"The baaraat is ready and waiting for the bridegroom," said Kamlesh Mishra, a former government employee and supporter of Narendra Modi, who I met in Varanasi. The people of Benaras might do their best to keep the conversation engaging but there are, after all, only that many ways of saying "I support Modi."
Having exhausted the morning talking to locals dreaming furiously of electing a man who could be India's future prime minister, I decided to use the rest of the day to talk to visitors to the city, whose voting preferences elsewhere in India would determine whether that is likely to happen.
As the cliché goes, Kashi, the sacred city within Varanasi, is a “microcosm of India”. Over centuries, the steady flow of pilgrims from all parts of the country has created a thriving cosmopolitanism, in which, as the epic scholarly tome The Sacred Complex of Kashi notes, even temples have come to be managed by priests from different regions.
"Kedar temple, Kedar ghat, Tilabhandeshwar and Vishalakshi managed by the South Indians; the Amba and the Gopal temples, looked after by the Gujaratis; the Balaji and the temples at Brahma ghat, owned by the Maithilis; the Pishachamochan and the Lakshmi Kund, managed by the Bhojpuris; and the Kali temple...owned by the Bengalis," the authors say.
I decided to do a spot survey among the pilgrims, but I did not reckon how hard it would be, given the multiplicity of languages involved.
“English or Hindi?” I asked a group of women wearing the trademark mangalgiri cotton sarees of Andhra.
“Nah,” they nodded. “Telugu.”
“Seemandhra or Telangana?”
“Andhra”
“District?”
“Kakinada. East Godavari district.”
While the women vaguely understood my questions, I had no way of following their responses, and so in some parts of the conversation, as a translation later revealed, the questions bore no relation to the answers.
“Who are you voting for?”
“You tell us who we should be voting for. You are a journalist. Who should we be voting for?”
“Jagan Reddy? Kiran Reddy? Chandrababu Naidu?”
“We were all one state. We are separated now. No one could stop it. I don't feel like voting for anyone now.”
“Jagan Reddy. Kiran Reddy. Who is your top pick?”
“You tell us who should we be voting for? Should we vote for Jagan Reddy? They separated us. After our children complete their education, where do they go for jobs? This KCR is saying that he will get us out of Hyderabad.”
The women promptly identified their MP. “Pallam Raju. Central Minister.” But when I brought up Narendra Modi, they seemed either not to know or not to care.
“Narendra Modi. What do you think of him?” I asked.
“Where are you from? What place do you belong to?” they asked me in turn.
“Narendra Modi?” I asked again.
But they were still on Telangana. “Kiran Reddy at least resigned and started this new Jai Samaikyandhra Party. Chandrababu Naidu allowed them early on to separate the state…”
***
The pilgrims from Maharashtra had heard of Modi. But he did not matter much to them, as one group from Tuljapur district, that had come to Benaras by “luxury gaadiyaa” (luxury bus), stated quite emphatically.
“Humari taraf nahi hai,” said Subhash Bhosade, a middle-aged man dressed in white shirt, trousers and topi.
His dismissal of Modi agitated his local tour guide, a young man named Vishal, who interjected, “Narendra Modi ko jeetao.”
Bhosade stuck to his ground. “We vote for the Congress.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because the minister Padamsinh Patil is from our village.”
Patil is the MP of Osamanabad constituency, of which Tuljapur is a part. He is from the Nationalist Congress Party and not the Congress. He used to be a minister in Maharashtra but is not currently one. Despite these inconsistencies, Bhosade’s response only confirmed that beyond north India, Modi was not as much a draw.
***
“No BJP in Tamil Nadu,” said Swaminathan, a retired labour union leader from Tamil Nadu’s Tiruvallur district. In his late seventies, he had come to Benaras to fulfill his wife Lakshmi’s desire to visit the Kashi Vishwanath temple.
Identifying himself as a supporter of the Congress, he admitted that the party was “weak” in the state.
“What about DMK?”
“DMK family problem. Eldest son fighting. Kanimozhi fighting. Maran 2G fraud.”
“AIADMK?”
“Jayalalithaa speaking but not doing.”
Despite that, according to Swaminathan, AIADMK was expected to do reasonably well. The allies of the BJP, he said, would not benefit a great deal on account of Modi.
***
While most pilgrims come to Benaras to visit the Kashi Vishwanath temple dedicated to Lord Shiva, those from Bengal head to Thakur Dwar, a Krishna shrine located some distance from the city. A resident of Kolkata, Roopa Das was on the way to the railway station to catch a train to Mathura, another Krishna shrine, and just had enough time to answer quick questions.
“Who are you voting for?”
“Aisa khatab bole? How can I say aloud?
“How is Mamata di’s government doing?”
“Bhaalo. Good.”
“That means you would vote for Trinamool?”
“Je kaam karbe wohi paabe. The party that works gets our votes,” she said, with a smile, before rushing off.
***
On the way to the ghats, I met another group of Telugu-speaking pilgrims. They were from Mahbubnagar district of the newly formed Telangana. Only one of them spoke Hindi. His name was Hussain. He was the tour guide.
“Who are you voting for?”
“Telangana mein Chandrashekhar ka hota.”
K Chandrashekhar Rao is the chief of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi, the party that was at the forefront of the statehood movement, and which might reap electoral dividends this time.
“What about Narendra Modi?”
The only way Modi would become relevant in their region, Hussain said, would be if the TRS chose to ally with the BJP.
***
There is a joke among journalists that the boatmen of Benaras are better at predicting electoral outcomes than pollsters. With pilgrims from all over India riding with them, the mallahs have a knack of knowing the national undercurrent.
Narendra Bharati laughed when I told him this. We are on his boat in the middle of Ganga.
“I think your opinion polls are better,” the middle-aged boatman said. “The other day I was watching Zee News and they were giving 217 seats to the BJP.”
He went on to discuss the opinion poll results in great detail, and I had almost given up on the hope of some earthy wisdom, when he delivered his punch line: “Jiskaa samikaran zyaada ho jaata hai, uski taraf bhaagte hai." Once a party gets enough seats to come into striking distance of power, others want to enter into alliances with it.
By then, Bharati has turned expansive. With the wind against us, he strained as he rowed the boat, while continuing his analysis of the mood of the nation. “Look, 60% of people in this country are workers," he said. "The day they don't labour, they don't get to eat. Thirty percent are budhijeevi, intellectuals. Baaki bachche 10% wo hai badhe audhe ke log. The remaining 10% are powerful people, which includes police, politicians, criminals and the media.”
Click here to read all the stories Supriya Sharma has filed about her 2,500-km rail journey from Guwahati to Jammu to listen to India's conversations about the elections – and life.