Uttar Pradesh elections 2017: For land once given, goodwill for BSP but not necessarily votes

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The 1.5 bighas barely sustains Ramkishan’s family. He lives in Auseri Khed of Jahanabad, which votes on February 23. Auseri Khed is one of 18 villages governed by the pradhan at Abhaypur, just off the Kanpur- Allahabad highway.

Further towards the Ganga from Abhaypur, the road becomes more and more of a dirt path as it approaches Jadepurva village. In these villages, most people are Nishads, with a few Kurmis and fewer Muslims and Paswans.

Farmers here are largely landless, except for a few who remember Mayawati for the land they got. One villager says that for generations they used to clear the forests along the river to farm but upper-caste residents of nearby villages managed to get the land listed against their names in the local records and pushed the farmers to work as labourers. That was before the government intervened and gave some of the villagers land rights.

What they got is limited. Villagers say most land here belongs to the Thakurs, Baniyas and the Pandits, and everyone, including those given small plots, work on those farms to survive, earning between Rs 100 and Rs 200 a day.

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Jadepurva has about a hundred families, their houses mostly of mud. They say they have never got work under MNREGA or any money under government pension or other central and state schemes. The village gets submerged for two months every year and they have to move closer to the highway, which makes them even more dependent on upper-caste villagers. The landless villagers allege that the powerful Thakurs also pressure them to vote for either the BJP or the SP.

The only route to the highway is through Abhaypur. Abhaypur has been electrified for decades unlike villages such as Auseri Kheda, Jadepurva, Madarpur, about a couple of kilometres towards the river.

The government erected poles to electrify the villages last year but the forest department removed them as they were in the area under their control, Puttal and other villagers say.

The BSP has won the assembly seat twice, in 1996 and in 2007, and still enjoys emotional support among Nishad villagers, if not the certainty about their votes. The sitting MLA is Madan Gopal Verma of the SP.