Image credit:  Supriya Sharma

If Kajal takes pride in being one of the only two students in the eastern Uttar Pradesh village of Baksha who won a laptop from the government last year on the basis of her class ten score – 86.3% – she does not show it. Even her parents are understated in their joy over their youngest-born’s achievement.

“Mehnat ki bachchi ne.” Our daughter worked hard, said her father Shardanand, a grey-haired man in his fifties, as he lowered a headload of potatoes to the ground with a smile.

The family had spent the day digging the potatoes they had sown in November on their tiny farm, smaller than one-fifth of an acre. One quintal of seed potatoes bought at a cost of Rs 1,100 had yielded seven quintals of potatoes, of which two quintals had been sold for Rs 1,200. With the investment recouped, a portion of the remaining potatoes will be saved for the family, and a few more quintals will be sold for a few more hundred rupees. In the summer, the same cycle will be repeated with maize. In between, Shardanand will look for some daily wage work, and he and his wife will hope to get some remittances from their sons who are working in Gurgaon.

Shardanand, back from his farm.

Despite living in such precarious circumstances, the couple did not shy away from putting money on Kajal’s education.

They sent her to a private school from class six onwards, paying a monthly fee of Rs 300 from class eight to class ten. Part of the reason to choose a private school was the proximity. Baksha, in Jaunpur district, has three government primary schools, but the middle school and the high school are some distance away. “She would have had to cross the highway, cross the railway line, walk another kilometre and half. We thought it was better to send her closer,” said Shardanand. “Bachchi hai.” She is a girl.

But even for their boys, the first preference of Baksha’s residents is a private school. The refrain is that in the government schools, “the master log come and mark attendance and then spend the day sipping chai”.

While parents spurn government schools, teachers covet them. The starting salary of a primary grade teacher in a sarkari school is about Rs 45,000, while jobs in private schools fetch as little as Rs 3,000 to Rs 10,000, said Sarvesh Kumar Yadav, who teaches at the Vivekananda Junior Girls School, where Kajal studied till class ten. Such is the allure of a government job that when the founder-principal of the Vivekananda school got selected for one last year, he left the daily management of his own school to Yadav and others, and moved to Gonda, 200 km away, to take up his government posting. “He spends the week there and the weekend here,” said Yadav.

It isn’t just teachers who have one foot in the government education system and another in the private one. For all practical purposes, Kajal studied at Vivekanand, but the teaching was couched as “after-school tuitions”, since Vivekanand School does not have government recognition beyond class eight. To ensure she could appear for the board exams, Shardanand had simultaneously enrolled Kajal in the government school.

He took all this trouble in the hope that one of his children would graduate.

“I am a high school fail,” he said, squatting next to his wife, Asha, outside their brick home in Baksha’s Harijan basti, home to Chamars, the Dalit caste to which Bahujan Samaj Party’s Mayawati belongs. “I was in class one when we got married,” he said, exchanging glances with Asha. “By class seven, the gauna happened, and she came home. By class ten, our first one was born. That was the end of my education.” Asha smiled, but protested: “Kha pi ke jaayin, picture dekh chale aayin.” He would eat and leave for school, watch a film, and come back.

Their older sons could not go much further, dropping out after high school to pursue factory jobs in the cities. Kajal’s sister, too, was married off to a factory worker. “Ek shaher hai Gurgoan.” There is a city called Gurgaon. They make chappals there.

The younger son made it to college but then fell in love with a classmate. Her parents did not approve and the young couple eloped to Mumbai last year.

Kajal is the only one left to fulfill Shardanand’s dreams.

The laptop screen has a political message.

In the Harijan basti of Baksha, dreams are hard won. Families have few assets. Everyone lives from hand to mouth.

“Hum yeh jaante hai ki haath per salamat hai to kamaa khaa lenge.” We know if our limbs are intact, we will earn enough to feed ourselves, said Lal Chand Gautam, who had returned from Delhi in November after the shoe factory, where he and his son worked, shut shop. The owner had no money to pay wages. The government’s decision to demonetise 86% of India’s currency has led to massive layoffs in industrial areas around India, including Delhi.
In the village, his brother, Dhruv Rai, who pushed a handcart and rented out diesel-fuelled lights for weddings, was struggling to find customers. The loss of income had forced the family to harvest potatoes early. “There is no money to buy vegetables,” said Lal Chand. “Kya khayenge. What will we eat.”

He admits that some of the residents of Harijan Basti were swept in the Modi wave of 2014 and had voted for the Bharatiya Janata Party. “The Congress’s time was up. Mayawati could not have won Delhi. So people thought, let’s look at the BJP. Everybody should get a chance.”

Two and a half years later, there is disappointment. “There has been no other benefit from the Modi government. Only gas.” He was referring to the LPG cylinder that the family had been allotted under the Pradhan Mantri Ujjawala Yojana.

What about Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party government? “Aheers will tell you about the benefits, not the Chamars,” was the cryptic answer. Aheer is another name for the Yadav caste group.

Not that the Bahujan Samaj Party government had delivered them any benefits, he hastened to add, but at least the administration was more responsive. “There was fear among officials and the police. Now masters while away their time drinking tea, but under Mayawati, whether masters or managers, they all reported to duty on time.”

There is no ambiguity over who they are voting for this time. “Yadavs vote for their Mulayam, we vote for our Mayawati behenji,” said Lal Chand, repeating what is now conventional wisdom in the state.

But the Bahujan Samaj Party poster on the wall of his house punctured this neat binary. The Bahujan Samaj Party candidate in Malhani assembly constituency in which Baksha falls is a Yadav – Vivek Yadav. Lal Chand explained the calculation: “Our votes will definitely go to him, he will also get some votes of Yadavs and some votes of Mohammedans.”

'Everybody's welfare, everybody's happiness,' says BSP's campaign poster. Vivek Yadav is the party's candidate from Malhani.

This time, the Bahujan Samaj Party does not have a discernible statewide social coalition on the lines of its Dalit-Brahmin alliance of 2007, the year it had won the election. But its choice of candidates shows an attempt to spread the net wide: of the 403 candidates declared so far, 113 are upper castes, 106 are OBCs, 97 are Muslims, only 87 are Dalits.

Dalits might form the party’s support base, but they have internalised the electoral logic that neither are their votes enough to win the polls, nor do they have enough money to fight them.

As Lal Chand pointed out, Vivek Yadav’s other favourable attribute was his wealth. “Badi party ko behenji ticket deti hai samajh bhoojh kar.” Behenji thoughtfully gives tickets to wealthy people, he guffawed. The family joined in the laughter, till Dhruv Rai interjected: “Chutkar nikaal na payin.” The small people can’t win. “You need Rs 10 lakh to win an election,” he said. Lal Chand corrected him: “What will happen in 10 lakh. You need one crore.”

Observing the conversation from a distance was a middle-aged, bespectacled, jacket-clad man. Introduced as a lawyer and a worker of the BSP, Vijay Pratap downplayed his role, saying he was merely “a member of the BVF”.
BVF stands for Bahujan Volunteer Force. It is tasked with maintaining security during the party’s rallies and managing election booths. In the words of Pratap, his job is to make sure there is no “danga fasaad, tu-tu-main-main” (fights and disharmony).

Asked about the rumours that demonetisation had deflated the BSP’s election chest more than that of other parties, Pratap distanced himself from the election campaign, but also defended the party’s prospects: “Isme bhi to moti waali party hai. We also have wealthy candidates. Vivek Yadav has two petrol pumps. His family controls 500 acres of land. He has several businesses…”

The implication: like the other rich, he would have found ways of protecting his wealth.

Buddha and Ambedkar on the walls of Baksha.

Old residents of Baksha’s Harijan Basti still remember the electrifying moment when a Dalit ki Beti became the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh for the first time in 1995.

Two decades ago, the people here are still loyal to her. But if Modi could wean away some of their votes in 2014, does the quietly popular Akhilesh Yadav stand a chance?

In both 2012 and 2014, Kaajal’s family voted for “Haathi” or Elephant, the Bahujan Samaj Party’s election symbol. “Jhooth kahe ko bole.” Why should I lie, said Shardanand.

Will they vote for the Elephant again? “Depends on the prevailing environment,” he said. “Haathi pe hum permanent hai, yeh baat thode hi hai.” It isn’t that we are permanently on the side of the Elephant.

“Whoever does good work for us, we will vote for them,” he said.
Has the Akhilesh government done good work?
“It has given us a laptop. Our daughter can use it to study better.”
But did they get anything other than a laptop? “One laptop is a lot for us.”
Does it mean they will vote for the Samajwadi Party’s Cycle?
“Let the time come…”

Over the next few weeks leading up to the Uttar Pradesh elections, Scroll.in’s ‘A Village Votes’ series will bring readers glimpses of how the residents of Baksha, a village of 2,500 people in the eastern part of the state, are making up their minds about who to support. The next part of the series will examine the interplay between politics and social welfare.

Courtesy: Scroll.in
 

The post The daughter of a Dalit gets a SP laptop. Will that be enough to swing her family’s vote? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Image credit:  Supriya Sharma

Exactly two months from now, on March 11, the results for Uttar Pradesh will be declared. With over 200 million people, the state rivals the fifth-most populous country in the world. It holds India’s future – one in three Indians below the age of 14 lives in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

What is life like for its people and what shapes the political choices they make?

Over the next two months, Scroll.in will bring you glimpses from a village in eastern Uttar Pradesh.

On the road from Lucknow to Varanasi, 15 kms short of Jaunpur town, lies the village of Baksha. It is home to about 2,500 people.

One of its residents proudly declared: “What’s not there in Baksha? It has a block office, a post office, a railway station, a police station. The only thing that Baksha is not is a district.”

But pride is not enough to feed families. Nearly every family has sent away young men to work in distant towns and cities, with Mumbai being the favoured destination.

The latest upheaval for Baksha’s residents has come in the form of notebandi or demonetisation. In the first week of January, the village’s only bank was still running out of cash.

Meanwhile, preparations have quietly begun for the election. In the Brahmin quarter, a young man started the new year by organising an expedition to Lucknow for the Bharatiya Janata Party.

How did it go?
Anil Shukla reluctantly woke up early on the morning of January 2 and got into the back of a Bolero jeep.

It was 6 am. The village of Baksha was yet to stir to life.

Thick fog covered its homes, cow sheds, handpumps and newly constructed toilets – the brown and grey of brick, mud and metal blurring into the green and yellow of wheat and mustard fields.
Anil’s cousin Ajay Shukla, who was also in his mid-forties, was at the wheel of the jeep, but a young, wiry 20-year-old neighbour Vikas Chaurasia, better known as Vicky, was leading the expedition.
Vicky had joined the Bharatiya Janata Party two years ago and had risen rapidly to become one of its sector sanyojaks, or area coordinators, in Baksha block.

In the third week of December 2016, the party’s mandal adhyaksh, or block chief, organised a meeting where Vicky was assigned the task of mobilising and ferrying a busload of people to Lucknow, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi was to deliver a speech on the second day of 2017.

It was not easy to persuade the villagers to come.

People asked Vicky: “Kya milega?” What will we get?

His answer: “Dekho bhaiya kuch milega to denge zaroor hum. Raaste ki poori vyavastha hai, bhojan ki, dhumrapaan ki.” I will certainly share whatever I get. There are full arrangements for transport, food and a smoke.

A day before the rally, the bus did not materialise. Vicky hustled a jeep. From his own village, he could only persuade Anil to join – the driver came for the pay. Picking up five men from other villages, the group covered 220 kms in six hours.

In Lucknow, such was the scrum that they were forced to park the jeep three kilometres from the maidan where the rally was taking place. Another hour of walking through the crowds brought them inside the ground, where they sat down near a large screen – the closest view they could get of the stage.

But even before the prime minister could arrive, the group decided to head back. They did not want to risk getting caught in traffic snarls and evening fog on the highway. By 10 pm, they were back home.

Vicky had been given Rs 1,000 for the expedition – in old Rs 100 notes. He distributed them among his co-passengers. The future might bring gains but for now, dabbling in politics came at a cost. “On the return journey, twice I had to buy everybody tea from my own pocket,” he said.

A day after the expedition, the Bolero was still parked in the Brahmin quarter.

Of the trip, what Anil Shukla remembers most fondly is the food served to the rally-goers 20 kms short of Lucknow.

“Buffer system tha,” he said. There was a buffet. People lined up and picked boxes of poori, sabzi and pickle.

But what about the rally?

“More than half the public was giving gaalis,” he said.

For what? To whom?

“Modi ji, who else. After all, he has ended the notes, not the bank managers, so what if they are the ones who are profiting from it.”

The night of November 8, when Modi announced demonetisation, Shukla had Rs 12,000 lying at home in old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes. The 48-year-old waited ten days before going to the bank, in the hope that the crowds would grow thin. It still took him seven hours to deposit the notes. Withdrawing new notes was even tougher. “I queued up at 4 am,” he said. “My turn came at 6 pm. All I got was Rs 2,000.”

Shukla has an account in the State Bank of India’s branch in the nearby village of Nauperwa. But a majority of Baksha’s residents depend on the Kashi Gomti Samyut Gramin Bank, which, like other rural cooperative banks, has been acutely starved of currency.

In the first week of January, the bank was still handing out a maximum of Rs 2,000 per account per week. The assistant manager, BS Chauhan, said that the bank had collected old notes worth Rs 3.17 crore, but had received only Rs 87 lakh of new notes between November 11 and January 4. Spread over 26,000 accounts, this comes to Rs 335 per account. Even by the standards of Baksha, too little currency to go around.
Most people in the village live a precarious life. Almost every family has an adult male member working in faraway cities – even upper-caste Brahmins, who prefer doing hard labour in the anonymity of the city rather than under the gaze of their fellow villagers. Not everyone in the village owns land, and those who do have only small parcels. In the monsoon, people plant urad, and in the winter, wheat, potatoes and mustard.

Shukla owns four and a half bighas of land, or a little over an acre. Two of his three sons work in Mumbai. Last year, the family had sown wheat on their land in the first week of November. This time, with the cash crunch, the sowing spilled into December.

Elsewhere in the village, workers, both young and old, have come back home after losing their jobs in factories.

At the Lucknow rally, those waiting to hear Modi, exchanged stories of distress, said Shukla.

“Chote aadmi naaraaz hain.” The small people are angry.

So does this mean the BJP does not stand a chance in the coming elections?

Furrowing his brow, he said, “BJP will form the government, but not with a clear majority.”

The board says: 'The cash is over'.

Brahmins have a natural proclivity towards BJP, Vicky mused. He had grown up hearing elders praise the BJP, but vote for the Samajwadi Party or the Bahujan Samaj Party, since the two regional parties stood a better chance to win.

In the 2012 assembly elections, for instance, most Brahmins of Baksha voted for the Samajwadi Party. “Mahaul tha Akhilesh ke liye,” explained Vicky. The sentiment was in favour of Akhilesh. Paras Nath Yadav, a Samajwadi Party veteran, was elected from Malhani, the assembly constituency in which Baksha falls.

In the 2014 Lok Sabha election, the Modi wave swept the region, drawing in voters from across caste groups. A first-time BJP candidate, Krishna Pratap Singh, won from the parliamentary constituency of Jaunpur.

For a young Brahmin boy like Vicky, coming of age in 2014 when the BJP was on the ascendant, joining the party was an astute move.

His brother had spent six years fixing tyre punctures in Mumbai, before saving enough to run his own puncture shop in the outer suburb of Vasai. Repulsed by the hard life of the city, Vicky looked for career options closer home. In 2014, soon after he joined first-year college, he walked into the office of an evening tabloid, Jaunpur Samachar, and got himself a job as a reporter.

“Humara udeshya tha naam. I wanted prestige,” he said, explaining his attraction to journalism. “If you go somewhere and introduce yourself as a journalist, at least you are offered a glass of water.”

A young man sprinkles urea over wheat fields. Sowing has been delayed in the village.

As 2014 drew to a close, Vicky read about the BJP’s membership drive. “There is a party in China that has 11 crore members,” he said. “India has so many parties. But only Modi ji thought of breaking China’s record.”

Not only did he become a member in January 2015, he organised missed calls from 1,000 people – the party was using missed calls as a device to enrol members. In the summer of 2016, he deepened his ties with the party by attending an eight-day refresher camp of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which he believes is “the largest organisation in the world”.

Impressed with his work, party officials appointed him sector sanyojak to co-ordinate with the booth adhyakshs, or booth managers, of Baksha block. The election preparation began in August 2016. “In every booth, the party has formed a committee of 20 committed workers,” said Vicky. “Booth mazboot rahega to log prabhavit rahenge.” If the booth is strong, then people will remain under the party’s influence.
But the party still faces a challenge.

The workers of Malhani assembly constituency are organised in four blocks. Two blocks are headed by Brahmins, two by Thakurs. The same upper castes form the leadership of the sectors and the booths.

Under Vicky’s charge, for instance, are 13 booths. Brahmins manage eight, Thakurs and Yadavs one each, Mauryas, the backward caste to which the state president belongs, lead three, and Dalits head none.

“In an earlier list, we had picked two Harijans and one Kewat,” said Vicky. “But they were not working actively. They would lie often.”

Citing an instance, he said: “I called one of the Harijans and he said he was in Mumbai. When the call ended, I saw money had been deducted from my account for a local call, not an outstation one. Clearly he was lying.”

“These castes don’t like the BJP,” Vicky concluded.

So how will the party win Uttar Pradesh?

Not everyone is upset with notebandi. Many are impressed with Modi’s move, including a Yadav family. Their story in the next dispatch.

Courtesy: Scroll.in

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