DOING THE DOAB

Identity or livelihood? Between these two streams lies a dilemma for the voters of western UP, ground zero for the most contentious issues of our time

- PRASHANT SRIVASTAVA

Looking accross the Yamuna from Kairana, Uttar Pradesh, you can see the fields of Haryana’s Panipat district—the legendary battlefield is less than an hour away. But it’s the riparian flatlands of western UP, teeming with sugarcane and angry men, that could well be the historic battleground of our times. The battle is one of ideas—a battle for minds—and will perhaps still be raging in crores of individual minds as the region lines up to vote in the first two phases from February 10-14. This was ground zero for some of the most contentious issues of our times: an epicentre of last year’s farm agitation, and also a Hindutva laboratory for over a decade. That, combined with the Doab region’s complex mix of communities, makes for competing loyalties of the most intense sort. How each individual voter resolves those issues will decide over a quarter of Uttar Pradesh’s 403 seats—across a swathe that runs from the temple town of Mathura in the south to Saharanpur up north near the foothills.

The Jat community, dominant in over 50 seats of this region and influential in the rest, are the heart of this conflict. Near-complete converts to the saffron cause till the other day, the farm unrest saw them mobilise defiantly on non-identitarian grounds. The ruling BJP naturally wishes to stanch that trend. That’s why Union home minister Amit Shah was here, going door-to-door, reminding them of the alleged ‘Hindu exodus’ in Kairana in 2014-16, even throwing in anachronistic references to the Mughals. It’s a rich vein the BJP has successfully mined in the past, and could work again—at least enough to divide their votes into innocuous fragments.