Voting Modi Over Kejriwal Like Growing Kharif Crop in Rabi Season

The Dalit Ekta Camp remains as invisible as it was in 2015. Tucked behind makeshift kiosks across C-8 Sector of the upwardly-mobile middle class colony of Vasant Kunj, too nondescript to be noticed by people driving past, it is a warren of one- and two-room tenements, criss-crossed by narrow lanes barely three or four feet wide.

I had visited the Camp a fortnight before the 2015 Assembly election, to report whether the poor and lower middle class were consolidating behind the Aam Aadmi Party. The impulse for this consolidation was said to have been the memory of the Aam Aadmi Party government’s crackdown on corruption during its first stint in power, which lasted for just 49 days before Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal resigned.

That brief battle against corruption had enabled the underclass to imagine what their life could be—that it was not a natural order of life to bribe police to evade their oppression and that they, the poor, had the right to a life of dignity.

Their new imagination, they told me in 2015, had the Dalit Ekta Camp to rally behind Kejriwal’s AAP. The consensus then, reached after a prolonged debate punctuated by banter among the supporters of the three contending parties—the AAP, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress—was that AAP would bag around 60% of the Camp’s votes.

It is 23 January 2020, 8 am, and I am outside the Dalit Ekta Camp.

I am conscious that AAP’s narrative to battle corruption was prematurely aborted because the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi seized control of the anti-corruption bureau. Could this have persuaded the Camp about the futility of endorsing the AAP government, which does not enjoy the same autonomy as state governments do and was repeatedly tripped by a Central government that remains hostile to it?

I emerge out from the Camp nearly three hours later, astonished that the consolidation behind AAP has further deepened over what it had been in 2015.

The narrative of 2015 is a memory. The Camp’s new imagining of the state is that it is not merely a repository of coercive power given to going berserk, but as an agent expected to pull people out from the morass of hopelessness, enable them to achieve economic mobility, and inculcate in them a sense of equality.

But that is getting ahead of the story. Wind the clock back to 8 am.

I disclose the purpose of my visit to a group of men, outside the entrance to the Dalit Ekta Camp, who are sitting around the dying embers of a bonfire. “Eighty percent will vote for AAP,” predicts Siya Ram, who is the president of the Camp’s panchayat and had figured prominently in the story I did on the Camp five years ago.

There is not even a hint of disagreement, quite unlike my visit five years ago.

A consolidation of 80% over the 60% in 2015 suggests a severance, to a great extent, of past party loyalties, does it not?

As is true of nature so it is of electoral politics, the wind rises and falls.

They say that a large chunk of the Camp’s voters had, indeed, backed Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the 2019 Lok Sabha election. This does not mean their opinion about Modi had changed since May. “A prime minister should be like him,” says Prashant Singh, a Rajput from Bihar. He and his older brother, Kaushal, are the wealthiest among the Camp residents.

They say they supported the scrapping of Art 370. “Why should people from other states be debarred from owning land in Kashmir,” says Siya Ram, believing it is unjust to stop people from buying property in the state to which they migrate to work. Does he know that there are other states where land cannot be bought by outsiders? “Accha [Really]?” he mutters. Another asks, “Where?”

They are also confident that the Hindus do not have to fear the citizenship issue that has the country in tumult.

Why have they then decided to ditch Modi?

It does not make sense to grow a Kharif crop in the Rabi season.

A person cannot gain by foolishly experimenting on seasonal cropping patterns. There have been gains a plenty for them, under the AAP government of Kejriwal.

“Barring a handful, just about everyone has been getting a zero-electricity bill for the last five months,” says Kaushal Singh. “Free bus rides for women, low water bills [this is not an issue here as the Camp’s accesses underground water and each household pays Rs 100 a month for it] … there cannot be an argument against such policies.”

But their fervour for AAP is not just because of ‘freebies’.

“At least 50 children from the Camp go to the Delhi Public School, Vasant Valley School, Bloom Public School… where the education is in English,” says Siya Ram.

Look at the transformation of government schools under AAP, at the access the poor have to expensive private hospitals, at… One of them interrupts to call out for Karim Khan, who had fractured his hand in an accident.

“Ask him where he was treated?”

“Fortis Hospital,” Khan said. “I did not pay a paisa.” That hospital can be expensive.

The expressions on their faces suggest I am stupid to ask, ‘Why AAP, why Kejriwal?’

Siya Ram offers to take me to listen to an incredible story tucked inside the Camp.

We pass through a narrow passage to enter the Camp, which has a population of around 4,000, of whom Hindus and Muslims are in equal proportions. Of the Hindus, the largest group is of the Scheduled Castes, who comprise 30%, another 10-12% belong to the Other Backward Classes, and the rest an assortment of upper castes. There are 1,100 registered voters in the Camp, which falls in the Bijwasan Assembly constituency.

There stands the protagonist of Siya Ram’s incredible story: Mohd Siraj, his beard neatly groomed, all set to report to work at a construction site. His four-month-old child fell from bed last year and was seriously hurt.

The child, Omar, was rushed to Fortis Hospital, where he stayed in the Intensive Care Unit for eight days. A few days after Omar was discharged, he began to run a high fever. He was back in the ICU for another prolonged stay.

The bill: a whopping Rs 7.5 lakh.

“I did not pay a single paisa,” says Siraj.

Everyone knows Siraj’s story. It is retold as if it is their insurance policy against a serious accident or illness killing them because of lack of medical attention. Just about everyone in the Camp has been to private hospitals in the neighbourhood, armed with BPL (Below Poverty Line) and Aadhaar cards, to consult doctors in OPD (outdoor-patient department, or those not requiring admission) without having to pay a penny.

Free treatment has its provenance in the 2011 order of the Supreme Court, which ruled that private hospitals built on subsidised government land must reserve 10% of IPDs (indoor patients, or those admitted for 24 hours or longer) and 25% of OPDs for providing free medical care to those belonging to the Economically Weaker Section category.

Nobody cared about the Supreme Court order, neither the beneficiaries nor the hospitals, until the AAP government began to track, through the Management Information System, the quota for the poor. Private hospitals promptly fell in line, thus giving access to top class medical care to people like those who reside in the Camp.

It is not always necessary to invent the wheel. It is always vital to have the wheel turn efficiently.

The AAP government, however, has also created its own architecture of free medical care. There are 450 mobile clinics, which function as primary healthcare and diagnostic centres and refer patients, if necessary, to poly-clinics. They, in turn, refer people to government hospitals. Anyone who has to wait for surgery in a government hospital for a month can undergo the same procedure at a private hospital, all expenses paid by the government. All private hospitals are required to provide free treatment to accident victims for at least 72 hours.

Serious medical episodes are not a frequent occurrence for most humans. Yet minor interventions, bankrolled by the state, provide succour to the people living in slums such as the Camp.

Ask Pinky, who is doing her MA in IGNOU, which way the wind is blowing in the Camp and she will recall how when her fever just would not go away last year, she visited Madan Mohan Malviya Hospital, Malviya Nagar. The hospital was clean, the doctors courteous; they examined her and gave her medicine. “All free, all done with care,” Pinky says, adding, with a chuckle, “With bus rides free for women, I will not have to even bear transport expenses.”

The Camp was languishing at the shallow end of India’s development paradigm. It is now riding the high tide of hope.

I realise this as I speak to innumerable women—Jyoti, Jahanara, Savita, Munni Chaudhry, until I lose track of their names—whose faces lighten up as they gush over the access their children have to English-medium schools, with a fee structure only those who live in flats can afford, through the 25% quota reserved for the EWS category. These are schools which either receive government funding or were built upon government land allotted at concessional rates.

The 25% EWS quota in private schools was not the AAP government’s idea.

But these quota seats, until the AAP came into power, had to go a-begging because those in the EWS category either did not apply or were surreptitiously assigned to those who could afford the fees or were used to build a patronage network. The AAP government made the admission procedure online, threatened to take punitive action against those circumventing the reservation for the poor, and enhanced awareness about it.

The response of Savita, a feisty lady whom I meet as she sips tea, underscores the sense of equality that access to English-medium schools has injected in the Camp’s residents. Her child is in Class VII of Delhi Public School. Earlier, the school held separate shifts for EWS students.

“My child attends the school during the regular hours,” Savita says. “When my child studies and eats with those who stay in flats, I feel very, very happy.” She says she gets invited to attend birthday parties in flats with her child, but finds them too daunting to accept.

“Most parents here are uneducated, cannot instruct their children,” says Savita. She and others have to hire teachers to help children with their work. “They should think of bankrolling tuition fees,” she suggests.

Jahanara is making chapatis as she speaks of the transformation of the government school in Kishangarh, where her child transferred months ago, after completing her primary education. A few years ago, teachers would rudely ask parents to take away their children as they were ‘incapable’ of studies. “Not only are they polite, they even offer tea to me,” says Jahanara, who has attended the parent-teacher meetings.

Jahanara says she is illiterate and cannot track her child’s studies, but it heartens her to see her busy doing homework every evening. “In her previous school, my child would say that teachers were all the time glued to their mobiles,” she says. Just about any resident claims, CCTV cameras have played a significant role in changing the behaviour of teachers, and for keeping tabs on their children, a point they make without my even asking.

The conversations get so repetitive that I inquire about Chanda, who is among the earliest settlers in the Camp. Ebullient and charming, she had, in 2015, stoutly defended the Congress, arguing that its assistance for the poor, over the past many decades, could not be brushed aside. She had laughed heartily when others countered her, saying that they had repaid their debts to the Congress by voting it for 65 years.

I am taken to Chanda, who laughs again as I ask her whether she still remains steadfast in her support for the Congress, even though the wind in the Camp seems to be blowing in favour of AAP. “No matter where they vote, my heart still tells me to stay with the Congress,” she says.

Then turning a little circumspect, Chanda says, “But people tell me that my vote will be wasted.”

Perhaps Chanda has come to realise that the Congress is a low-yielding seed, which will find few customers, in much the same manner that the Camp’s residents feel Modi is a Kharif crop that cannot grow in the Rabi season, in which the broom will bloom. But then, it is hard to predict to what extent the communal virus, injected into the electoral competition by the BJP, could shrink the bloom.

The author is a freelance journalist. The views are personal.