For over three decades, the Gorakhpur Lok Sabha seat has been a BJP bastion, with its Hindutva pull centred around the Gorakhnath Math. In a brief interlude, the Samajwadi Party-Bahujan Samaj Party combine had emerged victorious in the 2018 byelection, thanks to its superior caste arithmetic. Six years later, the SP-Congress alliance is hoping to repeat this success, amid discontent fuelled by inflation and unemployment, fatigue with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s reign, and BSP voters looking beyond their traditional choice.
The incumbent MP of Gorakhpur, BJP’s Ravi Kishan, is once again in fray. He is facing Samajwadi Party’s Kajal Nishad, who has been unsuccessfully contesting elections since 2012. Both have a foot in the entertainment industry - Ms. Nishad is a TV actress and Mr. Kishan, a Bhojpuri superstar, has earned acclaim for his recent roles in Netflix series Mamla Legal Hai and the Amir Khan production Laapataa Ladies. The commonalities end here though. The two are running campaigns that are starkly different in tone, tenor and scale.
Star appeal
Rows of red plastic chairs dot the small ground wedged between a railway line and residential colony in Nandanagar, where the stage is set by a three-member band playing a mix of devotional and BJP campaign songs. Mr. Kishan arrives 90 minutes late. The crowd that had been standing indifferently on the margins surges ahead, many hands holding mobile phones go up, and the excitement is feverish.
Once the chaos settles, Mr. Kishan starts speaking. In his baritone voice, further accentuated by the background music, Mr. Kishan lists out his achievements in Bhojpuri and extols the regimes of Mr. Modi and Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. Whipping the audience into a frenzy, he asserts that India woke up after 2014 and in 10 years had reduced Pakistan into a “leashed dog”. “Ghar Main Ghus Kar Marjala Dushman ke [We have killed the enemies in their homes]”, he says, while urging the crowd to not let caste dictate their choice, a reference to BJP’s main concern in this election. Towards the end, he breaks into Bhojpuri songs, leaving an electrified crowd swaying along with him.
Almost 20 km away, in a relatively bucolic setting, Mr. Kishan’s opponent, Samajwadi Party’s Kajal Nishad, hobbles out of her SUV. The venue is a vacant land next to the village temple flanked by a cattle shed. Ms. Nishad, nursing a nursing a fractured leg, and other SP local leaders sit on plastic chairs. A spare gathering of women sit at the margins of a yellow tarpaulin sheet stretched out on the ground for the crowd. The men huddle further behind, leaving most of the tarpaulin empty. Midway through the meeting, the microphone stops working, and she addresses the thin crowd without it. If Mr. Kishan’s speeches are set to a background score, there isn’t much to enliven the atmosphere for Ms. Nishad. However, she barely holds back.
“The roti [chapati] cooked only on one side could burn or ends up being half-cooked,” she speaks directly to the women. The government, similarly, has to be changed every now and then, she says, underlining that the region has not benefited despite the uniformity in the ruling regime - its MP, the State’s CM and the country’s PM are all from the BJP. The meeting ends with the assembled women singing along with Ms. Nihad, and walking her back to her SUV. “This is a an election between janata [people] and satta [government],” Ms. Nishaad reminds her voters.
However, it is not that straightforward a choice for Gorakhpur voters. Ram Mandir may not be a factor here in this election. Awdesh Paswan, a resident, opens up reluctantly about his electoral choices. He had voted for the BSP in the last two Lok Sabha elections, but is deeply disappointed with BSP supremo Mayawati’s “subservient” stance. “Why is she scared of going to jail? We would have all stood by her. Look at Arvind Kejriwal! [Delhi CM and Aam Aadmi Party leader] He went to jail and is now roaring like a lion,” Mr. Paswan said.
While he doesn’t want to commit to any party with polling more than 10 days away, he nods along as his friend Prem Chand Paswan lists out the “broken promises” of the BJP government in Delhi. “Mr. Modi came to power promising to remove poverty and instead in the last 10 years, he has been working to ‘remove’ the poor,” Mr. Chand said.
Nishaads, the group of communities whose traditional occupations have remained water-centric, are listed as OBC in Uttar Pradesh and are numerically the strongest in Gorakhpur. In the last two general elections, the group had leaned more towards the BJP, but there were hints of a sharp shift in public opinion. Ramesh Nishaad at Jungle Ramgarh Chawri has a litany of complaints - from high prices of essential commodities and shrinking employment opportunities to increased privatisation under the BJP government.
“They may or may not remove reservation, but surely, they will make it irrelevant by extensively privatising every government institution,” he said, underscoring the considerable challenge before the BJP in retaining their fortress.
