As the curtains came down on the Lok Sabha election campaign and Prime Minister Narendra Modi began his 45-hour meditation retreat at the Vivekananda Rock Memorial in Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu, the one place missing from his itinerary in the final days leading up to polling on June 1 was his constituency Varanasi.
The PM left the responsibility of supervising the election in Varanasi to Union Home Minister Amit Shah, his second-in-command who in the past couple of days held meetings with senior leaders Union Ministers Piyush Goel and Giriraj Singh, and BJP national general secretary Sunil Bansal. The three, along with a team of key BJP and RSS functionaries, have been managing the party’s affairs in the run-up to voting.
Among the others who held a meeting with Shah were BJP ally and Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP) chief Om Prakash Rajbhar and former Samajwadi Party (SP) leader Narad Rai, who joined the BJP on Tuesday. Sources in the BJP said Shah assigned tasks to his senior party colleagues, Rajbhar, and Rai who is from the Bhumihar community. Of the 19.62 lakh voters in Varanasi, there are more than 1.5 lakh Bhumihar and about 70,000 Rajbhar voters.
In the past few days, the BJP has mobilised workers from different states and districts of Uttar Pradesh to help with the campaign. Party workers from Puducherry, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Rajasthan are making rounds of areas where Tamils, Telugu people and people from Rajasthan live. At the party’s massive central election office in Varanasi’s Mehmoorganj locality, there was an air of calm and confidence. Apart from the out-of-state workers being assigned their duties, five local BJP office-bearers sat in a corner of a big hall, a register and heaps of saffron scarves lying in front of them.
“Hum log kayde se campaign hi nahin kar rahe hain, koi fight hi nahi hai. Bas jeet ka margin badhana hai (We are not properly campaigning since there is no fight. The only task is to increase the victory margin),” BJP city president Vidyasagar Rai told The Indian Express.
At the BJP’s poll office in Varanasi’s Rohaniya Assembly segment, the party’s district president Hansraj Vishwakarma said while Shah arrived in Varanasi on Tuesday afternoon, Goel and Giriraj had been camping in the constituency for a longer time.
Referring to the senior ministers’ presence in the constituency, Samajwadi Party (SP) president Akhilesh Yadav who addressed a rally with Rahul Gandhi in Varanasi on Tuesday advised the INDIA alliance’s supporters to remain alert and not get trapped in the senior BJP leaders’ “poll management”.
Facing Modi is UP Congress president Ajay Rai. In Varanasi’s Lahurabir area, the Congress’s central election office wore a deserted look earlier this week. When asked where everyone was, a party worker said Rai was busy preparing for the Akhilesh-Rahul rally — it was scheduled for the following day — and would address a public meeting at the DLW (Diesel Locomotive Workshop, now known as Banaras Locomotive Workshop) west gate. But the Congress leader failed to turn up and instead deputed local leaders Sanjay Rajbhar Santosh Maurya and Abdul Jabbar to address the workshop’s employees after their shift was over.
“We may not win but may reduce the margin of BJP victory and that will also not be less than a defeat for Modi,” Rajbhar told The Indian Express. In 2019, Modi defeated the SP’s Shalini Yadav by 4.79 lakh votes while Rai came third.
Jabbar, meanwhile, sounds more hopeful. He said the Congress was expecting a sizable chunk of around 3.5 lakh Muslim votes and 1 lakh Yadav votes, and was hoping to dent the BJP’s Bhumihar base since Rai is from the community. There is also a considerable number of Patels in the Rohaniya and Sewapuri segments, with an estimated 2.5 lakh voters overall. Jabbar also said the Congress would receive the support of Dalits, with the community having an estimated 1.5 lakh voters.
Vidyasagar Rai, however, dismissed the Congress leader’s caste calculations and claimed that the party had a loyal vote bank of Brahmins (about 3 lakh voters) and Thakurs (about 1 lakh), and added that Bhumihars would not choose Rai over Modi. He also claimed the support of Baniyas (1.5 lakh voters), Patels, Dalits, and people from outside the state who have now settled in Varanasi, saying their number is not less than 1 lakh.
A senior BJP leader said the vote shares of the SP, Congress, and BJP in 2014 and 2019 showed that the Opposition alliance would not make any difference.
Tale of two industries
The complexity of Varanasi is captured in the contrasting fortunes of two of its major industries: power loom and tourism.
Apart from the Kashi Vishwanath temple, Varanasi is known for Banarasi silk sarees. The district has more than one lakh manufacturers, traders, and dealers from the weaver community, with almost 60% of them Muslims. At the Madanpura saree mandi in the heart of the city, Asif, a trader, said the saree trade would die a slow death if some of the current GST policies were not relaxed. He said traders like him and weavers were in a bad state and that weavers were unlikely to support the BJP. At Lohta mandi, power-loom owner Pradeep Gupta said his family supported the BJP but this long association would be over if the current situation continued.
In contrast, those dependent on tourism are happy with the state of affairs, saying the footfall of visitors has increased manifold in the last seven years. Shopkeepers, autorickshaw drivers, tourist guides, and priests in and around Kashi Vishwanath and at various ghats are full of praise for Modi and Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath for the large-scale makeover and development of pilgrimage sites.
Around 20 km from Varanasi, in the city of Sarnath known for its Buddhist stupas and temples, Prem Shanker, a private guide accompanying a group from Mumbai, said, “This is not tourist season in Sarnath. But, tourists keep visiting Varanasi around the year after big developments and they all come to Sarnath as well. We are dependent on this income, which is growing day by day. Therefore, no question arises of not supporting the BJP.”