In the afternoon of April 24, 2014, as I came out of the Puri collector’s office after filing my nomination as the Congress candidate for the Puri Lok Sabha constituency, a posse of mediapersons was waiting to speak to me. “Have you familiarised yourself with the geography of Puri?” That was one of the first questions thrown at me. For the media, it was sexy to play up the “outsiders fight it out in Puri” angle. From all my three decades of work in journalism and strategic communication, I knew that, whether appropriate or not, it was a lazy angle that the media would be tempted to pursue.
“How can a daughter be a stranger in her own parental home?” I counter-questioned my inquisitor. “I am a daughter of Puri and I have come home to serve my folks, to be with them, to share their happiness and their sorrow.” As our procession wound its way through the bylanes of Puri, I was spontaneously stopped at many places by women welcoming a daughter home with aarti and elderly folks showering their ashirwad by touching my head. These scenes were to be repeated many times and at many nooks and corners of my sprawling constituency, spread across three administrative districts of Puri, Nayagarh and Khurda. I was often driven to tears in remote villages where people recalled my late father, a freedom fighter and Congress leader who had represented the area in the assembly and in Parliament for three decades. They were happy I was there with them, seeking to work for their development.
In our first-past-the-post system, the winner takes it all. My takeaways, despite the loss, are significant. I faced the double whammy of the so-called Modi wave and the bjd’s well-oiled election machine. We weathered the first but were beaten by the second. I am happy that many more people voted for Congress in Puri than in 2009 and that our voteshare went up. But of the greatest value was the connect with the people I was able to establish during an intense period of campaign, often door-to-door, of five weeks or so. The whole experience has made me more grounded and rooted to the people, and their lives.
