How Modi’s ‘namak’ analogy in UP is rubbing salt on wounds of beneficiaries

From Mahatma Gandhi’s Salt Satyagrah to colloquial adages and folklore or even our movies and their chartbuster songs, the allegorical significance of namak (salt) and the myriad emotions it can evoke can never be overstated. It is remarkable then that despite its infinitely versatile symbolism, salt hadn’t made a debut yet in poll rhetoric despite the competitive and transactional nature of our electoral system or the penchant our political leaders have for dramatic analogies.

The ongoing Uttar Pradesh elections have now filled that void with none less than the Prime Minister, with his flair for delivering everything that Indians had been deprived of for over seven decades, personally doing the honours. With his rivals, particularly Samajwadi Party’s Akhilesh Yadav and Congress’s Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, repeating ad nauseam the bland and banal charges of UP wallahs burdened by spiraling prices and joblessness under BJP rule, Narendra Modi finally added, though rather belatedly in the month-long poll fiesta, the required seasoning of salt to the poll campaign.

Campaigning in Hardoi on February 20, Modi, with his distinctly clairvoyant instinct, declared he was aware that villagers across UP were talking about the free ration – wheat/rice, chana, cooking oils and, most importantly, salt – that the BJP had distributed to the people of the state during the past two years of the COVID pandemic. The prime minister even knew the exact words being spoken, obviously in perfect synchrony, by these lakhs – or crores? – of villagers: “humne Modi ka namak khaya hai, hum Modi ko dhokha nahi denge (we have eaten Modi’s salt and won’t betray him,” Modi said, quoting the grateful voters of UP.

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Of course, a few days prior, BJP’s incumbent legislator and candidate from Etawah constituency, Sarita Bhadauria, too had tried to use the salt and loyalty correlation but the crassness in her stern reprimand to her voters – “hamara rupya kha gaye, galla kha gaye, namak kha gaye aur ab hamara namaskar sweekar nahi kar rahe (you took our money, ration and salt but aren’t acknowledging us now) – evidently lacked the finesse of Modi’s oratorical flourish.

Doles for the laabharthi

A cursory glance of the many schemes that the Modi government at the Centre has launched since 2014, and the eagerness with which the BJP’s Yogi Adityanath-led government in UP has implemented these since 2017, shows that the state and its people have been the biggest beneficiaries of countless doles – in cash or kind – among all Indian states. If the official data is anything to go by, every third person in UP – the country’s most crowded state with a population and voter count of over 24.10 crore and 15 crore, respectively – has been a laabharthi (beneficiary) of one government scheme or the other.

Let’s just look at some official data to put this claim in perspective. UP has over 2.4 crore beneficiaries under the PM Kisan Nidhi Yojana, over 1.5 crore beneficiaries under the PM Ujjwala Yojana, over 7.8 crore Jan Dhan account holders, over 45 lakh women enrolled under PM Matru Vandana Yojana, over 80 lakh employed under MG-NREGA, over 1.77 crore Ayushman Bharat card holders and over 10 lakh beneficiaries of the PM Awaas Yojana. Further, in just the past year, over 51 lakh accounts have been opened in the state under the Atal Pension Yojana while of the 22.85 crore workers in the unorganised sector who were registered on the Centre’s e-SHRAM portal from across the country, UP alone accounted for a share of nearly 35 per cent registrations.

And then, there is the near-universal distribution of free ration worth₹36,000 crore under the PM Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana as well as a ‘top up’ provided by the state government – duly attested with images of Modi and Yogi on every anna potli (parcels of ration) – through the pandemic months across the state.

In a state that is famous for polarized voting on caste, community or religious lines, the BJP proudly claims to have created a voting bloc that transcends the inherently divisive binaries of Hindu-Muslim or forward caste-backward caste. As UP went into polls, it was this bloc – the laabharthi varg (beneficiary segment) – that the BJP, and even its critics, had believed could translate into an easy victory for the saffron party. This segment was, BJP insiders claim, the buffer that the BJP was banking on over and above the Hindu consolidation in the party’s favour owing to the perceived appeal of Modi and Yogi as well as the under-construction Ram Mandir in Ayodhya or the social engineering that the saffron front had managed since 2014 by chipping away the non-Yadav backward caste votes or the non-Jatav Dalit votes from the SP and Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party, respectively.

Will the beneficiary stay ‘loyal’?

And yet, the people of UP are seemingly complaining about lack of jobs, rising prices, stray cattle, dilution of reservations, agrarian distress, debt-burden, crimes against women, police atrocities on students, communal disharmony, et al amid a perceptible wave in favour of Akhilesh Yadav’s SP-led caste-based alliance. Expectedly then, Modi had to remind the people of UP – after three phases of the polls were over and rumours of a bumper electoral harvest for the SP began to gain momentum – that they were eating “Modi ka namak”.

The BJP claims that the laabharthi varg will prove to be the “deciding factor” in these polls as it is “silently rooting for a BJP government”. “Our government has worked as per the prime minister’s mantra of sabka saath, sabka vikas, sabka vishwas… every section of the population, irrespective of their caste or religious identity has benefitted from the unprecedented welfare schemes that we have launched; despite the obvious challenges of the pandemic, we ensured near-universal distribution of free ration so that no person in UP sleeps on an empty stomach… the people won’t forget this when they cast their vote,” said Sidharth Nath Singh, a minister in the Yogi cabinet and the party’s MLA and candidate from Allahabad West.

Singh’s contention, however, doesn’t find uniform endorsement by ordinary voters on the ground, particularly since the SP has promised to not only continue with the free ration distribution if it comes to power but also address other livelihood issues – key among them being filling up vacancies in government jobs – on a priority basis.

“Before the election campaign picked up, there was a strong feeling that the BJP will benefit greatly because of the laabharthi varg it has created. In my village, every household got free ration and almost every third household has a beneficiary of one government scheme or the other, including direct cash transfers… all of them believed that the government had done something for them that previous regimes hadn’t but the perception changed after the SP’s campaign picked momentum. The SP has successfully tapped into the discontent over mehangai (price rise) and berozgaari (unemployment) and many laabharthis are now saying that if Yogi had given them real jobs or if prices were kept under control, they wouldn’t need to depend on freebies,” Vallabhachrya Pandey, resident of Bhandaha Kala village, on the outskirts on Modi’s Lok Sabha constituency of Varanasi, told The Federal.

In Pipraich town of Gorakhpur district, a bastion of Chief Minister Adityanath, Darshan Nishad (57) says people are divided in his locality over who they wish to vote for. “The youth want change because they have no jobs… the elders feel they should give the BJP another chance; many of them have benefitted from different schemes… sarkar paisa aur ration dono de rahi hai; noon-roti khayenge, bhajpa ko jitayenge khoob chal raha hai (the government is giving money and ration; we’ll eat salt and roti but ensure BJP’s victory has become a popular slogan),” Nishad said.

‘What about unemployment, rising prices?’

Critics of Modi and Yogi don’t share the optimism of Sidharth Nath Singh and aren’t as uncertain about Nishad either. “The laabharthi vote is secure only as long as other bread and butter issues or the poll narrative is under control, but the BJP has not been able to address issues of jobs or rising prices nor is it setting the poll narrative in this election and to top this there is massive anti-incumbency both against the state government and individual BJP MLAs… I’ll give you another example – in 2009, the UPA government won a big mandate at the Centre because it had its own version of laabharthis who had benefitted from NREGA and other central schemes while the government was also performing well on other issues. But by 2014, though welfare schemes were doing well and had actually increased since 2009, the UPA had lost the poll narrative because of scams, Anna Andolan and Modi… the BJP is making a big mistake if it thinks that the laabharthis will vote for it when its people from among this bloc who are also protesting on the streets against joblessness and facing atrocities of the police,” Chittaranjan Mishra, professor at the Gorakhpur University told The Federal.

Political commentator, Dalit activist and professor at Lucknow University, Ravikant agrees with Mishra and says that the prime minister’s “Modi ka namak” comment was in “extremely poor taste and though a section of people may be taken in by it, an equally large number of voters will take it as an assault on their pride and dignity.”

“The emotional connect Indians have with the salt analogy works at many levels and let us not forget that salt is useful only when you add it to something… Modi ji logon se keh rahe hain namak ka haq ada karo par ek bada tabka hai jo is sarkar ki vifaltaon se, berozgaari aur mehangai se pareshaan hai; uske liye Modi ji ka bhaashan zakhm par namak chidakne jaisa hai; woh chubhta hai; dard badhata hai (when Modi asks people to pay the price of salt he is asking for their loyalty but there is a big section of people that is unhappy with the poor performance of the government, with unemployment and rising prices…for them Modi’s speech is like rubbing salt on their wounds; it stings and increases their pain),” Ravikant said.

While the Congress party is, seemingly, still a distant contender for any electoral gains in this election, Priyanka Gandhi’s aggressive counter to Modi’s salt analogy – “unki himmat kaise hui yeh kehne ki, apne unka nahi, namak unhone aapka khaya hai (how dare he say these things; it isn’t you who owe him your loyalty but he who should be loyal to you),” she has been saying repeatedly at her rallies – has been gaining traction among the voters, say political analysts.

“The Congress may not be in a position to win many seats but what Priyanka says, her rebuttals to Modi and Yogi, have been striking a chord with the ordinary people and if you travel in the rural areas where this laabharthi vote is largely concentrated, you will hear people say Modi is sounding arrogant or that he hasn’t done them a favour… the people are also aware that the BJP’s promise for free ration is only till Holi and because the SP has promised to continue distribution if voted to power, the favourable impact of free ration that BJP was expecting has been significantly dented,” says Gorakhpur-based political commentator Harsh Sinha.

Sinha also believes that the reason why Modi began raising the laabharthi bogey aggressively after the third phase of polling was because the remaining phases at that point (February 20 onwards) were in areas that are extremely backward in terms of various social and economic indicators. However, he says that the resonance this pitch should have had is missing because there is already a growing sense among the electorate that the BJP is losing the election.

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“Unlike regions that went to polls in the first three phases, the remaining phases, particularly those left now in the Purvanchal belt, have the highest poverty levels across UP. However, by the time the BJP actually changed its campaign strategy by focusing on achievements like free ration, better infrastructure and equitable development instead of only attacking the SP and Congress on issues of the past or talking about Lord Ram, kabristan, Hindu-Muslims, etc, the SP had already created a buzz about its imminent victory… Naturally, the laabharthi sentiment isn’t as strong anymore because anti-incumbency was already strong and people now believe that the new government will also bring in new schemes for their welfare so the SP should be given a chance,” Sinha said.