It is not the object of her adoration that is important—it is the absence of despondency. Neither the Bharatiya Janata Party's Hindutva slogan nor the Congress' stability card means anything to her, or the other 3,500 voters living a sub-human existence in the basti. Yet she insists she will vote. In sheer faith.
In Ahmedabad and around, the rabble-rousing Sadhvi Ritambhara addressed a series of meetings from 'independent platforms'. But her only prescription for hunger and poverty was the "Ram mandir" in Ayodhya and a theory on how essential it is for the Hindus to vote "for a party committed to it". Hindutva no longer figures as frequently in L.K. Advani's resumed rath yatra and Atal Behari Vajpayee's whirlwind campaign tours—giving its leaders an opportunity to focus on issues like poverty. But the Gujarat BJP's agenda seem to be scripted by more local political compulsions—it uses Hindutva to the hilt.
The state BJP—badly divided between 'khajurias' (the Khajuraho coup plotters), and the 'hajurias' (loyalists)—finds Hindutva a cementing force. Come elections, and Sadhvi Ritambhara's venom is elixir for it. And a truncated Congress, bereft of its traditional votebanks, lacks the courage to protest. "We won't raise the issue", says PCC chief Prabodh Raval. Criticism of the BJP on the Ayodhya issue, the Congress knows, might lead to polarisation on the lines of religion which would only benefit the BJP.
This micro-level situation is symptomatic: it shows the absence of uniform national issues which theoretically should be dominating a national election. Thus, the issues differ from state to state. In the absence of effective and attractive party organisations—with the exception of the Left and the BJP in their areas of influence and the Janata Dal in Karnataka and Bihar—these are either of a purely local nature or highly personality-oriented. For instance, polarisations tend to happen around figures like P.V. Narasimha Rao, who seems to be the object of hate as much for Congress candidates as for their rivals.
Murli Deora, Congress candidate from Bombay South and the party's city unit chief, is more keen to get Finance Minister Manmohan Singh to his prosperous constituency—he would have some appeal there as the key architect of the economic reforms. With cine-star Dilip Kumar campaigning against the Congress because of its "lack of commitment to secular values", the only other person Deora, a three-term MP, might find useful is Tariq Anwar, national president of the Congress Minority Cell. For, Bombay South has a sizeable population of minorities. Dilip Kumar's appeal has swayed Muslims in favour of M.J.A. Patrawala, a Samajwadi Party candidate, and Deora's anti-TADA stance seems lost because of his association with the Congress.
The way the BJP-Shiv Sena combine rose to power and its rule in the past 16 months has led to the people doubting the Congress' capacity to form an effective counter-force to the BJP at the national level. "The Sena-BJP combine is reaping the harvest sown by the Congress," says Shaila Tai. After 20 years as a history teacher in a Marathi-medium girls school in Bombay, she quit her job when the authorities refused to accept her plea that "the projection of Muslims as bad characters in history text books should be stopped".
Shaila Tai now hops from one public meeting to another, lambasts the saffron brigade and the Congress together, and appeals to the "poor and secular-minded people to vote for the Third Front if India is to remain united....They are creating social imbalances, disturbing the Hindu-Muslim unity of centuries." Shaila's voice gets an instant echo and forceful endorsement from none other than Janata Dal leader V.P. Singh at one such meeting: "Now is the time that a poor person will become the leader and prime minister of the country. It has to be someone from them".
From Bombay to Bangalore and Hubli, Singh criticised both the Congress and the BJP, denouncing one as corrupt and the other as communal. But his voice has limited range. It is confined only to those areas where the Janata Dal or other constituents of the National Front hold some sway.
But Singh, by projecting a 'poor' person as the next PM, is giving two messages. One, that Janata Dal leader R.K. Hegde's move for a non-BJP government, preferably under Rao's leadership, is not acceptable to the party. Second, if he can have his way, he would take the "social justice movement" to its next logical phase—making a backward or a Dalit leader India's next prime minister. That is, if the National Front does play a role in that process. What may yet keep it out is its failure, unlike in 1989, to be perceived as an alternative at the national level. That is the scale at which the BJP is making its presence felt, and all the National Front has to show is pockets of strength.
This makes the BJP more optimistic. "Prajatantra ki abki bari, Atal Behari, Atal Behari (this time, only Vajpayee)," chant crowds at BJP meetings, with women either leading or joining the chorus. Vajpayee's oratory and his clean public image, backed by the redoubtable RSS network, give him and the BJP an edge over Rao and a dispirited Congress.
In all their speeches, both Vajpayee and Advani keep the accent on corruption, projecting it as the biggest issue and Rao as the "most corrupt" prime minister the country has ever had. The mere mention of hawala and the Jharkhand MPs bribery case have captive audiences becoming hyper-active, shouting vociferous anti-Rao slogans. Rao's failure on security matters in the context of the Purulia arms dropping gives Vajpayee some powerful ammunition against the Prime Minister and the Congress. One of his smash-hit one-liners: "Pahle aakash se ole girte the, ab gole girte hain (earlier, only hailstones fell from the sky, now bombs fall)".
And corruption has other faces as well. A young graduate in plague and earthquake-devastated Latur, Maharashtra, moves around the constituency with an appeal pasted on his shirt—"I am a graduate and unemployed. I want a petrol pump and gas agency"—a jibe against Congress candidate and Lok Sabha Speaker Shivraj Patil, whose son has got both agencies on the Central Government discretionary quota.
Rao's visit to Latur on April 12 might have been intended to convince the electorate that this is a prestige constituency for the party. If the Latur voter was grateful for such tender mercies, it did not show—he mostly stayed away from Rao's meetings. For the people in this constituency, Rao has donned the cap of the archetypal corrupt politician who commands little respect, and the liberalisation mantra is certainly not going to bring in the votes in Latur and similar constituencies. And former minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, who has done a lot for Latur's industrial and economic development, has quit the party, leaving the party rank and file in the area divided and confused. He is pitted against Janata Dal's Bapu Kaldate and the BJP's G.D. Patil. The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) has put up Manohar Rao Gamare.
The BSP's entry into the fray here, despite its essentially north Indian appeal, does not look a mere formality. The party has come out with a gentler, more 'democratic' message. Radical slogans like "tilak, taraju aur talwar, inko maro jutey char (Brahmans, Banias and Kshatriyas should be kicked out)" have been replaced by a more sensible one—"iski jitni sankhya bhaari, uski utni hissedari (participation in power in proportion to population)". A softening of the attitude is also visible on the BJP side, at least on the surface. The crowds no more yell "jis Hindu ka khoon na khaule, woh khoon nahi pani hain (Hindu blood which does not boil—in the mandir context, of course—is just water)", which often used to be the war cry during the first rath yatra of L.K. Advani.
Says Advani: "On my part, the intention behind the rath yatra was always political. I know the crowds used to come with a feeling of religiosity. But this time, even the crowd is political." T.N. Seshan, no doubt, has set ceilings on pre-poll fervour and candidates are finding themselves helpless against him. But the voters do not seem similarly demoralised. The political parties might have failed them. But from Galal Behn to Shaila Tai, and from Vajpayee fans to those supporting Phoolan Devi, a criminal or a symbol of resistance—depending on the way one looks at her—the nation's voters still do not seem tired of democracy.
