Nawalpur is a small town towards one end of Uttar Pradesh State Highway 79; there is a fork in the road here, the right one will take us to Ghazipur and beyond to Varanasi. The reason we are on the interior roads is because the main highway connecting north and south Purvanchal, National Highway 29 is in a state of utter disrepair, the polar opposite of the magnificent National Highway 28 that connects lucknow to Gorakhpur.
We had started our morning from the town of Padrauna, the town to which Minister of State for Home RPN Singh belongs and is also the local ‘Royal’. General Stores and Pharmacies line the main roads of the towns, as do a couple of relatively recent touches — automated teller machines of private banks. Yet the town itself has a relatively recent relic to the industrial decline of the region. Opposite the ‘Jagdish Dwar’, which leads to RPN Singh’s family estate, lies the rusting hulk of a once-bustling sugar mill. The mill was started by Singh’s grandfather back in the mid-1920s but has been passed through several hands and is currently owned by Purvanchal strongman Hari Shankar Tiwari.
Six-odd workers man the gate to the plant, they take shifts to man the gate to prevent anyone from gaining unauthorised access to it. When asked about Tiwari, the boiler foreman, Mahendra Singh, angrily accuses him of trying to asset-strip the company, selling old machinery for scrap.
The 119 permanent workers still on the rolls of the plant have maintained the plant in a ‘ready-to-operate’ condition. “Once the dues are paid and a little investment is made, we believe we can have the plant running in a couple of months”, says Mahendra Singh. The plant itself is a depressing place, despite some relatively modern machinery disused rusting cogs and gears highlight the air of despondency.
There is sadness in an empty factory with machinery lying idle that words fail to adequately describe. Will they vote for somebody who will restart the plantIJ There is no clear answer. The local mood in the town is a bit tougher to access, Singh is a popular MP for some, yet with six-seven hours of electricity cuts every night that plunges the entire area into blackness, there is some resentment.
Rajendra Aggarwal, a local pharmacist and member of the Aggarwal Samaj formed by the town’s baniyas blames ‘casteist politics’ for this mess and credits Singh for having built the admittedly smooth road that leads from Padrauna to Kushinagar. Kushinagar and its neighbouring constituencies, including Gorakhpur go to the polls on the last polling day, May 12, which is possibly why assessing a ‘mood’ is difficult to access. While the occasional Mahindra Scorpio or Tata Safari emblazoned with political party logos and stickers passes by on the road, surprisingly many party offices remain deserted.
But that is not the case at the local party office of Sangam Mishra, the BSP candidate for the Kushinagar seat. While workers give the walls a whitewash, a caste smorgasbord sits inside busily going through electoral rolls using surnames to identify voters they can target. This area was kind to the BSP in 2012 when the rest of the State ditched the elephant for the cycle, in fact the local
MlA Swami Prasad Maurya is the leader of the Opposition in the Uttar Pradesh legislative Assembly. like any party office, the workers inside speak bombastically of their chances. But one senses that they are not resorting to hyperbole. There is only one objective they have, to help their local candidate Sangam Mishra win, “Raja saab (RPN Singh) ko harana hai” he has to be defeated). While Behenji’s (Mayawati) campaign has not acquired much media attention and there are a distinct lack of hoardings, on the ground her party workers are working relentlessly in seats that they feel are winnable like Kushinagar.
At Kushinagar, there is a peculiar sight of hundreds of eastern Asian tourists, and clearly visible from the road is a massive Burmese-style pagoda. This is one of the most religious spots on the Buddhist tourist trail in Purvanchal as Gautam Buddha achieved parinirvana (physically died). The local economy is dependent on tourism to visit the ruins of a Gupta-era Stupa, rebuilt by the Union Government in 1956 complete with an idol of the reclining Buddha.
local shopkeepers admit that there is some sort of “Modi influence” but consciously avoid letting on who they would vote for. However, as one talks of the planned new airport which would help ferry tourists directly to Kushinagar. The project which is being spearheaded by the Samajwadi Party-led Uttar Pradesh Government was actually an incentive of the previous Mayawati Government, but has been continued by the current administration.
There is no doubt such an airport has massive potential, not only would it ferry in religious pilgrims from Buddhist nations, an estimated 3,00,000 tourists visit Kushinagar annually, there are thousands of migrant unskilled labourers from this region who work in the Arabian peninsula. However, while bidders have filed their technical bids, things seem to have come to a standstill of late. As it is the only other airport in the region with regular flights -- Gorakhpur -- 70 kilometres down the road has limited flights, although pilgrimage flights connecting Gorakhpur to Gaya and Varanasi (Sarnath) are operated by Thai airline Bangkok Air.
State Highway 79 begins at Kushingar and takes us past fields full of ripening wheat and pulses to Deoria, virtually on the UP-Bihar border. Electioneering does not seem to have begun in earnest in the heartland of Eastern UP’s political zone, but finding people to talk politics is fairly easy. We meet Rajesh Ahir, from Azamgarh in a hardware store as we ask for directions. He is the local Janata Dal(United) representative, surprising since the JD(U) has little presence a few kilometres from the border of the State its leader Nitish Kumar rules.
Ahir talks extensively of caste issues, the influence of the Koli/Kushwaha castes in this part of the world and also that the media is making a mistake in writing off ‘Netaji’ (Malayam Singh Yadav), “Modi is having an impact, but Netaji is very clever to stand from Azamgarh to puncture this balloon.” Although, others tell us that Netaji is contesting from Azamgarh to paper over cracks with Akhilesh who objected to his step-brother Prateek from contesting there.
Back at Nawalpur, just at the traffic junction where the road splits into two, we walk into a shop owned by a Muslim. locals gather around to see these outsider journalists from Delhi. There is a communal harmony here that is missing in Western UP, the shop we walked into while owned by a Muslim is managed by a Hindu, who has no qualms about admitting loudly that he will vote for the BJP.
It soon emerges, even from the Muslim youth gathered around us that the local BJP candidate for the Salempur constituency Ravindra Kushwaha is a popular person, and due to his caste, he is a sure-shot winner. Even the Muslims in the area hold few grudges against Narendra Modi, although Rayeez Khan, clearly a local leader talks angrily of Arvind Kejriwal when asked about the Aam Aadmi Party “Jung se koyi bhagta nahin hai” (nobody runs from the battlefield).
The antipathy towards the AAP has been the sole recurrent theme through the day. While people we speak to agree and disagree about there being a Modi-wave, the possible annihilation of the Congress and the bursting of the Samajwadi bubble there is a level of anger towards Kejriwal throughout. The message of Kejriwal being a ‘runner’ seems to have percolated deep within the countryside. Thanks to the widespread availability of a reliable mobile data networks throughout the area, a recent video where Kejriwal was caught ‘apparently’ fixing a TV interview has only increased this anger; along with a stronger anger towards television journalism.
But certain problems in the area are clearly first-world. As we drive on from Nawalpur in the village of Sillhata, the road takes two sharp turns and the turn-off for the village is in-between those turns. The locals, crowded around a tea-shop admit that their new road is great but lament that the village has lost all its dogs in accidents with trucks and cars. When asked who the villagers, this time in Ballia lok Sabha constituency will vote for, they choose a slower form of transport, the cycle (the symbol of the Samajwadi Party).
With elections here still eight weeks away there is still a lot to play for, but it is certain that the BJP, which is counting on a wave for their prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, does have its work cut out in this, the heartland of Indian politics.