When a tin-cutter’s daughter is doctor, do polls matter?

‘‘She wants to be a doctor, and she will do it,’’ he smiles. ‘‘Ten years ago, even if you wanted to study you could not. Now, look at the environment around us.’’

The environment that Kadir talks of is the 3 sq km neighbourhood of Ghantikeri in Hubli, 400 km to Bangalore’s north. Semi-slum and semi-lower middle-class, it is typical small-town Karnataka, with narrow roads, often ramshackle — but neat — houses, occasional garbage piles, uncertain plumbing and electricity.

But it isn’t the physical environment that Kadir and thousands like him refer to. They point instead to their real jewels: schools, more schools and colleges. There’s a Jain Rajasthani school, a Catholic school and 12 institutions of India’s oldest Anjuman-e-Islam.

‘‘Ab har ghar mein graduate hain (Now, there is a graduate in every home),’’ says Dr Zubeida Mullah, 51, principal of the Nehru College of Arts and Sciences (an Anjuman institution with many Hindu students and lecturers).

From being an area known for slums and crime, the whole environment has changed, she explains. Students come from all over north Karnataka, become doctors and managers while companes like Modi Xerox come calling. There is an ever-swelling support structure of teachers, alumni and businessmen and a sense of optmism in the air.

As S M Krishna’s tech homeland goes to the polls tomorrow, Ghantikeri’s mood is reflected across Hubli, north Karnataka’s largest city with nearly half a million people. The rise of education and opportunities is also a largely unknown story in a city known for the riots, police firings and killings over a maidan half the size of a football pitch and the related rise of the BJP.

This is the Muslim prayer ground given on a lease of 999 years to the Anjuman in the 1930s of Idgah maidan in Hubli’s teeming heart, used today as unofficial car park, watermelon market and a crumbling commercial complex begun by the Anjuman, stalled by the high court.

In the 1990s, the maidan was the epicentre of repeated orgies of violence as the BJP, led by businessman and present candidate for the Lok Sabha seat, Prahlad Joshi, insisted on raising the tricolour at this spot only every August.

‘‘We did a bit of social engineering to bring various groups under one umbrella,” said Arun Jaitley, the party’s chief poll campaigner in Bangalore on Monday. He didn’t mention the maidan, but its role in coalescing the Hindu vote is clear.

Last month, Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani declared in Hubli that ‘‘the Idgah maidan is no longer an issue’’. Though the matter is still pending before court, the credit for defusing the tenson goes to K V Gagandeep, the stern police commissioner who’s clamped down strongly on any attempt at violence.

So while the BJP and Krishna’s Congress go about their political ambitions, Ghantikeri goes ahead with its own social engineering.

Abdul Ghani Gorikhan, 51, of the department of botany of the Anjuman’s Arts and Science college says it’s a work in progress. ‘‘All rejects with 35 per cent still come here,’’ he says frankly, ‘‘but they go out with 60 per cent.’’

There are free coaching classes. Staff and former students pay for fees and books. Imams in mohallas have been corralled by the Anjuman (it celebrated its 100th anniversary last year with President Abdul Kalam in attendance) to help the movement.

The Anjuman’s four toppers are girls and the poorest parents — maid servants, auto drivers, tin cutters — have enrolled their daughters in school. ‘‘When you go ask for a match, they ask, is she matriculate at least?’’ explains Kadir. ‘‘They think that way the mother can provide at least primary education.’’ Something Kadir’s illiterate wife could never do.