Voter Adhikar Yatra: A first-person account from Champaran

Unprecedented is what I would say to describe the Voter Adhikar Yatra which passed through my home town Bettiah in West Champaran. I have never seen anything like this in Bettiah in my memory.

The excitement was hard to miss and I hit the road the evening before with a motorcycle ride to Kudiya Kothi, which was once an indigo plantation and later the farm of Chanpatia Sugar factory that belonged to Begg, Sutherland and Co and its subsidiary, Cawnpore Sugar works.

The farm has been barren for decades now with the sugar factory long being dead. Dead mills like this one in Chanpatia, or in Motihari is also replicated in the once thriving industrial hubs of Dalmianagar and Mokamah. 

I saw a small tented encampment for Rahul Gandhi in the farmland where the leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha was to spend the night in a container.  I took the highway towards Motihari from where Rahul Gandhi and other leaders were to drive into my hometown. Hoardings and flags dotted the landscape in the twilight sun, fluttering in the cool evening breeze.

About eight kms on the highway to Motihari, brightly lit up premises of a resort made me stop. About a hundred RJD workers were huddled outside in groups. I walked in and found RJD MLC Saurabh Kumar with a cell phone in one hand and a Walkie-Talkie handset in the other.

Saurabh was to be Tejashwi’s host for the night and he was busy attending to finer details like ensuring readiness of gen-set back up.

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Outside, I met Deepak Yadav, the Harvard educated owner of Bagaha Sugar mill who, after being denied the BJP ticket in the 2024 LS polls, had overnight switched and had unsuccessfully contested the polls from Valmikinagar. Suddenly, the electricity snapped. T

he Sugar baron joked, “125 unit Bijli ho gayi hai free!”, referring to one of the pre-poll sops announced by chief minister Nitish Kumar. Everybody grinned and in the spirit of the moment, I told him, “Deepak, it seems that this camp (for Tejashwi) has been declared by the government as the Lalten (lantern) zone.”  The lantern is of course RJD’s election symbol.

I rode ahead and found Bakharia village in a festive mood. Both young and the old along with a good number of women had gathered on both sides. A loudspeaker blared in Bhojpuri-Lalu bhaiya ke jeetawe ke baa, Tejashwi ke Mukhya-mantri banaabe ke baa. Most of them said they were Yadavs and would vote for the RJD but the flags they held in their hands were overwhelmingly of the Congress tricolour.

I returned to Tejashwi’s camp. He arrived a little before 10 pm, got out from Rahul Gandhi’s car and walked in to cries of Zindabad. Rahul Gandhi drove ahead to his camp even as two of Tejashwi’s close aides- Manoj Jha and Sanjay Yadav- drove into the resort.

Back in town, Bapu’s statue was being decked up at Harivatika Chowk and a little ahead, Ambedkar’s idol in front of the Collectorate too was being readied with flowers.  

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The next morning I was woken up early by loud cries of Rahul Gandhi zindabad. People were marching into the town, flags and posters in hand. CPI ML leader Dipankar Bhattacharya walked, red flags fluttering behind him. The Communist Red and the RJD Green were conspicuous in clusters amid a sea of the Congress tricolour. Elephants, camels and horses added to the excitement while patriotic songs filled the air.

It was unfortunately hot and humid, slowing down the pace of the Yatra. Saw a stall briskly selling Shikanji. A fruit juice stall also did brisk business as bottled water flew off the shelves. As is the case often, tea stalls seemed the best places to mingle and be a fly on the wall.

I chose instead a small dhaba where Ashish Sah was cooking both mutton and chicken. Itinerant YouTubers and the humungous crowd of people had multiple choices for lunch.

I met Ashish who was cooking Champaran mutton and was doing brisk business. His forefathers had relocated from erstwhile East Pakistan after Independence. Ashish, the third or fourth generation of Hindu Bengali settlers, is still referred to as refugee, and has supported the BJP. On this day he was talking about how an inclusive Nehruvian India had given them shelter and a homeland.

I had not seen this Kumbh-like assemblage of people ever before in Bettiah. The crowd perplexed me. Just before last year’s LS polls, I had driven to Lauriya expecting a huge gathering at a Mahagathbandhan rally that Tejashwi addressed.

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The CPI-ML’s three-star red flag had then outshone other alliance partners. The crowd was disappointing and listless in the run-up to the national polls. People compared the poor crowd to the huge crowd in 1984 that attended the rally addressed by Rajiv Gandhi.

Since 1984 Champaran, which had been a Congress bastion since Gandhi’s Satyagraha in 1917, has become a BJP stronghold. The BJP is well entrenched with committed cadres swarming in mohallas, villages and in every booth. BJP has mapped voters in each booth, I was told.

Add to that the national media’s tilt towards the government and the WhatsApp university-inspired falsehoods and social media trolls, and the opposition always seemed to be fighting a losing battle.

Against this backdrop of motivated spins and mind games, the surge of the mass of people in the Yatra came as an eye-opener and surprise. With thousands on the roads, women crowding the roofs and terraces, Rahul Gandhi and Tejashwi Yadav seem to have succeeded in creating a buzz and a narrative. Hardly anyone was without a smart phone.

People were busy taking pictures and recording videos. This people’s media with the fastest fingers were now flashing their own images, stirring interest and debates in family and other social groups and seemed to have overwhelmed the WhatsApp groups.

(Excerpted from the author’s Facebook post with his permission)