[Why did the British leave India? If the British left, why are you still here? What do you people like to eat the most? Do you think I am asking stupid questions? In America, if I like you and take you away, will your father kill me? What is the benefit to you of writing stories from here? How much money do you have in the bank? What is your salary? If you do not tell me your salary, how will I know how much money you have? Is it true that white people are not honest? When your replacement arrives, would he like to lease a car from me?]
By
Ellen Barry
 |
|
Jahiruddin
Mewati, the chief of Peepli Khera, a small village in Uttar Pradesh,
presided
over a
particularly Indian form of justice. Credit Andrea Bruce for
The New York Times
|
PEEPLI
KHERA, India — On my last
week in India, I went to say goodbye to Jahiruddin Mewati, the chief of a small
village where I had made a dozen or so reporting trips.
Jahiruddin and I were not precisely friends,
but we had spent many hours talking over the years, mostly about local
politics. I found him entirely without scruples but candid. He suspected my
motives but found me entertaining, in the way that a talking dog might be entertaining,
without regard for the particulars of what I said.
Jahiruddin, though uneducated, was an adept
politician, fresh from winning a hard-fought local election. During our
conversations, he would often break into rousing, patriotic speeches about
truth and justice, thumping the plastic table in emphasis and making it jump.
The effect was somewhat tarnished by his Tourette’s syndrome, which caused him
to interject the word “penis” at regular intervals.
He was frank about the dirty aspects of his job.
He occupied a post reserved for women from lower castes, but no one pretended
this was any more than a sham; his wife’s name appeared on the ballot, but the
face on the poster was his.
Nearly everything he did in local government
was transactional, driven by the desire to secure the votes of minuscule family
and caste groups. The funny thing was, it seemed to be working pretty well.
Among his pet constituencies was a community
of former beggars, some of the poorest people I had met in India. I had visited
these people regularly over the past two years, and their lives had improved in
striking ways — in some cases through Jahiruddin’s intervention.
He had persuaded — and by this I mean bribed
— caste leaders to allow their women to work as day laborers, and their rising
incomes were apparent in new brick houses and well-nourished children. A new
subsidy had provided women with gas stoves, freeing them from the grinding task
of scavenging for firewood. That shift struck me as quietly revolutionary, like
the arrival of the contraceptive pill in the West.
I wanted to compliment Jahiruddin on his
advocacy for these people, and also to say goodbye. Everything I owned had
already been loaded onto a container ship that had left the port of Mumbai and
headed past the Horn of Africa.
Jahiruddin seemed unsettled by the news of my
departure and, perhaps assuming that he would not have another opportunity,
peppered me with questions for the next 45 minutes.
Why did the British leave India? If the
British left, why are you still here? What do you people like to eat the most?
Do you think I am asking stupid questions? In America, if I like you and take
you away, will your father kill me? What is the benefit to you of writing
stories from here? How much money do you have in the bank? What is your salary?
If you do not tell me your salary, how will I know how much money you have? Is
it true that white people are not honest? When your replacement arrives, would
he like to lease a car from me?
It went on like that. I promised to keep in
touch, and he saved my telephone number under the name “Angrezi,” which
translates, more or less, as “white lady.” We parted on good terms.
A short while later, someone told me about a
murder in Peepli Khera, and I realized I had to visit him one more time.
Thursday:
A Grim Rumor
While reporting in Peepli Khera, I often set
myself up at the home of a woman named Anjum, who lived next to a hand pump for
water and therefore served as a clearinghouse for gossip.
I was lounging there when I heard that a
woman had been killed last year, bludgeoned to death by her husband in front of
at least a dozen people.
Anjum said the woman’s screams had woken her
from a deep sleep, and she stumbled through the dark to the neighbor’s house,
some 20 feet away. The woman, Geeta, was cowering in a neighbor’s bathroom, a
U-shaped enclosure used for showering, while her husband brought a bamboo stick
down on her, again and again, she told my colleague Suhasini, who was
translating.
“I dragged her out to protect her,” Anjum
said. “No one was protecting her. Everyone was just watching.”
But when Anjum stepped away, Geeta’s husband
— a slight man named Mukesh — stood above Geeta, who was slumped on the side of
a rope cot, and brought the stick down on her head several more times. She died
on the spot.
What bothered Anjum, she said, was that the
police had been contacted about the killing but almost immediately closed their
investigation, releasing Mukesh after a few hours.
In fact, just the day before my visit, Mukesh
had remarried, to a girl who was lighter-skinned and taller than the dead
woman, and he kept driving his new wife around on the back of his motorcycle,
showing her off.
Mukesh’s brother, Bablu, happened to be hanging
around Anjum’s, and he said his brother had caught Geeta cheating and had
killed her.
“He was sad,” he said of his brother. “But
then yesterday he got another one. So why would he be sad?”
We drove to the nearest police station, a few
miles away, and a young constable, Jahangir Khan, was sent out to speak to us.
He was carrying a rifle whose butt was held together with wire — he reckoned it
dated to “the time of Hitler” — and he said he could tell that I was American
because my nose shook when I talked, a national characteristic he had observed
while watching James Bond films.
What follows is an abridged version of our
conversation:
Constable: She was sleeping on the terrace.
She woke up to urinate. So there was a wooden staircase, a makeshift wooden
staircase made of bamboo. Her leg slipped when she was coming down the
staircase. She got hurt in the head.
Reporter: Didn’t her injuries suggest
something more violent?
Constable: When you are hit by a stick, you
will just be hit on one spot on your head and you will die. But when you fall
off a staircase, you will not just get hit on the head. She had seven or eight
marks on her body, which means she was not hit with a stick but she fell down
the stairs.
Reporter: It seems unusual to get that kind
of head injury falling down the stairs. You might break your neck.
Constable: When you fall off the stairs you
will get bruised all over.
Reporter: Didn’t the neighbors tell you that
she was beaten?
Constable: Some of the neighbors said the
husband had killed her. But the wife was fine. She was strong and well fed and
happy, and she had two kids. She was healthy, plump, like you.
After a while, the constable indicated that
he had no more time to discuss the case. As he left, he turned back to me.
“This is the trick that foreign countries
like yours are playing,” he said. “You will write something. People will read
what you write, and say, ‘This country will progress only after 100 years.’”
Friday:
Visiting the Killer
I had a degree of sympathy for the constable
on his last point.
Over the past decade, in Russia and then
India, I have been asked versions of this question hundreds of times: Who are
you to come here and tell us what is wrong with our system? And it’s true, the
whole enterprise of foreign correspondence has a whiff of colonialism. During
the years I have worked abroad, Americans’ interest in promoting their values
in the world has receded, slowly and then precipitously. I doubted the regional
hegemons filling the vacuum would do better, but still, I wasn’t sure it was
such a bad thing.
I worried, as the constable suggested, that I
wrote too much about violence. In India, in particular, where millions of
people move out of extreme poverty every year, there is a great deal to be
hopeful about — the transformation that comes with mobile phone and internet
access, or with young women cashing their first paychecks, or even something
like installing a family’s first air-conditioner.
I wrote those stories, too, but the move from
dire poverty to ordinary poverty is subtle and difficult to capture. Violence
writes itself.
Saturday:
Back to the Constable
In my line of work, there are few things as
gratifying as catching someone in a lie. We returned to the constable the next
day, with a recording of Mukesh’s confession saved in my phone.
The constable seemed a little uneasy. He said
he didn’t want to talk to us in the station, and invited us across the road to
a tea stall. But the tea stall was occupied by a half-dozen khaki-clad police
officers on break, mussing one another’s hair and smoking beedis, so he took us
to a cubbyhole tractor repair shop, where we sat facing each other — him
sitting on a lawn chair, me on a rope cot.
It was very hot, and bullock carts kept
squeaking past on the main road. As we told him what we had discovered on the
previous day, the constable kept mopping his forehead with a handkerchief.
Then, after a minute or two, he spoke.
“When you get information of any kind,” he
said, “you go and investigate. There are two sides to every story. We have to
assume that both sides are telling the truth. Mukesh told us she fell down the
stairs. We also spoke to the girl’s family. What the mother gave us in writing
was that her daughter fell down the stairs.”
For the next 45 minutes, I asked him the same
question in many different ways. As she translated, Suhasini tried to make my
questions seem less angry, but this was not easy, since I was sitting three
feet away from him, leaning forward and staring into his eyes.
If you had asked me at that moment, I would
have had difficulty explaining why the truth mattered, since no one I had
spoken to seemed interested in reopening the case. But I kept asking him and he
kept lying until we were both exhausted.
At one point there was a sort of ripple in
the surface of the conversation. We were sitting quietly, having run out of
ways to restate our positions. He was gazing at the back wall of the shop, and,
completely out of the blue, he said something about Mahatma Gandhi.
“People hang Gandhi’s portrait on their walls
here,” he said, “but they do not follow Gandhi’s rules.” I asked him whether he
liked being a policeman, and he shook his head briefly. No.
Then he asked us for a ride home. I wondered
whether he might just be interested in riding in an air-conditioned van —
people here were so poor, he might not get another chance — but as soon as we
began to drive, he began to speak, staring not at us but at the road ahead.
“I will tell you, this was a murder,” he
said.
He said that Mukesh’s family had bribed the
senior officers in the police station, but that it could not have happened
without a vigorous effort by the village chief, Jahiruddin Mewati, to persuade
Geeta’s widowed mother, a day laborer from a village 30 miles away, to withdraw
murder charges.
The whole thing made him a little sick. “I
felt bad about it,” he said. “That’s the reason I want to quit this job.
Ninety-nine percent of cases are dealt with in this way. I get very angry. I am
an honest person. I can show you four guys here who can rape a woman as easily
as plucking the feathers off a bird, but they never get arrested.”
He said he was thinking of becoming a driver
and asked if we could help him get a visa to the United States. He asked how
old my parents were, and where they lived, and whether it was true that many
people suffered from diabetes in America. I said this was true, and he looked
at me strangely, asking, “Why should I go to such a place?”
Sunday:
The Headman Explains
So I found myself back in Jahiruddin’s yard,
now armed with a file folder full of evidence that he had broken the law.
This was a change in the dynamic of our
relationship. I put my phone on the table right in front of him, so he could
see that I was recording. At one point, listening to us talk, his son tried to
warn him that he was incriminating himself, but Jahiruddin didn’t care at all.
He told us he was proud of burying the case.
This was not because he believed that Geeta
deserved to die or that her husband deserved to escape punishment. It was
something more practical. Mukesh’s extended family controlled 150 votes;
Jahiruddin had won his last election by 91. A murder case would have been a
blot on their caste, and by brokering the cover-up, he had performed a
particularly valuable service to a key vote bank. It might help him win
re-election someday.
“In India, there is no vote in the name of
development,” he said. “In India, there is no vote in the name of doing
something good. The vote is in the name of caste, family, community. And then
10 percent of people will say, ‘He did something good for me.’”
It had not been easy, he said. The police had
demanded a large bribe from Mukesh’s family. The hardest part, he said, was
persuading the victim’s mother to withdraw the charges.
The mother was a day laborer, a tiny,
dark-skinned woman who worked on a construction site, carrying cement mix back
and forth all day in a basket on her head. She had never been addressed by a
policeman until the day of her daughter’s death, let alone a village chief. But
she was angry when they saw the state of her daughter’s body. Mukesh had hit
the girl so hard, her relatives said, that they could see her skull through the
parted skin of her scalp.
Jahiruddin said he had worked on the mother
for five hours before she relented.
“They were totally adamant — they said, ‘We
will not allow this compromise to happen.’ They would not budge. They sent the
girl’s body for post-mortem,” he said.
Sometimes it seemed that the European legal
system, with its liberal emphasis on individual rights, had settled only
lightly on a country fixated on the rights of groups. Political leaders have
driven this deeper into the culture: Equality, in India, is equality among
groups. Justice is group justice.
Whatever triumphal feeling I got from
interrogating the constable, it was gone. So was my amusement with the village
chief. He noticed this, and turned to Suhasini.
“Please ask her what type of person she
thinks I am,” he asked her. “I’m not greedy. I don’t have any kind of greed.
It’s a service. Maybe you think I am greedy for votes from villagers.”
When I failed to adequately reassure him, he
became animated.
“You are here with some kind of greed,” he
said. “You want some kind of news. But what am I getting from you? I gave up
two hours of my time. What does that mean to you?”
On the way back to Delhi, we stopped by the
town where the dead woman’s mother lived, but I no longer expected to find much
interest in our investigation. The woman’s mother had accepted what the village
chief told her, that dropping the murder case would be better for Geeta’s four
children. That the consequences of provoking a conflict between related clans
would have weighed heavily on her. It was all for the best, she said.
The silences between us extended
uncomfortably, and I realized she was desperate for us to leave but did not
dare to say it.
Beside her, with his knees drawn up to his
chin, was a small boy of about 8, who had been listening to the whole
conversation. It turned out to be Geeta’s son. He was silently glowering, and
when I asked him what he thought about this whole situation, he said his father
was a good-for-nothing.
“My
father did not love my mother,” he said, his voice so quiet that I had to lean
forward to hear him.
His grandmother looked at him dotingly.
“Maybe when he grows up,” she said, “he will take revenge.”
