By Ravi Velloor
South Asia Bureau Chief
velloor@sph.com.sg

 

In India

SO MUCH of reporting is about cities and the people who live in them that travelling to the hinterland in a vast nation such as India can be an exhilarating experience for the insights one gains into the inner bowels of the nation.

These past two months I've had the opportunity to travel to Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in the Hindi speaking heartland of India. These provinces are sometimes called the Cow Belt because of their propensity for conflict, lack of development and general backwardness.

If you heard someone say Bihar and UP are the heart of India's darkness it would be tough to disagree.

Yet, my trips have been a revelation about how much India is changing at the core. Perhaps these changes are best explained by labelling them as the Four Cs.

First, Caste.

Indians are said not to cast their votes but vote their castes. This is still largely true. Yet the country's age old custom of social stratification is breaking down, overturned, in fact.

The sullen and the silent masses are the ones who are taking charge and that promises a deepening of democracy.

In UP, Chief Minister Mayawati is from the Dalit caste, the lowest of the low. There is a newfound confidence in the downtrodden seeing the people they bowed to for centuries, now scraping before them.

In Ayodhya, holy to Hindus who believe their God-King Rama was born there, the local rajah, who is a high-born Brahmin, is fighting elections on a ticket from Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party.

The seat is currently held by Mitrasen Yadav, a local strongarm figure who won on a BSP ticket in 2004, but Mayawati refused to back him this time after Yadav's son allegedly insulted a Dalit woman.

Secondly, Communalism.

Communal politics is falling out of fashion.

The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party is a limp self of the image it was able to project even in 2004, the elections in which it ceded power at the Centre. Indians are seeing through the communal game - whether played by Hindus, Muslims or Sikh parties - for what it is.

The BJP was entirely perplexed by the anti Muslim vitriol unleashed by their young hope for the Pilibhit constituency in UP, Mr Varun Gandhi. Once the storm broke, it was unsure how to handle it and finally ended up both criticising Mr Gandhi as well as backing him against the harsh penalty it fetched in the form of an arrest under the National Security Act.

Ditto with the Muslim community, which is reassessing the support it lent to groups such as the Samajwadi Party of Mr Mulayam Singh Yadav. Muslims may well return to Congress in this election.

Three, Consumerism.

Did you think packaged food and shampoo was only for city slickers? Guess again.

The smallest shops of the hinterland display everything from packaged biscuits to bottled water and sachets of shampoo. The biscuits aren't from some local factory but come from established names such as Britannia and Parle, priced as low as Rs 5 (16 cents) for 10 small biscuits and Rs 1.50 for a shampoo sachet good for a single shower.

It is this rural market that is holding up the economy when cities are in a blue funk over job losses and shrinking export orders.

Rural India is no more a collection of Little Republics, as British colonialists found them. Thanks in part to colour television and the proliferation of consumer goods, there is a mass culture seeping into the heartland.

This is changing aspirations on the ground and could affect voter behaviour in ways not fully comprehended.

Finally, Communications.

Indians were never short of conversation. Now they are talking like never before as more than 10 million cellphone connections are sold every month, mostly into the rural market.

In village after village, and sometimes even where there are no basic medical facilities, the tallest manmade structure in view is the cell phone tower. Combined with the proliferation of satellite television, accurate current common knowledge is no longer the preserve of the upper classes.

That is helping to deepen India's democracy.

India begins to vote on April 16.

Balloting is staggered over five phases so as to make it easier for security forces to provide maximum cover.

On May 16 the world will know the winners and losers and who the silent masses spoke for.

Read Ravi Velloor's GE Special Report of India's coming vote in Saturday's edition of The Straits Times.