A tribe that is no longer lost

Yet here, in local overlord and seven-time Congress MP Manikrao Gavit’s constituency, the air is thick with discontent. Mawachi youths, wearing garish T-shirts and trousers, stand outside their mud-baked huts in the mid-morning sun, eyeing visitors with suspicion.

Eventually, a few summon up the courage to step forward. ‘‘In all these years, we have received nothing for our votes except for a little money,’’ says Bapdya Vasave, an unskilled labourer, ‘‘we have no jobs, no water, no compensation.’’

For the 500-odd inhabitants of this hamlet, the factors that matter most are typically those that affect tribal groups all over the district: encroachments on forest land, scarcity of potable water, lack of adequate employment.

Such is the bitterness that Gavit, in the run-up to the polls, has already been put on notice. Dari Pada’s tribals, who have sent him to Parliament seven times successively over the past three decades, recently defeated the MP’s attempts to launch his son’s political career in the zila parishad elections.

Manikrao who had never visited this village in living memory, had come down to personally appeal to his loyal voters. It didn’t work. Bharat Gavit lost to a fellow tribal candidate from the NCP, trumped by a rising tide of voter rebellion in his father’s own bastion.

Daulatsinh Lakhma, who own a pair of buffaloes and sells milk for a living, unleashes a volley of expletives against the Gavits before elaborating on the reasons for his disenchantment. ‘‘Bharat Gavit is the contractor who is actually building this road into our village under the Pradhan Mantri Yojana though the board has someone else’s name. In two years, he has done nothing except move some material.’’

The villagers have now resolved not to give into either threat or coercion on D-day. Local party agents or pudaris are notorious for turning on the night before an election to dole out petty sums of cash to every family and drop hints about the hazards of voting against the dispensation. ‘‘I have been beaten up many times for raising my voice against them, but it’s not going to stop me now,’’ laughs Bhilkya Hurj, a farmhand.

Apart from recent incidents, Dari Pada’s vehement opposition against the MP has a historical basis: villagers here are yet to receive compensation for farmlands that submerged when a minor dam was built nearby on a tributary of the Tapti river (‘‘some of us were paid, others got nothing’’). Given their limited means for survival, many have started migrating to Gujarat in search of jobs as daily wage workers—the nearest railhead Bhadbhunje is, in fact, in Gujarat, 4 km away.

The local schoolteacher, a conscientious youngster who commutes 60 km by bus everyday, despairs for the children of families who have been uprooted in their search for a livelihood. Almost 20 per cent of the 160-odd students accompany their parents when they leave for Surat or Odhna after the monsoon or kharif crop is harvested and the dry season begins to set in.

The sarpanch, an extremely unpopular individual called Hiraji Keshav, appears to think Gavit will win with a comfortable margin. Seated cross-legged in the verandah of a two-storey concrete house, the only one in the vicinity, Keshav refuses to be seen as the agent guarding the votebank. But, he says, ‘‘I will go around and propagate what the party has done.’’

Seems absurd coming from a man who owns a Maruti 800 in a village fighting for a road.