Krishnaleela pulls crowds but will votes follow?

Nitish seems to realise this. He makes full use of his TV image and relies heavily on symbols and metaphors borrowed from the Krishna legend in his discourse to attract crowds.

“Jai kanhaiyya lal ki,” they chant as Nitish comes out of his Byora camp office on Janmashtami. Wearing a printed yellow silk kurta and black jeans, a saffron angavastram around his neck, he waves at them as he boards an open jeep decked with flowers tomake it look like a chariot.

The show starts. At Narsinghgarh one can see him wearing a peacock-feather mukut; at Kuravar, he poses as Krishna playing the flute; and at Jhajhla, another dusty town, he wields the Sudarshan chakra, proclaiming “yeh janata ka Sudarshan chakra hai jo anyayiyon ka nash kar dega”.(this is the people’s Sudarshan chakra which will kill the oppressors).

The crowds are everywhere. Women shower flowers from rooftops as his convoy passes through small towns and villages. An old man, who has walked for miles to catch a glimpse of Bhagwan Krishna, touches the tyres of Nitish’s Tata Sumo.

To keep up the illusion, the BJP candidate quotes Sanskrit shlokas, sermonises on dharma and karma and frequently alludes to mythological villains — Kansa, Ravana, Duryodhana etc — to hit out at Sonia Gandhi, Digvijay Singh and, of course, Laxman Singh.

For the record — CEC is watching — Nitish makes it a point to tell the crowds that he is not asking for votes in the name of the Hindu god.But he reverts to the allegorical vein without loss of time and the message is clear: “The likes of Shakuni and Kans become rulers only when people stray off the path of religion.”

Can the BJP candidate pull it off? “I am not sure,” says Laxmi Sahu, a tea vendor at Byora, two hours after Nitish Kumar’s roadshow has passed. “We went to see the man who played the role of Krishna in Mahabharat,” adds his wife, Ramrani.

People go to Nitish Kumar’s meeting due to the novelty factor’ maintains Raj Singh of Gagorni village in Kilichpur Tehsil. “Laxman Singh ghar ke laddoo hain, pet unhi se bharega,”(Congress candidate Laxman Singh is a local and he alone can satisfy us) says Umeda of Jaitpura, agreeing with Raj Singh.

Donning a colourful Rajasthani pagri, Laxman seems unperturbed by the crowds his BJP opponents is attracting. “They are spectators, not voters,” is his laconic reply.

Laxman makes no bones about the fact that he is banking on the achievements of his elder brother, Diggy Raja. BeforeDigvijay became CM, Rajgarh was at the bottom of the Human Development Index pyramid of Madhya Pradesh. “Today it occupies the third place in the state,” he notes with pride. All the villages in the district have been electrified. The area under irrigation has increased from 27 per cent to 40 per cent. “Work has already started in 100 remote villages of the area under a Rs 27-crore World Bank project brought to the district by me,” Laxman reminds people at Undankherti, Jeeradei and Kilchipur.

“Kya aap chahte hain ki ek Bambaiya babu aakar yeh sab khatam kar de?”(Do you want a stranger from Bombay to undo all this?) he asks everywhere, evoking a loud, “No!”

This might sound strange from the people of a region who sent a rank outsider like Jagannathrao Joshi to the Lok Sabha on the Bharatiya Jana Sangh ticket during the 1971 Indira Gandhi wave.

But as Sandeep Singh of Kilchipur puts it, “The once illiterate and backward people of Rajgarh are now wiser. They will see who can help them getthe little things that matter in their lives before they decide to vote.”

Jhale Singh, a Thakur of Dangiwada, points out that the Bare Saheb-Chote Saheb team — as Digvijay and Laxman are called has done its bit to satisfy the people’s religious instincts by getting numerous temples in the area renovated. “And they have given us schools and hospitals also,” he says. Nitish’s religious rhetoric has to contend with this ground reality.