Cows, bulls, jobs, caste

Caste is back and joblessness is the new nationalism and religion. This UP election is a more 'normal' and fiercely contested one after three walkovers

Writings on the wall is a metaphor that grew out of my travels, mostly through the poll-bound regions of India and the neighbourhood over the past 15 years. Because, even more than its big festivals, the subcontinent comes to life during its elections. And what’s on people’s minds, their aspirations, joys, concerns and fears, you can pretty much understand by reading these writings on the wall. These can be graffiti, advertising, skylines, fences, mere piles of rubble. 

Or even a solitary bull. In glorious patches of black and white. It has to say something for the way politics is playing out in the 2022 election campaign in Uttar Pradesh that the first of the “writings on the wall” that catches our eye is a bull. A real bull, not as in the many mostly rude metaphors drawn from it. The imposing beast looks down at us from a hundred feet up. Its all-black hump rising in the skyline a little like just anything that looks prominent and ornamental placed as a canopy on top of a typical Hafeez Contractor skyscraper. It stands on top of the interchange on the new Purvanchal Expressway and we turn left from underneath to drive into Ballia district. It looks curious, although we can be sure it has no idea it has now become a key factor in this poll campaign. A factor significant enough to help upend some recent presumptions.

Chutta saand (bull) or simply chutta pashu (vagrant cattle) is now a part of almost every political conversation. Cow slaughter has been illegal in Uttar Pradesh since 1955, but strict implementation of the law over the last five years has changed the picture. The stray bovine has now become a case study of the law of unintended consequences.

If in five years, cow protection has lost its oomph, and stray cow menace is an issue, it tells us that politics changes all the time. Even in the Hindi heartland where we might have thought it was frozen after the three Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) sweeps of 2014, 2017 and 2019. In 2014, campaigning for his first term, Narendra Modi had thrown opposition to “pink revolution” (meat exports) as a key proposition.

But, stray cows are now a liability hurtful to the extent that in the later stages of the campaign, Yogi Adityanath is promising a monthly cash dole to those owning non-yielding cows.

This is no game-changing issue. But it’s among the many factors that carry weight in that perpetual post-1989 tussle in the heartland. Can you unite with religion (Hindutva) what caste divided, or can caste again divide what religion united?

Sonbhadra isn’t the poorest district in Uttar Pradesh, although in most parts you wonder what a poorer one would look like. The poorest and most backward, not just in UP but in all of India, is Shravasti, almost 400 km away, generally to the north.

At his rally at the grounds of an engineering college outside the district headquarters in Robertsganj, Prime Minister Modi seems to have sobered his message to fit Sonbhadra’s reality. His pitch isn’t about more factories, growth, jobs. It is mostly about free food grain. Did any of you have to starve during the period of pandemic? I, he uses first person, made sure food grain was sent to 80 crore poor people in the country so no one would starve.

Conversations at the Dalit basti in Genduria village, a few kilometres down the state highway to Varanasi, probably give us some clue. Everyone, every adult in the clump of about 50 houses is unemployed. Most have some education, several intermediate (class 12) pass. Some have been unemployed for a decade since they finished school. The government is not hiring, industry is not expanding, many had gone to work in distant states, as Panchmukhi Sonkar, 30, who worked in Goa, first at a toothpaste factory and then at an automobile puncture-fixing shop. He’s set up a kuchcha tea shop but there are no customers because no one has any jobs. Like others in the huddle, he survives as a casual labourer at construction sites, brick kilns.

Panchmukhi sold vegetables to pay for his education. Chandan Kumar, also a Dalit Jatav, scrounged and worked on the side to pay for his diploma as a pathology lab technician in Varanasi. But then the government said it does not recognise the diploma. He’s grateful he’s found a low-paying job in a local private hospital. How does he hope to live better, or less worse? By working two eight-hour shifts a day at the hospital. 

Another 20 km on the same highway, we halt at Juri village, also a clump of thatched huts with the odd brick structure jutting out here and there. In local discourse it is called an “Awas”, as in built from funds under PM Awas Yojana for the below poverty line families. The family at the thatched house next to an “Awas” is from the Maurya community in this Other Backward Class (OBC) hamlet with a mix of Kushwahas, Koeris and Kurmis, who say they voted for the BJP the last time. But there is rethnking now.

The story plays out similarly. These are a sample from among the largest non-Yadav OBCs. In the last three elections, the BJP has aced their vote. Now the picture isn’t so comfortable for joblessness is the new caste in UP.

Jobs, jobs, jobs. That is all you see written on the wall of placards waved by a near-stampede of mostly young people at Akhilesh Yadav’s rally in Nagra near Ballia. Some placards want those selected for the police in 2017 given appointment letters, some want teachers’ recruitment exams held, some for paramedical staff and so on.

The lack of jobs is a grievance common to these educated young. There is still some sense of humour though. Placards read: B.P. Ed Exam, now in year 3202. This is the kind of energy we rarely see in an election rally these days, except when Mr Modi has himself on the ticket. Akhilesh finds a few minutes to chat with us even as the stage is being shaken perilously by surging crowds. Much of Mr Modi’s attack on him lately has been over “parivarvad” (dynastic politics). Would Yogi Adityanath have become the head of his religious order, Akhilesh asks, if not as a mere successor to his mama (maternal uncle), who held the position earlier? He would’ve spent his time being jobless like so many others here, he says.

In Mau, the “karmabhumi” of many rival dons, but mostly of Mukhtar Ansari (jailed for some time), we find his son Abbas, a former national shooting champion and a winner of seven national medals in his chosen discipline, skeet.

The Yogi government’s claim of improving law and order, he says, is all baloney and communal. Mayawati echoes the same point too. Has the Yogi government taken the bulldozer and hammer to any non-Muslim property, she asked us in a short conversation after her rally near Varanasi. 

In all BJP marches, rallies, one chant stands out: Bulldozer baba, Jai Shri Ram/bulldozer baba zindabad. In his speeches Mr Adityanath, too, uses the bulldozer as a dog whistle. At a rally at Baldev Inter College in Varanasi’s Baragaon neighbourhood, the only times he gets the crowd interested is when he mentions the bulldozer, hathauda (hammer) and Samajwadi Party’s idea of development merely being raising the walls of kabristan (graveyards). But you know what, people have heard him say all this before. Within two minutes of him beginning to speak, there is an exodus. To be fair, everyone we speak to says they will vote for BJP. But, for Modi, not Yogi.

Here is the big picture in these writings on the wall. Joblessness is the new caste, nationalism and religion. With those emotional issues fading, caste has also returned. Too many poor people are hurting as they pay for cow protection. Most of the upper castes, especially shopkeepers and traders, say they are stressed, but would vote BJP because they improved law and order. A lot of the poor acknowledge free grain, pulses (channa) and edible oil.

Sounds confusing? It only means it is a more “normal” and fiercely contested election in Uttar Pradesh after three walkovers for the BJP.

By Special Arrangement with ThePrint