In The Arid East, The Palm Stirs Faintly

In Varanasi I did find the Congress was in with a chance, because Brahmins were unhappy with the bjp’s choice of a Bania as their candidate, and the Muslims too might swing back to them. But when I asked the Congress candidate, Rajesh Mishra, about the rest of Purvanchal he said, "We have a good chance in two more areas and are putting up a good fight in the rest," which is usually shorthand for "little or no hope in the rest". Sitting in party offices in shabby small towns in other constituencies, driving down potholed and puddled cart tracks, listening to candidates addressing voters squatting under mango trees, speaking to villagers by the light of oil lamps, the refrain I heard almost everywhere was "Congress is zero here".

In Mirzapur constituency’s Khanapur village the Samajwadi Party candidate, Phoolan Devi, wearing a startlingly bright pink sari but with her head demurely covered, was having a lunch break. Pointing to the admiring women surrounding her she asked, "Do you think I have to worry about Sonia? What concerns me is the mafia of the bjp candidate Birendra Singh. They defeated me last time by booth capturing." In the Samajwadi Party’s office in Robertsganj they wished the Congress well saying, "Any votes they get will only help us by cutting into the bjp’s upper caste support. The Congress can’t be a threat." In the bsp office in Ghazipur, I was told: "We aren’t against Sonia, she just doesn’t matter in this state".

I found that strategy, not issues, dominated the parties’ thinking at the constituency level, and the strategy was caste and community based. In Ghazipur for instance, the bsp had put up a Yadav candidate in the hope of eating into Mulayam’s vote. The Samajwadi Party candidate was a Rajput so he could be expected to bring some upper caste votes to swell the party’s obc base. The bjp had put up one of ‘their’ castes, a Bhumihar, but the party’s district president listed for me the obcs he was counting on too. As another facet of their strategy, the bjp was busy putting it about that the bsp was stronger than the Samajwadis who defeated them last time. By this they hoped to sow confusion in the ranks of the Muslims and Yadavs who could not know which was the strongest anti-bjp candidate.

The Congress had chosen a Muslim candidate for Ghazipur with the ambition of reviving their old links with that community. But in the village of Fakhanpura, seventy five per cent of whose population is Muslim, I didn’t find any evidence of a Congress renaissance. Irshad Ahmed, who was elected as spokesman for a group of Muslims who gathered round me said, "The Congress has been nowhere since this caste politics started ten years ago, because they don’t have castes of their own. Our vote will go to the person putting up the best fight against the bjp candidate, and that won’t hold just for this village, it will be the same for the whole area." So who will get that vote? Apparently that won’t be decided until the day before polling, when the Muslims assess which is the strongest opponent of the bjp. The reason for this caution, according to Irshad Ahmed, is that the bjp has its spies in every camp.

The light was fading fast in Fakhanpura and by the time I reached the village of Machati, down tracks which even our jeep had difficulty in negotiating, there was thick darkness all around, unrelieved by any electric lighting. The villagers only get power for about five hours a day and they never know when it’s coming and when it’s going. Here I found some Muslim support for the Congress. Enquiring about Ayodhya, I was told that the person responsible in their view, Narasimha Rao, had paid the price. But when I asked whether they would vote Congress, I was told they would go the way the rest of the community went.

A few more miles on, and after two more narrow escapes from skidding off the track into the sticky, pitch-black mud which is a feature of this area known as the Karail, I came to the village of Awathai. It too was in darkness. We stopped beside a group of men who were sitting on charpoys outside a small thatched house and asked where we would find the Rai Sahibs, the Bhumihar caste name. "We are all Rais," they said, more than a little surprised. But with the unfailing courtesy of Indian villagers they insisted we have some tea and sweets before we started to talk about the election. Brought up in the less hospitable traditions of the West, I never cease to be amazed by Indian villagers’ willingness to discuss any subject with a stranger who walks into their homes. Here again the Congress had lost a once loyal community. The Bhumihars explained, "The Congress fire is extinguished. There is no organisation left, so we have nowhere to go except the bjp." The Bhumihars were displeased with Kalyan Singh and his government but they said, "We are not voting for him, we are voting for Vajpayee. In the state elections it might be very different for the bjp".

But if Purvanchal had so far not been touched by the Sonia magic, the Atal alternative didn’t seem to have been any more effective, except among those who already supported the bjp, nor had the attempts to condemn Sonia’s foreign nationality made much of an impact. No one who was not a bjp activist was in the least concerned about her origins. Even the bjp Bhumihars accepted her as an Indian bahu. As for the Churchillian prime minister’s "V for Victory" sign, it has been turned into a local grievance against the bjp by both the Samajwadi Party and the bsp, and has been much more effective than the Congress charge that Vajpayee slept while the intruders were digging in. Unfortunately for the bjp, the bodies of ten soldiers killed during the Kargil operations have been returned to Ghazipur district. Seven of them were Yadavs and one was a Muslim. In the village of Dharammarpur I saw the enthusiastic response of the crowd when the Samajwadi candidate, Om Prakash, bellowed into a microphone, "It was Ghazipur which put the flag on Tiger Hill, not Atal Behari Vajpayee. How dare he claim victory from the brave sons of our farmers?".

Most of the arguments going on in the papers and press conferences of Delhi didn’t seem to have touched the electorate of Eastern UP. There the concerns were the local economy and development, not economic liberalisation or swadeshi. As there is no sign of any foreign investment coming to eastern UP, I couldn’t help wondering what a bjp candidate’s audience made of his promise to turn the town of Mau into a Singapore. Whether Sonia or Atal ruled India seemed insignificant compared with the burning issue of the local candidates’ caste or community. The Congress was not fancied by voters because it didn’t have a solid caste base, and with national issues not catching on that’s what mattered.

So has Sonia, with her whirlwind campaign, at last introduced a national issue into the UP elections? Is the return of the dynasty the guarantor of political stability? Will the voters now throw all those caste and other local considerations to the wind and go for her? The evidence of the last ten years suggests that the days of the "winds" may be over. In ‘91, I travelled with Rajiv when he opened his UP election campaign. Mobbed as he was by ecstatic crowds on his long, slow road journey from Jhansi to Kanpur, I thought he would be blown back to power by a toofan. But the wind had died down by the time the voters reached the polling booths. There hasn’t been any sign of a wave or a wind since, and in this election no political meteorologist had forecast a wind before Sonia entered UP.

In a recent article in the Economic and Political Weekly, Yogendra Yadav agreed that the era of ‘winds’ was over. With the support of copious figures and charts, he pointed out that over the last ten years local issues, the sort of issues which formerly dominated state elections, had come to play a much larger role in national elections. "Now people vote in the parliamentary elections as if they are choosing a state government," he wrote. This indicates that Sonia’s success will depend on the number of voters she’s able to convince that her party not only can win in their constituency, but will also defend their particular interests if it does.

But even if the wind does turn out to be no more than a breeze, and even if the people I met who wrote off the Congress don’t change their mind, I believe Sonia will be the net gainer in UP. By that I don’t just mean she is going to open the Congress account again. That is taken as given. Whatever the credit balance is, it will belong to Sonia. If she builds on that, and somehow persuades her partymen to at last start working again at the constituency level, those Bhumihars of Awathai village will not be the only caste or community to accept that the Phoenix has risen from the ashes and will vote for her nominee when judgement is passed on the Kalyan Singh government.