Dalits to decide the winner in Ramachandrapuram

RAMACHANDRAPURAM: This town in the vicinity of Draksharamam is in the midst of the summer rush of pilgrims. Most visitors ask for directions to the Pancharama and Manikyamba temples, but this season there's been an influx of political animals who seek to know which way the Jagan sympahy wave lies. This latter question invariably stumps the locals.

There are three main contenders in the fray, two Kapus -- Thota Trimurtulu of the Congresss and Chikkala Ramachandra Rao of the TDP -- and one Setti Balija, Pilli Subhas Chandra Bose of the YSR Congress (YSRC), the incumbent.

The winner is likely to be the one who successfully taps the 35,000 Dalit voters in the constituency. So it's no surprise that a 16-year-old incident is being dredged up to gain the sympathies of the Scheduled Caste voters.

Talk in the streets is that Trimurtulu is a nice man. But back in 1996, he allegedly got two young Dalit men forcibly tonsured to humiliate them.

The incident became a huge controversy then with Dalit activists raising a ruckus and giving it a name. Locally it is remembered as the Shiro Mundanam Case. In the present interplay between the three candidates, the Dalit vote is crucial, and Trimurtulu's adversaries are enjoying telling the story again.

As per conventional wisdom, Dalits here are voters of the Congress, so Trimurtulu is expected to draw much from that vote bank.

But then Subhas Chandra Bose, one of the most loyal of Jagan's apostles, is happy to narrate the Shiro Mundanam Case to whoever will listen, while also hoping that his two Kapu rivals will split their base vote and yield the edge to him. Typical electoral arithmetic.

At the entrance of the Pancharama temple, Sattibabu sits at his post as the custodian of the footwear. A Madiga and a Christian, he is the kind of voter whom the pundits expect to plump for Jagan Mohan Reddy's party.

With one ear cricked to a passing campaign vehicle loudly extolling the virtues of Bose, he certifies that this is going to be a tight fight between YSRC and the Congress.

'Trimurtulu has always been with us. And Bose was not available to ordinary people and he did nothing for us in the last three years,' he complains.

He has no sympathy for Jagan, jail or no jail. 'God will decide the fate of such people,' Sattibabu says and declares that he will vote Congress as always.

Mention of the sympathy vote is enough to divide any group of Ramachandrapuris down the middle. The 'there is' group and the 'there isn't' group. Venkobu, a petty businessman, considers the question a long time and says there is indeed such a wave.

The arrest was vindictive, so he will vote for poor Jagan. Overhearing this, door-to-door cloth vendor Srinivas unburdens himself of his wares and joins issue: 'Jagan is getting what he deserves. I will support the Congress.'

Taking her mind off her soft drink kiosk, dowager Srilakshmi declares, 'No one is honest in politics. Jagan is in the opposition, so the ruling party put him behind bars. If the Congress loses power, someone will put them in jail too.'

As for herself, she likes Timurthulu and will vote for him. 'Trimurtulu is always available to us. Bose did nothing even for people of his own caste,' she says.

Farmer Srinivasa Rao pipes up and says only the rich and the educated would consider corruption as an issue and vote accordingly. But Ramachandrapuris as pragmatic people, and would very likely vote for Trimurtulu because he's in the ruling party and would be able to get some work done. What's a vote to Jagan except a brownie point made.

So where's the TDP man? Chikkala Ramachandra Rao, acknowledged to be a nice man, comes distinctly third in the mindspace of Ramachandrapuram. 'He is a good person. But he is an outsider to us,' said Raiv, a student, alsmost apologetically.

Corruption is far or high places tends to be an abstract issue in towns like Ramachandrapuram. So also the travails of a rich man like Jagan in prison.

His mother and sister were here to address an audience that filled the balconies overlooking the town square, but it was an audience of gawkers rather than an impassioned mob.

Ramachandrapuram is not a drought-affected area, so there's work to be done and the concerns are pragmatic. Samuel, a labourer, encapsulated the question in the mind of most voters here: 'He has an enormous following among the SCs here. But is he the man his father was?'