Another son invokes Dad memory, Cong Mom by his side

In comparison, Sachin is not quite 8216;8216;a son of the soil.8217;8217; He grew up in the hip city, has an Ivy League degree behind him. Yet there is a certain smoothness with which this boy from Baskin Robbins country settles into a workers8217; meeting in downtown Kotputli8212;one of Dausa constituency8217;s eight tehsils, just off the Delhi-Jaipur highway8212;where the summer refresher of choice is Matka Kulfi sold by an earnest young man on a cycle-pulled cart.

It8217;s his first election on May 5 but Sachin insists he8217;s not nervous. There8217;s a sense of deja vu to the whole campaign. 8216;8216;I have been here earlier, campaigning for my father and then my mother. It8217;s pretty much the same, the same team, same people8212;there8217;s 13 years of rapport, of keeping in touch with people.8217;8217;

Sachin is quick to emphasise that his commitment to the constituency is no sudden, poll-eve discovery. 8216;8216;Four years in a row, there was a drought here. Every June, I would be in Dausa, visiting 20-30 villages a day. Trying to help. People respond to connectivity.8217;8217;

This election, political pundits are talking incessantly of the great Indian expectations revolution, of how the folk in Dausa want to be like the folk in Delhi. Does Sachin buy into that?

8216;8216;It8217;s more the fundamental necessities that people seek,8217;8217; he says, 8216;8216;sanitation and health, roads and electricity, things we take for granted in Delhi.8217;8217; High on the demand list, says this aspiring MP, is education: 8216;8216;We had set up some primary schools, now people want them upgraded to secondary schools.8217;8217;

Even so, straddling both the Jaipur-Delhi highway and the Jaipur-Agra highway, Dausa is scarcely unmoved by the changes in the rest of India. Two emblems of post-1990s India are everywhere. One, the STD-PCO booth8212;not surprising, given Rajesh Pilot was once Union telecom minister8212;and two, the ubiquitous board saying 8216;8216;Property Dealer.8217;8217; You see it everywhere8212;just inside Dausa, just outside Jaipur, just off the highway in Kotputli, in Bassi, just another one-buffalo town perched between Jaipur and Dausa.

If there are suddenly so many property dealers, more people must be buying and selling land than ever before. It may just be the unwritten PhD of this election.

If dynastic democracy seems nice and snug in Dausa, it has more than just personal appeal to thank. This constituency is a 15-lakh electorate behemoth, where the 2.25 lakh Gujjar voters swing it the victor8217;s way. The Pilots are Gujjars. So too is Kartar Singh Bhadana, the candidate the BJP has imported from Haryana with the idea of dividing the Congress vote bank.

While Bhadana is decidedly the underdog against Pilot baba, he would probably not have been so against the mother. As even Congress workers admit in the party office in Dausa town8212;it8217;s called 8216;8216;Chaudhary Haveli8217;8217; and is as drab as its name isn8217;t8212;8216;8216;If Ramaji had stood, it would have been tough, very tough.8217;8217;

This year, of course, Dausa is discovering a new Mrs Pilot, for Sachin is married to the former Sara Abdullah, daughter of Farooq, sister of Omar, child of Kashmir8217;s most famous political family. She did the rounds during the campaign, asking for votes for the Pilot family, promising to help as the MP8217;s wife.

8216;8216;She8217;s not really a political person,8217;8217; insists Sachin, 8216;8216;she8217;s here because she wanted to help and has been a great support for me.8217;8217;

She8217;s also as elusive as the Scarlet Pimpernel. In the Pilot residence in the Shobnath area8212;you could call it Dausa8217;s 10 Janpath8212;journalists are shooed away.

A mystery, mouse-like man only identified as 8216;8216;Rajkumar8217;8217; first answers the land line, later denies the number exists. When you dial the number from your mobile and it rings inside, he only smiles sheepishly. When you offer him your visiting card, he takes it into the house, then comes back to tell you nobody8217;s home.