ON the morning that I left Lucknow for Rae Bareilli, I discovered from the newspapers that Sonia Gandhi would be addressing a vishal rally in her constituency that day. I saw this as a bonus but it was not my main reason for going there. My main reason was that I had not been to the Gandhi dynasty’s pocket borough since I did my last interview with Rajiv in Amethi two weeks before he was killed in May 1991. I wanted to see how much had changed and what the two most VVIP constituencies in India now look like. But, I thought, as I drove past mustard fields and mango groves and signs for Airtel and Docomo, if I did manage to catch Sonia’s rally during the course of the day then that would add to the flavour of the story.
Ambedkar Gaon
My first stop was in a village called Mastipur. My interest in it was aroused by the rusting board at its entry point that said ‘Ambedkar Gaon’. Villages declared Ambedkar are part of one of Mayawati’s most successful development programmes whereby Dalit-dominated villages are singled out for special treatment. Once they come under the Ambedkar scheme they are given electricity, water, a road and what local residents call ka-lonis. Here a colony is a single room tenement built with government funds for the homeless.
When I met the pradhan of Mastipur, a wizened little man who looked older than his years, his first complaint was that since he got elected two years ago, the government had given no ka-lonies to the village. He admitted that the village had electricity and water, but felt that the government should now help them build a tank that could pump water into individual homes. These were all pucca and made of unpainted red brick. While we talked a crowd gathered and the main complaint that everyone had was lack of employment. If they could only get work, they said, they would be happy but the situation was so bad that even those with a BA degree were unemployed and forced to eke out an existence from working in the fields. The children of Mastipur were all barefoot, unwashed and ill-clad.
My Dalit driver, Ranjit, said that this was a rich village compared to his own in Sitapur that did not even have electricity yet. It had been declared an Ambedkar village but then someone canceled it out of the programme or he would by now have owned a ka-lony of his own. He said the programme had made a huge difference to the lives of Dalits and this was one reason why they would continue to support Mayawati. But, of the 97,000 villages in Uttar Pradesh only 2,000 have so far become Ambedkar villages. Wherever the scheme has reached it has made enough difference for locals to sing its praises.
My next stop was in an Ambedkar village in the constituency of Rae Bareilli. It was called Mubarakpur and since the pradhan was away, details of village development were given to me by a pretty young girl who spoke in educated Hindi rather than a dialect. She said, that since the village came under the Ambedkar scheme in March 2011 a pucca road had been built (on which we stood), there were regular supplies of electricity and water and many ka-lonies had come up.
She said that people were happy with Mayawati. But, while we talked a man, who looked Muslim, said that the Mahamaya Awas (housing) Scheme was no better than the Indira Awas Scheme. He had plans to go to Sonia Gandhi’s rally that day. The Congress Party transport had already arrived in the village.
It was at exactly the time that the rally was supposed to start that I arrived in Rae Bareilli. It was as decrepit and dirty a town as I remembered. But, there were no signs that the rally was about to begin, so I drove on towards Amethi and passed St. Peter’s College, the Ryan International School and signs for ‘Amul macho underwear’.
No sooner did we leave Rae Bareilli than the road deteriorated into such a bumpy ribbon of a dirt trail that I could no longer make notes in my notebook. The villages around me deteriorated as well and looked like the clusters of mud huts that I remembered from when I was here twenty years ago. We stopped in one of them, Kumharpurva, to talk to local people. They said they had seen no development at all in the past five years but yes they supported Rahul Gandhi and would be voting Congress.
Warisnagar Chowk
All the villages I passed on the way to Amethi were hideously poor and the towns hideously ugly. What had changed since I was last here was the arrival of cable television and the cell phone. The cell phone has reached the poorest villages and I suppose this could be interpreted as a sign of progress but of other signs there were few. Not even in a relatively prosperous Muslim village which was my next stop. Here a man with a neatly combed beard and neatly oiled hair told me: “Every Muslim will be voting for Congress, we always have and always will.” But, no sooner did he cycle off than some men who looked much poorer and were also Muslims said they lived without electricity, clean water or any other facilities. “This is Warisnagar Chowk,” an old man said “Please write about what
we need.”
By the time I drove back towards Rae Bareilli I found myself wondering why our ruling dynasty had allowed their pocket borough to remain so desperately poor.
Surely, even their MP funds could have served to build basic infrastructure? When I got back to Rae Bareilli and stopped for lunch in the Suryesh restaurant, Sonia Gandhi had started her speech. So I sat and listened to it on television along with political workers and tired looking policemen.
Sonia, with Priyanka seated beside her, said ‘we’ have sent more than Rs.1,00,000 crore to the state government and the money has been looted. At the end of her speech when she asked the crowd to yell ‘Jai Hind’ three times after her the response was so lukewarm that her voice was louder than that of her audience.
And, in the Suryesh restaurant the general response was lukewarm as well. Someone said as I was leaving, “Mayawati has had five years. The Gandhi family has had forty. How can we blame her?”