Babbar: Jat power

Gajendra Singh and Padam Singh hate the Congress but love Raj Babbar.

When the star chose this seat, 33km southwest of Agra, they told him he shouldn’t mention the Congress in his speeches. “We said, if you mistakenly take its name, you will lose our votes,” said Padam, a former village headman.

The two farmers, in their sixties, share the Jats’ historical antipathy towards the Congress because their hero and Lok Dal founder Chaudhury Charan Singh projected the party as an “enemy” of the intermediate castes and a patron of the landed rich from the Brahmins and the Rajputs.

So, even if they are rooting for Babbar, they fervently hope the Congress will be unseated at the Centre so a more “peasant-friendly” dispensation can come in.

As Babbar fights his third Lok Sabha poll, he is up against daunting odds: first, he had to move to Fatehpur Sikri because his earlier constituency, Agra, became reserved after delimitation.

Second, he quit the Samajwadi Party following irreconcilable differences with general secretary Amar Singh.

Third, although he joined the Congress soon after, he wasn’t sure of getting a ticket because of the party’s on-off alliance with the Samajwadi, which eventually fell through.

Babbar was lucky to get Fatehpur Sikri, part of the Agra seat earlier. The contest should have been a breeze for him, but it isn’t.

While his “glamour quotient” and his ability to transcend the caste straitjacket worked to his advantage in 1999 and 2004, the inadequacies have begun to hit home now.

“Bollywood glamour doesn’t work here. The trouble is Babbar concentrated too much on the city and neglected the rural areas. When he did attend to them, the only thing he did was to get licences for tourist guides in Fatehpur Sikri,” said Satish Aggarwal, the president of the Kiraoli village market association.

In the redrawn seat map, he has only two urban Assembly segments: Fatehpur Sikri and Dayal Bagh. The other three are predominantly rural.

That is why Babbar has to keep the Jats happy. In a constituency of 12.5 lakh voters, they may be considerably less (1.45 lakh) than the Thakurs (3.15 lakh), Brahmins (2.5 lakh) and Jatavs (2 lakh).

But the Jats are his only vote bank in a fight where he is up against Seema Upadhyaya, a Brahmin from the BSP, Aridaman Singh, a Thakur from the BJP, and Raghuraj Singh Shakhya, a backward caste Kushwaha from the Samajwadi Party.

The backward castes account for nearly two lakh voters. Samajwadi chief Mulayam Singh Yadav is apparently in a vengeful mood, playing pied piper to the OBCs who went for Babbar as long as the actor was with his party. “Vote out this nachgayya (cheap entertainer),” he urged the crowds at a recent rally and blamed him for scuppering the pact with the Congress.

Shakhya may not be Babbar’a obvious challenger. Seema is. She’s the wife of Ram Veer Upadhyaya, Mayavati’s power minister.

Upadhyaya is said to have invested Rs 1,000 crore in Fatehpur Sikri to improve local power facilities the moment she was declared the candidate eight months ago.

However, the 33KW cables and 40 sub-stations set up in 40 villages carry a price tag: “Seema’s workers are threatening that those who vote against the BSP will lose these bounties and get electricity for only two hours,” said Bulla Pandit, the former headman of the Karai panchayat.

Her alleged tactics of intimidation haven’t gone down well with the up per castes, who complain unceasingly about how the law on the prevention of atrocities against the Scheduled Castes and Tribes was slapped against the Brahmins, Thakurs and Jats.

“When our great power minister informed the chief minister how his Brahmin voters were being harassed, he was told he won his seat because of the Dalit votes and he shouldn’t worry about the other communities,” said Ranveer Singh, a former member of the Fatehpur Sikri zilla panchayat.

If Babbar is indeed third time lucky, sections of the upper castes will still vote for him, if only to keep the BSP candidate out. Babbar is ploughing a lonely furrow. “We told him he will have to fend for himself because we don’t have a network and a vote base here,” said Balkishan Sharma, the local Congress vice-president.

But The actor’s family is behind him, fanning out into the villages. Wife Nadira, sons Aryan and Pratiek, and daughter Juhi have been going out of their way to request village elders to “bless” Babbar.

Fatehpur Sikri votes on May 7