Poll Wheels V

On 17th April, a majority of Jhalawad-Baranians voted for a person who was not only born, 40 years ago, with a silver spoon in his mouth but also with the luck of Mahendra Singh Dhoni, Manmohan Singh and Hugh Hefner...combined.

Meet Dushyant Singh, the son of sitting Chief Minister of Rajasthan, ‘Madam’ Vasundhra Raje Scindia . He is three years younger than Rahul Gandhi (43), the symbol of ‘youth’ in Indian politics.

He is vying for a consecutive third term from the constituency of Jhalawad-Baran where people vote for him only because of his lineage. Before him, the people have sent his mother to Parliament five times in a row. Ask a question on Dushyant's work in the past 10 years and you get pin-drop silence or hysterical laughter. Some start reciting his mother’s achievements instead. He is disliked, if not detested, even by those who vote for him, leave alone those who don’t. But the triple-glare of the party, ‘Madam’ and Modi is so strong; people simply can’t seem to bother about who they are voting for.

Yunus Khan, a farmer from Rajpura village is quick to remind that ‘Modi-wave’, if at all, is only a recent phenomenon. Dushyant Singh, after all, has won form the same seat even when the state was ruled by a Congress government. His mother’s name is more than enough to cover-up his almost vegetative terms and win him votes. The Icing on the cake is the anti-incumbency towards central government lead by Congress.

Badri Lal from Rajpura village belongs to the Bheel tribe. This tribe, like most of the other Scheduled tribes, is considered to be Congress party’s vote-bank. This time he is flirting with the idea of voting for BJP. “LaDii se laDii juDe to mazaa aaye (It'd be fun if one chain gets connected to the other)," he said. He was hinting towards bringing the same party in the state and central governments. 

Meena community is also considered to be Congress loyalists. Another Badri Lal, this one from village Aantirwad near Chhatrapura, believes that this assumption has led the community to be taken for granted. He plans to give some shock-therapy to the party in these elections.

But loyalty of Chaturbhuj Berwa from village Mau Borda is rock solid. For him, Congress is the “caretaker of the poor”. “Earlier, we were asked to sit on the ground. It was Congress which gave us a level playing field,” he recalls. Today, even a Dalit is given a chance to become a Sarpanch, he adds.

If assessed on individual mettle, “Pramod Jain ‘Bhaya’ (Congress’ candidate) is a lakh times better than Dushyant Singh” but people are seeing only the party, said Dharamraj of Pipalda village. Interestingly, he himself would have voted for Dushyant Singh, if he were a Congress candidate. Contradictions abound. 

Only a handful of people are daring to swim against the current. Mahender Singh’s village, Bhoomri, is almost entirely coloured in saffron colours but he is so pissed off with the ‘prince’, he has decided to vote for ‘Bhaya’ this time. “Just look at the pathetic condition of the roads of the village. What has he done?” he asks.

Dushyant’s supporters are quick to defend him. “How could poor Dushyantji have brought development? It was a Congress government in the state until late last year,” they say. A very weak defence but when has servility cared for that?

The constituency comprises of two districts—Jhalawad and Baran. While Jhalawad boasts of being the ‘home’ of Chief minister Vasundhara Raje, former Vice President of India Bhairon Singh Shekhawat was from Baran. Such ‘high-profile’ linkages though haven’t helped the districts much. Baran, particularly, has received a step motherly treatment.

So much so that access to one of the fundamental necessities of life—water—is a challenge in some of its villages. Seeta Bai of Kaushalpura village says her family is forced to live a life of nomads despite having a home because there’s no source of drinking water in her village. They settle anywhere where they can find water, some vacant land and a nearby source of employment. But Seeta Bai went back to her village on 17th, to cast her vote.

On the other hand, there are villages like Pipalda near Sarola Kalan in Jhalawad district where hand-pumps fitted with motors run 24x7 on sarkari electricity. Precious drinking water— and electricity—goes down the drain, literally. When you don’t pay, you don’t care. When I took pictures of this preposterous wastage, a man first objected to it and then promptly rushed to the electric pole to disconnect the wires of the motor attached directly to the power-line.

There are a third kind of villages as well where the drinking water comes with a rider. You get it only in the wee hours of the morning. Why? Because that’s the only time when the fans are switched off letting the poor transformer provide sufficient voltage to the motor to pull up the water, says Rampal of village Mujra Sultanpur. With apologies to Robin Williams,  “God/Government gave them both a fan and a water-motor, but unfortunately not enough voltage supply to run both at the same time.”

Rampal, by the way, is a not-so-proud father of seven daughters. And he is still in the pursuit of happiness, where happiness is synonymous with a son. All this exercise to please the so-called samaaj (society) who won’t give a shit if his wife dies in the process (she remains sick all the time) or the entire family dies of poverty. I tried to dissuade him by giving my own example of how useless sons can be when it comes to caring for one's parents. Don’t know if it worked.

Rampal’s wife, Kanti Bai, when not sick, works as a labourer in various projects under Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). The minimum wage under MGNREGA in the state is Rs 149. But this wage is like 21MBPS speed of my 3G dongle; it’s never attained. She hardly ever gets more than Rs 100. “It ranges from Rs 60-80 most of the times,” she said.

Prem Bai working on a road connecting Ganeshpura to Taancha recounts a similar tale. Lekhraj, a labourer who owns a motorbike and fetches water for his colleagues on it from the nearby hand-pump fares a bit better. He gets around Rs 120, still less than the minimum wage nonetheless.

When I jokingly asked who they were going to bury in the pit they were digging, their frustration was more than evident in the reply. “It’s for the mate,” replied a colleague of Prem Bai while adjusting her ghunghat. A supervisor who oversees the work on behalf of Employment Assistant appointed by the village Panchayat is informally called ‘mate’ by the villagers.

Harish Chand, the supervisor of this road project, says that the workers can get full wage (after deducting Rs 12-15 for insurance) if they achieve the target of the day, which never happens. “The payment is deducted at senior levels,” he says, defensively.

The wounds of sub-minimum wages are further rubbed with iodised-salt by delaying payments by more than a month. In fact, a lot of labourers have quit working in MGNREGA projects because they never get the money when they need it the most. In a 24th January report in the Business Standard, panchayati raj and rural development minister of the state G. C. Kataria said that if workers' salaries were not given in 15 days, the officer concerned would be penalised. I couldn’t confirm the number of such officers but your guess is as good as mine. Leaves one wondering what the penalty for blatantly lying in the house is.

Elections may be fought in the name of welfare but the priority of our politicians can be clearly understood through this picture. Human beings work on incentives and politicians are no different. This Upper-Primary school in Bhoomri village was gifted with electricity just two days before the elections to facilitate the voting process. The man in the picture installed the meter himself. The comfort of hundreds of children, who incidentally don’t vote, was apparently never an incentive before.

But that school would still be considered lucky when compared to this Girl’s middle school in Bamori Ghata village near Chhabra.

The walls have such gaping fissures that it leaves you wondering what might be holding the roof above your head. “It’s been a year since a PWD officer inspected the school,” Sitara Begum, an MA in Urdu and history who teaches Hindi to class 6th and 7th, says. Interestingly, the building is also hosting a boy’s school whose structure was declared defunct and dangerous for children.

One of the Hallmarks of Harappa Civilization, some 3100 BC, was an excellent drainage system. By that standard, this region must be even older than than Harappa. Barring a few cities, there are not even rudiments of a drainage system to be seen. A ‘tributary’ emerges from each house to meet the ‘river’ flowing on the road.

Drinking water, on the other hand, takes the aerial route. From a distance, you simply can’t tell the difference between an electric cable and a water-pipe. Different villages have different reasons to embrace this novelty. Like the one where I halted for night— Piplia Ghata— is so rocky, you simply can’t dig the ground to lay pipelines. 

I crossed Parwan river early in the morning. The proposal for damming the river, Parwan Baandh Pariyojna, has already been inaugurated by none other than Rahul Gandhi. Location of Piplia Ghata is quite unique. At one end there are miles of forest, on the other end, a river. To make it more exciting, there is no primary health centre in the village. For anything, ranging from a fever to cardiac arrest to child birth, you have to rush either to Chhipa Barod (across the forest) or Sarola Kalan (across the river).

According to the villagers, the forest department objects to a tarmac road. And a bridge cannot be built because of the proposed dam as the village is supposed to go under water in few years anyway. What’s the point in pouring crores of rupees down the river? Even if we don’t touch upon the cliché about what the govt may have been doing for the past so many decades, one is forced to wonder whether there can’t  be a makeshift bridge till the time the village is not inundated. Also, when thousands of acres of pristine forest are given— officially or unofficially— to the mining industry every year without batting an eyelid, how harmful to the ecology exactly would a good tarmac road through the forest be in comparison?

To compensate for its apathy perhaps, the government seems to provide the village with free electricity. Not a single house has a meter—nor a toilet. They don’t seem to feel the need of either.

Though the project to build a dam was conceptualised by the BJP government, the villagers don’t seem to resent the party. They don’t even oppose the dam despite being highly sceptical of the track-record of any government when it comes to giving fair and timely compensation. On the contrary, they are likely to vote for the party en-masse. Reason? The mukhiya of the village is extremely close to ‘Madam’ and he has a strong influence on the villagers.

Piplia Ghata is not alone in depicting such voting pattern. “The entire village changes court in a single sweep, hours before the election,” says a young man in Dolam village when I tried to inquire the prevailing mood.

That the former Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot wasn’t bad either was the general opinion, barring few exceptions, who seemed to hold him responsible for reducing the number of beds in the government hospital at Jhalawad, apart of course from corruption and distributing freebies. But his “free medicine scheme” was an instant hit among everyone irrespective of their political preferences.

BJP remains strong in the region “I don’t think he (Dushyant) can be defeated,” surmises Tara Bai, a worker at Garlic mandi in Chhipa Barod. She herself seemed to be quite excited about ‘Bhaya’ though.

The only front where the luck of the ‘Prince’ doesn’t seem to work is in getting Muslim votes. “We can vote for Vasundhara but not for her son,” says Irshaad Ali, a young welder at Mandawar who left schooling after 9th class. “For us, she is even better than Ashok Gehlot,” adds Nafees, the cook at Diamond Hotel near Jhalawad bus-stand which he claims was metamorphosed by Vasundhara Raje.

But I was lucky. Lucky to have tasted the lip-smacking mutton curry and bota-kaleji prepared by this ace cook. Highly recommended.