Of cabbages and kings

There is a certain vicariousness with which I watched Barack Obama deliver his farewell speech. Welcome to the abyss, fellow Trumpistas. We're two years ahead of you in the trenches. Bewildered and beguiled by our braggart-in-chief who cut off our heads via our money two months ago and forced us to smile our way to the guillotine.

Your turn now, Americaaaa, is what I was thinking. And these thoughts led me to a not so minor discovery. Or an affirmation (what else can you do in the trenches?). It's very bleak when you look for power in all the legitimate places. And you expect the kings of unreason to somehow say and do the right and reasonable things. But actually, if you live in Gujarat, as I do, you will find out sooner or later that real power lies in all the illegitimate places. And that can, in these dark times, be quite liberating.

Take money for instance. And you will see this happy overturning of the system at play, with almost every Gujarati trader from your friendly neighbourhood grocer to the millionth creator of a new app. None of them operate in one fixed mode. There's an official register and bill book and like always, the actual world of money transactions that is well outside that pale. For both kinds of people, demonetisation is a curse. But you may find them smiling back at you and saying, "Oh well... so what? Do we the people of Gujarat, operating for two decades in a unipolar political world have any real choices when it comes to expressing our dissatisfaction? Where was the opposition party, the Congress, when minorities that were killed and crushed needed them? Where is the opposition now, when we have no notes to pay hospital bills with?"

And so the Gujarati does what the Gujarati knows best. Operate outside the confines of the official and the legitimate. That's how the politics of the state has been in its modern and post-modern avatars.

Elections are another delightfully illegitimate space to watch. I have followed the BJP candidates in two local elections in as many years. And there is only one precondition that has to be fulfilled if you want to remain in contention as a candidate. You have to supply every house in the village or city ward you want votes from with a bottle of alcohol each.

In a state where the sale, purchase and consumption of alcohol has always been prohibited, it is the only must-do if you want a stab at power, locally. There is a method to this — an alco-math — that kicks in around election time. If the household you are visiting consists of hooch drinkers — whose daily consumption is a local brew made of mahuva leaves or some pasty pot of local glue mixed with chemicals, you provide them with a white liquid that is one notch higher — that some people call gin and others, simply, daaru.

I wouldn't dare hazard a guess as to what the said liquid actually is. All I can testify to is that it has an acrid smell and stings your eye upon closer inspection like a bottle of sulphuric acid does. If you happen to be a family that already consumes the said white liquid and therefore a notch above the poorest of the poor, then you are treated to booze that's even better, at election time. It is the prized yellow liquid that everyone calls whisky, but could be any kind of liquid really.

Women are not meant to be drinkers, but they are to be supplied with bottles of cold drinks as an alternate inducement — Sprite or Thumbs Up usually does the trick. This ritual does not mean you will be voted in. But if you do not follow this, unofficial but absolutely essential code, your list of potential voters will not even turn up at the polling booth the next morning — as a losing candidate, head in a consolatory glass of rum once told me.

But the alco-math and dismissal of the dark prophecies around demonetisation in Gujarat point to a larger picture. The fact that people here do not put their faith or money on the rule of law or the system or any kind of rule book for that matter. So, when the rule book becomes more fascist, the average Gujarati just becomes a better liar.

Up to a point, the facade of acquiescing has worked for the BJP. It scared people into submission and continues to do so. But on closer inspection, the story is a technicoloured Gujarati coat with its patchwork coming entirely undone. When the BJP is at its peak in the Centre, here — where that politics was crafted — many are sitting back and laughing.

They may not be able to vote the BJP out, but privately and sometimes even publicly, they are anything but believers. And because all of this is illegitimately coded behaviour, even the BJP may not know who has escaped their snare while happily pretending to be in it.

This week, I found such surprising solace in the unlikeliest place. At a corporate gathering of business networkers, at a plush meeting room at the Marriott Hotel in Ahmedabad. I expected complete obeisance to the CEO and chief demonetiser of our country. And so I sank myself into a strong cup of coffee and waited my turn to see if I could shake what I assumed would be a room full of faithfuls.

"I am a professional disruptor," I said to the 100-odd traders, IT professionals and businesspersons. And to my complete amazement, there were a few who said privately, "Actually, we are not big fans of the establishment either."

And then, outside the boardrooms, sometimes, even the pretence falls away. As it did last year, while I was pillion riding a bike with a local election candidate who had recently jumped ship from the BJP to the Shiv Sena. "The Shiv Sena doesn't have much of a presence in Gujarat, you're not likely to win this. Why did you jump off the BJP wagon?" I asked this man as we rode through streets where he had started to canvas.

"Well it's like this," he said, building up the drama. "Modi has such a large presence in this state that they say even if a street dog contests with his poster as the backdrop, he will win. And I am not a street dog."

And with that flourish, I was immersed in the thoroughly Gujarati, illegitimate way of seeing. "Where you are is where you are not," to quote T S Eliot's Four Quartets. "And what you do not know is the only thing you know, and what you own is what you do not own."

Winning may not be where it all stacks up. The few losers may be those that slowly puncture tiny, leaky spaces into the mainframe. Which no one may notice, until the entire bag bursts. Now or thirty or three hundred and thirty years from now. But it's a space worth staring at vicariously in these times. Especially if like me, you feel the claustrophobia and need some deviant air to breathe.

Also read: Khadi is equating Modi with Gandhi - and it's absurd