It was a small platform for a man working on the biggest political stage of his life.
Rahul Gandhi, India’s political pin-up and a man who might one day lead the world’s largest democracy, sat last week on a plastic chair on a slightly cramped podium in the dusty town of Sitapur in northern Uttar Pradesh state.
The deeply impoverished region heads to the polls next week to elect a new state assembly and Gandhi has led the campaigning for Congress, the party headed by his family that has dominated post-independence India.
Success will energise those clamouring for him to take on the prime minister’s job; failure will feed the doubters — and there are many — as well as interest in his sister Priyanka, whom some Gandhi loyalists still prefer.
Standing in his path is state leader Mayawati, a 56-year-old low-caste populist with a fetish for handbags and statues, making the multi-stage UP poll one of the most politically important and fascinating Indian contests in years.
After introductions from the local candidates, 41-year-old Gandhi tip-toed around the chairs on the stage, wearing running shoes with his traditional white shirt and pyjamas, and grasped both sides of the lectern.
His speaking style is confident nowadays in contrast to his nervy entry into politics in 2004, although he struggled to fire up a fairly docile crowd of about 5,000 on a small school playing field.
For 22 years — the time Congress has been out of power in UP — the state has lost out because of corruption and mismanagement which has worsened under Mayawati, said Gandhi, his party’s general secretary and youth leader.
“I get angry when I see UP lagging behind the rest of the country,” he declared, referring to a state with some of the worst indicators country-wide for child mortality, life expectancy, literacy and malnutrition.
It has a population of about 200 million and poverty as bad as anything found in sub-Sahara Africa. If it was a country in its own right it would be the fifth biggest measured by inhabitants, larger than Brazil.
Mayawati, whose BSP party champions the rights of those at the bottom of India’s social ladder, had lost touch, Rahul said. He, expensively educated and the son of a prime minister, could feel their pain.
“Yes I studied in England and later in the United States, but what I have learned from you over these last seven years is unparalleled,” he said.
A day later and a short distance up the road, Mayawati began her own campaign.
A packed crowd of up to 50,000, many transported in on free buses by local candidates, squabbled and gossiped before she arrived by helicopter, which drew gasps and applause.
The majority of supporters were low-caste farm labourers, who earn about 100 rupees (about $2) for a gruelling day’s work out in the field.
Mayawati had transformed their relations with the higher castes, some said, helping to ease the plight of a class of people once called “Untouchables” for their presumed physical and spiritual dirtiness.
“Earlier the upper caste people used to harass us,” said Sripal, a labourer aged about 60.
“Now when they do it, there is action taken against them,” he said, explaining that the police now responded to their complaints, sometimes even without money being exchanged.
Others dismissed corruption allegations that swirl around Mayawati’s administration, as well as criticism of her lavish spending on memorials, statues and monuments to low-caste icons — including herself.
“It was only one percent of the budget on statues, and she made all these new parks,” said Kuldeep Bhati, 35, repeating Mayawati’s own defence of the vast projects.
Her reputation for megalomania was enhanced by widely reported — and furiously denied — US embassy cables published by WikiLeaks which recounted “the first-rate egomaniac” sending a private jet to Mumbai to pick up some sandals.
She also drew flack in 2010 after she wore a giant garland made of 1,000-rupee bank notes.
Taking to the stage, she turned the tables on the Congress-led central government, lambasting it over corruption at the national level and accusing it of blocking her attempts to draw industry to Uttar Pradesh.
“It is the first time for this state that our government took up the cause of the Dalits and the deprived, as well as Muslims who were always neglected by successive regimes,” she said
Beyond the rallies, on the main street of Sitapur or in nearby villages where the fertile land produces sugar cane, mangoes and wheat, many disillusioned voters listed their grievances.
Corruption blights their lives; politicians appear every election time to make promises, only to fill their pockets the rest of the time; and a moribund economy provides no job opportunities for the young.
Electricity supplies are unreliable — a village AFP visited hadn’t had any in 15 days — and food inflation has caused more hardship.
Somu, a 25-year-old owner of a street teashop with a calf tethered in the corner, says he has to pay off the police every time he has a problem.
“Bribery and corruption are the main issues,” he told AFP. “The trouble is that only the poor are harassed. And only during elections do the politicians talk about it.”
Ravi Mishra, a 24-year-old graduate with a degree in biology, complains there are “no avenues for jobs here,” while others remember a long-closed plywood factory as the only industry nearby apart from sugar cane refineries.
UP has a legacy of mismanagement and corruption as woeful as anywhere in India, but the success of neighbouring Bihar — once a byword for human misery — has shown what can be achieved by forceful leadership.
Under chief minister Nitish Kumar, Bihar has shed its reputation as a lawless backwater, leading to surging economic growth and the sort of development yearned for by UP’s poor.
Which party the people of UP yearn to lead them will be realised on March 6 when results are announced.
