A throng had gathered in Akbarpur village. The discussion over the forthcoming election in Kushinagar district’s Padrauna assembly constituency was turning intense.
Shankar Prasad, Akbarpur’s lone male Musahar – an extremely backward community that years ago would consume rodent flesh – was so bewildered that he had no clear view on which party to vote for.
A Peddler of Dreams-On-Wheels Comes Visiting
And then, as Akbarpur’s talkative, excited and animated villagers wagged their heads and chattered, a kiosk-on-wheels made a silent appearance on the scene.
From the thatched-roof huts emerged young girls and newly-married women, who mobbed an amused Thakur Chauhan commandeering the cart. The peddler of dreams, especially for Akbarpur’s rustic, illiterate women, who otherwise spend their mornings kneading heaps of cow dung, had arrived with his mobile beauty salon. Meanwhile, the shy Musahar, Shankar, quietly slipped out to prepare food – chaara – for his lone buffalo.
The women surrounded Chauhan, besieging him with crumpled Rs 10 notes or coins, clearly eager to purchase his ware: colourful glass bangles, hair clips, aalta, bindi, “ladies’ combs”, earrings, necklaces, mirrors, hair bands, nail polishes, trinkets, Dolphin kesh nihaar teil, among other sundry feminine knick-knacks that brought a smile to the lips and a glint in the eyes of the village women, whose life is otherwise one of routine drudgery.
The Short, Nasty, Brutish Life of Akbarpur
Barring the odd movies downloaded by their husbands or male friends on their mobile phones, there really is no source of entertainment for the young women of Akbarpur, easily the most backward village on the eastern fringes of Uttar Pradesh.
Akbarpur and its adjoining villages will go to the polls on 4 March, the penultimate phase of the ongoing assembly elections. There is no electricity in Akbarpur, most villagers are illiterate, infant mortality is high, none of the thatched huts have toilets: life is short, nasty and brutish.
From a Raj Mistry to ‘Pheriwala’
Hailing from adjoining Naharchhapra village, 24-year-old Chauhan sought to change his fortunes by quitting the job of a raj mistry – construction site labourer – six months ago to be a mobile peddler of women’s beauty products.
“The risk of losing my life at a construction site was great. So, in consultation with my wife, I took the decision to turn a pheriwala. And I am not doing too badly. I make about Rs 500-600 per day,” Chouhan, who does a 9 am-7 pm schedule cycling across eight to nine villages, said as he jabbed his index finger in the air, identifying the items neatly laid out in his mobile kiosk.
Chouhan said that the mobile kiosk cost him Rs 16,000, though it was funded by a generous loan from the Samajwadi Party government of Akhilesh Yadav. His wife, Kusmawati, sells a range of similar, if not identical, women’s beauty products at home even as she takes care of two children, eight and nine years old.
“Yes, they go to school, but a private one,” Chouhan said proudly, adding that he “will send them out to higher classes depending on how [his] income is in the coming years.”
“Modi Ne Itna Kiya...”
Neither Chouhan nor Kusmawati went to school. “Hum to angootha-chhap waale hain (we are illiterate).” Chouhan, clad in faded jeans, a white shirt and cheap sneakers, which may be good for marketing, said. “Modi ne itna kiya – paisa badli kiya, logon ka hausla badhaya, woh ghuskhori bandh karwayenge, gareebon ko naukri mil jaayegi (Modi has done a lot – he implemented note ban, he will put a halt on bribery, the poor will have jobs) ,” Chouhan said, not making a secret of his political inclination.
However, of about 3,500 voters in Chouhan’s village of Jungle Naharchhapra, not many – especially daily wage labourers, who are at the bottom of the socio-economic pile – are enthused by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s demonetisation move.
Hemant Kumar Bheel, a Musahar by caste, who is a college dropout but now a “rozgar sevak” engaged with the MGNREGA programme, said that notebandi has hit daily-wage labourers hard. “Mazdoori milbey nahin kari (We don’t get any work)” Hemant said in his shrill Bhojpuri, punctuated by loud chuckles when it came to which parties the village folk would vote for.
This was cue enough for Shyamlal, a landless Chauhan by caste who works on the sugarcane fields of a substantial farmer from Padrauna. “I work eight hours and make about Rs 150 per day but I don’t get to work every day. Fifteen days a month is the average I get to work.” Shyamlal said, adding that like himself, his four children have not been to school.
Shyamlal’s daily wages are just about enough to fetch him and his family of six some rotis, a potato dish and some daal for lunch, while for dinner they have rice with the leftover daal. “I do not have any bank account and spend what I earn,” he said, as he launched into the merits of “Modi’s notebandi” that he has picked up from village chatter.
Voting: A Man’s Job
Across the dirt track that leads into the village, a few of the womenfolk have formed a circle, telling us about the humdrum routine that begins with a visit to the fields to defecate, followed by cleaning the house and cooking meals in mud hearths.
The reference to voting and the forthcoming election brought blank looks. “Whoever we are told to vote for,” came the response. The drift was: electoral decisions are not for the women to make; that is a man’s job.
As sharp-witted Hemant detailed, quite matter-of-factly, the lack of basic amenities – toilets, electricity, schools and healthcare – he gestured towards his elder brother Brahma Kumar, the gram pradhan.
“Sapa, Baspa, Bhajpa...”
Two years ago, kala-azar – Japanese encephalitis being the other deadly annual scourge – struck Brahma Kumar, leaving him partially deaf, which comes in the way of processing information. All of the 26 kala-azar patients from the village had to be carried to distant Kushinagar for treatment.
Cornered by administrative apathy and crushed under the deadweight of poverty and disease, the village folks of Jungle Naharchhapra will yet cast their franchise come 4 March when some parts of eastern UP go to polls.
Being a semi-government employee, Hemant would head for “election duty” in Padrauna. But long before the first vote is cast, he knows the final party line-up. “Sapa, Baspa, Bhajpa (SP, BSP, BJP),” he writes on his left palm with his right index finger before seeing us off as darkness envelops his village.
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