Our father, in heaven, state be thy name

Two centuries later, Sir Chhotu Ram became the first and probably only Jat ever to be knighted. But a penumbra of embarrassment stains that prize for he earned his distinctions coaxing brethren to far frontiers of the Second World War to become fodder for Allied armies. He spoke and wrote English too, an extra feather to the plume of someone who had laboured up from the depleted underbelly of Jhajjar; in his memorials at Rohtak you will find proudly displayed such flourishes with the language as calling the moneylenders ‘‘the Shylocks of our times’’.

Then there was Chaudhary Charan Singh, or, former Prime Minister Chaudhary Charan Singh, as the correct nomenclature goes. He led a coalition to high office on crutches and, consequently, lost all three rather quickly; all that remained was that prefix to his original name, sullenly pinned to the peak of his Gandhi topi. He was, and still is, a revered visionary to his people although there is a fable to that vision he himself spun — it didn’t extend beyond the Vindhyas.

And now comes Devi Lal, intent beyond the end of time on correcting the injustices of tags that trailed him through life: kingmaker, never king; provincial satrap, not national leader; deputy prime minister, never Prime Minister; chaudhary but not with a capital C, not Chaudhary Charan Singh. So here he comes, armed with his own homegrown, copyrighted title — Tau — making a grab at a place in the pantheon, probably at the head of it. Here he comes, powered by the ambitions and purse-strings of a filial government, taking phantom strides across his constituency, stalking memory, knocking at the gates of the Jat hall of fame to demand pride of place.

It all began quite innocuously when he claimed, rather as a matter of natural right, nearly half of Kisan Ghat, Chaudhary Charan Singh’s samadhi near Raj Ghat, as his own final resting site. Since then, the scale and speed of his canonisation has been such that it has left the legates of competing Jat icons a little cold and insecure. His son and Haryana Chief Minister, Om Prakash Chautala, recently went to the inauguration of a students’ hostel in Sir Chhotu Ram’s memory at Rohtak and offered a substantial donation. But rather than please them, he made his hosts nervous. ‘‘We could accept it,’’ they made it plain, ‘‘but only if you will not insist on renaming the hostel after Devi Lal.’’

Equally disconcerted are the votaries of Chaudhary Charan Singh. For Ajay Singh, former chairman of the Kisan Trust, this is no sterile race for one-upmanship between departed runners, it has a strong political dynamic to it. ‘‘Devi Lal’s successors are trying to give him a stature in death that he could never achieve in life,’’ he says, ‘‘but through this, they are also trying to secure their own political future. Chautala has little to show for himself, he can only merchandise his father.’’

If there are things the Chautala government is not doing in the name of the Tau, they must be unmentionable things. What is it that they are not naming — community centres, stadiums, hospitals, dispensaries, roads, lanes, bylanes, bus halts, parks, ponds, dairies, canals, bridges, viaducts, ducts, nooks, corners, crannies, squares, roundabouts, quadrangles, rhombuses, triangles, prizes, programmes, schemes, packages, posts, compost. We made polite enquiries with the powers about whether there existed a fiscal estimate for this resurrection and were immediately put down as impolite: When you go paying tributes, you don’t start counting the pennies in your pocket, specially not with such a beloved of the masses as the Tau. In other words, if there is a bill — and there will be a fairly hefty one — the people will pay.

We had been told on good authority, by a gazetted officer of the Haryana government, no less, that Devi Lal resides in the hearts and minds of the people. But then, misinformation is not an invention of the Haryana cadre. We found the great helmsman had changed his address. He had moved to posters and hoardings on highway crossroads, he was on frayed billboards outside government offices, he was on plaques at public utilities, he had become green graffiti on gnarled village walls, he illustrated distended diaries and dusty calendars, he was a face and a slogan behind a state-run bus. There was another slogan beside that, bolder, brighter, more urgent: ‘‘Dr Kaushik, Gupt Rog Visheshagya, Roz Milenge, Mil To Len. Railway Chowk, Hissar’’. Coke and Pepsi had the run on him, as did Thunderbolt beer and discount notices for other varieties of alcohol; Shah Rukh Khan sprawled disconsolately on a Devdas poster, swilling whiskey and bleeding self-pity; motor parts, steel pipes, tractors, undergarments, virility potions, chit funds; someone called Sat Saheb who is probably a spiritual guru and star of the Aastha channel, revealing the meaning of it all, on the hour, every hour. Among them Devi Lal was an also ran, sorry as a PSU pasted on the back of government transport. Who’s bothered?

In Rohtak, for instance, the rage is not the 16-acre recreational park the government is fashioning in the Tau’s memory, it is a 25 by 10 fast food parlour crammed with toys from some thrift store clearance sale in Texas — a drop-a-dime love rate machine that measures depth and intensity at the press of a thumb; a mock ice-hockey gameboard made of ply; a hand-operated indoor football contraption; a pink pool table with 12 pockets and plastic cues. On the side they serve Bada-Sambhar, Black Current (rpt Current) ice cream and a drink called Bloody Merry, such a delectable spin on words had it been intended. It’s packed each evening and its owner obviously has time only to speak in monosyllables. ‘‘Devi Lal?’’ he asked, quizzically, then went back to counting cash, and then said, ‘‘Yes, he was a leader of farmers and he was also chief minister. But he died, what about him?’’

The hearts and minds of the people, that area where we were told Devi Lal had found permanent residence, we found otherwise and variously occupied. In the glitzy highrises of Gurgaon, with chilled wine and airconditioning and the lust for more. In the scorched heartland, with heat and dust and utter despair. They gulp dry rotis with rancid water and battle flies as big as eyeballs. Ride the road from Delhi through Gurgaon into Haryana and in almost no time it will land you in the lap of frightening ogres. The jacarandas and laburnums of the sylvan Gurgaon neighbourhoods vaporise into mirages and all you have is keekur and thornbush and high yellow centigrades reducing all life to a painful crawl.

You might begin to wonder whether it’s an address in Hell you’ve reached or an address in Haryana, which claims enviable human development indicators. But did someone really believe all villages in the state are electrified? On paper, yes, supply lines reach most villages but the supply itself reaches them for no more than a few hours each day. Drinking water? Plentiful in most villages, at community ponds where colonies of buffaloes and mosquitoes compete for space. It is water and it is the only thing to drink, so it must be drinking water. Roads? Take the track from Hissar to Bhiwani, or the one from Bhiwani to Tosham, or the one from Bahadurgarh to Delhi via Jhajjar and you will see evidence of the roads, here and there in bits and pieces, like a broken scrawl in the dust, the very signature of populism, the very stuff of the great populist.