The BSP’s sweep in Bundelkhand in the 2007 Assembly polls was apparently hard-won. People here still remember the painstaking work of political mobilisation by the party in what is known to be one of the most parched and backward regions in the country, home to farmers’ suicides and that dire and untranslatable slogan “Khasm mar jaaye, gagri na phoote”.

In the 2007 Assembly elections, of the 21 seats in Bundelkhand, the BSP won 14, SP four, and the Congress a mere three. Mayawati rewarded the drought-stricken region by including as many as seven ministers from Bundelkhand in her government.

Two years later, there are two curiosities in Bundelkhand’s Hamirpur constituency: Will the BSP repeat its 2007 performance? And, who will the district’s substantial Lodh population back ?

Several non-Dalit voters in this faraway corner of UP are vehement that the vote for the BSP in 2007 was actually a mandate against the SP’s misrule. “It is a myth that Pandits voted for the BSP,” says Raja Pande, a social worker in Muskura. “We only voted for Mayawati to defeat the SP”.

He recounts an episode that may have been the last straw: In 2007, when the SP lost the zilla panchayat election to the BSP, women were abducted, taken away in jeeps allegedly by henchmen of the then ruling party even as the administration watched. In the Assembly elections that followed soon after, says Pande, the people struck back at the SP.

“At that time, anger with the SP consolidated a diverse coalition behind the BSP,” agrees Sushil Lodhi, a farmer. “No more”, he says. In these parts, the SP’s “goonda raj” is seen to have made way for the “Syndicate”, which levies the “goonda tax”.

... contd.