Lok Sabha polls: In Hindi heartland, farmer distress isn't holding BJP back

By Pratik Parija and Clara Ferreira Marques
 

Sitting cross-legged in a starched white kurta, Dayaram Raikwar moves the bellows on his harmonium with dexterity, chanting about subsidised toilets, clean water, debt relief for farmers, emancipation for women, the rule of law.
 

Raikwar, a farmer and devotional singer, is one of thousands of door-to-door volunteers who’ve been expanding the reach of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party well beyond its traditional urban base. With national elections less than a month away, campaigning has dialed up here in the Hindi-speaking heartland. His small troupe find eager listeners for their political speeches and musical performances in and around southern Uttar Pradesh, the country’s most populous state and one of its poorest.

Raikwar’s act also represents a paradox at the heart of the world’s largest democracy. Rural India, home to most of the country’s population, has been instrumental to the BJP’s rise over the last decade. But while India remains the fastest-growing major economy —  a place where Apple is making more of its iPhones and global investors are parking money once bound for China — outside of its metropolises, investment is still weak, infrastructure remains spotty and economic prospects for its citizens are far less rosy.

If Prime Minister Narendra Modi earns a third term in office, as polls suggest he will, it will be in spite of the state of the rural and farming economy — not because of it. A recent trip through the vast agrarian states of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh found villagers struggling to find work, while promises of running water had translated only into metal pipes sticking up from the ground, dry. Though the government has built more than 100 million household lavatories, for many here they remain a distant prospect. Even as Raikwar spoke on his porch, a rainstorm rapidly turned the main access path to the village into an almost impassable stream of mud.

Crossing some of India’s most destitute districts, it’s apparent that the reasons for Modi’s success are varied. Many appreciate the ruling party’s income support schemes — made possible by a vast biometric identification system that predates the BJP’s time in office — plus hopes of latrines and subsidised dwellings. Those who have yet to see benefits like roads and electricity say they trust Modi’s “guarantee” — as he’s repeatedly mentioned on the campaign trail. It helps, of course, that there’s also little evidence of alternatives to counter the BJP’s door-to-door campaigning and fluttering saffron flags, even though the main opposition Congress party has promised similar benefits and minimum selling prices for farmers.

Raikwar, 50, who joined the BJP in 2019, has calm rebuttals for voters’ concerns, citing a long list of government programmes and party pledges that those in an ascendant India are eager to believe in — even if the returns are still years away.

“Some people bring up inflation. We tell them the government is distributing free food to the needy — and that’s expensive for the state,” he said. Those receiving free grain and farmers benefitting from income support were happy enough, he added, pointing to a handout scheme for growers that amounts to a little over $70 annually.

The BJP hasn’t traditionally been the party of farmers or the lower castes. And yet its tightening grip on politics over the past decade has been possible only because of millions of rural voters, agricultural workers and the bottom rungs of India’s social ladder. 

Numbers tell the story. In 2009, the BJP won 10 seats in Uttar Pradesh, or 13 per cent of the total. By 2014, when Modi emerged as a candidate for prime minister on a wave of anti-incumbent feeling, the party won 71 out of 80 seats in the state. In 2019, the BJP and allies won by a landslide win even after policy disasters like a shock cash ban — they took more than 350 seats out of 543 in the lower house of Parliament — and largely because of continued success in states like Uttar Pradesh, home to some 240 million people.

“The BJP has become the party of the rural poor,” said Nalin Mehta, a political analyst and the author of a book on the party’s transformation. “The BJP is winning because of the rural vote.”

The question now is whether the party can use that grip on the rural heartlands to make even deeper inroads when nearly a billion Indians head to the polls next month — and how sustainable that dominance will be, absent significant improvements.

Urbanites don’t have to look far for signs of anguish. Since mid-February, farmers have been massing outside New Delhi under rubber bullets and tear gas, reprising protests that first paralyzed the capital in 2020 and 2021 and marked the biggest challenge to Modi’s popularity to date. Their demands — guaranteed crop prices and debt waivers — are a reminder of the acutely unprofitable nature of farming in India, and of the distress that persists across swathes of the countryside.

The BJP didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Take spending. The gap between rural and urban consumption has narrowed and smartphones have reached India’s smallest villages. The latest consumption figures show spending on food fell to just below half of household incomes. But monthly spending in cities is still more than 70 per cent higher than in rural areas, even after the gap narrowed. Youth unemployment weighs. Farm plots are shrinking, water is scarce and yields lag global rivals. And yet more people are dependent on the sector — not less.

“India is going through what we call a stunted structural transformation. The value generated by agriculture is now about 14 per cent, but the population dependent on agriculture is still close to 50 per cent,” said Thiagu Ranganathan at the Centre for Development Studies in southern India, who works on the agricultural economy. Not enough jobs have been created in areas like manufacturing, he said, while the early benefits of the green revolution and its reliance on chemicals are beginning to wane.

Almost all of the farmers and other laborers interviewed across Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh reported incomes squeezed by rising costs, paltry work opportunities and high debts.

One of Modi’s splashiest promises in 2016 was to double farming incomes by 2022. But that’s been quietly dropped. Between 2015 and 2019, the latest year with available data, incomes have only risen from a base of roughly 8,000 rupees a month to a little more than 10,000 rupees in nominal terms.

“If we look at the last 10 years, there hasn’t been much development in this area,” says Raja Bhaiya, who runs the aid group Vidya Dham Samiti, in the Banda district of southern Uttar Pradesh.

“Some people are still not getting pensions, social protection schemes are not reaching villages, safe drinking water is not accessible, medical facilities are not working properly.”

In the town of Atarra, the strain was visible among a crowd of men in thin, grimy jackets. On a cool morning, they gathered along the state highway waiting to be picked up for work. All of them hoped for construction jobs, which can pay 400 rupees (just under $5) a day — almost double what most would earn working on farms.

Rampal, a 47-year-old landless laborer and father of four, was among those huddling in the chill. He manages to find work about 15 days a month, he said.

Despite the sporadic opportunities, Rampal, who goes by one name, and most of those gathered support the BJP.

“Nothing has happened yet, but I will vote for the BJP again as I hope they’ll provide a house and a good road near our village,” he said.

Back in Rampal’s village a few kilometers away, Khamhaura, infrastructure is scarce. Women wash clothes and clean cooking utensils at a water pump, using silt to scrub aluminum bowls. There’s no running water beyond that, though locals say pipes were installed two years ago, raising at least the promise of household connections.

There’s limited evidence here of Modi’s national sanitation drive and efforts to end open defecation, widely perceived as a success. One home has a hole dug into the ground. The owner said he hoped cash from the government would arrive to finish building the toilet. It hasn’t yet.

“There’s been no improvement in our lives in the last 10 years,” said Usha, who uses only one name and makes 100 or 200 rupees a day (just over $1 to $2) toiling on farms. “Our house is covered with plastic sheets to protect us from the rain. The free food from the government lasts about 10 days. Then we are left to eat boiled potatoes and tomatoes, the cheapest, and whatever grain we can buy at market prices.”

The story isn’t different for farmers who own land.

In nearby Khanpur, Shiv Baran Singh, 67, grows rice and wheat on 10 acres and sells higher-end varieties to private traders. He has some of the trappings of rural middle class life: a second-hand tractor, a grain separator, a television, a handful of cows, even private primary school for his grandniece to avoid the chronic absenteeism of state alternatives. There is water, an electricity connection and a motorbike.

Still, sitting under a tree outside the brick building that doubles as the family’s sleeping area and grain store, he explained that costs are rising too fast — far outpacing yields. Fertilizers are virtually impossible to obtain at government-controlled prices.

“If you ask me about what I have gained in the last 10 years, I can only say a debt of nearly 500,000 rupees,” he says, clutching a wooden cane. Farmers protesting near New Delhi are right, he said. Prices are simply too low.

“We can manage our expenses but there are no savings,” he said. “We would not have such a huge debt if we made enough money from the farm.”

Even with those hurdles, he has no plans to vote against the incumbent. He knows the local BJP representative, and is grateful for a graded road leading close to his house, and for farmer income support.

“We voted for the BJP in 2014 and 2019. I will vote for the BJP again,” he said with a shrug.

Modi’s decade in power has still seen some major changes outside cities — among them, the widespread adoption of smartphones and e-commerce. Now, roughly a third of India’s middle class lives in rural areas. They’re often households with steady incomes from government or company jobs. 

India’s south has fared particularly well, even under a party rooted in the Hindi-speaking north. Less populous and rural, southern states outperform when it comes to economic opportunities, and are home to many of the country’s most profitable start-ups.

Even in the north, though, we found a handful of upwardly mobile farmers, cultivating bigger plots and selling to large corporations.

But very few corners of rural India are untouched by the consequences of uneven growth.

In the bustling town of Naraini, Rajnaryan Gupta runs a saree and cloth shop with his wife and son. The small space, neatly lined with folded fabric, should be packed during India’s wedding season, when extravagant spending is expected even among the poorest. But Gupta’s shop is empty and business is slow. The 52-year-old’s son dropped out of college, because they couldn’t pay the fees.

“Our business depends on demand from farmers in villages. When farmers are not doing well how do you expect us to make money and flourish?” he asked. “It’s wedding season now but people who used to buy as many as five sarees are buying only two sarees.”

Gupta said he’ll still vote for the BJP because of concerns about law and order and of the party’s Hindu nationalist agenda. He cited January’s opening of the Ram temple, built during Modi’s tenure on the site of an ancient mosque razed by Hindu extremists.

“Does anything else matter to Hindus beyond the Lord Ram temple?” he asked.

Back at Raikwar’s house, under the dim light of a single bulb, the singer leaves his harmonium to drink sweet tea and speak to a colleague on the phone. The campaign is keeping him busy, he says.

As a BJP “panna pramukh,” a title that translates as “page chief,” he’s charged with wooing 30 or so voters listed on one sheet of the local electoral roll. Tens of thousands of foot-soldiers like him have already been deployed to get voters out — Uttar Pradesh alone has some 160,000  polling stations — and not just from the party’s traditional nationalist base.

A member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, a Hindu group with close ties to Modi and strong grassroots programs, Raikwar brushes aside questions of religious fault lines. He’s popular in Muslim villages, too, he says. 

Voters have different priorities, but everyone, Raikwar adds with a smile, wants a pension, cash benefits and free food.