This time, upper castes feel left out

Paramilitary forces are all set to patrol villages for the last leg of UP elections on May 8, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: May 7, 2007, 08:32:42 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, Gazipur/Ballia

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Paramilitary forces are all set to patrol villages for the last leg of UP elections on May 8. Unlike past elections, when the terror of khaki was used to prevent the lower castes from voting, the forces this time would ask all the voters to come out in full force to use their constitutional right.

“Thanks to the positive impact of the forces, more Dalits are coming out to vote than the upper castes,” said a senior official of Border Security Force (BSF) in Gazipur, where mafia don Mukhtar Ansari is contesting the polls as an independent candidate.

The BSF official said people now feel more confident of using their voting rights due to the various rules enforced by the Election Commission (EC) — for example, no vehicles were allowed within 100 metres of a polling booth, a proper queue was maintained for all the voters, only central government officials were recruited as major election functionaries and UP police officers were restricted outside the booths.

However, there were some, like J.P. Singh of Ibrahim Patti village who blamed the central forces for the low turnout of the upper castes. “They do not allow cars near the booths. We have to wait in a long queue alongwith the Dalits and it is so hot there,” he said.

Pawan Singh, a candidate from Bansadi assembly segment, called it “reverse discrimination” of the EC against the upper castes. “They don’t allow even the senior citizens to jump the queue. This rule affects only the upper castes,” he lamented.

Manoj Singh, a Congress candidate from Doaba, however, said that the EC’s move has reduced financial burden on the candidates and now anyone can contest the elections.

In the end, though political parties may have a few objections, majority of the people are giving a thumbs up to the EC for a free and fair election.

“For the first time an upper caste candidate came to my house asking for my vote,” said Ramlal Rajbhar of Amali village in Dewaria district.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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