Ranjit Kumar Bind in Mamamra village, Badohi is a self-confessed BJP supporter who voted enthusiastically for Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014 and 2019. Just as deftly as he folds paan for waiting customers, he also sums up his assessment of Mr. Modi’s ten-year-long government.
“Yeh khaye bina marne nahi denge, par aage bhi badne nahi denge (he won’t let us die without food, but he won’t let us go forward too),” Mr. Bind, who belongs to one of the many non-Yadav Other Backward Classes (OBCs) that changed their affiliation post-2014, helping the saffron party shed its identity as a representative of only the upper castes, and vaishya or baniya (trading communities) in Uttar Pradesh.
Mr. Bind’s comment critiquing the Modi government’s free ration scheme, under which each person in a household receives 5 kg of free grains per month, evokes peals of laughter from the gathered crowd, all of whom pitch in with their own appraisal of the BJP government — that it was keeping them short of complete destitution but had cheated them out of the life they had been promised.
