In Rabindrapuri, one of the plushest parts of Varanasi and just over a kilometre from Banaras Hindu University, power cuts can last 10 hours a day. The nagging whirr of generators tells you how the rich try to cope with one of the crippling problems in the city. Outside their houses, garbage heaps have piled up. The roads in the colony, pock-marked with potholes, are so narrow that barely two cars can pass.

Ironically, this is where some of the city’s most powerful residents stay. Among them are the Jalans, one of Varanasi’s most moneyed and influential families with a house on the colony’s main thoroughfare. But in this eternal city, the message that money can’t buy everything — not even a level road — is conveyed to the rich as if with some venom.

True, the political contest in Varanasi will also be about caste and communal combinations and none of the winners of the past can take their places for granted. Yet, as is becoming evident — and a fact repeated in cities and towns across the country at election time in recent days — the largest issues will revolve round development and the breakdown of civic infrastructure.

Says businessman V N Singh, “There is no power, and the roads are bad. We are fed up with the political system. The question is who do we hold responsible for the mess. Political parties must have a definite development plan.” So powerful has the bijli-sadak-paani issue become that in a bid to beat anti-incumbency Samajwadi Party candidates in the city like Abdul Samad are desperately flaunting the development card while campaigning. BJP candidates Shyam Dev Roychowdhury and Jyotsna Srivastava are doing everything to rub their fingers into the Samajwadi Party’s anti-incumbency wound as they talk of roads, bridges and girls colleges.

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