AT the Sangam, where the holy waters of the Ganga, Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati mingle, the wiliest pollsters on the plains of northern India ply their traditional trade as Mallahas (boatmen) to thousands of pilgrims who come from afar to bathe at the confluence. The devotees talk and the Mallahas listen.
I have great faith in the political wisdom of the Mallahas who only reveal their knowledge after many protestations of modesty. "What do we know? We are poor and unlearned. Who cares about what we think or say?" I persist as they were dead right in their poll predictions when I had last visited them on the eve of the Lok Sabha elections in December 1984 and before that, on the eve of the fateful March 1977 elections which had sent the Gandhi family packing for a few years.
After much prodding, Jagannath Nishad, 45, comments: "BJP ka zor hai. Par ham garibon ki kaun sunega?" (The BJP is going strong. But who is bothered about us poor?). A younger boatman, Ramnarain Nishad, 32, contests Jagannath's statement. Ramnarain says that Saroj Dubey, the sitting Janata Dal MP since 1991 from Allahabad, does listen to the poor and has solved some of the Mallahas' problems. Saroj Dubey is contesting again this time as the Janata Dal candidate supported by the Samajwadi Party and faces a tough fight against the BJP's leading light, Murli Manohar Joshi. Ramnarain has decided that he will vote for Saroj Dubey and Jagannath has decided defiantly that he will not vote for anyone. None of them listens to the poor.
Jagannath's angry dismissal of politicians, parties and the electoral process is echoed among several poverty-stricken folk I meet during a trip (April 21 to 24) through Khajuraho and Satna constituencies in north-eastern Madhya Pradesh and Phulpur and Allahabad constituencies in eastern Uttar Pradesh. I had assumed that cynicism about the present political process was a restricted, urban upper-class phenomenon. It is now apparent among humble villagers even in small hamlets. Mewalal Kushwaha, 65, bare-chested, frail and with only a torn lungi to cover his nakedness, rasps, with fire in his eyes: vote-seekers are beggars. They create scandal after scandal." Mewalal has one bigha of land and 15 mouths to feed in the hamlet of Ishipur in Phulpur constituency where the BSP messiah of the downtrodden, Kanshi Ram, is one of the leading con-tenders. A disgusted Mewalal Khushwaha says he does not know whether he will bother to vote at all.
Seated next to Mewalal on a charpai is Asharam, 21, a confident BA student of Allahabad University. Asharam, who also lives in Ishipur, declares he will vote for Kanshi Ram as during the four months that the BSP was in power in Uttar Pradesh, it did a lot of work for the scheduled castes. Asharam openly proclaims that he is an "SC". Looking on, Audesh Kumar Kushwaha, 21, a B.Com student, regrets that Phulpur will witness a caste-based election and refuses to say who he will vote for. Later, as I distance myself from the open forum at the charpai, Audesh Kumar quietly tells me that educated persons like himself can only support the rati-onal and forward-looking BJP. Though his background is Kush-waha, a backward caste, all literate persons must support the only non-caste party, the BJP.
His views are supported by a fellow student, who is also a Kushwaha, and some other educated persons from backward caste backgrounds whom I meet during my trip. Could this suggest a trend of upward social mobility through supporting and voting for the BJP which has attractive non-caste credentials? Are some literate sections of the backward castes attempting a new version of Sanskritisation through the electoral ploy of voting along with the upper castes for the BJP? Just some 40 or 50 years ago, some of the so-called middle castes had sought to climb the caste ladder by adopting the social customs and religious rituals of the upper castes, especially that of the Brahmins.
While sections of the backwards or OBCs are attracted towards the BJP and other groups of backwards remain with Mulayam Singh's Samajwadi Party or waver in the direction of its ally, the Janata Dal, the Dalits or SCs are demonstrating a remarkable degree of confidence and cohesion under the banner of the BSP. The BSP's arrogant style is a match for the BJP machismo. On a dirt-poor wall of a collection of jhuggis in Satna town is an uncompromising slogan scrawled in the bright blue colours of the BSP: "The Bahujan Samaj stands free from the clutches of the Brahmin."
Inside a dark garage, which is the local office of the BSP, the message of the party's election organiser for Satna town, Mohammed Ejaz, is as clear as the blue graffiti on the wall outside: "Other parties talk of providing roads, jobs, etc. We do not mention these at all. The BSP only says it will bring respect and dignity to the people."
Ten minutes walk away from the BSP's garage, on Satna's main road is a messy, sprawling bungalow. On its compound wall is a puerile slogan: "Narsinhrao zindabad, Shyama, Vidya zindabad, Digvijaysinh zindabad!" It seems the local Congress office can do little else but wish its various squabbling chieftains a long life. Inside the bungalow are a bunch of demoralised Congress workers moaning about poor resources. Throughout my trip, the popular and constant refrain is that the Congress is finished. Other parties are in the fight but the Congress has lost the will to win.
IF the Congress is finished, so it seems are the aspirations of Arjun Singh, one of the top figures of the dissident Congress(T), who is contesting from Satna. He won on a Congress ticket from Satna in 1991 with a majority of 65,000. This time, he is out of favour with almost every group in his constituency. The general feeling seems to be that he has been too busy grandstanding on the national stage to bother about Satna's local problems such as the severe shortage of drinking water in the town and irrigation water in rural areas. The only group who may stand by him are his Thakur caste companions who number some 50,000 of the total 11 lakh voters.
There is also similar resentment against Uma Bharati in her Khajuraho constituency where she won twice for the BJP in 1989 and again in 1991, though the intensity and extent of popular anger is not as great as that against Arjun Singh in Satna. She has rarely visited her constituency since 1991 and many in Khajuraho grumble that they have got nothing from her except "Ram ka naam". The owner of a lodging house in Khajuraho town, who does not wish to be named, says he has been a dedicated BJP worker for many years. But this time he will vote for the Janata Dal "to teach Umaji a lesson". She meets only rich and prominent persons in the constituency and has no time for her party workers, the lodge owner claims. Other BJP workers nod in silent agreement.
It is quickly apparent that Khajuraho is an extremely poor and undeveloped constituency, except for the oasis of the tiny town-extended village of Khajuraho where planeloads of chattering French and Italian tourists land to gawk at the erotic temple carvings, while immediately opposite the airfield gates, frail women spend hours in the scorching sun looking for berries which may have fallen to the ground from the roadside trees. They need the berries to save their families from semi-starvation during the long, parched summer months. Uma Bharati has no time for them. She is too busy with issues of national importance.
Laloo Prasad Yadav, JD chief and Bihar chief minister, flies into Khajuraho on April 21 to address a public meeting at Rajnagar village. He says that he wants a "Bharat jis may na rani hai, na mehtarani, na oonch, na neech" (an India where there are no queens nor sweeper-women, no high-status, nor low status). Many of the applauding crowd of two or three thousand are party workers of all hues—JD, BJP, Congress, BSP. There is good-natured bonhomie within the political class, regardless of party affiliation.
This is another marked feature of the political landscape: the easy camaraderie and fellowship between the workers and local leaders of the various political parties. They show more concern for each other than for the concerns of the voter. In most small towns, the various parties' election offices are close to each other, grouped around one chowk or all on one road. They are almost like hardware stores or wholesale textile shops, all huddled together, selling wares which are not too different from each other. The only thing that varies is the sales talk.
This political class is present in every town and in many villages. It has undoubtedly served a representational and mediatory function of voicing public grievances and controlling the excesses of the local bureaucracy and police. It has, however, grown flabby, self-serving and increasingly remote from the general populace. Part of the reason for its remoteness is that it has not expanded in numbers at the same rate as the growing population of Lok Sabha constituencies or of Vidhan Sabha constituencies.
The Lok Sabha constituencies have grown particularly large in the sheer size of the number of voters. Most constituencies have grown from a rough average of about five lakh voters 20 years ago to about 10 lakh voters now, that is, doubling their size in just two decades. How can an MP represent such a huge constituency?
Satna can be regarded as one such example. Satna was formed as a Lok Sabha constituency in 1967 with 5.25 lakh voters. At the time of the 1971 Lok Sabha election, the number of voters in Satna had increased to 5.71 lakh. The constituency was reorganised in 1977 and the number of voters went up to 5.93 lakh. By 1980, the number of voters had increased to 6.60 lakh. In the 1984 election, the number of voters was 7.30 lakh. In 1989, it was 9.59 lakh. In 1991, it was 9.85 lakh and now in 1996, it is 11.14 lakh. Between 1977 and 1996, the size of the electorate has almost doubled.
The number of MPs in the Lok Sabha over the past 20 years has grown by just a single member from 542 to 543 MPs while their constituencies have grown in the number of votes by almost 100 per cent. An expanded Lok Sabha with smaller constituencies could be an answer. Paradoxically, with the growing popular resentment against politicians, voters might reject the idea of having more MPs to represent them.
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