 "Naroda Patiya")
The doors of the blue-coloured police station in Naroda Patiya are locked. A window pane has been smashed. The policemen are busy elsewhere with polling duties but the small precinct station looks boarded up, almost derelict. Within walking distance is a large encampment of the State Reserve Police. Despite this proximity to structures that denote law and order, less than 50 metres from the police station are the little lanes where some of the worst violence of the 2002 riots unfolded.
Naroda Patiya is where Maya Kodnani, a gynaecologist and minister in Narendra Modi's government, led rioters who doused their victims with petrol and set them alight and skewered others with swords. Along with Gulberg Society where the former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri was killed, Naroda Patiya became part of the grim lexicon of 2002. By the time the carnage ended, 95 people had been killed. Shakila Banu Firoz Ahmed was voting for the first time after the violence. She explains that she did not have the heart to vote in the past 10 years because she felt overcome by grief and hopelessness. "I had given up on justice," Shakila Banu says. "But this time is very important." The 36-year-old lost eight members of her family, including her mother and her brothers, while she cowered on a rooftop, too scared even to cry. "She has lost so much, lost so much, she has nothing left to lose," says a bystander. The 2014 election, her husband says, is a "straight contest between the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Muslims."
Sitting at a table nearby are Congress volunteers with voting lists, exhorting passersby to go out and vote. At 3.30 pm, turnout in Naroda Patiya is 60 per cent but one of the men confidently predicts it will be 80 per cent by the time polling ends. Gujarat will see its highest turnout of 62 per cent in four decades when the booths close, but it is Naroda Patiya where both the battles to uphold India's secular traditions and the need for development seem most urgent. One of those who has not gone out to vote by mid-afternoon because he was busy working at his sewing machine was Tahir Hussain. Sitting in what used to be the premises of a provision store, amid yards and yards of fuchsia pink and magenta gauze that look like piles of candy floss, the 22-year-old is determined to vote for the Congress but regards the result as a foregone conclusion. "No matter whom we give a vote for, Modi is coming," he says, matter of factly. His workroom with six sewing machines looks upon a road that appears to have deteriorated to a mud path in a few years. Asked if the municipality has promised to fix the road, Hussain says he has no time to ask them. "Everything stays the same," he says, though he admits that there are no power cuts in the area. "If the Congress were to win, Hindu-Muslim problems would lessen. At least that will happen."
The polling booths for Naroda Patiya are on the grounds of the Naroda Beggars Home, run by the state's social defence department. Jitendra Abhavekar had just voted. "It is a vote for development," he declared. "Gujarat, of course, has development but all of India should have that." Warming to his theme, Ahavekar, an advocate, delivered a stump speech. "In all the elections that have come and gone, this one is the most important. If we choose the right person, India will shine bright enough for the world to notice."
He says he has travelled to other states and only in Gujarat do women get the respect they deserve. "After May 16, women everywhere in India will be able to walk freely," he says. Rapes happen, he says, because unemployed men harbour bad thoughts.
Asked who he voted for, Abhavekar turns coy and says it is only right to respect the secret ballot. "I will only say I have voted for development," he says as he jumps on to his scooter. The policemen nearby confirm that the Beggars Home is, in effect, a disused building. Many of its windows are broken and the mosquito mesh has gashes large enough for a dog to walk through. Beggars are housed instead at a facility in Odhav in suburban Ahmedabad, the policeman says.
A couple have just voted. The husband says he voted for Modi. "Development will happen," he says. In this part of eastern Ahmedabad, which is on the wrong side of the Sabarmati river and less well off, what is most striking is how little "development" has happened. The sense of an unkempt village giving way to concrete is widespread. The plastic bags and biscuit wrappers and detritus from the last building project that characterise the unremitting landscape of Indian cities forms a familiar backdrop in this part of Ahmedabad as well.
