Suraj Mandal

Suraj Mandal—Lok Sabha by polls
Santanu Saraswati
Dumka, April 30—Like the daft emperor in the story of the new clothes, Suraj Mandal is the only one seeing waves trailing him behind wherever he goes in this region. All that trails him as he leaves meeting after meeting in this sweltering rum for survival is the swirl of dust under his white ambassador car.Each time he starts, he prods son Binod Mandal to stick his hand out of the window and wave to the crowd behind. There is no body waving back. He moves forlorn to the next stop and resorts to myth to recreate the Mandal mythology. “Lehar hein lehar hein Suraj Mandal ka lehar hein (there is a wave of Suraj Mandal)”, he chants, arms raised, symbol swinging, almost the picture of a solitary lighthouse keeper wishing a storm on a sea-gone placid. This is an audience, which Suraj Mandal not used to. He has never been so desperate to convince, never sounded so unconvincing. Suraj Mandal ending rally upon rally without cursing the media, without expressing the hopes of new Jharkhand for the poors –not what Marandi Government at Ranchi is giving them—is just like Helen going through a three hour movie without doing the cabaret. They don’t go to see Helen films if she isn’t jiggling on the floor.This campaign is the elaborate, if largely unobserved, funeral of the pulpit’s great patriarch. He himself leads the lonely procession, cased in a fiberglass coffin, adrift and unhinged from crowds no longer in his thrall.The Jharkhandis were to him what the rats, and later, the children of Hamelyn were to the Pied Piper. He held them like a puppeteer holds his puppet. He held the strings, he could make them roll and swing and laugh and cry at will. But after his expulsion from the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (Soren), now these strings have all snapped. He arrives on stage waving his arms, but the crowds don’t sway to their bidding. “Mandalua pehle hum logon ke saath nacthta tha, aab khali gaddi mein ghumta hein. Kaise chalega? (Earlier Mandal used to dance with us. Now he only moves on a car and wants people to dance to his tune. How will it work?)” Asked a poor farmer of Jama village, a former faithful as his leader departs on an air-conditioned car. “Mandalua aab Mandalua nehin raha.” Suraj Mandal had he crowds because he was a creature of the crowds, even on stage. He was their man performing, talking the language they speak, speaking things they love to hear and wanted to say.The Jharkhandis celebrated his power because he was their man wielding it. His magic was, in fact, that he himself never celebrated his power. Even in the Jharkhand Area Autonomous Council office and in his sprawling bunglow in Ranchi, he remained an anti-hero, an intruder into the establishment, and a man of the tribal mass who had come to claim the system for them.He has lost them now because sometime after the JMM-bribery case broke, Mandal suffered a stroke of arrogant amnesia, a common enough disease among the politicians whose only cure, ironically, is not attention, but public rejection. Suraj Mandal forgot about empowering the tribal mass and set about empowering himself. The man fighting against the system trapped himself within it. From a creature of tribal crowds, he became a creature of power, a clinger.He lost his impetus as he drowned his energies in trying to survive. The tribal empowerment vanished from the face of Jharkhand, cheap housing projects for the poor tribal mass were abandoned, the wretched—the constituency he celebrates—were getting killed in the fields but Suraj Mandal was busy barricading his throne in the JAAC office. The tribals, the Yadavas, the Brahmins, the Muslims were asking him for food and shelter and clothing and roads, for safety of their lives. He was asking them for power. When he could cling no longer, he played a farce that would have been comical were it not so tragic in its implications for this region, for the promise he had set out to fulfill and for the man himself. He usurped the throne after being expelled by JMM (S) chief; he hung on to the palace no longer his. The “Emperor of Godda” still struts in the dazzling bunglow with an “I-am-the-State” countenance. Only, the hundreds of hired plastic chairs serried ion his lawns are empty. Suraj Mandal has lost his clothes and he does not even know that. EOM.
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