H-Pop by Kunal Purohit

Author:Kunal Purohit [Purohit, Kunal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: null
Publisher: HarperCollins India
Published: 2023-11-21T23:00:00+00:00

By then, his Hindutva poetry had started getting noticed. He was performing regularly in kavi sammelans across the state, while some of his poetry had even achieved virality online.

When elections came, he started getting approached by local leaders of the BJP to back the party. Kamal was open to the idea of campaigning for the party. So he jumped at the opportunity to address public meetings in support of a BJP MLA aspirant in Lucknow, just three months before the polls.

In the next ten days, Kamal went on a whirlwind tour of the constituency, addressing meetings in every nook and cranny of the city. Days would start by 9 a.m. and end in the wee hours of the morning, addressing meetings in the candidate’s support. These weren’t major political rallies. ‘The crowds would range from 200 to 20,000 people. No matter how small the size, I had to perform,’ Kamal says.

For the poet, campaigning was a new experience: here, he couldn’t come up and just recite his poems as he had done all this while. He had to be much more explicit in his political stances and had to fill in the gaps between his poems with electoral rhetoric. It didn’t prove to be a very difficult task for Kamal. He just had to stay true to his beliefs.

He would lambast critics of the Modi government and mock the liberals.

The country had seen frequent disturbances—a spate of mostly Muslim victims had been lynched by vicious mobs, often by Hindu right-wing activists in the name of cow protection.13 One of the first such attacks took place in Uttar Pradesh, when a Hindu mob lynched a fifty-two-year-old Muslim villager named Mohammed Akhlaq on the suspicion that he had slaughtered a cow.14,15

The killing had triggered outrage across the nation. Upset at the silence of the Modi government and its inability to rein in some of its leaders who backed and justified16 the lynching, eminent intellectuals and artistes returned government-bestowed honours and awards in protest. All this forced even Modi to react17 and call the incident ‘sad and undesirable’.

Kamal mentioned the incident in his speeches but mockingly punned on the victim’s name. ‘1 Akhlaq mara, toh usko mile 45 lakh,’ 1 Akhlaq died, and he got 45 lakh, Kamal would say, referring to the financial aid the government gave his family. He would slam the ‘award wapsi gang’, a disparaging reference to those who were returning their awards in protest.

But he would be careful not to say this in all his public meetings. Each night, Kamal would be handed over a chart that spelled out his schedule for the following day. Accompanying the chart would be detailed instructions: where the meetings were, the time, the prospective audience size, as well as demographic tidbits like their castes or subcastes, their class or livelihoods. With these details would come a crucial piece of instruction. ‘The candidate and his team would tell me where I needed to use acchi bhasha, decent language, and where I could go hard (sic),’ Kamal says.

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