Where is it all happening?

Have thetub-thumpers at election meetings ever said a thing about leprosy patients and leprosy? Of course not. So Indira Nagar has decided on a canny and pragmatic voting policy. They have turned down several thousand rupees for a food-and-drink binge. A Hanuman Temple is coming up in their colony. Any party which undertakes to finish it will get their votes, they have said.

Sister Anna of the Missionaries of Charity is also indifferent. With 60 or 70 sick women on her hands, two schools and a Shishu Bhavan, unmarried pregnant girls coming to be delivered of their babies and leaving them for adoption, one or two babies being pushed under the gate every month, she says she has had nothing, and expects nothing, from government. The Aj on her table is probably the nearest she will get to the election, except on polling day when she and her ten colleagues will go to vote.

T.N. Seshan, brave soul, has creamed off much of the expensive razzmatazz from the campaigns. There are no posters, no flag-waving jeeps, no threewheelers with microphones appealing for support. Jacking up the security deposit and the expense limit has helped slash candidates’ numbers. There isn’t so much need to field `dummy’ candidates and dip into their allowance. Ranchi has 12 candidates for its one Lok Sabha seat where once it had 65.

The businessman-industrialist surprised me. True, his tongue was somewhat loosened by whiskey but he said he was fed up to the gills with a system riddled with incompetence, lack of interest, cynicism and, sometimes, out-and-out bigotry. “I pay the sales tax people, the excise duty people, the police and the income tax people. Now there are claims also from those who check the environmental state of my factories and the health of my workers. I would say that over 90 per cent of the officials are buyable.” If these `levies’ are not paid, he said, his factory gates would have padlocks on them. “I don’t expect things to change whichever government comes to power.” He seems to blame officials more than politicians,of whom he pays only the top few. His lack of faith in the election is complete.

On a beautiful sunny day the civil servants of Ranchi, bunched under a `Commissioner’s Eleven’, played the State Bank of India at cricket. A military band played, a catered lunch in the open was generously lubricated by beer. Skilled commentators followed every ball and stroke and well-dressed ladies clapped their menfolk on. The civil servants, calmly awaiting their stint as returning officers, observers and upholders of the law were laid back about the election. It will not change, they know, their own towering grievance: how to confront an aggressive judiciary with both hands tied behind their backs. A rash of contempt cases, trigger-happy public-interest litigation, and comprehensive judicial directions have drained their morale. They expect no relief from the election because the judges will remain. One commissioner-level officer exhorted me to go to the civil courts and see how openly money changes hands there.

Will theelection process become any more interesting in this red-soil, mine-and-mineral-rich Chotanagpur? Not for the spare-framed adivasi women doing menial work at home and never daring to enter the big shops of Main Street. The observers will scurry around in their white Ambassador cars with winking lights on the roof. As one observer said, “A TV discussion of talking heads, batting around `Criminalisation of Politics’, means nothing to the vast majority of voters”. This time the observers will have the power to stop the counting. But the process, even if meaningful for the moneyed elite, will remain remote for the ordinary voting family.

Everyone is his or her own psephologist. To one the non-elite electorate is ignorant and uninterested, to another it has the wisdom of ages and cannot be fooled. Party manifestos have no credibility. There is the cynical — but maybe not far wrong — conclusion that with no issues that touch them people will settle for candidates of their caste, subcaste, or religion. Atleast they will be voting for people whose broad loyalties they know.

Most ignored of all are federal issues. Even if, through teashop-hearsay, states issues are somewhat familiar, WTO and CTBT are mere alphabets. A Kisdu man or a Munda woman couldn’t care less whether India makes it to the UN Security Council or not.

In Bihar — and it cannot be very different in other states — it seems an election is no instrument of popular education. If manifestos are regarded as rubbish, speeches are about tarring other parties and spewing promises everybody knows will not be kept, then what is an election campaign? If the main thing to talk about is whether Sonia Gandhi will bring a shower of votes for the Congress or whether she is putting her head into a lion’s mouth of insincere apologies then it’s a poor sort of election campaign.

Basant Panchmi has brought on childhood memories. Images of Saraswati being taken home on cycle rickshaws just as we used to from Calcutta’s Kumortuli. And, a day later, Saraswatibeing taken for immersion in processions with music which brings everyone to the windows or verandahs. Young people dance behind the slow-moving trucks. This at least has meaning for people as did the end of Ramadan recently. Or does it? My driver said witheringly that young men extort contributions and spend them on drink and frolic. Certainly the processions are tinder boxes with which the police dare not interfere. Asking about the election I am sure would have fetched stony stares.

More worrying was the musing of an educated and well-to-do mother about her children: “I am going to put them in boarding schools in the hills in the North. What future is there in Bihar?” Let the candidates answer that.