Opinion Vandita Mishra writes: Notes from the Madhya Pradesh ground

I travelled to one of the five poll-bound states, Madhya Pradesh, and here are some takeaways, some of the images and voices I came back with. They are not new, of course, or unique to MP.

First, the election is about the parties’ planned campaigns and hard strategies, which were translated this time in MP, most of all, in competing promises made in rupees, but the voter wants more.

You heard the BJP talk of the Ladli Behna scheme (Rs 1250/- a month to women below a certain level of family income), and the Congress held forth on how the BJP was facing anti-incumbency after four terms in MP.

For many voters, however, especially young voters, the election was about the missing opportunities to make their own future, away from state handouts, and the fact that neither the incumbent nor the challenger was addressing this problem, much less articulating a vision for overcoming it.

For first-time voters in MP, the state’s several recruitment-and-admission scams have been increasing a sense of being walled in. Many defined corruption not as the rampant bribe-taking at lower levels of government or the alleged large-scale misappropriation of public funds at higher echelons — those were there too — but, most of all, as the state’s complicities in the shrinking and closing of citizens’ opportunities.

In fact, amidst a large-scale takeover of election campaigns by cash-and-carry pledges, here and now, big ideas of any kind — not just possible solutions for the broken system of examination and recruitment that blights its future — were missing from the ground in MP. The MP BJP fell back on invocations of the big ideas of the Modi-BJP at the Centre, but by doing so, it only seemed to underline that in the state it has reached a standstill.

The sense was unmistakable — of voters straining for bigger and better and more, even as parties fail to keep step with them, a failure born as much of the calculations of short-term politics as of the lack of imagination and empathy.

If the gap between what young voters want and what parties promised seemed etched vividly on the MP ground, so was the polarisation — here, too, both parties seemed to be on the same side of the divide, the BJP taking the lead, and the Congress, with its silence, acquiescing. What was visible, too, was the flailing against its predicament in the minority community.

Just as the Congress has unreservedly joined the race of cash promises launched by the BJP, it has plunged into a game played on BJP terms — of competitive religiosity. The Muslim minority is estimated at less 7 per cent in MP, and yet, if a spectre of siege is nursed in sections of the state’s overwhelming majority, the Congress too must take part of the responsibility.

For the Congress, there was a choice not made, a road not taken, as elsewhere, in MP. It could have built the 101-feet Hanuman statue in Chhindwara, and organised the Hanuman chaleesa ahead of elections in Khandwa town, while at the same time, showing up to speak against the clear injustice perpetrated by the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government on entire families in the Muslim locality in Khargone. Here, several homes were demolished as a sort of collective punishment to the community after incidents of arson and stone-pelting on a Ramnavami procession in April 2022.

“The Congress didn’t come to help us then. The BJP does not come to ask us for votes now”, they say in the Muslim locality. “Why doesn’t the BJP come here? We would welcome them if they did, would we not?” There is bitterness in that question, and also a railing against the claustrophobia and the straitjacketing.

Another impression reinforced on the MP ground is of the futility of speaking of voters as air-tight groups and impermeable monoliths — the “OBC vote” and “the tribal vote”, to take two instances.

It is true that caste is inscribed on the very land in MP, as it is in many other states, with separate clusters for different castes in villages. And yet, the spatial distribution of caste groups across the state’s distinct regions has meant that there is no dominant pan-state OBC caste, and therefore, no ready-made “OBC identity” to be mined politically. For raising the issue of the caste census, Congress would have to work to prepare the ground, which it was reluctant to do in this election evidently.

On the other hand, the state’s Scheduled Tribe population, though well defined by geography, is divided by history and politics — the Congress has traditionally been strong in tribal areas, but the BJP-RSS have also made inroads, and there are newer mobilisations, by the ostensibly non-aligned JAYS (Jai Adivasi Yuva Shakti) formed by the educated ST youth, and by tribal parties like the Gondwana Gantantra Party, which has splintered into several factions of the parent party. Therefore, the “ST vote” is a misnomer too — it is more correct to speak of not one but many.

Till next week,

Vandita

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– Aromar Revi, “Nine things to do for clean air”, November 15

– Rama Srinivasan, “The power of simple pleasures”, November 15

– Smith Mehta, “Ease of control”, November 16

– Mrinal Pande, “Great Gatsby of Hindi media”, November 16

– Virginius Xaxa, “Gesture politics”, November 17