Elephant no pushover in Nagpur

It’s an election battleground spread across urban Nagpur’s smooth, wide avenues to the forests of Melghat in Amravati and the Naxalite-affected districts of Chandrapur and Gadchiroli.

As D-Day draws closer, it is Mayawati’s new force of ticketless rebels with grassroots embedded in Vidarbha’s cotton-rich black soil, who are giving sleepless nights to the Congress-NCP and Shiv Sena-BJP.

The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) lost every seat it contested in the Lok Sabha elections here. But when it went down—with over half its statewide votes coming from Vidarbha—it took the Congress-NCP with it. The combine lost 10 of Vidarbha’s 11 seats, where the BSP chewed their share.

Nagpur—cluttered with rebels from Dalits to Marwaris riding on the elephant—is representative of the war for Vidarbha’s vote. It can swing the final tally on Oct 16 any which way. There are no straight fights, no easy political maths.

‘‘Even during the LS elections, till the last day of nominations, rebels internally worked for BSP while still within the Congress-NCP or Sena-BJP,’’ says BSP’s Nagpur district chief Jitendra Ghodeswar.

Our tactic is simple, says BSP state secretary Suresh Sakhare. ‘‘Each candidate can get at least 10,000 votes from his community, and another 20,000 due to his local political network. This is the BSP’s best election in the state’s history.’’

Though the Congress-NCP’s troubles overflow with the rebel menace, the saffron combine is also stressed out. ‘‘We expect the strangest results to emerge from Vidarbha,’’ confides a top BJP source in Mumbai.

To find out why, The Indian Express followed the elephant, the BSP symbol, starting from Nagpur (East) assembly constituency.

‘‘The BJP always lets the Sena get this ticket and they always lose. They have no local network,’’ grumbles mill-owner, Ashok Goyal, the ex-chairman of Nagpur civic body’s standing committee and the corporation’s top vote-catcher in 2002. The first-timer, who ditched a decade-old BJP relationship for the BSP, is hoping to give his Shiv Sena and Congress rivals a run for their money.

Likewise in the north Nagpur constituency, the spoiler is an ex-Congress corporator and ex-mayor. It is Rajesh Tambe’s network in the Valmiki Samaj, a scheduled caste category, that will bother local Congressman Nitin Raut. After canvassing on a motorcycle all morning, Tambe wants you to believe that he shifted for BSP ‘‘ideology.’’

Everywhre Maya goes—on 11 rallies in 11 districts, compared to just one Nagpur rally for the LS polls—she promises a separate Vidarbha statehood for the region, named after Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar. Both alliances are silent or vague on the issue.

In Nagpur (West)—the state’s second biggest constituency—where Congress has been appeasing its own near-rebel Ranjeet Deshmukh (57), the contest is between the former MPCC chief and BSP’s Prashant Pawar, an ex-NCP man and local chief of the Vidarbha Vikas Party.

Deshmukh has piped down after threats to withdraw from the fray because the alliance skipped his pet vote plank, the statehood issue, in its manifesto. ‘‘I spoke to Digvijay Singh, Margaret Alva and Pranab Mukherjee,’’ he says. ‘‘They said Vidarbha’s statehood will be handled along with Telangana’s demand in Andhra Pradesh.’’

At south Nagpur, we catch up ex-NCP youth leader Kiran Pandav, one of BSP’s 113 OBC candidates of the 272 seats (the highest by a single party) that it’s contesting statewide. There are also 93 Dalits and scheduled caste candidates, 36 Muslims, five Marwaris and a smattering of Sindhis and Jains.

‘‘Pandav worked for us for three-four months before joining officially,’’ says the BSP’s Godeswar. Locals say BSP votes are mostly limited to those from the candidate’s community. With so many faces that voters once familiarly attached to the hand, lotus and the bow-and-arrow now atop an elephant, what if they forget who’s with which party at the polling booth?