 "In Yadavs' heartland, handouts and hope")
The moment you turn off the Yamuna Expressway just east of Agra, you expect the roads will turn bad. For 90 minutes you’ve driven on Jaypee’s incredible highway, which cuts imperiously across Western UP’s fields of winter rice like a Roman road through Gaul.
Multi-laned, perfectly finished, its air of being an imperial imposition is only heightened when you see families ducking through the barbed wire to try and cross it, dodging cars travelling at 150 kilometres an hour. But, in the Real India of Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mayawati, the highways are bad, they say, and so when you get onto NH-2, you brace yourself.
Quite unnecessarily, as it turns out. The National Highways Authority of India may be accused of being sclerotic but most sections of the road between Agra and Kanpur are in perfect condition. The surroundings, however, change more sharply than the quality of road surfacing. The Yamuna Expressway, once it passes the white elephants being built out in Greater Noida, has almost no “rurban” building on its sidelines. Not so the much older NH-2, which meanders through the margins, and sometimes the middles, of the towns of west-central UP. For both villages and towns, the appropriate neuroses are visible on the walls: in the villages, promised cures for sexual dysfunction; and, in the towns. “global education centres”, “world schools” and “international baccalaureate academies”.
This is Samajwadi Party country. The city of Firozabad, famous for its glass chandeliers, is now festooned instead with banners for schools and colleges. A close second are SP flags and banners. Across UP, the SP is supposed to be wiped out; but here, in the constitutency that used to be Akhilesh Yadav’s before he became chief minister in 2009, the Yadavs still reign. Akhilesh’s cousin Akshay is the nominee in 2014, his Varun Gandhi-esque eyebrows and scowl omnipresent. The SP lost the seat to the Congress in a closely-fought bye-election in 2009, in which Raj Babbar beat Dimple Yadav. Babbar then did nothing to the constituency, apparently, and has now been shifted to Ghaziabad; Akhilesh, instead, swore revenge and has supposedly been running a low-intensity campaign ever since.
But there are no signs of this at the Samajwadi Party’s office on the outskirts of Firozabad. It is an extraordinary building, four stories high, with a neoclassical façade, pediment, pillars and all. Clearly recently built – presumably after 2009 – its white exterior is already showing its age; the only thing that gleams in the entire compound is the huge diesel generator at the back. But amazingly, it is empty. There isn’t a soul inside. On the steps stand a handful of petitioners, come to meet Akshay or the local SP strongman, Azim Bhai.
One of them, dressed in a white safari suit and sneakers, declares he’s come all the way from Etawah on a mission for Akshay’s father, Ram Gopal Yadav. “How is this a campaign office?” he sniffs, peering through the glass doors into the dim, empty interior. He’s informs us, nevertheless, firmly, that there’s no Modi wave in this area at least. “Elsewhere, perhaps. Here the Mohammedans will not leave the SP.” The safari suit’s a lawyer, and his name is Balveer Singh. The two other petitioners, two young burqa-clad girls, very noticeably don’t nod when he tells us about how “Mohammedans” are likely to vote.
The two girls, one in college and one in high school, have come to find out what’s happened to the money girl students were supposed to receive. Nobody in Firozabad has gotten it this year, apparently. The two are determined to find out what’s going on. The older one, who’s in her first year of college, also wants to know where the famous free laptops have gone. “The SP always takes care of us,” says the younger one, doubtfully. She is wearing a burqa with silver embroidery and has marks from Holi celebrations on her face.
In Firozabad, the communal divide is written across the cityscape. That one, Holi-playing burqa-clad schoolgirl doesn’t seem representative; there aren’t many splashes of colour on the eastern side of Firozabad. The houses too are more drably painted, and smaller. But here, too, there are signs for schools –with lots of girls in the posters. As for the men, it’s not difficult to see what their equivalent to an obsession with laptops and schools is: every two steps there’s a gym, adorned with that one famous picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger from the 1970s.
At the Firozabad SP office, too, there are posters of various Yadavs with smiling schoolgirls, handing out money and awards and laptops. But the articulate disappointment of the two waiting girls tells its own story. Even in the Yadavs’ backyard – the spanking new brick-and-glass outskirts of Etawah are a short drive away – patience is wearing thin. True, the flags and posters everywhere are the SP’s. But here’s an equally visible, odd thing about the party’s red-and-green standard. When the red is exposed to the elements long enough, it fades. And, turns saffron.
Multi-laned, perfectly finished, its air of being an imperial imposition is only heightened when you see families ducking through the barbed wire to try and cross it, dodging cars travelling at 150 kilometres an hour. But, in the Real India of Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mayawati, the highways are bad, they say, and so when you get onto NH-2, you brace yourself.
Quite unnecessarily, as it turns out. The National Highways Authority of India may be accused of being sclerotic but most sections of the road between Agra and Kanpur are in perfect condition. The surroundings, however, change more sharply than the quality of road surfacing. The Yamuna Expressway, once it passes the white elephants being built out in Greater Noida, has almost no “rurban” building on its sidelines. Not so the much older NH-2, which meanders through the margins, and sometimes the middles, of the towns of west-central UP. For both villages and towns, the appropriate neuroses are visible on the walls: in the villages, promised cures for sexual dysfunction; and, in the towns. “global education centres”, “world schools” and “international baccalaureate academies”.
This is Samajwadi Party country. The city of Firozabad, famous for its glass chandeliers, is now festooned instead with banners for schools and colleges. A close second are SP flags and banners. Across UP, the SP is supposed to be wiped out; but here, in the constitutency that used to be Akhilesh Yadav’s before he became chief minister in 2009, the Yadavs still reign. Akhilesh’s cousin Akshay is the nominee in 2014, his Varun Gandhi-esque eyebrows and scowl omnipresent. The SP lost the seat to the Congress in a closely-fought bye-election in 2009, in which Raj Babbar beat Dimple Yadav. Babbar then did nothing to the constituency, apparently, and has now been shifted to Ghaziabad; Akhilesh, instead, swore revenge and has supposedly been running a low-intensity campaign ever since.
But there are no signs of this at the Samajwadi Party’s office on the outskirts of Firozabad. It is an extraordinary building, four stories high, with a neoclassical façade, pediment, pillars and all. Clearly recently built – presumably after 2009 – its white exterior is already showing its age; the only thing that gleams in the entire compound is the huge diesel generator at the back. But amazingly, it is empty. There isn’t a soul inside. On the steps stand a handful of petitioners, come to meet Akshay or the local SP strongman, Azim Bhai.
One of them, dressed in a white safari suit and sneakers, declares he’s come all the way from Etawah on a mission for Akshay’s father, Ram Gopal Yadav. “How is this a campaign office?” he sniffs, peering through the glass doors into the dim, empty interior. He’s informs us, nevertheless, firmly, that there’s no Modi wave in this area at least. “Elsewhere, perhaps. Here the Mohammedans will not leave the SP.” The safari suit’s a lawyer, and his name is Balveer Singh. The two other petitioners, two young burqa-clad girls, very noticeably don’t nod when he tells us about how “Mohammedans” are likely to vote.
The two girls, one in college and one in high school, have come to find out what’s happened to the money girl students were supposed to receive. Nobody in Firozabad has gotten it this year, apparently. The two are determined to find out what’s going on. The older one, who’s in her first year of college, also wants to know where the famous free laptops have gone. “The SP always takes care of us,” says the younger one, doubtfully. She is wearing a burqa with silver embroidery and has marks from Holi celebrations on her face.
In Firozabad, the communal divide is written across the cityscape. That one, Holi-playing burqa-clad schoolgirl doesn’t seem representative; there aren’t many splashes of colour on the eastern side of Firozabad. The houses too are more drably painted, and smaller. But here, too, there are signs for schools –with lots of girls in the posters. As for the men, it’s not difficult to see what their equivalent to an obsession with laptops and schools is: every two steps there’s a gym, adorned with that one famous picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger from the 1970s.
At the Firozabad SP office, too, there are posters of various Yadavs with smiling schoolgirls, handing out money and awards and laptops. But the articulate disappointment of the two waiting girls tells its own story. Even in the Yadavs’ backyard – the spanking new brick-and-glass outskirts of Etawah are a short drive away – patience is wearing thin. True, the flags and posters everywhere are the SP’s. But here’s an equally visible, odd thing about the party’s red-and-green standard. When the red is exposed to the elements long enough, it fades. And, turns saffron.