By Sushil Kutty
INDIA bloc leaders are disappointed after meeting with Election Commission officials with a specific complaint related to Bihar Voter Roll Revision, alleging that this could trigger “mass disenfranchisement” of Bihar’s poor from the electoral list. An INDIA bloc delegation met the Election Commission on July 2 to voice concerns but declared the meeting “disappointing” and “unfriendly.” Earlier, they had taken the concerns to the “special intensive revision (SIR)”.
Leading the INDIA bloc is, but of course, the Congress, which believes the grand old party will make a turnaround in the 2026 Bihar assembly elections and that there are a number of factors why? For starters, the Congress was the first off the block. Two, the Congress is regaining trust among Bihar’s voters, the impact of which is evident.
Voters have better things to do besides tossing and turning. The number of Bihari displaced by Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta’s “bulldozer action” runs into lakhs and the homeless Bihari are taking the “bulldozer injustice” to Bihar where assembly elections are slated for November. And the message has gone to “our relatives” and “our friends”.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP doesn’t know what’s in store. The BJP will not get their votes in the Bihar elections and of the 40 lakh slum-dwellers in Delhi, half the number are Biharis. The common refrain among the Bihari slum-dwellers is “Bihari will not vote for Baimaan Jhoota Party”. Delhi’s slum-dwellers were overwhelmingly from Bihar and consisted of both Hindus and Muslims.
AAP convener Arvind Kejriwal made a foray into AAP’s one-time stronghold. But AAP and Kejriwal do not resonate in today’s Delhi. To the Bihari slum-dweller, the squalor of a Delhi slum is like Eldorado, the stuff of his parents’ and grandparents’ dreams. No Bihari who clambered into these stinking slums wanted to leave and live anywhere else, not after adding floors to the original one-room tenement.
A second refrain is “Indira Gandhi gave us our jhuggi”. The never-say-die dyed in the wool slum-dweller can stop comparing Indira Gandhi and VP Singh with Modi and Rekha Gupta. Indira Gandhi’s generosity and munificence is remembered to this day. The Congress in the 1970s and 1980s led the poor of Bihar into the national capital and awarded them the luxury of “of owning free plots” on railway property and DDA lands.
In time, more Bihari made a beeline to Delhi and the thatched tenements were teeming with children of the original “slum-dog millionaires”. Life in the slums is now a smoothie for hundreds of thousands, with the third generation of slum-dwellers possessing all “necessary documentation”, for them to demand from Modi and Gupta “homes”.
Armed with Aadhaar Card, Electoral Card and Ration Card, the entire regimen of cards, even Bangladeshi infiltrators live in Delhi government-given flats distributed to Delhi’s slum-dwellers! The Bengali-accented Hindi is a complete giveaway but the Delhi Police is tone-deaf and whether it is the Wazirpur slums or the Daya Basti “colony”, there wouldn’t be slums in Delhi but for Delhi Police in cahoots.
AAP ruled Delhi for nearly 11 years and the “sins of the slums” multiplied. The slums now are where everything and anything illegal goes. Not just “nasha” but also “chaaku-choori”. The Daya Basti slums, for instance, are divided. The far side of the railway crossing is 100% “chaaku-choori” and “this side” is “truely peaceful”. But, today, both sides are united in the face of the common enemy, the “rampaging bulldozer.”
It is in these trying times for the Bihari slum-dwellers of Delhi that hate for the BJP has peaked and love for the Congress has reached a crescendo. Congress politicians “imported from Bihar’s poll-battleground” are climbing atop the ruins of Delhi’s slums and imploring Bihari slum-dwellers to “spread the word back home” and throw the BJP+ out of power. The INDIA bloc is hoping that “Bihari anger” will trump over Election Commission hostility! (IPA Service)
