UP Yatra with Neelesh Misra: Story 2

“We had heard there was a lady called Mayawati”

Neelesh Misra

Azamgarh:

There is a good chance you’ll miss the man.

Under the long tin roofs at the messy Azamgarh courthouse, lost in the pitter-patter of typewriters, crowds of rural petitioners and the rows of cynical notaries, there is a small black sign on the yellow wall: “Ram Krishna Yadav, Advocate (Ex-MP)”.

Here under this sign, a 75-year-old man sits wrapped in a woollen jacket and muffler, on a tottering old wooden chair, at a shaky table. Some 650 kilometres to the southwest in Bhopal, his first cousin Ram Naresh Yadav lives in the opulent Rajya Bhavan; he is the governor of Madhya Pradesh.

Ram Krishna Yadav handles criminal cases in this eastern Uttar Pradesh rural expanse, standing in court to argue cases related to small land disputes, clashes and dowry charges. There was a time when he used to similarly stand in Parliament to argue on matters on national importance. In 1989, Yadav became one of the three first-ever MPs of the then-fledgling Bahujan Samaj Party, which made its mark even in the pro-Janata Dal wave.

Yadav won from the Azamgarh constituency, after a short quick-fire campaign across the countryside in just one jeep, compared to the well-resourced campaigns of his rivals.

Apart from him, there were two newcomers: Harbhajan Lakha from Phillaur (Punjab), and a rising star in the party called Mayawati from Bijnaur (Uttar Pradesh), later also Yadav’s next-door neighbour at the apartment complex for lawmakers at new Delhi’s North Avenue.

“We had started hearing that there is a lady called Mayawati who was gaining prominence with Kanshi Ram ji – but that was the first time I met her, after we got elected to Parliament,” said Yadav.

They did not hit it off.

“Since that time, she seemed like a very ambitious woman. She said she was a teacher, but she had dreams beyond her capabilities, I used to think,” said Yadav, one of the founding members of the BSP, sitting at the Azamgarh courthouse with fellow lawyers.

The success of Kanshi Ram’s BSP, founded in April 1984, was a significant political ripple at a time when upper and intermediary Hindu castes dominated politics. It won more than 1 million votes right away -- in the 1984 Lok Sabha elections, leading to the first parliamentary success in 1989.

Yadav’s political career began when he was invited to Kanshi Ram’s closed-door dinners with Azamgarh’s political activists, where they discussed strategies to create a niche in the already crowded political space.

Yadav soon gave up his successful legal practice to join politics.

“I had nothing. I was a middle-class criminal lawyer. I have never had even a car in my life, I still don’t,” Yadav said. His former colleague Mayawati’s declared assets are worth Rs. 87 crores.

Kanshi Ram started inviting Yadav to share the stage with him and speak at every other public rally.

“I agreed with him that power of all sorts – whether political or financial, or intellectual -- vested in a few hands and it was time to change that,” Yadav said. “I was hugely impressed with Kanshi Ram ji.”

The mercurial Kanshi Ram headed a new shift in political thinking. He was ready to align with any political rival, saying he would do it as long as it served the interests of his key constituency, the Dalits.

Parliament was dissolved in 1991 after the fall of the Chandra Shekhar government. Yadav and the other BSP lawmakers lost that year in the Congress wave after the Rajiv Gandhi assassination.

In the 1996 elections, a quirk of circumstances saw Yadav being pitted against and losing to his own cousin, former state Chief Minister Ram Naresh Yadav.

“After that, I was left with savings of just over Rs 10,000 then. But I was content,” Yadav said.

The BSP, though, had arrived. In 1996, it was granted the status of a national party.

“But Kanshi Ram’s influence had begin to wane by now. The old guard was being sidelined. Mayawati was gaining control,” Yadav said. In 1998, he quit the BSP.

“The themes and policies for which we had joined the BSP and worked for it -- a socialistic outlook, working for the dispossessed – had vanished from the party,” said Yadav.

“The party’s mission was to go after the three M’s – money, media and mafia. Now all is lost.”

A ceiling fan, a 36-year-old dream

My mother called today in excitement. For the first time ever, a fan had just started working in the remote village school my parents set up in 1972 in Uttar Pradesh.

The 36-year-old school, Bharatiya Gramin Vidyalaya, was my father, Dr. S.B. Misra's childhood dream. But it still has no electricity and barely any other facility, and solar panels just brought to life a luxury: a fan that will help some people sit through the excruciating heat this summer.
The fan is a small punctuation in a long story.
As a child, Dr. Misra walked 24 kilometres to and back from his school in remote Uttar Pradesh, with a dream to educate the children in his region so that they would not have to undertake that long walk every day.

He was a brilliant student. He worked through extreme hardship, worked his way through scholarships. From his village, he got an opportunity to get on a train for the first time, get on a plane for the first time, and travelled to Canada in the late 1960s to study geology.
Within months, he became a star when he discovered 565 million-years old fossils that were the oldest records of multicellular life on Earth.
But he still agonised over the long walk to school, that thousands of children were still making in his rural backyard.

Misra and nine of his friends used to sit in a coffee shop every Sunday, horrified at the stories of squalor emerging out of India, and keen to do something about it. He bought an expensive car. He lived a comfortable life. But four years later, on his way to a career of fame and fortune, he quit and returned to his village in 1971 -- to fulfill his dream and set up his school.
Before that could happen, marriage proposals were pouring in. This was the 70s, few people from UP ever went to the West -- and Misra suddenly was a very eligible bachelor. He humbly entertained all proposals -- but laid one condition. He would mary the woman who was equally passionate to set up a school in his village.
Nirmala Shukla was a city woman, a 1960s Lucknow brat. She had never been to a village -- she preferred to go to the movies and poke flirtatious men with safety pins when they tried to act funny with her group. She said: "What the heck, lets do this." They got married in May 1972. Within weeks, she was wading through waist-deep floodwaters in remote Uttar Pradesh, an adventure that sent the blood pressure of her strict father shooting.
This seemed much more than she had bargained for: all the god's creatures she was terrified of, from snakes to scorpions, were here. The couple went door to door, asking people for contributions to the school. They knew people did not have money, even to feed themselves -- so they asked for a fistful of grain, so that the people of the area -- mostly SCs and STs -- felt involved. The school was set up.
In an area where no girl had gone to school before, parents began sending daughters to study because there was a woman principal in Nirmala Misra.
But back in Canada, a deeper conspiracy had taken place. His credit as a discoverer of the extremely rare fossils had been snatched from him by Western scientists. His family launched a campaign to fight back, and finally won.
Last autumn, he received a rare honour from Canadian officials and scientists when one of those fossils was named after him.
Meanwhile, the school has touched and transformed thousands of lives in an area where most of the residents are from the Scheduled Castes, who earlier had no access to education. And for the time time, girls began to study with the opening of the school, and numerous have changed their lives with education. But the school has come through, and continues to face -- many challenges, and is an eloquent example of what is wrong, and what could be right, with India's education system.
And the school just got its first ceiling fan. A few people will not sit in the heat this summer.

(Pictures of the school in the 1970s and now; by Dr. S.B.Misra and Shailesh Misra respectively)

(Those who want to help the school can contact Dr. S.B.Misra at 91-94155-60309 or 91-522-4010 640)