Backstory: Why hanging out with this Brahmin lawyer in Gwalior spooked me

Cooped up at the back of Anil Mishra’s SUV, driving through the narrow lanes of Gwalior, my colleague Kritika and I had become a captive audience for the garrulous lawyer.

He would occasionally turn around to look at us while speaking, but he never really bothered to wait for our response. And, truth be told, I am glad that he didn’t because I remember feeling very conflicted about what was happening.

We were in the city to cover the controversy over the proposed installation of an Ambedkar statue in the premises of the Madhya Pradesh High Court’s Gwalior bench.

Anil Mishra was part of a group of mostly Brahmin lawyers who had blocked the statue on the pretext that due process had been flouted to rush through its installation in May.

In an interview he had given us in his chambers, Mishra had spoken at length about the technical grounds on which he was opposed to the statue.

But in the car, with Kritika’s camera locked away, the real reason for his opposition tumbled out. “This statue will never be erected anywhere in or around Gwalior,” Mishra declared. “Not even in a toilet.”

The casteist import of what he said was not lost on us. But we sat quietly at the back of the car, grateful for his help in navigating the city.

That day, the Ambedkarite group Bhim Army had called for a public meeting in Gwalior to protest against the stonewalling done by upper-caste lawyers and to demand that the statue be installed.

The police had turned the city into a fortress and journalists like us were struggling to get anywhere close to the court. When Kritika tried to click a picture of the court’s facade, the police officials on duty chased her away.

So when Mishra offered to take us to the court and show us around, we jumped at the opportunity – unaware of what we were signing up for. All through the drive, Mishra held forth on how Gwalior’s upper castes had fought back Ambedkarite assertion.

He harked back to 2018, when caste clashes had claimed over half a dozen lives, mostly of Dalits, in Gwalior and its neighbouring districts. The fear of a repeat of 2018-like violence, Mishra argued, would stop Ambedkarites from escalating matters over the statue beyond a point.

He seemed to be acutely aware that the dispute over the statue was bigger than a lawyers’ squabble over legal minutiae. “We have shown the country that these Ambedkarites can be stopped in their tracks,” he boasted.

Mishra’s choice of metaphor was telling. He likened the spread of social justice politics in the Hindi belt over the past four decades to the Ashwamedha yajna – a Vedic ritual performed by kings to expand their territories.

The ritual involved a horse traversing foreign lands with the king’s army in tow to battle any opponents who came in their way. All the area that the horse covered thereafter became the king’s own.

“Nobody thought that it could be done but we have captured the horse from their yajna and tied it up,” he said.

Then, out of the blue, came his confession.

“Jhanda toh humne zabardasti laga diya,” Mishra chuckled sheepishly. We put the flag there for no good reason.

He was talking about the tricolour that some upper-caste lawyers had forcibly hoisted on the podium meant for the Ambedkar statue. When we visited the court, the flag was still flying high while the statue was gathering dust far away from the city, in the factory where it had been sculpted.

To this day, I have not been able to figure out why Mishra opened up to us the way that he did.

It is, of course, possible that we had nothing to do with it and that we merely happened to be there when he was doing and saying what he usually does and says. Perhaps he was bragging in a markedly casteist manner because that is his wont.

But there is another potential explanation that haunts me. Soon after we met, he had asked us about our castes and appeared to be at ease knowing that we, too, came from upper-caste backgrounds.

What if he felt comfortable enough to let his guard down and express himself freely because he had assumed that we shared the same views as him? While we had not said anything to him that would feed such an assumption, we did not say anything that could have countered it either.

These are the thoughts that I was grappling with as Mishra took us around the court that evening. Only some police officials were present in the complex at that hour. When we reached the podium, a policeman came forward and requested us not to use our phone cameras.

Mishra, however, took us to the first floor of the building and gently nudged my colleague to record a video of the flag. We were grateful for all that he did to help us that day and thanked him profusely.

But on the way back to Delhi, I thought about the unease I experienced listening to some of the things he said. I wondered what I could have done differently. It is a question that has bothered me ever since.