Two days earlier L K Advani’s rath yatra passed through Chhindwara, his first stop in Madhya Pradesh. Two days from now, Sonia’s road show will descend on the same constituency. At stake is Kamal Nath’s hold on his home turf, a seat he or his wife have held uninterrupted since 1980 except for a bypoll loss to Sunderlal Patwa in 1997. Pitched against him is the BJP’s Union Minister of State for Coal, Prahlad Patel, close confidante of Uma Bharti and recently in the news for his attempts to locate the presence of the HIV virus in goats. By itself this should be enough colour for good election copy, but the real story lurks in the background — the rising influence of the Gondwana Gantantara Party in this tribal district.Barely 20 km on the main road from Chhindwara, on the very route that Advani took, lies the village of Raja Kho. Gobind Prasad Uike is the Gond sarpanchpati, the sarpanch’s husband, ‘‘All this has happened in the past one year. There’s been an awareness of our Gond identity. It began with functions where we were told about our heritage. It has extended to work against alcoholism and dowry.’’This work is only the most recent manifestation of a phenomenon that dates back a decade. In districts such as Mandla, the GGP has set up schools where Gondi is taught and Women Self Help Groups have been established. News of this work has carried to the Gonds of Raja Kho. Shri Ram Dhruve, a village elder adds, ‘‘No one here speaks Gondi any longer. We now want the Gondwana Party to set up a school here. We are relearning our history, our language. Sammelans are held where our history is related to us.’’A resident retrieves one such calendar from a nearby hut. The names of the days of the week, the months, the Gond festivals are all set out in the Gondi script. No one here can read the script but all of them respond to this quest for self-affirmation.The difference this self-affirmation has made is immediately obvious to everyone in the village. Pati Ram Marskole is a student at a nearby Polytechnic, ‘‘The attitude of those in authority towards us has changed.’’ This overwhelming social transformation, which extends to the entire Gond belt south of the Narmada comprising the districts of Balaghat, Seoni, Mandla and Chhindwara, is also bad news for the Congress. In the recent Assembly elections the Congress was wiped out in this entire belt, and in Chhindwara it lost all eight of the Assembly constituencies.In a season of bad news for the party, this was the worst. This was a votebank the Congress always took for granted. Now the Gonds claim the Congress has never done anything for them. ‘‘ Those in power have built buildings and bought tractors in our name,’’ adds Uike.A claim that even finds a resonance when put to Kamalnath. ‘‘Yes, many of their demands relating to culture and language are genuine and I support them. Gondi should be given official status.’’ But these are words that have been forced upon him. The growth of the GGP’s influence has almost entirely been at the Congress’s expense. Kamalnath now claims, ‘‘People here know the work I have done for them. I have been going among the Gonds and telling them that for all this talk, the fact remains that voting for the GGP will indirectly benefit the BJP. And this is finding a response among them.’’But for the moment this seems more like wishful thinking. It is indeed true that the BJP benefited. In the recent Assembly elections, seven out of the eight Chhindwara Assembly seats went to the BJP, one to the GGP; yet the votes of the GGP and the Congress totalled over the entire Parliamentary constituency exceed those polled by the BJP. This division is exactly what the BJP is banking on, and there is reason to believe the BJP has tacitly extended support to the work of the GGP. But in the end this can only be a temporary truce because much to the RSS’ chagrin the GGP’s work extends to the affirmation that the Gonds are not Hindus.And for this reason the GGP supporters are looking beyond the immediate political calculation. Some like Uike have nothing against Kamalnath personally, ‘‘He has done work here and if we have faced trouble it is at the hands of the lower functionaries of the party. But now we will no longer support the Congress.’’
