The Lucknow-Agra Expressway, the most talked about among Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav’s infrastructure projects, includes a 3.3-km strip designed to allow emergency take-offs and landings of fighter planes. At Bangermau, around 60 km from Lucknow, where the airstrip is located, a narrow tar road, the only entry-point, cuts in towards the inter-connected villages of Kabirpur, Ghambeerpur and Khambaouli.
After winding past a few shacks, dilapidated drains and kiosks, it leads to the house of Ram Bharose Patel, the former pradhan of Kabirpur. The farmer, who belongs to the OBC caste of Kurmi, is an influential man. To build the 302-km highway, the government acquired 3,500 hectares of land across 236 villages from 30,000 farmers. In Kabirpur, Mr. Patel gave away 5 bighas — the largest in his village — and received compensation of ₹15 lakh a bigha after some hurdles.
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Farmers’ concern
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“We grow three crops on the land. The rate offered first was not enough — ₹8 lakh. The matter went to court and it was increased to ₹15 lakh. A petition to push it to ₹16 lakh is pending,” says Mr. Patel sitting in his courtyard. The Kurmis in the village have good things to say about Mr. Akhilesh. But has the expressway bettered their lives, as the Chief Minister claims?
Connectivity has become better, the villagers agree. But at a slight inconvenience. Since service roads and underpasses are yet to be built in the area, the villagers are forced to take a roundabout to reach their fields across the road. A dusty track separates Kabirpur from Ghambeerpur. Arjun Singh Patel’s house is at the junction. He is resting on a cot. Though he does not criticise the expressway, he feels the village has got little out of it.
The opinion among the dominant Kurmi caste in the villages may be split on Mr. Akhilesh’s achievements but till a few weeks ago, even those praising him were gearing up to vote for the BJP, overlooking the damage done to their farming by demonetisation.
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Kurmis are among the non-Yadav backward communities the party has tried to mobilise in recent years. However, the equations are different today. The BJP denied ticket to the Kurmi frontrunners and parachuted Kuldeep Sengar, who defected from the SP last month, and most importantly is an upper-caste Thakur. The Kurmis feel betrayed.
“The SP did not work for five years. We were expecting a backward caste candidate from the BJP. And they fielded an upper caste, that too a defector,” says Sri Ram Patel, another farmer. “We voted for Modi in 2014, and will again make him PM in 2019. But for this election we want to defeat the BJP candidate.”
Raghavendra Singh, member of the BJP youth working committee, says: “We have to garland the same fellow we would be bashing. Karyakartas who worked for five years did not get anything. We will not let him win on the BJP ticket. It will give a wrong message that you can go anywhere and win.”
Disappointed with the BJP, the Kurmis here are now veering towards the SP and the BSP, both of which have Muslim candidates, fielded mainly because of local factors and a lack of choice. The BJP has never won the seat.
Goodwill matters
Some Kurmis are pitching for the SP not because of Mr. Akhilesh’s work but for the goodwill the SP candidate, Badlu Khan, the incumbent MLA, enjoys. The BSP has fielded Irshad Khan, who stood second in 2012.
While the larger issues are key to building perception of parties, in U.P., the voting patterns are often also determined by local equations, offering a complex scenario.
Oddly enough, if Kurmis are voting for the SP due to the local candidate, the Muslims are mostly voting for Mr. Badlu Khan due to the goodwill Mr. Akhilesh enjoys. Though many Muslims keep the BSP as an option to keep the BJP out in case of a change in equations, there is little Dalit-Muslim unity.