State of play: The Bruhat Bengaluru Maha Turn Off

Bengaluru: Talk about a dialogue of the deaf! Between the political class and the man on the street… they’ve been talking to each other, at each other, and around each other for weeks. And Bengaluru has either failed to get the message, chosen to ignore it, or is saying, just get Bengaluru back on track, Mr. Chief Minister, poll or no poll.

On Saturday, at the all but empty voting centres, barring the poll officials, downing one coffee shot after another to keep awake, an eye on the clock, waiting for it to strike six, there was nobody! Should we be shocked, surprised, upset, unnerved? Was it not entirely unexpected…The ennui, the sheer boredom across the city whenever the issue was raised, has been palpable for weeks. The BBMP poll. Aka the Bruhat Bengaluru Maha Turn Off!

The abysmal turnout is marginally higher than the voter turnout in the last BBMP polls, which stood at a lukewarm 43%. Today, with ten lakh voters added to the list, if it averages just below 50%, then it’s a cold shoulder that cannot be put down to the usual excuses — an uncaring floating population that isn’t invested in the city, or the exodus that sees weekend revellers head out of town for a long weekend.

Simply put, Bengaluru no longer cares who their BBMP corporator is. That he — and she — are the footsoldiers of the politician, fund collector and vote collector rolled into one is well known. I, for one, already have a vocal, apolitical, smart woman, who heads our street committee. She’s got the dratted pourakarmika out of my hair. She’s got the garbage off our streets. She’s got us to segregate our garbage. And she’s got a garbage collector to come every two days and get the segregated waste to a garbage collection centre. And she doesn’t want her larger than life poster up on every wall!

Why do we — or anyone else on our street — need a corporator at all? He-she doesn’t police the streets, get the traffic police to sort out the double parking or the school buses that are parked outside my gate, the cable guy digging up and leaving huge holes in the pavement that I shelled out Rs 35,000  to fix because even after my father tripped and fell innumerable times on the uneven pavements, every plea to the BBMP had fallen on deaf ears!

There’s been a rank bad stench hanging over this city and it took citizen committees like the one this woman got going, to do what the BBMP has not been able to do for the last five years and more.

And the collective ‘no’ isn’t just because of the misery and disease brought on by the garbage and the stagnant water and the overgrown empty plots. It’s the thought gnawing away at every voter, that this isn’t a poll that would give us a civic body that will last beyond maybe, September.

It was imposed on the city by the writ of the powers-that-be and it could as easily be scrapped if the Governor or the court or the President deem otherwise. A monumental waste of time, energy and funds? Whatever. But, it kept Bengaluru indoors, un-inked. That, and the rain, the sludge, and the overflowing drains!

Or the other thought — and this is the big one — the overwhelming conviction that no new corporator — someone’s wife, sister or mistress — would do anything more or less, than her predecessor. Why vote for ‘her’ when, in reality, you were still voting for ‘him.’ But it wasn’t until I was driving home through Ulsoor market on the last day of campaigning at about half past eleven that night that one realized how this truism was a fact.

Our car scrunched over the garbage as we navigated past the large Jersey cows, consuming the pile of refuse at the rubbish dump that’s been there for as long as I can remember, outside this very church. (Where’s the guarantee any corporator, sitting or incoming, will ever do anything about it!)

Dominating the narrow street was a stage, festooned with a picture of a beaming woman candidate alongside that of the previous corporator, who, no prizes for guessing, had to be her husband. As we slowed and the crowd parted, the man emerged, smiling, from the throng of people jostling for space on the podium, waving at us, complete strangers! The woman, dour-faced, sat, unmoved.    

It was clear to anyone and everyone present, who the real candidate was, who the real power would be. As it must be, across the 198 wards of our wonderful city, consumed by a collective feeling that there was no point in voting for a perpetuation of the status quo, a perpetuation of rule by local goons masquerading as our saviours?

There’s also the political manoeuvring, one party buying off the other, the whispered backroom deals that predicate the voting and ensures the victory of one man before the first vote has even been cast.

The BJP’s once powerful Somanna was invisible. The unspoken rivalry between R Ashok and former chief minister B.S. Yeddyurappa that replicates the internal fight for the upper hand between the Vokkaliga lobby and the Lingayat that the two men represent was not; and the once powerful Ananth Kumar, who knows this city like nobody else, was not as active as one would have expected. That was the BJP. And as the day wore on and the BJP-RSS worker went missing from strongholds like Chamarajpet, Malleswaram and Basavanagudi and Vijayanagar, the panicked message sent out to the BJP MPs like Sadananda Gowda and other MLAs was — get your voters out. Where was Mr. Shettar? Where was Shobha Karandlaje?

The power of the local corporator to buy his votes has always been there. I knew the minute my maid waltzed in, new silver anklets tinkling, flaunting her new sari, that her investment was about to pay off. Walk the candidate, door to door through the slum and she stood to earn a thousand rupees a day. Double, incidentally, over what she earned during the last civic polls.

On Saturday, these slum-dwellers were out in droves. In Gandhinagar, Gandhibazaar, Shivajinagar. And that’s a vote bank that despite spoilers like Asaduddin Owaisi’s Majlis-Ittihadul-Muslimeen and the Samajawadi, traditionally belongs to the Congress in a city where the BJP’s hold over the educated native has always been a given. The irony is that the money that brought Bengaluru’s slum dwellers to the voting booth would be enough to fix our perennially pot-holed roads, our garbage, hell, everything!

Traditionally, a larger voter turn-out is a signal for change, while a lukewarm response, signifies a vote for status quo. But insiders also said, a low voter turn-out brings the margin of victory down, making it that much easier for the challenger to knock off the incumbent. Going by that logic, if the Congress were to win even three to four wards in each of the 28 parliamentary constituencies, then Chief Minister Siddaramaiah could get 80-100 odd seats in the BBMP.

Most civic experts don’t want the Congress to sweep the BBMP, afraid that it would make the ruling party impervious to the city’s needs and set in motion a cannibalization of its assets by greedy corporators. That’s not to Bengaluru’s benefit.

Better a small margin of victory that would impel the man who has had a hard time living down the tag of an outsider to set in motion, that long overdue re-making of Bengaluru into a model city. Siddaramaiah has already said that outright victory or not, he will sort out our garbage and traffic woes and build that east-west and north-south corridor to decongest Bengaluru. He kept his word on the signal-free corridor to the airport. He must keep his word again.

Let’s hope that in the mad rush to trifurcate, split the city into five parts, a presidential sign-off or not on fresh polls, Mr Siddaramaiah realises that this is the moment to forge his legacy, leave his own mark on this city. And maybe next time, Bengaluru will come out to vote for something they believe is worth voting for.