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Poll pourri: Indian election diary - April 24
In this web-only diary, Neena breaks away from the politicians and the soundbites to take an alternative look at the polls, and find out what's really happening on the ground.
- Published: 23:32 May 3, 2009
Gulf News Foreign Editor Neena Gopal is in India covering the state elections.
In this web-only diary, Neena breaks away from the politicians and the soundbites to take an alternative look at the polls, and find out what's really happening on the ground.
The draw of politics in these parts is simple -it makes men out of boys and boys out of mere men.
Either way, they have a ball. The women hang back in doorways, windows. They're spectators, not participants.
I don't quite know in which category of man or boy to place 21-year-old Kannan though. He was befriended by Gulf News photographer Kiran Prasad as we trailed the curmudgeon-turned charmer of the Communist Party V. S. Achuthanandan through his constituency of Malampuzha in a car.
Kannan had caught our attention as he whizzed past, more than once, weaving and darting on his trusty bicycle as we trundled carefully over the terrible, rutted narrow tracks.
"I like elections," he says when I finally caught up with him on a campaign stop in one of the many villages on both sides of the Coimbatore-Palghat road that forms part of VS' constituency.
"I start when VS starts and ends when he ends his campaign," he said breathless as he jumped off the cycle and began wheeling it. Driving a jeep for a living, he had hardly any work since the election began so he was here to take part in the frenzy that passes for an election in these parts. "I've done it for five days, every single day."
And then just as we all thought he was going to set some kind of a record for most loyal fan, he abandoned his bicycle and hopped on to a scooter, happy to be riding pillion. I catch hold of him at the next stop. No, he's not tired. He's got to get to the open field quickly. There's a cricket match to be played and he's opening bat. This time, he's just an excited young boy.
In fact, it's the volunteers that the Marxists managed to drum up who play vital back room boys during a campaign. There are decorations to be made, garlands, posters and banners. Some fairly inventive, like glueing red paper on the entire palm leaf, all six feet of it, and placing it by the wayside. Cost-effective and very eye-catching. Some bordering on the brilliant like a haunting black and white picture of a woman and the ubiquitous line below it "nammude chinnam", our symbol.
What draws these young people to do guard duty at the campaign, distribute peaked caps to the children who came out on Sunday, to shout slogans so archaic it makes you wonder which world they live in. Inquilab Zindabad would have been fine during the freedom movement, but today??
In the oven-like community centre run by the left in a village in Pudussery, near Palghat, we sit down to a meal on tables that have already seen two sets of diners and are just plain filthy. The food is uniformly tasteless. As we bake in the heat, a quartet of young people, one sporting a T-shirt with Che Guevara emblazoned across the front, the other who said his name was Shijil began bombarding me with questions. Why did I wear my hair short, could we put him on television, how do you send reports. And then he wanted a telephone number!!
One of the constables on VS guard duty quickly broke that one up. No surprises, he's a former resident of Dubai - who isn't - and had worked in the UAE for three years before coming back to live with his mother. He's all praise for Chandy. He says it was the incumbent government that raised police pay scales throughout the state. He now earns as much as he earned in Dubai.
"Everybody wants to improve their lives, I don't think anyone should stand in the way of development." Code, I suspect for "I am against the left because it's anti-development".
He's all for enterprise. A chap from Uttar Pradesh of all places, was selling ice-cream on this horribly hot day. It was home-made, the cones were every colour of a technicolour rainbow. And while neither he nor his customers could really have a chat, the price was not negotiable. One rupee for an ice cream cone was the same in every language.
And then there was Ponni. Her name means gold.
It was her beautiful ear-rings set with huge rubies and green stones that first attracted my attention and her toothless but infinitely warm smile. As young girls, they widened the pierced hole in their ears by wearing ever bigger stems of the banana leaf, until it can take a big ear-ring like this one.
She's one of 40 people in that village who get free rice from the left's charitable centre.
Vimala, who was equally nicely dressed said if they didn't get the rice they'd starve.
Ponni and her ageing husband can no longer earn as coolies. They're too old but don't have children to support them in their old age. Another woman said she had no husband, while her children simply refused to help.
What is this poverty, that is there in most households in Kerala, making the poor invisible?
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