The plains that surround Etawah, tinted with golden, heaving fields of wheat, end abruptly at a boundary wall. Above the crumbling barrier, an incomplete cricket stadium looms large, studded with four large floodlights that glint in the strong summer sun. Beyond, a concrete skyline — complete with clumped, whitewashed housing developments — appears amidst buffaloes and goats silently foraging in the sweltering heat. Yet, every metalled road that leads here is diligently marked with signposts that prominently display a six-letter name: Saifai.
By definition, Saifai remains a village of some 5,600 in Etawah district. By destiny, it is the ancestral home of the first family of Uttar Pradesh politics. And by design, a once dusty hamlet transformed by Mulayam Singh Yadav — leader of the Samajwadi Party, three-time chief minister of the state and father of the incumbent, Akhilesh Yadav — into a Yadav-esque Eden. At the centre of Saifai is a large, squarish grassy patch that is left at this time of the year for cattle to graze, surrounded by well-laid, smooth roads lined with sizeable, mature trees. It is flanked, on one side, by a series of gleaming, modern buildings and, on the other, by a wide avenue that leads to an air strip on the outskirts of the village. It is this square that hosts the village’s annual celebration, Saifai Mahotsav, which a few years ago saw a bevy of Ukrainian dancers titillate audiences, after Mulayam’s fallout with one-time partner Amar Singh meant that the trickle of Bollywood celebrities that once came here dried up.
For all its splendour and sway, born out of the influence of its illustrious sons, Saifai remains a place that is susceptible to the vagaries of political change. After the frugally-funded winter under Mayawati, four-time chief minister of Uttar Pradesh and Mulayam’s nemesis, Saifai now finds itself in the early days of a bountiful spring.
* * *
Saifai’s air strip is a 10-kilometre drive through the fields that surround the village. In the middle of a large, dusty plot, stands a cluster of four buildings. Barely months after the Samajwadi Party swept into power with an outright majority, the airfield is already being prepared for the numerous short visits that VIPs are expected to make. A two-storied structure, which contains four bedrooms with attached bathrooms, a lounge and a large sitting room furnished with beige sofas, is undergoing “routine repairs”, claims a supervisor overseeing a small band of workers. By his feet, four brand new Voltas air-conditioners sit in their brown cardboard boxes.
Early in the evening, Abhay Ram Yadav rides in sitting pillion on a motorcycle, dusts down his unpretentious dhoti and kurta, and settles into a grimy plastic chair in the middle of a fly-infested cowshed. After spending a few minutes carefully inspecting the 30 or so head of cattle, he sits back, folds his legs, bringing a mud-caked rubber loafer to rest on his thigh, and then casually lights a beedi. Few outside Saifai can be expected to know this man, but here in Mulayam’s village, few can choose to ignore the younger brother of Netaji, the political heavyweight’s local moniker. The second-youngest of the five Yadav siblings, Abhay Ram may have made a conscious decision to stay out of politics, preferring instead to tend to the 500 bigha of farmland and the cattle that the Yadavs own, but he remains a much-respected representative of the family that now finds itself based out of Lucknow and New Delhi.
“I wake up before dawn, around 4 am, and then spend the rest of the morning arranging fodder for the cattle and allocating work in the fields. Later, I go to the fields myself and sometimes have lunch there. In the evening, I come to the cowshed, meet some people and stay here till around 8 pm,” he says as a retinue of dhoti-kurta-clad village elders amble in and gather around.
More From This Section
A few hundred metres down the road from the cowshed stands a whitewashed compound, bound by lush trees and bordered on one side by a dried-up but heavily embellished water body, complete with concrete crocodiles and plastic penguins. There are three houses within the complex: two plush two-storied bungalows for Mulayam and his elder brother, and a smaller, under-construction one for Akhilesh. Across the road is the Yadav family’s ancestral home. Rebuilt and revamped extensively, it hardly resembles the house that Mulayam would have grown up in, but then again much has changed in Saifai, Abhay Ram admits, since his elder brother first came to power in 1989. “The villagers now have jobs, pucca houses and roads here have been metalled. People have fans, coolers and even air-conditioners now,” he says, as a large, standing fan hums along behind him, before pointing in the direction of Saifai’s hospital and adding nonchalantly, “The people of Saifai now have it all.”
None of what he says is an exaggeration. Instead, it is the nonchalance that is decidedly flawed, for the minuscule Saifai doesn’t merely have a hospital — it is home to the 700-bed, multi-speciality Uttar Pradesh Rural Institute of Medical Sciences and Research (RIMS), its adjoining medical college and an upcoming paramedical college. If it is the concrete, glass and steel of the buildings that house RIMS and its 2,000-strong staff and students that defines Saifai’s horizon, it is the institute’s comprehensive —and affordable— set of facilities that draw up to 2,000 people per day from surrounding areas to its out-patient department. A former Army Medical Corps doctor at RIMS says that more super-speciality facilities are likely to be added this year, along with the creation of an entirely separate super-speciality block. And the cost of treatment ranges between free and a maximum of Rs 400, for even the most complex of treatments. Yet, like much else in Saifai, RIMS, too, suffered a little when its patron-in-chief had to move from the Treasury Benches to those reserved for the Opposition in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly. “The expansion plans were stalled. The building for the Rs 111-crore paramedical college has been complete for some time now, but we weren’t able to get it started. The funds have already started coming in, and things will start moving now,” explains another former two-star general from the Army Medical Corps.
Doctors at RIMS describe how Mulayam’s inability to find a suitable set of administrators for the newly-established facility led him to tap old contacts at the defence ministry — he was Union defence minister between 1996 and 1998 —and, subsequently, a group of Army Medical Corps veterans were called in to take charge. Many of them continue to serve in Saifai, but recall a time when the village was unable to provide even the most basic of urban needs. “When we first came here, there were no shops, and no places to buy fruits and vegetables. Someone would have to be sent 20 kilometres to Etawah to buy bread and butter. All that has changed now,” an ex-Army medic recollects. Saifai now has at least three banks and the shops that line the main thoroughfare are replete with basic, urban requirements. There is uninterrupted power throughout the year and a brimming water table that ensure that few borewells fail.
* * *
Mulayam’s tenacity, a trait that has served him well in political life, didn’t go unnoticed even in his younger days. Sridarshan Singh, a stern-faced man and Netaji’s one-time wrestling guru, claims that he never saw anyone more committed than the Yadav chieftain in the mud pit. “He never really thought about winning or losing. He would always just give it his all,” Singh says, “I haven’t seen a wrestler like him since.”
Akhilesh, the Yadav scion and newly-crowned chief minister, may not have the martial character of his father, but those who have seen him grow up over the years are convinced that he will deliver. As a boy, an assembly of village elders recount, he was not mischievous at all. “Akhilesh was always sober, but he loved riding bullocks carts,” Abhay Ram quietly slips in. “He always takes care of himself. He is very committed to staying fit and makes sure that he goes for a run whenever he finds the time,” adds another, younger family member. “When he is in Saifai, he goes for a couple of circuits of the stadium.”
Saifai has three stadia — one incomplete arena for cricket, and another two for athletics and other field sports. These, too, betray signs of neglect inflicted during the previous political regime, though the recent victory of the Samajwadi Party has meant a quick reversal in fortune for these sporting venues surrounded by fields of wheat. Saifai’s cricket stadium, a generously proportioned, bowl-like venue, with a multi-storied, glass-fronted pavilion and large, stepped concrete stands, is swarming with tractors and a large earth-mover. Standing on an uneven green that could well be the batting pitch, a contractor explains that work has only just started to clear the field of undergrowth that had taken over the stadium in recent years.
Mulayam’s building spree has permanently altered the physical appearance of Saifai, but in doing so it has also created a fascinating set of issues for what is a primarily agrarian settlement. Working his fields along with his family, 50-year-old Devai Lal claims that he has absolutely no complaints about living in this celebrated constituency, except for one thing: there just aren’t enough jobs to go around. “Some of the educated can go out of Saifai and work, but what about the uneducated who live here?” he bluntly asks, “And even some of the educated children have a hard time finding jobs. We really need a factory here. We need some large industry.”
Netaji can’t be expected to find employment for the whole of Saifai, a fact that young wrestler Karan Yadav realised as he was finishing his BA degree from a nearby college. He now sits in a small, three-square-metre shop outside Saifai’s tehsil office, providing everything from mobile phone recharge coupons to printouts of government forms and examination results from his desktop computer. “Few people here take education seriously, even though every facility that one needs is now available. When it comes to jobs, no one wants to aim for the big posts. It’s just not the priority,” he says while loading music from his computer into a pen drive for a taxi driver in his little shack.
As the sun sets on Saifai, a bunch of medical interns play a quick game of cricket in the gated basketball court, located halfway between RIMS and the unfinished cricket stadium. Jawed Ahmed Siddiqui from Aligarh, taking a minute off from fielding, says that the medical college has everything that a student might want: “Within the campus, everything is fine and nothing is lacking. It’s only when we step out do we realise that we live in a bit of a Utopia.”
