One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas — and you have to work through it all.
—V.S. Naipaul
Rajpur Road, which is Dehradun’s main drag, is congealed with rackety traffic and is festooned with Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) posters welcoming the youth wing president Tejashwi Surya to the city. Every poster, the distance between them not more than a furlong, sports the same Surya, bespectacled and half-smiling, as if the whole shindig of welcome and big-font applause embarrasses him.
The vehicles of various makes and colours, making ear-splitting noise, are jostling to nose ahead, and their rush, competitive and cacophonous, clashes strongly with Surya’s half-grin. Either he is amused at the city’s tooting madness, or the city, represented in all its vehicular fury, just ignores him as it goes about speeding and honking into a dark hole of mundanity.
Elections, when they come every five years with buntings and banter, offer, momentarily, a road that is off the beaten track of the everyday quotidian route. Elections suddenly place a jerry-rigged lid on the dark hole of mundanity and put a smile—doesn’t matter even if it is half—on the posters and transfer anxieties to newspaper headlines and societal panics to TV chyrons .
In Dehradun, the hills are hazy with morning mists, and the sun, getting brighter every moment, tries to dispel them fast. The hills around the city, which are now getting obscured by the numerous buildings and haphazard infrastructure that a hyper-charged capitalism has wrought, still offer a tiny glimpse of Rousseauian splendour that was part and parcel of the city’s life a few decades ago, but the upcoming polls have brought the labyrinthine Hobbesian world into the city in all its gargantuan—and some would say galling—glory.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who made a trip or two to the state before the election process kicked off in right earnest, has always been known for his immense affection for the state. Modi, whose ever-growing legend carries an ascetic tale of his tapasya in the hills of Uttarakhand, has been involved with the Char Dham road project from the get-go. Connecting Kedarnath, Badrinath, Gangotri and Yamunotri to each other and to the country and then to the entire world is akin to connecting all the dots of a magnificent Hindu project, whose hub lies in Haridwar, which is also the social laboratory for the Hindutva project. Many seers and akharas are based in Haridwar and they together radiate a strain of Hinduism that BJP can ill-afford to be out of step with. Hence, the Char Dham project becomes all the more crucial for Modi and his BJP.
Contained in the Char Dham roads and the infrastructure that will ensue after completion is also the promise of employment for the hill youth, which jibes well with the BJP slogan of stopping migration from the mountain villages, some of which have just withered away into ghostly reminders of once-thriving human habitation. The hill-migration issue has bipartisan support. Even the Congress, spooked by many hollowed-out-of-humanity villages, talks animatedly about it.
Strangely, in this election, it isn’t Garhwal—where the Char Dham sites are located—but Kumaon that has emerged as the hot spot in the state’s political sweepstakes. Both the chief minister, Pushkar Singh Dhami, and his rival for the post, Congress’s Harish Rawat, are fighting from Kumaon. For Rawat, this may be his last election, and he and his party are fighting for survival in a state that has, every five years, tossed out the incumbent. Rawat knows if he and his party lose this important election, it may be curtains for both. In a small border state where nationalism has always been a signature tune, if the ruling BJP wins again, the Congress, like a song that has been lost to oblivion, faces the prospect of grim and quick fadeout.
Rawat is a tall leader and the Congress, once he hangs up his political boots, has no one to match him in acumen and charisma. Rawat’s nous can be measured by the fact that after his anointment, the BJP never took a chance of installing a Brahmin as chief minister. All three CMs—Trivendra Rawat, Tirath Rawat and Pushkar Dhami—have been Rajputs, a caste to which Harish Rawat belongs and a caste that is dominant in the state.
Earlier, the BJP has seen two Brahmin CMs in B.C. Khanduri and Ramesh Nishank. They gave the crown to B.S. Koshyari for a short while, but once Rawat came into the frame dislodging another Brahmin, Vijay Bahugana, and became the Congress lodestar, the BJP never took a gamble on a Brahmin in this term. After Trivendra Singh Rawat clocked four years as CM, he was replaced by Tirath Singh Rawat and then swiftly by the current CM, Pushkar Dhami. This revolving door gave some voltage to grumblings in the state, but the BJP is confident that Modi will again light up its campaign with his unfailing charisma and sparkling oratory and his powerful, almost unbreakable, connect with the people of the state.
Modi remains an astoundingly popular figure in the state. His trek to the Kedarnath cave after winning the last Lok Sabha election and the meditation he did there has become an integral part of the state’s lore.
Election promises and the economy
The state’s fragile economy, battered by the pandemic and consequent drying up of its cash faucet of tourism, has been dragged into the campaign. Harish Rawat, like politicians of every stripe, has promised a slew of jobs. The details are vague, but the promises have been loudly broadcast. Rawat, shrewdly, has also vowed to provide gas cylinders to the poor at less than ₹500, a shot across the bow of the government’s vaunted Ujjwala scheme. The BJP anyway is banking on its infrastructure push and Modi’s magnetism and his growth mantras. For a state where jobs are scarce, these promises bring some hope, but scepticism reigns as people, inured to these election vows, know how easily these hopes can be dashed. The BJP also hasn’t been able to do anything forceful about demographic change, its perennial bugbear in the state for some years now. Muslim migration from the plains of Uttar Pradesh to Uttarakhand is worrying the saffron party, but it hasn’t found a way to staunch it.
For some years, the hills of Uttarakhand aren’t alive with music; they are alive with only one sorrowful refrain: that the mountainous regions, compared with the plains of the state, are getting the short shrift. Delimitation in the state has given 11 seats to the Haridwar region; nine have gone away to Uddham Singh Nagar and the Dehradun region takes a big chunk of 10 (though some are in the hills). In seats, it’s more or less even-stevens for the hills and plains. But since the plains of the state are more densely populated than the hilly areas, the focus of parties and politicians on these blocks is quite deep, invariably making the hill tracts an anguished sufferer.
Women, too, haven’t got their due. Uttarakhandi women have always been in the vanguard of social agitations in the state. But somehow their social activism has never translated into their political ascendance in the state. The women of the state, when need arose, wholeheartedly embraced trees during the Chipko movement, but the political process has shied away from hugging them back.
Daughters of B.C. Khanduri and Harish Rawat are fighting the election, but that is just pro forma and not exactly women emancipation, something the state is rightly proud of. Uttarakhand is one of the safest states for women in the country, and hence it is all more flummoxing why they don’t get proper representation in the political structure. Uttarakhand still awaits the day when the women at the grassroot level will be rewarded with a place in the political sweepstakes. Until that happens, women's participation—which has been abysmal this time too—will stay cosmetic.
Vote-cutting machine
Arvind Kejriwal and his band of stormtroopers have also landed in the state, eyeing an opportunity. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which is projecting Ajay Kothiyal, a former army colonel, as its CM face, hoping that the people of the state, enamoured of the guts and glory and glamour of the defence forces, vote for him. AAP, however, is preparing for the long haul. Unlike Punjab, where it is in a tough and bruising battle with the Congress for the Chandigarh crown, the Kejriwal party knows it won’t make a big impact in the hill state in this election. It, however, is a threat to both the mainstream parties—BJP and Congress—for its remarkable ability to snatch away votes from them. Generally, in these cases, it is the incumbent who takes a knock and that’s precisely why the BJP is more wary of AAP than the Congress. Kothiyal’s is a clean and honest face, but unlikely to sway voters this time. Who knows what will happen after five years. AAP has jumped into the fray, keeping the long term in mind. For now, its vote-cutting machine is giving the heebie-jeebies to the main parties.
Hills or plains. The tussle is immemorial and will perhaps be unending. But the state, now entering adulthood, has to find its steady feet and shed its pimply and scabrous skin. Even a sliver of brightness will be enough to stop people from disappearing into the dark hole of mundanity. That half-smile Surya sports in confused bemusement has to give way to a proud and confident grin, in posters and in real life. Just like the bright sun that burns away the mists of the Uttarakhand hills. Creative has to replace commonplace; innovation has to shut away sloth; enervation has to give way to energy; dejection to determination; melancholy to magic; vapidity to vivacity.
That, of course, won’t be the centrepiece of any campaign, but that’s what the state of Uttarakhand, taking tentative steps into adulthood, desperately needs. There is a chaotic mass of ideas. There is a jumbled mass of expectations. Someone just has to work through them. Find solutions, find answers. Will the answers be on Rajpur Road when the election cycle is over? Watch this space.
Also read: 2022 Assembly Elections | Do-or-die poll battle on cards in Uttarakhand
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