Ismail Siddhi of Bhooranki village in Khanapur taluk clearly remembers the first time he voted. It was a long trek to Khanapur through forest tracks. He and a few others, mostly women and elders, walked for nearly 10 km. before they were carried in a Congress party van to a polling booth in Khanapur. His memory is vague on the year that it happened.
He also remembers voting in 1999. The voting booth had moved near his hamlet by then. It was set up in a government school in a nearby village. Also, they were picked up by the candidate’s followers, fed lunch and dropped back.
These were the only two occasions that Ismail Siddhi, the 59-year-old landless labourer, voted. He is no exception. Most men from the Siddhi tribe don’t get to vote often. Some of the younger lot have never voted.
That is because most of the 300-odd men from the Siddhi tribe (an ethnic group) move to Goa or Maharashtra to work in the brick industries or on construction sites. Few come back during polls. “It depends on the time of elections,” says Rashid Siddhi who keeps moving across the border for work. “Our work in the brick kilns is fixed. It starts after monsoon and goes on till summer. The winters are free. We either come back for a few months or go looking for some jobs in Goa or Maharashtra,’’ he said. Ismail Siddhi also says that no government has done anything of significance for them.
Siddhis from here migrate in groups of four to the kilns. A group of four gets around Rs. 1,000 per day. “Some times we are lucky to get work for 150-200 days. But on other times, we are employed only for around 100 days. We have to run our families with those meagre resources,” said Bastanya Diyog Siddhi.
Bringing them together
There are around 600 Siddhis in seven villages in Belagavi district. They are mostly poor. There is not a single man or woman who has gone to college, said Kaitan Francis Siddhi, who retired as an assistant in the Forest Department in Karwar. He is organising Siddhis across Karnataka under one banner.
In some cases, where Siddhis have married non-Siddhis such as Waddars or Lamanis, they have got some land from the in-laws. Otherwise, they lack resources, Mr. Kaitan said. Siddhis are members of a forest dwelling tribe who have adopted Hindu, Christian and Muslim faiths. Most Siddhis in Belagavi are Muslims, he said. He is worried that unlike in Uttara Kannada, the Siddhis in Belagavi are not considered as members of Scheduled Tribes.
Mr. Kaitan, convenor of the Karnataka Siddhi Vikas Sangha, said, “We are organising monthly meetings of Siddhi elders in all hamlets. Among other things, we told them to caste their votes this time.” District systematic voter awareness and electoral participation committee chairman and Zilla Panchayat Chief Executive Officer R. Ramachandran said they had organised special drives to make sure nobody got left out of the electoral process.
