 "Congress leader Rahul Gandhi during an interaction with fishermen in Begusarai, Bihar, on November 2 photo: pti")
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Sunday jumped in a turbid Begusarai pond, swam almost half its length, and joined his party’s youth leader Kanhaiya Kumar and Vikassheel Insaan Party’s (VIP’s) Mukesh Sahani to give a hand to fishermen to pull the fishing net out of water.
In other parts of Bihar, addressing public meetings in the past couple of days, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah have harped on the ruling National Democratic Alliance’s (NDA’s) promise of providing an additional ₹4,500 “topup” from the Centre to farmers for aquaculture, ensuring that they receive ₹9,000 per annum if the alliance returns to power in the state.
According to the Bihar caste survey of 2023, the Mallah caste group, which depends on rowing boats and catching fish for its livelihood, comprises 2.6 per cent of the state’s population. Along with the Nishad, Bind, Manjhi, Kevat, and Turaha groups, which too rely on water bodies for survival, these communities account for a substantial 9.6 per cent of the population, and are classified as Extremely Backward Classes (EBCs).
Apart from fishing, these communities grow makhana. At least for the past one year, not just Gandhi but Union Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, and others, on their visits to Bihar, have waded into muddy waters to try their hand at sowing makhana seeds or catching fish. In this Assembly polls, the rival alliances of the NDA and INDIA bloc have courted the community like never before.
The INDIA bloc has announced Sahani, the 44-year-old who used to design film sets in Mumbai and has proclaimed he is “Son of Mallah”, is its deputy chief ministerial candidate. Weeks prior to this, when an upset Sahani was on the brink of quitting the INDIA bloc, and posted on X his intent to hold a press conference, Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation chief Dipankar Bhattacharya had intervened to speak to Gandhi to persuade the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leadership to stop Sahani from leaving the alliance. In the event, the VIP got 15 seats to contest, which sources in the INDIA bloc said was twice as many as the NDA would have offered him.
The INDIA bloc’s desperation in seeking the vote of these EBCs, and of the NDA’s to retain it, is evident. In Muzaffarpur’s Aurai Assembly seat, which the RJD has contested over the last few decades, the INDIA bloc fielded Bhogendra Sahani of the VIP, while the NDA dropped its sitting legislator, Ram Surat Rai of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), to field Rama Nishad, wife of two-term former BJP Muzaffarpur Lok Sabha member Ajay Nishad. It is a first that the principal parties have not fielded a Yadav candidate in the constituency since it was created in 1967.
In Bihar, the NDA and INDIA blocs have support bases across castes and communities that are almost cast in stone. The INDIA bloc needs a shift of 2-3 per cent for the 2025 polls to become as close a battle as the 2020 polls were.
In Muzaffarpur’s Baikunthpur village, Lakshman Sahni, in his 40s, who drives an auto-rickshaw in Delhi but has returned to vote, says he could this time vote for the RJD since Sahni could stand a chance to be deputy chief minister. However, the women in his household are “Nitish supporters”, especially after some have received ₹10,000 in their bank accounts, and there is the promise of receiving another ₹2 lakh in the next two and a half years as stated by Shah in his rallies.
While the younger men in the community, such as Lakshman, are enthused by RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav’s promise of delivering jobs in the state to stop migration, older ones remember the Yadav assertion of the rule of Lalu Prasad-Rabri Devi, which still makes them wary of voting against Nitish Kumar.
In Patna, Muzaffarpur, Vaishali, and the rest of the Mallah belt of North Bihar, where campaigning ended for the first phase on Tuesday evening, the November 6 vote would determine whether Tejashwi Yadav-led INDIA bloc is able to muster votes beyond the RJD’s Muslim-Yadav base, and if Sahani is able to sway his community to transfer its votes en bloc to the alliance.
