By all accounts Uttar Pradesh has been the big surprise in the 2024 Indian elections – both for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and for those in the business of analysing Indian politics. It was not a total surprise because some ground reports had indicated that there was a change in the mood of voters and, in particular, worries amongst repressed castes about BJP leaders’ statements about changing the Constitution. Nonetheless, nobody was willing to venture that the UP voter would punish the BJP as badly as they have.
It is worth asking why.
For almost a decade now, North India has been largely dismissed as the “cow belt”, with Uttar Pradesh (UP) as the epicentre, the broken heart of a broken India. Its people are depicted as poor, illiterate, caste-ridden, communal, and willing to fall at the feet of any criminal or godman that promises to be their messiah.
In short, India thinks of UP in the way most of the world thinks of India: incapable of valuing or sustaining a democratic polity, irredeemable because of its own people.
Many of the criticisms of UP – and India – are true; at least about corruption, criminality, and desperation, if not about the people. When my editor, years ago, suggested that I write a book on Gorakhpur, my hometown – which has been synonymous with some of the worst aspects of UP for many years – I was not keen. My years in Gorakhpur had not been a time of joy. It was hard to see rampant poverty, people scrabbling for jobs or any desperate chance (legal or illegal, moral or immoral) to get ahead, and not be scarred by that. Like many people in such cities from UP, my biggest desire was to escape and not revisit the place of my hurt.
Maybe what troubled me most of all was that I was able to escape, that my parents’ investment in my education and generational privilege paved a pathway for me to a different world. Whenever I went back, I was confronted by the harsh reality that my escape, my successes, were greatly aided by the random chance of my birth. I may have worked and tried, but that alone did not explain the disparity in outcome when I saw others, as intelligent and capable as I was, working hard and not getting anywhere.
Worst of all, for all the successes I could count as my own, there was precious little I could do for people in Gorakhpur. I could, and continue to, pay for some people’s education, help pay for somebody’s healthcare, or just outrageously overpay rikhshaw wallahs. But that is a drop in the ocean, a balm for my own guilty conscience and nothing more.
Over time, though – and maybe simply because I respected my editor – I started to pay attention to the people and stories I encountered on my many trips “back home”. And I started to ask a simple question – did the difficult conditions make the people as they were, or were the people the problem?
I do not have a definite answer to that question. People are often good or bad despite the circumstances. There are enough people with extreme privilege who back hate and violence to refute the notion that it is only the conditions people live in that determine their behaviour. That said, unless we create conditions where people are free to choose their path, it is facile to blame desperate people, struggling with shame and pain, if they do not shine.
And it is not as if Gorakhpur did not have its own shining history. It was one of the only cities in India that endured as a free zone during the 1857 uprising. Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor, even sent a personal envoy 800 kilometres through a land torn up by war to Gorakhpur. The thriving literary scene of the city is, reportedly, why Munshi Premchand, who would go on to be one of India’s great literary figures, sought a job there. There is a reason that Amrita Shergil painted some of her most iconic paintings in her family estate in Gorakhpur. Even later, Raghupati Sahai, known by his nom de plume (pen name), Firaq Gorakhpuri, emerged as both a literary icon and a queer trendsetter.
In the end, when I wrote my book about Gorakhpur, I did not omit the criminality, the desperation, the poverty or the sectarianism, but these were not the themes of the book. Instead, I chose to retell the history of Gorakhpur, and that of India, from the perspective of people often passed over and ignored by their own citizens and the wider world. I chose to retell it from a street dog’s perspective, because that is the term of dismissal used to refer to us.
But we have our own stories, our own way of looking at the world. Yes, we live in desperate circumstances, so is it any wonder that we fall for the spiel of fast-talking politicians that promise the world, and offer us nothing more but a different flavour of crime and corruption?
But we are more than just the product of our pain, and if you would look at us with a bit of affection and offer us a bit of dignity, we will overwhelm you with our response. I would ask all those who have ignored and dismissed us for so long to please see us for what we are – your fellow citizens, as redeemable and as human as anybody else.
Omair Ahmad is an author and journalist.
