaved roads. There was a bus coming towards us, empty apart from the driver. I read the logo on the bus as it passed us. It said: ‘Maytas Hill County SEZ’. The name seemed familiar, and when we reached Hyderabad, I saw it plastered on a series of billboards
offering luxury housing: ‘Maytas Hill County SEZ: Less concrete, more chlorophyll’.

Qazipally offered a picture of the changes that have been wrought in Andhra Pradesh since the nineties. That was the time when a certain kind of urban growth, centred around Hyderabad, began to be promoted even as rural Andhra Pradesh was subjected to new approaches to agriculture. Both came from the brain of Chandrababu Naidu, the investor-friendly chief minister who held office from 1995 to 2004, and who was much loved throughout his tenure by the press and by officials at the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and Britain’s Department for International Development. Naidu was the consummate technocrat politician, periodically announcing various ‘e-governance’ schemes, so futuristic in his approach that he hired the American consulting firm McKinsey to prepare a report called ‘Andhra Vision 2020’.

The McKinsey report, which cited the structural reforms carried out in Chile under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet as a model for Andhra Pradesh, recommended a smaller role for the government and generous incentives for private businesses. It strongly recommended the winding down of support services for farmers, including the agricultural offices dispensing advice and seeds, the loans given through public banks and the programme of buying back produce at a minimum guaranteed price through the state-owned Andhra Pradesh Seed Development Corporation. The McKinsey report suggested that the state let market forces take over, even as it focused on encouraging service-oriented business in Hyderabad – an approach that would guarantee that, by the year 2020, ‘poverty will have been eradicated and current inequalities will have disappeared’.

The success of the McKinsey method can be measured both by the resounding defeat of Naidu’s party in the state elections in 2004 and by the fact that the report, once easily available on the Internet, has since disappeared from cyberspace (although McKinsey continues to do business as usual, last year producing a report for Nasscom, an Indian consortium of software and outsourcing companies, that was titled ‘Perspective 2020’). The Congress government that succeeded
Naidu has been careful not to mouth the free-market rhetoric quite so openly. Yet while portraying itself as a friend of the farmers and posting signs on the backs of rural buses with a helpline number for farmers feeling suicidal, the new government hasn’t substantially changed any of Naidu’s policies.

The rural crisis was continuing unabated when I arrived in Andhra Pradesh. It was concentrated especially strongly in a region that is known as Telangana, and that includes the city of Hyderabad as well as the districts of Warangal, Adilabad, Khammam, Mahabubnagar, Nalgonda, Ranga Reddy, Karimnagar, Medak and Nizamabad. Spread over an area of some 155,400 square kilometres, Telangana is an arid region, dominated by gneiss rocks that are billions of years old. It possesses an identity distinct from the rest of Andhra Pradesh, in part because it belonged to an area ruled by the Nizam of Hyderabad until the formation of independent India, and in part because it is impoverished, with all its districts, apart from Hyderabad, classified by the Indian government as ‘backward’ or extremely poor.

Telangana is also a region known for peasant revolts, the most famous of these being the Communist rebellion from 1946 to 1951, an uprising that began as a movement against the Nizam – the very person Ved Mehta had profiled as the richest man in India – and that continued against the independent Indian state that seized the Nizam’s territories in 1948. From the seventies onwards, Telangana was home to a number of left-wing armed groups referred to as Naxalites or Maoists, which by 2004 had combined into one political party known as the Communist Party of India (Maoist). The McKinsey-Naidu government alternated between initiating talks and carrying out paramilitary operations against the Maoists, and as the police carried out a series of encounter killings, the Maoists began moving into neighbouring states like Chhattisgarh and Orissa. The leadership of the Maoists continued, however, to consist of people from Telangana, and its chief, Mupalla Laxman Rao or Comrade Ganapathy, comes from Karimnagar district, where he had worked in the seventies as a schoolteacher.

The Maoists were still around in Telangana, but they had toned down their operations in the region. The discontent of the area had
been channelled instead into the demand for a separate Telangana state, and one afternoon I travelled to Nizamabad district, just outside Armoor, to attend a meeting in favour of statehood. It was taking place at the ‘Garden City Function Hall’, across from a stretch of empty fields, the vegetation everywhere blasted dull yellow by months without rain. As waiters dressed in jeans, waistcoats and shoes without socks circulated with glasses of water, a man with a splendidly oiled moustache and long, curly hair climbed on to a stage and began singing, his right hand theatrically pressed to his heart at times, and at times swept out to raise the audience from their midday torpor. A chorus line of young boys, bare-chested and in white dhotis, danced behind the singer, breaking out periodically in a sheepish refrain of ‘Jai Telangana’, or ‘Victory to Telangana’.