In the local government election last year, frustrated with elected representatives reneging on the poll promise, some villagers in this CPI (M) stronghold had planned a boycott, or alternatively to put up an independent candidate, but they were persuaded by their patron party to change their minds.
Could (and would) the villagers unitedly stand up to the CPI (M) this time? In a milieu of patron-client politics, can non-party mobilisation at the grass roots succeed?
INITIAL REACTION
For three weeks, the boycott call did not provoke any active response from political parties. Then, five days before the election, at 7am on 11 May, the Congress candidate visited the village. He spoke with some of the boycott campaign leaders and pointed out that their demand had been included in his constituency manifesto. The following day, the BJP candidate too arrived and promised to fulfill the villagers’ demand. That day, the CPI (M) distributed an election notice in the village. But the party candidate and legislator representing Kongad constituency, who had once promised assistance for the road, kept away.
Over telephone, the CPI (M)’s local committee secretary told one of the boycott organisers that he was prepared to discuss the issue. But the back-channel manoeuvre irked village leaders, who wanted the party’s leaders (local committee secretary or someone higher) to openly face the villagers and account for their failure to deliver the poll promise of the past three elections. The CPI (M) did not play ball.
VILLAGE MEETING
So, three days before the election, the boycott campaign leaders organised a public meeting to take a final decision. At six in the evening on 13 May, more than 90 villagers gathered near the rail track. About forty of them, mostly women, sat in plastic chairs, while others, including women holding children in their arms, stood and listened. In the front row, five youngsters sat holding placards. A local cable TV channel was present to cover the event.
Speakers included elder leaders Balan and Gopinathan, in their 50s, and youth leaders Sumesh and Subhash, in their late 20s. The speeches were brief, none lasting more than two minutes.
Balan, a retired local government employee, outlined the context of the meeting. Gopinathan, an ayurveda doctor, recounted some of the recent efforts to get road connectivity and said, ‘To make ourselves heard among officials, politicians, and the general public, we have decided to boycott the vote. If anybody has a different opinion, please express it. If not, this time we will boycott the vote, and next time, we shall vote for whoever acts in our favour.’
Nobody said anything for about ten seconds. One of the younger leaders, Sumesh, a construction worker and secretary of the Dr BR Ambedkar Memorial Reading Room in the village, observed that there were no two opinions on the matter. Gopinathan said, ‘In that case, kai adhichu pass aakkaam (approve the decision by clap of hands).’ The audience immediately obliged.
Unanticipated by the organisers, a resident walked to the dais and stressed the need for unity. ‘What will we do if some betray us and vote?’, he wanted to know. Gopinathan replied, ‘If they can’t stick to a decision once it has been taken, they are not men. Let them do what they want.’ Subhash, one of the youths, took the stage and said, ‘If some [break ranks and] go [to vote], the youth here will not participate in that family’s events, such as marriage or death.’ His tactical shot triggered a murmur in the women’s section of the audience.
Gopinathan maintained that each individual was free to decide, but should remember that the road was everyone’s need. Sumesh elaborated that unity was necessary to convince the world outside. ‘Don’t bother about others. Each one must decide to boycott, for the road, and stick to the decision. By doing so, the boycott will succeed,’ he said. ‘This is not any particular party’s activity,’ he pointed out. ‘There are Congressmen, BJP, and Communists here. Think of the collective and co-operate to make this a success. Whoever brings us the road—whichever individual, party, or organisation—we will work for them forever. Because this [getting the road] is historic.’
The floor was then thrown open to political parties. Unnikrishnan, a local Congress functionary who had grown up in the village but now resided outside, reminded the villagers of his party candidate’s visit and promise. Sumesh stepped to the dais and responded, ‘We can consider [supporting the candidate]. But first let him win and bring us the road.’ CPI (M) members and sympathisers formed the majority in the crowd, but none that day spoke for the party or explained the party’s position. One local office-bearer of the BJP was present, but he too did not speak.
Balan then invited women to express their views. Women outnumbered men in the audience, and they seemed uncomfortable with the youngsters’ idea of social boycott. Yet no lady came forward or spoke publicly from where they stood. Balan said that if the CPI (M), especially the local committee, continued to drag its feet, the villagers would consider organising a strike, a human chain, or other means of protest. ‘We might have to endure more suffering. But for a good future, we must sacrifice some things now,’ he concluded to a round of applause.
The meeting finished in 18 minutes, the speeches seemingly extempore, and the proceedings tinged with spontaneity (bordering on the amateurish). Unwittingly, it lent the poll boycott campaign an air of genuineness—a public expression of the grievance of a village—and contrasted with the formal, well-ordered meetings organised by political parties, with their ritualistic welcome speech and vote of thanks.
After the meeting, I asked the boycott organisers why they were not using the NOTA option. ‘It won’t work here,’ one replied. ‘People here are used to voting for one party symbol. If they reach the polling booth, they will forget everything else.’ All laughed in agreement.
The next day, in the evening twilight, Balan and a dozen others toured the village, door-to-door, requesting each household to co-operate with the collective decision. At one house, a young campaigner asked a family to boycott the vote. His compatriots corrected him, ‘We should not ask them to boycott. We should simply say, “Sahakarikkuka” (Please co-operate).’
ELECTION DAY
From election booth 116, at the Krishi Bhavan in Thenur, you can see the highway and hear the trains. On election days, Vattappallam residents, most of who are daily-wage labourers, vote early so that they can go for work, confirmed the booth-level officer Sunil Dath. He is an assistant teacher in the upper primary school at Thenur, and has officiated here more than once.
On 16 May, polling began at 7am. Despite a drizzle, 20 per cent of the booth’s 1,403 voters cast their vote by 10am. This was in line with the state polling average. In the next three hours, however, only 18% more voted. The boycott was a near-total success in the forenoon, as only a handful from Kurunkaad and Vattappallam had voted. But the boycott had failed in the third colony (Pulleparambu); more than a hundred voted from there. (‘We did not raise awareness in Pulleparambu as much as we did here,’ Balan told me later.)
Meanwhile from the village, there were two pathways to the election booth. On one route, via the highway, boycott organisers stood at two points, casually chatting with friends. They denied monitoring passers by, but it was obvious that they were. I pointed out that a few women were on their way to the highway. ‘They are going for a wedding,’ assured Chandran, a behind-the-scene organiser.
Leela, a 59-year-old construction worker, was walking towards the village, carrying vegetables in a white, polythene bag. Will she vote? ‘I haven’t decided. I will not vote alone,’ she replied. She said that she was a CPI (M) member, attended party meetings every month, and trusted the party. She was also the president of a Kudumbashree unit in the village. In her view, the protesters had not met the right people who could get them funds for the road. Yet, she also felt that it was only fair that someone from the party should have come to the village when the boycott was announced.
At the entrance to the villages, near the rail track, no other soul was in sight. In Kurunkaad and Vattappallam, the main streets were deserted. Once word spread of my arrival, a few pro-boycott residents began to accompany me. I had gone to check whether villagers were being physically blocked (they were not) and to meet Usha.
Two days earlier, when Balan and friends were canvassing support in the evening, Usha had responded unlike others: she had said that she might vote. I wanted to know who she was, why she was unwilling to boycott, and whether she had changed her mind.
Usha, 38 years old, is chairperson of Kudumbashree’s panchayat-level community development society in Parali panchayat. When I reached her house at noon, she was out rounding up women to vote (all of them part of the Kudumbashree network) and fuelling rumours (of physical threats by pro-boycott youths and of boycott leaders having voted early morning, neither of which was true). She preferred to be interviewed publicly.
Usha too wanted the road; it was a collective need, she said. But there was also an individual need that she had to address. ‘Kudumbashree funds come through the gram and block panchayats, via the district panchayat. So, it will be very difficult for me to deal with matters there [if I boycott the election],’ she said. Will they block funds or other approvals? ‘We will get it. But shouldn’t we get the things in time? What we need today, there is no point getting it only tomorrow, right?,’ she explained. When I probed who would make her run around or deny funds in time, she shied away from specifying.
Usha is a CPI (M) member and owed her Kudumbashree appointment to the party, a job that fetches her Rs 4,000 a month. She has to listen to them, she said, if she had to perform well in her job of overseeing the 300 Kudumbashree self-help groups in the panchayat. Similarly, the party had helped women in the village set up a Kudumbashree canteen near the panchayat office. Choosing between the village and the party was not easy.
At 3pm, about 10 women, including Usha, set out to vote from Vattapallam. They crossed the rail track, and boarded an auto-taxi, which took them to the booth. (A few walked the entire distance.) On their return, near the track, they saw me filming and hesitated. It was drizzling. I was at a distance from the crossing, but could hear one of the ladies suggesting that they shield their faces with umbrellas. A goods train chugged by. As the women began to cross, one shouted to me, ‘Don’t shoot, don’t shoot.’
Until then, their voting had seemed an act of courage. But now it appeared an act of submission. Voting, like many a thing in life, was not about free will; it was about fear, and feeding the bigger beast.
By the time polling ended at 6pm, only 53.7 per cent had voted in Booth 116. The boycott organisers claimed that just 26 residents (8 men, 18 women) out of the 250+ from Kurunkaad and Vattappallam had voted; a local CPI (M) office-bearer put the figure at 41.
But there was no difference of opinion on what had really happened. As dusk set in, CPI (M) leaders and cadres in Thenur were sullen.
Updates – After the Boycott
]]>This summer, however, Palakkad district has been burning, with day temperature soaring to a record 41.9 degrees Celsius. Thenur’s fields are parch brown. As Kerala goes to the polls on 16 May, a three-metre stretch of the railway track at Thenur has sent political mercury further north: three Dalit colonies here have announced a poll boycott.
Near the railway track, at the entrance to Vattappallam Dalit colony, rises a big flex board in Malayalam: ‘Dear leaders,’ it says in bullet points, ‘If you cannot fulfil our need, none need bother to come here asking for votes. Caught between the railway track and the [Bharathapuzha] river, we have been facing hell for more than a century…. With assurances that everything will be set right, elected representatives have made us run around in circles. We want Rs 1.65 crore. Unfinished houses or un-usable drinking water schemes are not what we want. We too are humans. We too want a motorable road. We are unwilling to be deceived further by your charming promises.’
THE COMMUNITY
About 400 households, many of them related to each other, reside in Vattapppallam Colony, a cluster of three Scheduled Caste colonies (Vattappallam, Kurunkaad, and Pulleparambu). For more than a century, the communities—mostly Cherumars and Parayas, but also a few Thiyyas/Thandaans, and a couple of Nairs and Ezhuthachans—have been living between the river and the railway track.
P.S. Chandran, a 45-year-old resident, said, ‘Our forefathers lived here in British times, even before the rail line was laid.’ Unlike their forefathers, who worked as farmhands, Chandran and a few others have made it to government service with education and reservation for Scheduled Castes, but the majority are daily wage labourers. Women are relatively less educated and many still work in the fields.
All households enjoy satellite TV channels connected via dish antenna (because local operators cannot lay cables across the railway track). Improvement in living conditions has also led to desire for more facilities. Since 1979, the village’s main demand has been an all-weather, motorable road to connect them to the rest of Kerala.
THE DEMAND
When a person suffers a heart attack or snake bite in Vattappallam, the best available option is for four able-bodied men to carry him in a plastic chair for 1.5 kilometres to the railway track, lift him across two curving rail lines, and proceed in a three-wheeler or car to the hospital. Some die on the way.
Almost every family here has a personal tale to tell about how they have suffered due to lack of road connectivity.
Take a short quiz on the situation in Vattappallam. 5 points for a correct guess.
And hence the demand for a road, which is really a demand for a subway under the railway track, to connect Vattappallam with the state highway.
Almost a month ago, flex boards announcing the vote boycott were erected at two bus-stops on the state highway too, but barring the local police who investigated why the boards were put up, no election official or political leader has visited the three Dalit colonies (see Updates).
VOTE BOYCOTT
As I drove to Vattappallam to enquire why they were boycotting, three questions about collective action were upper-most in my mind.
- Does vote boycott help the cause, especially since the winning candidate knows that he/she won without their support?
- How can anyone, especially marginalised Dalits, break patron–client relations with political parties in a state where sectarian politics is practised by parties at the grass roots?
- Are Vattappallam residents using the threat of vote boycott to extract a pre-poll promise from all candidates, and actually likely to vote as usual on May 16?
On reaching the colony, I learned that it was a CPI (M) stronghold. Since 1996, the ward has elected only CPI (M) candidates to the gram panchayat.
Mohanan, a 42-year-old daily wage labourer in the construction industry, said, ‘We made a mistake last year, in the local body elections. We planned to boycott all parties and put up an independent candidate from the village.’ But the CPI (M) persuaded the villagers to accept the party’s nominee, as usual, and elect her. This time, however, the villagers are determined to resist the offers of the CPI (M), he said.
Anti-CPI (M) sentiment is strong now, even among many who have traditionally voted for the party. They acknowledge that the CPI (M) has brought benefits to the village historically, but they are disillusioned with the party for dragging its feet on the road issue.
Residents who have been at the forefront of the road campaign pointed fingers at the Palakkad district committee of the CPI (M). They recalled what a prominent CPI (M) leader had told them: the party’s district committee holds the reins of power on big-ticket spending of MP and MLA local area development funds.
Colony leaders pointed out that all their elected representatives—MP, MLA, and panchayat members in all three tiers—were from the CPI (M), and all panchayat tiers too were ruled by CPI (M). Still, if the required funds have not been released for the road since 2014, it only means that the CPI (M) is in no hurry. The villagers have bought their leaders’ reasoning.
Based on what he has seen in panchayat politics, C. Balan, a 57-year-old retired local government employee, speculated that it could be the CPI (M) local committee’s lack of enthusiasm in convincing the district committee, due to local jealousy on who will get lifetime credit for building the road to Vattappallam.
Mohanan, who has studied till the tenth standard, and worked in the past for CPI (M), appeared distrustful of all parties. According to him, the road is a low priority for the party because ‘Depositing the required amount—the remaining 1.84 crore—with the railways will not fetch the CPI (M) or its elected representatives any commission. The Railways have their own contractors.’
Residents also felt that the CPI (M) takes for granted the Scheduled Caste colony’s support. It is the business-as-usual approach that the youths in Vattappallam are challenging in this Assembly election.
Sumesh, a 27-year-old leader of the poll boycott initiative, is an Economics graduate, secretary of the Dr BR Ambedkar Memorial Reading Room in the colony, and a labourer in the construction industry. According to him, the road has not materialised ‘because no one reacts here’.
In a 45-minute public interaction arranged for me on 1 May, and attended by about 60 villagers, Sumesh explained, ‘All these years, we stood with them, but they did not do it [build the road]. Why should we run after them again? Those who get our valuable vote, they have a responsibility towards us. If they don’t fulfil that even slightly, what should we do? Visiting us only at the time of elections and asking for vote, that is not a correct approach. There is no Opposition here. That is why things are the way they are.’
Chandran, who works in the revenue department, said, ‘All of us in our department work very hard, even several months before an election is announced, to ensure that the polls go well.’ It was awkward for him, therefore, to endorse a poll boycott. ‘The vote boycott is an initiative of the youngsters’, he confirmed, and explained that the village was unitedly rallying behind the idea because the demand for road was long-standing and legitimate.
Balan has heard of another Dalit colony in the panchayat boycotting the vote in last year’s local body elections. He told me that it led to CPI (M) losing the ward to Congress, and within months, the CPI (M), which rules the panchayat, delivered the colony’s demand for drinking water. But Vattappallam’s threat of vote boycott is not inspired by that, he clarified.
Both privately and publicly, I asked the residents whether they were ready to face the consequences of a boycott. While the women, including those associated with Kudumbasree, responded with a deafening silence in the public interaction, more than one man said that if the CPI (M)-controlled panchayat denied benefits under the rural employment guarantee programme, they would challenge such denial under law.
Local party leaders disapproved of the vote boycott. V.V. Haridas, CPI (M) member and ex-panchayat president is one of the residents who has led the struggle for the road in recent years. He assured me that the road will come in two years, ‘Nobody in the district committee has an objection to the road. The new panchayat [elected six months ago] has earmarked Rs 20 lakh for the road, in its development plan. We will get funds from the district and block panchayats too. We should unitedly try to get that, not boycott the election. The key point is, the railways’ [Rs 1.89 crore] estimate is valid for five years, and only one-and-half years are over. We still have time.’
Congress (I) office-bearer Unnikrishnan grew up in the colony but no longer resides here. He said, ‘To convey our needs, and do things in the ministry or Centre, we need a representative. We must elect a representative, demand what we want, and try to get them to do what we want, rather than boycott the election.’
Such views of leaders cut no ice with the male residents, though. ‘Only promises at the time of each election. There is no progress thereafter,’ said P.C. Gopinathan, a doctor in a private ayurveda hospital.
Lakshmi, an agricultural labourer, told me that the elected representatives had promised the road. ‘Why did they not give it? That’s what we ask. Let them answer our question,’ she said. In the public interaction, however, compared to men, women were far less critical of CPI (M) and less inclined to boycott the vote. According to the men, women did not speak up because they were less educated and feared the CPI (M).
On 1 May at least, Vattappallam seemed ambivalent towards vote boycott. Some women said, ‘First the road, then the vote,’ and some men said, ‘We will vote for whoever brings us the road.’ But within minutes, men and women were unsure whether to boycott or to vote for the most convincing candidate who promised the road.
POLITICS AND MORE
Recent village meetings to discuss the road issue have been attended by sympathisers of the three political fronts in Kerala (NDA, LDF, and UDF). As the public interaction ended, ex-panchayat president Haridas surfaced near the venue. When I asked him why he had kept away from the meeting, he replied, ‘Because it was not convened by me or the CPI (M)’.
According to Haridas, a 10-member, bipartisan committee for the road issue had been formed in the village, but of late, meetings were being convened bypassing that committee. He said he knew the political background of everyone there, and the recent meetings, including for vote boycott, were being organised by the BJP.
One resident told me privately that the village was not entirely united even on the road issue. Headload workers in the village, for example, benefited from the absence of a road; once the road is ready, demand for their service—transporting goods across the rail track—will decline substantially. This summer, when light commercial vehicles came to the colony, via a small underpass (Railways forbids its use), some colony residents alerted the Railways and gave them the vehicle number; the railway promptly swung into action, he said.
Despite difference of opinion along various axes—gender, age, strength of party ties, and livelihood—in the colony, the leaders of the poll boycott were confident that all would stand united in the event of a poll boycott. They said that the final decision to vote or boycott will be taken by consensus after holding a few more meetings.
For now, the Dalits in Vattappallam are showing the red signal to the CPI (M). But there are ten days to go. What will happen on 16 May in Booth 116? Stay tuned.
Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.Read what happened on polling day
Updates from Vattappallam
Acknowledgement: I am grateful to Suraj Jacob for comments on a draft, and Vinu Palissery for inputs and assistance in the public interaction organised at Vattappallam on 1 May 2016. Inadequacies mine.
]]>The UDF’s flex ads are aspirational. Whether it is about the airport in Kannur or the tech hub Smart City, the ideas chosen are Janus-faced, inviting the voter to look back at the UDF’s achievements and simultaneously look forward to their economic potential.
Only the UDF logo is in colour. The ads (see Slideshow) use abundant white space to simultaneously draw and deflect attention: white guides the eye to text and pictures, and the mind to associate the UDF with white (purity, goodness, honesty), rather than shady deals and corruption scandals. Metro models, simple typography, and minimalist design, proclaim an urban, upper-class aesthetic. Strikingly, political leaders are missing; the ads highlight ideas and projects.
While UDF ads appear to be from Mumbai, the LDF ones feature quintessential Malayalis.
The Left’s big ads are of two kinds. The first, featuring CPI(M) leaders in a united show of strength, glut the highway — there is one almost every two kilometres. One half of the ad highlights UDF corruption while the other half counters the mainstream media’s narrative (disunited leadership, two party stalwarts jockeying for power). The ad, however, cleverly leaves the leadership question unanswered — VS Achuthanandan stands in front of Pinarayi Vijayan, yet equally, Vijayan is at the centre. EMS Namboodiripad and AK Gopalan, regular fixtures in Kerala communist iconography, are out of the picture.
The second kind of ads highlights issues, such as communalism, corruption, ecological damage, and lack of agricultural development (see Slideshow). Although the ads have been published in the name of local committees, the uniformity on display across constituencies suggests that the ads were designed centrally. In contrast to the UDF and BJP ads which highlight issues, the biggest lettering in corresponding LDF ads is reserved for the general slogan: ‘LDF will come, Everything will be alright’.
Just as, cloth banners gave way to flexes long ago, locally produced boards are now ceding ground to centrally prepared campaign stationery. Giant, corporate-style hoardings tower over old-style, smaller posters and flex boards designed in small-town DTP centres. But the latter continue to dominate the scene numerically.
Politics and elections, even in ancient Greece, involved persuading and convincing citizens through rhetoric and other means. But once political parties sell like firms, playing on people’s minds with increasing sophistication, the gulf between reality and projection is widened, and dishonesty in politics deepened. The savvy who win elections in this manner end up relying on even more PR for governance.
In Kerala, political parties are hiring ad agencies, the New Indian Express newspaper reported this month. It signals the increasing professionalisation of parties and elections. Once democracy is marketised, or begins to mirror the market, we must brace ourselves for dominance by big, established players. Elections in Kerala have been free for sixty years, but will they be fair twenty years from now?
How do you read these ads? Will they help to deepen democracy?
Musician Brian Eno’s article ‘Taking Control of Democracy’ (The Guardian)
‘When governments rely increasingly on sophisticated public relations agencies, public debate disappears and is replaced by competing propaganda campaigns, with all the accompanying deceits. Advertising isn’t about truth or fairness or rationality, but about mobilising deeper and more primitive layers of the human mind.’
Credits: Text and Photos – Ashok R. Chandran; Video source – Official YouTube channel of Oommen Chandy.
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