You cannot fault the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) for not putting more prominent signs to announce the exit ramp for Rewari on its showpiece toll highway from Delhi to Jaipur. Rewari, in southern, dry Haryana, too far from Chandigarh, not close enough to Delhi, not quite Rajasthan though contiguous to it and not quite the cradle of any Jatland politics, is unlikely to be high on anybody’s priorities.
It is still supposedly an out-of-sight-out-of-mind territory that defies familiar description: It isn’t part of a Rajput, Jat or Dalit “belt”, nor really some paddy, cotton or sugarcane “belt”. Maybe, the Americans would describe it as a sun-baked panhandle of sorts, jutting out from Haryana into Rajasthan, all within a hundred kilometres from Delhi, with its very own politics and economics, with a centre of gravity entirely its own. For decades, the zone has been known to be most backward. My own school textbooks, three decades ago, said so in what was then combined Punjab. So, I believe, they do even now. It is good enough therefore that the NHAI has built a spotless, sharp ramp off the highway, at nearly the 80-km point from Delhi, leading you to a 12-km connecting road to Rewari. This is the heartland of the Ahirs, or the Raos who sometimes answer to the last name Yadav, direct descendants of Lord Krishna and too proud to be confused with the Yadavs of the cowbelt. They may count for little in national politics. In their own domain, you had better take them seriously.
You would enter Rewari hoping to see the bleak face of backwardness, even more so if you spent your childhood in old Haryana hearing tales of poverty and desolation, lack of schooling, hospitals, water, producing little else than desi ghee and, indeed, farmers who were forever unwilling to repay their debts. One of my abiding childhood memories is of my father returning from week-long tours of the district after disbursing and recovering (truth to tell, he rarely managed to recover anything) cooperative loans in the region, with stories of hopelessness, crime, anarchy, lathi-raj. Now eight hours is too little time for me to confirm to you that any of that has changed and it is likely that a lathi-raj of some sort persists. But this countryside does not look, feel, smell, or even “read” like the old stereotype. It is not rotting or sliding backwards into desolation.
Any itinerant journalist learns over time the cultural nuances of direction-giving as they vary from one region to another. In the north, for example, when somebody tells you to turn right, he usually raises his left arm and vice versa. Then you figure out what is material, the speech, or the gesture. If you have doubts, check out any of the security guards in South Delhi’s colonies at night, particularly if you are lost and most of the gates are already locked. In Assam, you ask somebody how far a place is and usually the distance is determined by the length of his drawl. But we stop outside the village of Berli and a man in his seventies, bearded, with sunken cheeks, dirty dhoti and soiled vest, tells us to go straight, drive on the kutcha road along the canal, due “north”, then skirt the village and turn “west”. Then you reach the village of Naher and ask for further directions. An even older, bent, poorer man tells you to go left (raising his left arm) and veer around the village near the water tank as the road “bifurcates” and then join the main road for our destination, in this case the twin village of Bahu-Jholri. East, West, bifurcate? Where is this precision English coming from? I wouldn’t stop to ask, but it is a reasonable guess that both the veterans were ex-armymen. The army is still the preferred destination for the men here. But we will return to that later.
Through years of travelling through the countryside, particularly during elections, I have confected what I might call the Graffiti Theory of Rural Development. The more bare the walls, the less developed a region is. But if its walls are full of sales talk, for oil, shampoo, soap and toothpaste, cigarettes, tractors, motorcycles, branded cement, steel rods (saria), fertilisers, pesticides, seeds and banks, it is booming. You can’t find a bare wall in Punjab, western Uttar Pradesh, the rain-drenched Terai, Gujarat, coastal Andhra Pradesh and I believe even large parts of interior Maharashtra, though I haven’t been there yet. Most villages have a shop selling sprinklers and drip irrigation systems, shuttering material for RCC construction and a fast growing profession is “tubeler”. Strain your mind a bit and you can translate it into simpler English as “tubeweller” or the tubewell repair man.
The Wall Street Journal last week carried a very detailed front-page special (www.wsj.com) on MNCs competing in India’s booming rural markets. It is a pity the venerable Journal confined itself mostly to the acknowledged green revolution zone of central Punjab for, if they had come here, into the boondocks, they would have noticed what else is selling and driving rural economies. The fastest growing businesses here are schools (English medium, preferably affiliated to CBSE, facts all graffiti flaunts with pride), nursing homes manned by doctors with MD and MS degrees, banquet halls and, even if the jholawalas wince, mobile “disco dance floors” and somebody called “DJ Manoj” who seems to have the monopoly over the fun business. But this is no green revolution zone unable to digest the new riches and slipping into effete decadence.
My family was here, actually, on a sad and solemn journey, to join the family of Ram Kumar, my driver for 15 years who died, apparently of a heart attack at the age of 41, and I’d rather record, exactly five hours after he had been examined by a senior physician at Delhi’s most glamorous multispeciality corporate hospital and prescribed a whole bunch of tests but was somehow not given an ECG. At his small — but fully pucca — home, on the men’s side of the mourning congregation the talk soon shifts to, what else, but schooling. A man so old you would expect him to tell you stories of how he killed the Germans in World War I, with thick, boxy, dark glasses like a welder’s goggles but still with a polythene Carrerra sticker slanting across one lens, tells us of what has changed. “It is great for Chautala, at least he has now made English medium compulsory from Class 1,” he says and he himself doesn’t know a word of any language.
Others talk of how the state education board is feeling the heat of competition from CBSE, and reforming. Or, of how too many people are setting up schools as shops and rooking people so the state board has set up minimum requirements for recognition. Apparently a primary school has to have a three acre plot of land, a middle school five and a plus-two school eight acres of which a certain minimum has to be left vacant as the playground. Each class room has to be at least 24×16 with an 8-foot verandah. It is still not quite like the schools your children or mine would go to. But it is a huge improvement from my years in similar countryside with classes held under peepul trees, where you took your own gunny-bag from home to squat on and where you kept one eye on the teacher and the other out for the big, black ants, loaded with formic acid, on the ground. Some government schools here now even boast of having “ecology” clubs, the private ones have special coaching for “sainik schools, Navodaya schools, National Defence Academy”, even combined medical and engineering entrance exams. The flavour of the times is English medium even if it creates such quaint Indianisms as the Yaduvanshi Convent School (Yaduvanshi, the descendant of Lord Krishna).
Two things, however, haven’t changed. One is the obsession with caste identity. Old election graffiti demands a state for the Ahirs, a university, an Ahir regiment in the army. The other is the fascination for soldiery. The most prolific political slogan is “vote wohi payega jo bharti daftar khulwayega” (he will get the vote who gets a recruitment centre opened). Most of the region’s heroes are soldiers. Near the village of Gudiani there is a Martyr Sandip Memorial, the exit ramp on the highway faces a petrol pump in the name of martyred Sepoy Bajinder Singh and on the outskirts of Rewari you see a memorial that more of India should have known about. It is called the Rezang La Memorial and if that doesn’t ring a bell let me tell you a small story.
The battle of Rezang La, a redoubt overlooking the strategic Chushul plains in Ladakh, is one of the most glorious chapters in the history of the Indian army and has been compared by some military historians with the famed battle of Thermopylae. In the unequal war of 1962 against the Chinese where the Indian army rarely stood to fight, the Charlie company from 13 Kumaon, led by Major Shaitan Singh, decided that until they were alive the Chinese weren’t going to have a look-in on Chushul, at 17,000 ft. Of the 120 defenders, only three survived, seriously wounded. The rest, including Shaitan Singh, were discovered after the winter, frozen, mostly holding their weapons but with no ammunition. A dozen were outside the trenches, and it was evident that once out of ammunition they had charged the enemy with bayonets. This was a genuine last man-last round defence and many times more Chinese were killed, the evidence again being frozen bodies on the slopes. This battle inspired M. S. Sathyu’s gut-wrenching classic, Haqeeqat. Let me quote from Maj Gen Ian Cardozo’s Param Vir, Our Heroes In Battle: “When Rezang La was later revisited dead jawans were found in the trenches still holding on to their weapons… every single man of this company was found dead in his trench with several bullet or splinter wounds. The 2-inch mortar man died with a bomb still in his hand. The medical orderly had a syringe and bandage in his hands when the Chinese bullet hit him… Of the thousand mortar bombs with the defenders all but seven had been fired and rest were ready to be fired when the (mortar) section was overrun.” Not much of a citation needed to be written for Shaitan Singh’s Param Vir Chakra. The frozen bodies, including his own, reclining against a rock where he bled and froze top death after ordering the three wounded survivors to leave him there, told the whole story.
The lesser known fact is that Shaitan Singh was evidently an Ahir and so were 70 of the 117 men of the 13 Kumaon’s Charlie company. Rewari has raised a memorial for them, a granite slab with the 70 names inscribed, and the slogan “veero mein shoorveer, veer Ahir (the bravest of the brave, brave Ahir).” Not to miss the Lord Krishna lineage the granite is topped with the mural of the sudarshan chakra on the Lord’s finger. But you can’t walk in for a closer look. The padlock on the memorial has not been opened for years, weeds have eaten up the grounds, a stinky, open drain flows next to it and pigs wallow in it. Not the way any nation would honour some of its most glorious soldiers ever.
But in spite of that there is no taking away the enthusiasm for the army. If George Fernandes is worrying where to get officers from for his army, he should come here because today’s Ahirs will not merely be other ranks. So many of them will now graduate from English medium schools, even Yaduvanshi Convent, and will probably still not have accent and diction “fixable” for call centres. The army — but the officer corps now — would do just fine.