A14 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.TUESDAY, MARCH 1 , 2022
eight months, Gautam has made
calls, sent letters, even hired a
lawyer for $15 to send online
petitions to Modi and Adityanath
so he could get a toilet installed at
home. “No response,” he fumed.
Yet Ayodhya also has im-
proved, Gautam acknowledged.
Beyond its ghats, or riverfront
steps, and its timeless churn of
bathing pilgrims, holy men and
beggars stands a gleaming prom-
enade, renovated by Adityanath
in 2019. Outside town, there will
soon be a new airport named
after Lord Ram. A new train
station will be the largest in Uttar
Pradesh.
Thirty years ago, Gautam said,
his family helped feed and shelter
the Hindu “volunteers” who tore
down the mosque. Today, off the
main road, a new Ram temple is
rising. And for Gautam, that was
enough.
“Look, I’ll still vote for Yogi,” he
said. “But, please, get me a toilet.”A worsening divide
As the tight race has gathered
steam in recent weeks, Modi has
mostly pitched the BJP as the
party that’s delivered tangible
results to Uttar Pradesh: new
highways, new loans for entre-preneurs, new colleges for aspir-
ing doctors. Adityanath has been
more pointed. This month in
Shahjahanpur, a sugar cane re-
gion, he said his opponents were
the ones who pander to religion.
“I talk about sugar cane, they
talk about [Mohammad Ali] Jin-
nah,” he said, referring to the
founding father of Pakistan at the
partition of India in 1947. “I talk
about holistic development, they
talk about Muslim burial
grounds.”
A day later, Akhilesh Yadav —
the Samajwadi Party, or Socialist
Party, leader who is seen as the
BJP’s main rival — swooped into
Shahjahanpur by helicopter
bearing a different message. On-
stage, a band played music remi-
niscent of both Sufi qawwalis and
Hindu songs of worship, with
lyrics that drove the point home:
We are residents of this coun-
try,
All its people, we love; Akh-
ilesh, we love
“Akhilesh is our only hope,”
said Hafeez Ansari, a Muslim
member of the party, standing in
the crowd.
That sense of apprehension
has been echoed by Muslims
across the state ahead ofMarch 10, when results of the
vote will be announced. With
Adityanath at the helm for the
past five years, Uttar Pradesh has
passed laws to prevent the
slaughtering of cows and discour-
age interfaith marriages, two
measures that critics say target
Muslims. Headlines about mobs
lynching Muslims or right-wing
leaders delivering hate-filled
speeches have continued to crop
up.
“We’re afraid of what will hap-
pen if they’re reelected,” said
Maqbool Hasan, a leader of Vara-
nasi’s Muslim weaving communi-
ty. For one thing, the economy is
so bad that the number of looms
operating is a quarter of what it
was during the early 2000s, he
said. Weavers have quit to drive
rickshaws and sell vegetables.
Beggars are everywhere.
Then there is the worsening
religious division.
“There’s poison in the air,” said
Hasan, who says he fears that
Muslims one day could be asked
to vacate the Hindu holy city.
A few weeks ago, a Hindu
nationalist group put up posters
telling non-Hindus they were for-
bidden to visit Varanasi’s ghats.
(The posters were later takendown.) Hasan saw further worry-
ing developments this month. A
protest erupted in southern India
over whether Muslim students
could wear the hijab to class,
sparking angry showdowns in
several states between Muslim
women in headscarves and Hin-
du men in saffron shawls.
Across town, Vishwambhar
Mishra felt sympathy for the
Muslims, even frustration.
As the high priest of the Sankat
Mochan, one of the most influen-
tial Hindu temples in Varanasi,
Mishra made for an unlikely crit-
ic of the BJP. But all around him,
he said, he saw Hindu religious
sentiment being “exploited.”
In December, Mishra said,
Modi had swept into Varanasi,
cameras in tow, to pray at a shrine
to Shiva and give his blessings to
the Kashi Vishwanath renova-
tion, which will feature grand
prayer halls and a dramatic wa-
terfront staircase.
“If you say, ‘I can’t get a job, I
can’t find a good hospital, the
price of petrol is over 100 rupees,’
they say, ‘But look at the tem-
ple!’ ” he said, throwing his hands
up. “What is this? Let me tell you:
It’s not good for Hinduism, and
it’s not good for the country.”PHOTOS BY VIVEK SINGH FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Construction in the Kashi Vishwanath Temple Corridor is seen from the Ganges River in Varanasi; the
$100 million temple renovation was promised by the Bharatiya Janata Party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who inaugurated the
project in December. Shivam Chaudhari, a BJP supporter despite his financial difficulties, stands near a cremation on the riverside steps
in Varanasi. BJP workers gather at a local party office in the city. R.P. Singh, a retired archaeology professor, s its at Pappu’s tea shop,
reknowned for its political chatter. Pilgrims and boats line the ghats, or steps, along the Sarayu River in the temple town of Ayodhya.
Gaurav Gautam works ferrying pilgrims on the Sarayu. Temporary structures separate housing from the temple project in Varanasi.BY GERRY SHIH,
NIHA MASIH
AND ANANT GUPTAvaranasi, india — Shivam
Chaudhari dreams of working
with computers, maybe one day
in Dubai. Instead, he says, he’s
condemned to cremating bodies
here on the banks of the Ganges
River.
He has applied, and failed, to
get one of the office jobs that are
so scarce today. He has tried, and
struggled, to save any money,
with inflation so rampant. When
the novel coronavirus struck this
city of pilgrims two years ago,
corpses were piled so far up the
riverfront steps that it was “over-
whelming,” he recalled. Yet, when
his community, a low-ranked
caste traditionally tasked with
burning bodies, asked for masks
and vaccines to carry out its
work, the government, led by the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP),
said no.
Still, when you ask the 22-year-
old devout Hindu which party he
supports, he doesn’t hesitate.
“The BJP,” Chaudhari said, as
he showed off a video he took
recently of Prime Minister Nar-
endra Modi cruising in a boat on
the Ganges, shortly after he inau-
gurated the $100 million renova-
tion of a Hindu temple up the
river. “The King of India,” Chaud-
hari captioned his Facebook post.
This month, roughly 150 mil-
lion voters, including Chaudhari,
are casting ballots in Uttar
Pradesh, the most populous state
in India and a political battle-
ground where the elections are
widely seen as a referendum on
Modi and his BJP.
At play are dueling personal-
ities, perennial debates over eco-
nomic development and law and
order, and the rivalries between
castes that make up the complex
jigsaw of Uttar Pradesh politics.
But beneath it all, the battle could
be tipped by the same overriding
force that has long polarized
India: religion.
In interviews across Uttar
Pradesh, next to fields of sugar
cane, at vast political rallies and
in the shadow of ancient temples,
voters said they were weighing
promises of jobs, stability and
basic services made by Modi and
his ally Yogi Adityanath, the fire-
brand Hindu cleric who has been
chief minister of Uttar Pradesh
since 2017. By those measures,
some voters felt disappointed.
Inflation in the state has topped
6 percent, according to India’s
central bank, while the rate of
employment in formal jobs, hurt
by the pandemic, has fallen below
33 percent, from 38 percent in
2016, according to the Center for
Monitoring Indian Economy, an
independent think tank.
But even if jobs numbers have
waned, many said, their sense of
Hindu identity has not.
“I do blame the government
for corona, but would someone
other than Yogi have managed
any better?” Chaudhari asked.
What Adityanath has managed,
he said, was making sure Mus-
lims no longer dare to intimidate
Hindus in Varanasi’s streets, or to
wave the Pakistani flag in public.
BJP officials and supporters of-
ten describe Hindus, who make
up 80 percent of India, as facing
threats — real or unfounded —
from the country’s Muslim mi-
nority.
“The Muslims now stay in
line,” he said with satisfaction.
“Hindus finally feel secure.”
In 2014, Modi swept to power
nationally by touting his eco-
nomic know-how, his corruption-
free image and, more subtly, his
Hindu nationalist bona fides. But
in 2017, the BJP overwhelmingly
won the Uttar Pradesh state elec-
tions for the first time in decades
with a more overtly religious
platform: The party pledged the
controversial construction of a
temple to the Hindu god Ram in
Ayodhya, on the site of a 16th-
century mosque that had been
demolished by a Hindu mob in
1992, and promised a grand reno-
vation of the Kashi Vishwanath
Temple in Varanasi. Modi inaugu-
rated the temple renovation in
December to Chaudhari’s delight.
Those banner projects, com-
bined with a raft of new laws in
Uttar Pradesh that appear to
target Muslims, have fueled criti-
cism from the BJP’s opponents,
who say the ruling party is under-
mining modern India’s secular
foundations.
But those initiatives also have
left an impression on voters such
as Gaurav Gautam. Sitting beside
the Sarayu River in Ayodhya, the
38-year-old boatman said he was
frustrated with BJP officials who
once promised plumbing to poor
residents like him. For the past
Enduring popularity
For every Mishra, there are
Hindu voters such as the regulars
at Pappu’s teahouse in Varanasi, a
hangout renowned for political
chatter. Over chai and chickpeas,
locals offer their takes on the
day’s headlines — and a glimpse
into the BJP’s upper-class sup-
port.
It’s not all about Hindu nation-
alism, argued R.P. Singh, a retired
archaeology professor. For all
their faults, Modi and Adityanath
have never been trailed by allega-
tions of corruption, a rare quality
in Indian politics, he said. The
last time the Samajwadi Party’s
Yadav served as chief minister,
from 2012 to 2017, organized
crime gangs run by Yadavs —
members of the political leader’s
caste — and Muslims ran amok,
Singh said, echoing an allegation
frequently made by the BJP
against its opponents.
“There were kidnappings, car-
jackings, politicians dropping by
police stations bailing out crimi-
nals,” Singh said. On the cam-
paign trail, Yadav has often re-
torted that the BJP, rather than
his party, is filled with criminal
elements and has pointed to ex-
amples of current and former
BJP lawmakers who have faced
accusations of murder and rape.
Too many people were expect-
ing welfare handouts — and eco-
nomic miracles — from the BJP,
Singh said. “Instead of blaming
the government, why don’t we
blame ourselves?” he asked.
Milan Vaishnav, an expert on
Indian politics at the Carnegie
Endowment for International
Peace, said the BJP’s law-and-
order image, combined with the
appeal of Hindutva, or a form of
religious nationalism, could out-
weigh voters’ concerns about the
slumping economy or its pan-
demic management.
“The link between perform-
ance and accountability is not at
all clear,” Vaishnav said. “Modi’s
popularity is still sky-high.
There’s an enormous reservoir of
goodwill and confidence in his
leadership.”
For decades, Uttar Pradesh,
with its dizzying array of castes
jostling for power and a 20 per-
cent Muslim population, was
seen as an electoral puzzle that, if
solved, would pave the way to the
prime minister’s office in New
Delhi. Some parties wooed Dalits,
formerly known as untouchables,
while others pursued Muslims as
they cobbled together coalitions
of support. In the 1990s, the BJP,
once known as the party of
m iddle-to-upper-class traders,
began a concerted effort to win
over all Hindus, reaping signifi-
cant rewards.
This year, one region where the
BJP could lose support among
Hindus is western Uttar Pradesh.
A stretch of farmland dominated
by an agrarian caste known as
Jats, the region became polarized
along religious lines after deadly
riots broke out in 2013, killing
more than 60 people, the majori-
ty of them Muslims. After that,
the Jats mobilized behind the
BJP, giving it a crucial boost in
Uttar Pradesh.
In the last state elections, the
BJP swept the region, collecting
53 of the 58 seats in the Jat belt.
Then came 2020. Modi intro-
duced an overhaul to agricultural
subsidies, which sparked huge,
year-long protests by growers.
After angry farmers occupied
Delhi’s borders in protest and
fought with police, BJP leaders
hit back, accusing the demonstra-
tors of being a front for Sikh
separatists or leftists.
Modi withdrew the laws in
November, but at the side of a
dusty road in Pinna village in
Muzaffarnagar district, Rajveer
Malik, a 59-year-old sugar cane
farmer, wasn’t able to forgive the
BJP. He was voting for the opposi-
tion.
“The farmers who feed the
nation were called names,” he
said. “In a democracy, everyone
has the right to protest against
the government. We haven’t seen
such arrogance before.”
For many, the choice is harder.
Sumit Malik, a 25-year-old farm-
er who is not related to Rajveer,
said he has always voted for the
BJP. “Modi made us feel pride in
being Hindus,” he said.
But last year, he joined the
farm law protests and, for the
first time, began to question his
allegiances. Soon after, other con-
cerns surfaced. Unemployment
was rising. Farming incomes
were down, and electricity prices
were shooting up. Last year, his
family shelled out $225 on elec-
tricity bills, three times the
amount they had paid previously,
and to make ends meet, Malik felt
compelled to open a shop selling
pesticides.
What the BJP had done for the
Hindus was good, said Malik,
pointing — again — to the Ram
temple in Ayodhya.
“But will that fill our stom-
ach?” he asked. “For farmers, our
fields are our temples.”Voters in key Indian state weigh jobs against religious ties
Despite economic woes,
many still hold to Modi’s
Hindu nationalism