No entourage,only direct connect

The absence of an entourage may look out of place in a season of frenetic electioneering,but Manvendra calls it a waste of resources.

I do not consider myself a conventional politician, he tells The Indian Express as he drives to the first public meeting in a village 100 km from Barmer town,between umpteen calls and uses of the hand sanitiser.

One needs to build a direct connect with the locals, he says. My interaction with the villagers is enough. What is the point of an entourage? Such a waste of resources and fuel.

The calls keep coming,the Stevie Vaughan ringtone too seeming out of place in the desert backdrop. He rarely misses a call and if he does,he returns them. Polling agents have to be finalised,more meetings have to be accommodated on the last leg of campaigning,and there are sundry nitty-gritties that he makes sure he handles personally.

At the first stop in Paleva,a village of the backward Meghwals,Manvendra stops by to say fluently in a Rajasthani tongue that Vasundhara Raje is poised to come back to power and theirs will be the government if they choose him to represent them. He tells them to turn out in large numbers on Sunday. Barely taking five minutes of their time,he drives out only to be stopped by a youth,who cheekily says,Do come back after you win.

At the next stop,Unrod village,a sizeable gathering of Muslims welcomes him and he yet again makes his offer of meetha paani,meaning relief from hard water. On the way back,driver Hukum Singh is ready with feedback: One of them said,Saab wont win. Others snubbed him.

Water is my single-most important agenda for this constituency, Manvendra says. Safe potable water is yet to reach them even after 66 years of independence. There have been ad hoc schemes but this area needs something more concrete and doable. Water from the Narmada canal must be brought in, he adds,sipping from his Adidas bottle of lukewarm water that helps him cope in the dry desert.

Of course,there are cross-border issues, he says. Almost every family here has relatives across the border and marriages still take place between the two sides. They need better accessibility.

Manvendra is no longer just former BJP minister Jaswant Singhs son,but someone who has carved a niche out for himself. He contested his first parliamentary election in 1999 but lost,then won in 2004. He lost the same Lok Sabha seat,Barmer-Jaisalmer,in 2009.

A former defence correspondent with The Indian Express,Manvendra took time off over the last five years to edit the magazine Defence and Security Alert and write the book Campaign Diary: Chronicle of an Election Fought and Lost,and is now back to claim power in an assembly constituency of which parts fall on the Pakistan border.

This time he faces sitting legislator Amin Khan,the waqf and minority minister,who has for decades been winning almost every alternate election here. The constituency of 2.20 lakh people includes a significant Muslim population of 60,000. Yet many locals say Manvendra holds sway even on this section of the votebank in addition to those of the Rajputs,Purohit,Charan,Jat and other communities,simply for his accessibility and humility.

At home,wife Chitra,mother Sheetal,brother-in-law Hemendra and others young and elderly gear up to set out campaigning in earmarked areas. Father Jaswant Singh stood by him on the day he filed his papers and will come back on polling day. Chitra and his mother have drawn large crowds,at places more than Manvendra himself has managed. Their traditional Rajasthani clothes mak that connect with the village woman while their drawn veils evoke acknowledgment of the familys regard for tradition.

Sheetal is a campaign veteran,having been at it since 1967 when she would go out seeking votes for her husband. She recounts how in the late 1980s she,along with a few other women,drove around in Fiats campaigning for her husband in Jodhpur,drawing much awe in the community.

Things have changed, she says. Now the way politicians have become corrupt and have brought disrepute to politics,I feel embarrassed to go out seeking for votes. What does one say to the people? They already feel so cheated.

At a time when the Election Commission is keeping a watch on the spending of candidates,Manvendra not just keeps it low-key but frowns upon Hukum Singh when the latter almost stealthily hands out a bunch of modest pamphlets seeking votes.

As he drives off from Unrod leaving behind a dust trail,and the Liverpool Football Club poster that the avid soccer fan passionately keeps pasted on the rear windscreen fades from sight,it leaves villagers perplexed about which partys election symbol that might be.