A for Prayagraj

In yet another instance of history’s inexorable vindictiveness, Allah was driven out of Prayagraj on 16 Oct 2018. Allahabad became Prayagraj with the single stroke of a pen. The pen is mightier than the sword if it is wielded by a mighty hand. Might is what matters. It is what mattered from time immemorial. Every war is born of someone’s desire to impose himself, his might, on others. War can be in the form of name changes.

Changing the name of a place is to erase its history. Changing the name of a place is to erase a whole people from that place. Place names, animal totems, dress colours or styles – they can all be weapons of mass destruction. Nothing really changes except names, totems and dresses. Crime rates don’t change. Poverty levels don’t. Political corruption and chicanery don’t. Even after Allah wad driven out, the state of Uttar Pradesh has remained the same, if not became worse, on the various parameters that determine social progress and cultural development. One thing changed, however: dominance. One whole community became vassals instead of citizens. The ego of another community was inflated.

Such conquests as these – obtained by changing names, totems and dresses – do not prove that all the people in the state share the phobia or hatred of the person who brings about the changes.

I once visited Allahabad before it became Prayagraj along with Maggie. It was in 2015. The school in Delhi where Maggie and I were teaching was breathing its last, thanks to the villainous changes imposed on the teachers and students by a religious cult. We started looking out for other job opportunities and one of the many schools which showed interest in appointing us on mutually acceptable terms was Khelgaon Public School [KPS] in Allahabad. The school was founded by Dr U K Mishra, a biochemical engineer by profession, who takes immense interest in school education with a unique focus on sports and games. It is one of the rare schools in the country with an enormous indoor stadium that has all the facilities for various games and sports.

The school sent us free tickets from Delhi by an AC train to attend the interview. We were accommodated in the room next to the Principal’s own residence. We were treated royally. The school made its car available for us when we expressed a desire to see the Triveni Sangam and requested for a taxi after the interview. When chicken was served for lunch, we were surprised. Chicken in a school founded and run by a Brahmin in UP? “We have a lot of athletes in our hostels from various parts of the country,” the attendant explained. “They need healthy diet.”

KPS was a wonderful example of the inclusiveness contained in the ancient Indian wisdom which taught that the whole world is a family: Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam.

You won’t find that sort of inclusiveness in UP generally. A man who calls himself Yogi became the state’s chief minister and any possibility for inclusiveness that KPS had promised vanished instantly. What happened to the glorious vision of the Upanishads which refused to differentiate even between the divine and the human? Why is UP today just the opposite of what the profound Advaita philosophy taught?

The answers are obvious, of course. Yogi was reported to have delivered 34 communally inflammatory speeches in the three months that preceded the recent state assembly elections. He made more than 100 anti-Muslim comments or allusions in his campaign speeches. He explicitly divided the state into 80 versus 20. Division. Just the opposite of what the Upanishads taught. It was this Yogi who drove away Allah from Prayagraj.

What has all that hatred achieved except political power? By subjugation of one section of the state’s population? According to all available statistics, there is more unemployment among youth in UP now than ever. The state’s GDP is crumbling. It is number one in poverty index. The law-and-order situation is pathetic with wayside lynching by ordinary people and legal killing by the police. The way the pandemic was handled was disconcerting.

I loved Allahabad and Dr U K Mishra. But I was only a one-day visitor. A flirt. It was good that I didn’t take up the job there. The Yogi would have disillusioned me irreparably. Now he reminds me of Kajal Ahmad, the Kurdish poet who threw a challenge to the misogynist philosopher Nietzsche.

Kajal Ahmad

    Give me one night

I’ll make you look like a fool.

Give me one night

The fortress of your cockiness will get cracks.

Give me one night

I’ll transmute you with a kiss

from a thinker into a thought.

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Tomorrow: Bhatti Mines is a symbol