In the mid-1990s, while writing a book about rural poverty, I lived in a small village near Amethi, the pampered Lok Sabha constituency of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. I found, to my surprise, that the crores pumped into Amethi over the preceding 15 years had left poverty as widespread as in areas of central Uttar Pradesh not favoured by political largesse. While Amethi was equipped with more factories, smoother roads and finer government rest-houses, by outcomes relevant to the poor it performed no better than the average for this area of UP.

Last year, on renewing my research, I found that there had again been depressingly little progress for the impoverished dalits and lower backward castes in Amethi, despite another decade of being a ‘VVIP’ constituency. The inequity in land ownership remains as great as elsewhere in the area, wage rates for labourers no higher, oppression by the upper castes as intense, and literacy and health no better.

Two thousand km south of Amethi, this pattern of social and development failures persisting despite ‘VVIP’ status is evident in Andipatti, where I spent some weeks recently. Andipatti returned Chief Minister MGR to the Tamil Nadu assembly in 1984; since 2002 it has been Jayalalithaa’s constituency; and Theni district itself has long been an AIADMK bastion.

The most egregious failure in Andipatti is the strength of ‘untouchability’ practices. They are of such an intensity that even the oppression of dalits in Amethi seems trivial by comparison. Thus, people of the Arunthathiyar caste continue to be barred from village temples, are given inferior-quality tumblers at tea stalls, and are forbidden from wearing chappals on upper-caste lanes. Bonded labour is commonplace. In several schools, Arunthathiyar children are segregated. A report on the entire Theni district, published last year by Arogya Agam, a courageous NGO, and the Arunthathiyar Mukkal Munnetra Iyyekam, found that these practices were the norm in 196 of the 281 villages in which members of this caste live.

... contd.