05 February 2013, 12:28 PM IST
As elections loom large, our cities, towns and villages are gradually being transformed into giant campaigning sities. Posters, banners, handbills, billboards, stickers and plastic flags of various sizes fight for space. It is hard to travel a few hundred meters without having to confront the photoshopped visage of some smug looking politician trying to look suitably statesmanlike and wise but more often looking like they were part of the line-up at a local police station. In a village in Shahjahanpur, a tea-stall owner joked that after having been in hibernation for years the politicians will emerge and pretend as if they had never been gone. "Suddenly you see politicians in the poorest part of villages bending over backwards to try and get votes. I could make a politician stand in a mud-pit if I could persuade them that it would get them votes."
In Aligarh, the billboards of Guddu Pandit and Kajal Sharma of the Samajwadi Party adorned nearly every lampost and there must have been hundreds, if not thousands of these posters, dotted, not only all over the city, but also in the surrounding countryside. In Sitapur huge hoardings of Kaiser Jahan and Jasmir Ansari of the BSP wished passers by Happy New Year, Happy Eid and Happy Gantantra DIvas, all in the same breadth. Jaipur had been blessed with Congress posters congratulating Rahul Gandhi for his recent 'elevation' in the party. In Bareilly huge banners urged people to go to to Lucknow [Lucknow Chalo] for a BJP national meeting. Lucknow has been draped in a sea of orange and green with huge posters of the BJP leadership looking down on the city's inhabitants. Interspersed among the banners and posters of the larger political parties were the advertisements of smaller, local parties with symbols such as a handpump, a bucket, a pair of glasses, a spanner amongst many others. Irrespective of the symbol on the poster, the one thing that is undeniable is that people spend exhorbitant amounts of money on these campaign blitzes. Of course, it is not as if politicians spend money from their own pockets without calculating how they will make a return on their investment. And so, the cycle continues.
A few days ago, I was driving past the Governor House in Lucknow and turned into a small by-road by mistake. As I turned around to leave I noticed a tiny makeshift shack at the end of the road under a large and ancient looking banyan tree. Of course, these shacks or jhuggi-jhowpadis, are a common sight all over our cities and either form part of larger colonies or in some instances, like the one in Lucknow, are standalone. Like all other jhuggis, this one too had been constructed from discarded tin, plastic sheets, a few unevenly placed bricks and an assortment of other recycled material. However what distinguished it from other the jhuggis that I had seen was that it was drapped in the banners of various political parties. The outer level of 'insulation' was provided by the blue and red and green banners of the BSP and SP respectively and the roof was covered by a torn and discoloured Congress banner. Not far from the banyan tree was an open sewer and plastic and other rubbish was littered around the area. The Governor's House could not have been further than 600 meters. As I came back out onto the main road I saw the huge banners of the BJP rally. I thought to myself that the owner- though 'owner' is probably the wrong word since the munipical authorities can just destroy this home without notice- would, at least, have a fresh batch of plastic banners to drape his shack in. In so many ways that jhuggi was symbolic of the various shortcomings of our political parties.
Assuming the jhuggi owner was registered to vote, politicians would probably view them primarily as a faceless member of a religious community and caste or sub-caste group. Of course, even this identity would be forgotten soon after elections and the jhuggi owner might, if they are lucky, become just another statistic. As I left that side-road I thought of all the conversations I have heard about India's GDP, projected economic growth and all the other areas in which advances are being made and wondered how the jhuggi owner would be persuaded of all this. An increasing number of educated people in towns and cities are becoming more and more aware of the power of mass public protest. It is their responsibility as Indian citizens to stand shoulder to shoulder with other less fortunate Indians. It is important for them to remember to try and be a voice for the voiceless. Unless this happens, social and economic divides will continue to grow and this in turn will only lead to a more instable and volatile political atmosphere. Of course, this will only be useful for those people who benefit from a myopic, divisive and antagonistic form of politics.
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