Noise. Civic insensitivity. Filth. Gabbar Singh songs at 2am. Regional chauvinism. Political advertisements. Chikni Chameli. Drunken revelry.
Or
Killing animals.
Such is a "religious" "festival" in Hyderabad. Where to celebrate with dignity is a blasphemy.
Sneakily saintly, with zero display of aggression, the state’s most celebrated (and alleged, I must add) criminal walked into Chanchalguda Jail on 28 May, with palms folded and a beatific smile spread over his face.
It wasn’t a sentence for his crime as such – the hearing had just begun, and Jagan was being sent to judicial remand for only 14 days – but a large section of the citizenry was waiting for just this moment.
The CBI seemed to have nailed it, finally; and political vendetta or no, here was a man widely believed to be a wrong-doer, whose scale of crimes could not easily be fathomed, finally being tried for his deeds.
Only, it is us - this very citizenry - that the tables are being turned against.
For starters, Jagan has his supporters – largely spilled over from YSR’s fan following (that can be very emotional, indeed: my maid was so shattered when YSR died that she didn’t show up for work that day) – who have gone on an overdrive joining their leader in crying foul. Let’s not forget that we are inherently a people with disturbing tendencies of fanaticism, hero-worship and aggression, and also with money easily thrown about in order to feed these tendencies.
Jagan basically claims that the Congress and the TDP are out to get him since they are scared of his rising popularity, which is an obstacle to their winning the upcoming 12 June by-elections. And there is certainly widespread belief that the CBI runs at the behest of the Congress.
The Congress, of course, has rubbished these claims, but the timing of the arrest has only fueled the Jagan camp’s aggressive allegations that all this is just a political drama. There are intellectuals as well, who believe that Jagan is being targeted simply because he “dared to go against Sonia Gandhi” (the Odarpu Yatra being his act of defiance).
And meanwhile, media coverage of the state’s most high-profile case has built up so dramatically over the past week that virtually, Jagan was seen as doing the taxpayer a huge favour by simply appearing before the CBI for his questioning.
Let’s get this straight: this case is specifically about Y S Jaganmohan Reddy’s disproportionate assets, and a probe has been going on for over 8-9 months now (and a dozen elite industrialists, IAS officers and ministers were arrested so far). And Jagan condescending to appear before the CBI for the first time ever, in a case pertaining to his own assets, is a favour to the state?
What we see on TV and read in the papers may be merely a smokescreen for what is happening out there, but whatever has happened so far simply seems to doing Jagan more good than harm.
The media has hyped this up (and I don’t really condemn that, since this is a case of such great magnitude that people deserve to know how much they were looted), the state has given him extraordinary security during his interrogation, and he was arrested only a few days before the crucial by-polls. (The judge has rapped the CBI repeatedly, asking it is taking so long to deal with the No. 1 accused, arresting everyone else meanwhile.)
And that is why Jagan has little reason to even feel punished (it is a different matter that he does not seem to believe he has done anything wrong). His demeanour, as he went into prison, showed not arrogance but contentment, not helplessness but control, not defeat but victory.
The man is a poster-boy of whatever the hell he stands for, and since our society is pretty indifferent to crime, or at least has selective memory about it, Brand Jagan has higher recall than even brand YSR. Why this must alarm us is that we are currently a state with absolutely no brand to care about – not Kiran Kumar Reddy, not Narasimhan, not the Congress. (Chandrababu Naidu is a lost case, unfortunately)
It’s all the more fascinating that Jagan has a personal reputation no one envies (I’ve heard nasty stories from reliable sources), but then again, we are a society for whom power and money are reputation.