Every vehicle passing the tehsil office of Tirora in Gondia district stirs up dust and fine sand, remnants from trucks ferrying loads from dredging pits along the Wainganga river, 30km away. With each roar of vehicle motors, a layer of dust settles on Nilesh Khobragade, 32, seated cross-legged in a tent opposite the office. A farm activist and former sarpanch of Indora Khurd village, Khobragade has been protesting, on and off, since June.
Seasons passed in these months, he said. He hosted a small Ganapati idol for 10 days in his tent, celebrated the Bail Pola festival, decorating a draught animal beside the tent, and observed Janmashtami. Even as the months passed, one thing remained constant: “Tragedy kept befalling small farmers and agricultural labourers,” he told THE WEEK. This year alone, farmers have suffered crop damage from harsh, sporadic rains, a flooded Wainganga in September, and wild boars trampling standing crops.
Khobragade has put forth 34 demands, including a few intriguing propositions such as Rs15,000 as subsidy for wages under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act to pay labourers during sowing and harvesting. With soybean prices plunging to 2011-12 levels, and paddy farmers forced to sell rice below the government-assured support price until procurement centres open, Khobragade and others in Tirora have a key demand for those aspiring to represent them in the Maharashtra assembly as the state goes to the polls on November 20: “Fix a fair minimum support price, and keep government procurement centres open year-round.”
His dogged struggle aligns with widespread demonstrations across Vidarbha, a region in eastern Maharashtra comprising 11 districts known as much for its turbulent agrarian crises as for its ‘white gold’ or cotton. In every tehsil, farmers are raising concerns regarding irrigation, crop insurance and commodity prices―issues radically altered from the state’s distinct rejection of the BJP’s recent brand of politics during the Lok Sabha polls early this year.
Distress in the countryside
Leaders of the ruling coalition say rural distress played a significant role in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls in Maharashtra, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s warnings about the opposition INDIA bloc’s perceived plans to snatch the buffaloes and mangalsutras of poor voters fell flat. Modi himself, speaking in Wardha in September, acknowledged the anger in Vidarbha, calling the farmers central to Maharashtra’s prosperity. “The first hero of Maharashtra’s multidimensional progress is the farmer of Vidarbha. The road to Maharashtra’s prosperity goes through him,” he said.
In response, the Eknath Shinde government rolled out several initiatives aimed at the rural poor, including the flagship Ladki Bahin scheme that deposits Rs1,500 into women’s accounts monthly. Farmers also received payments from both the Union government’s PM-Kisan Samman Nidhi and the state government’s Namo Shetkari Mahasanman Nidhi Yojana, which has been paying Rs6,000 per year to 92 lakh small and marginal farmers since its introduction last year.
Fighting for justice: Nilesh Khobragade on hunger strike outside the Tirora tehsil office in Gondia on October 15 | Kavitha Iyer
In early October, at an event he attended in Washim, western Vidarbha, Modi inaugurated more than 7,500 projects that were set up by beneficiaries of the Agriculture Infrastructure Fund, a Central scheme launched in 2020 to provide medium- and long-term loans to improve agri infrastructure related to processing, packaging and cold storage.
By the end of September, nearly 9.4 lakh Vidarbha farmers also benefited from a new electricity concession scheme that eliminated bills for agricultural pumps, with the state covering the cumulative cost of Rs14,761 crore. “We have now covered the gap on farmers’ needs,” said Pankaj Bhoyar, two-time MLA and the BJP’s candidate in Wardha. “This is going to help us in the polls.”
Recently, the state government reversed a decision to halt the Rs1 lakh ex gratia payments to families affected by farm suicides. In the first six months of 2024, the 11 districts of Vidarbha recorded 687 farm suicides. Officials assessed that suspending the payments would tarnish the government’s image.
Returning to the voter, humbly
On October 5, a mob of about 1,000 Muslim protesters hurled stones at the Nagpuri Gate police station in Amravati, demanding action against Ghaziabad seer Yati Narsinghanand for objectionable comments about the Prophet. The clash left at least 21 policemen injured and several police vehicles damaged. This marked the second serious conflagration in Amravati, following the 2021 violence that led to curfew being imposed for days.
“All elections are dirty,” Yashomati Thakur, former minister and Congress MLA from Teosa in Amravati, told THE WEEK. “This one is dangerously communalised.”
On her way to meetings with Congress workers, supporters and local influencers, Thakur accused the BJP of turning the district into a testing ground for sharply polarised electoral contests by “instigating aggrieved elements” in the Muslim community to stir unrest.
Congress leader Yashomati Thakur campaigning in Teosa assembly constituency in Amravati on October 17 | Kavitha Iyer
A three-time MLA, single mother, and the guardian minister of Amravati during the 2021 riots, Thakur is viewed as a capable administrator. She displayed her provocative side recently when, during a victory rally after Daryapur MLA Balwant Wankhede won the Lok Sabha polls, she mimicked the action of stringing a bow to release an arrow, to annoy BJP candidate Madhavi Latha in Hyderabad, who had performed the same gesture during a Ram Navami procession amid a communally charged campaign in May 2024.
According to her team, divisions have been deepening in Amravati since 2014. Feeling pressured, they now encourage lower-rung leaders to ensure that local Hindus are included, saying, “Hindu bhhaiyon ko bhi saath lena hai (We must also take our Hindu brothers along).”
Thakur is concerned that groups of 10-15 young men now march through the city on Independence Day or Republic Day carrying saffron flags instead of the tricolour. “If this is supported by the BJP or a son of Vidarbha like Devendra Fadnavis, it is an insult to the nation.”
While Thakur touches upon these ideas in her speeches, her ground-level campaigning is more personal, involving door-to-door visits and connecting with even strangers through gestures―offering to carry an elderly woman’s bag, asking the sister-in-law of a household for a snack box, calling on a party worker recovering from a fracture, and visiting soybean and paddy fields in Teosa ravaged by October thundershowers. “Some of us do this year-round,” she told THE WEEK, “so it doesn’t feel any different on a campaign day.”
Steering the ‘narrative’
Marking a shift from the Lok Sabha polls, the RSS is now active in grassroots campaigning, organising thousands of “awareness” meetings in homes and neighbourhoods. Hindutva organisations such as the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM) and the Bajrang Dal have also been mobilised.
Days before a large gathering of first-time voters in Nagpur, the BJYM staged a striking, albeit ineffective, protest at a lecture by journalist-reformist-rationalist Shyam Manav of the Akhil Bharatiya Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti. Titled ‘Samvidhaan Bachao, Maharashtra Bachao’ (Save the Constitution, Save Maharashtra), the event continued even after BJYM activists stormed the stage and were asked to leave.
Bunty Kukde, a former Bajrang Dal worker, ex-corporator and current president of the BJP’s Nagpur city unit, used a parable to illustrate the party’s sharp narrative against the INDIA bloc. He described how Yama, the god of death, and his bookkeeper Chitragupta decided that a bell must ring each time someone tells a lie. Days later, said Kukde, when all the bells rang simultaneously and Yama asked about the pandemonium, Chitragupta said, “Rahul Gandhi is holding a rally.”
Vote check: (From left) Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar, Union Minister Nitin Gadkari, Chief Minister Eknath Shinde and Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis present a cheque to beneficiaries of the Ladki Bahin scheme in Nagpur on August 31 | PTI
The punchline, though somewhat predictable, was greeted with roars of approval and chants of ‘Jai Shri Ram’ at the gathering of first-time voters.
Badal Raut, Nagpur president of the BJYM and son of a vegetable vendor, says young and first-time voters are their campaign’s prime targets. A video they showed to first-time voters rehashed the ‘India story’ that multinational corporations eyeing India’s vast market harp on―infrastructure development, high-speed road connectivity and digitisation. There was no mention of Vidarbha’s farmer suicides, the ongoing agrarian crisis, or India’s stark inequality.
In Wardha, the Lok Sabha seat that the BJP lost in the polls, the party’s incumbent MLA Bhoyar undertook a candid analysis of the defeat. The BJP had lost the seat not to the Congress, the traditional claimant of the Vidarbha ‘bastion’, but to Amar Kale of the NCP’s Sharad Pawar faction, a virtual non-entity in the region. Kale led in five of Wardha’s six assembly segments, including all four where incumbent MLAs belong to the BJP. “The lead in Wardha assembly segment was the smallest,” Bhoyar told THE WEEK.
According to Bhoyar and many BJP leaders in Vidarbha, the INDIA bloc’s focus on a potential threat to constitutionally guaranteed reservations for marginalised communities resonated with Vidarbha’s poor. “Well, the BJP did return to power,” said Bhoyar, “and no such attack on the Constitution is in sight, so that false narrative by the Congress no longer holds any appeal.”
The terms ‘false narrative’ and ‘fake narrative’ are liberally used, in English, by members of the BJP, the Bajrang Dal, the BJYM and other sangh parivar organisations during public meetings and voter interactions. Samir Kunawar, a two-time BJP legislator from Hinganghat in Wardha, remains unfazed by the 20,000-vote lead that Kale got in his assembly segment.
“People were angry with the sitting BJP MP,” he said of Ramdas Tadas, a wrestler-turned-politician whose daughter-in-law, too, ran against him, polling a couple of thousand votes. “And then there were the lies spun by the opposition. That won’t be repeated―the assembly election is a different scenario altogether,” he said.
Saddling up old warhorses
The Congress is grappling with the hard-bargaining ally Shiv Sena (UBT) in Vidarbha, but there is confidence among candidates that stems from regional satraps. These include Anuja Kedar, wife of five-time MLA Sunil Kedar in Saoner in Nagpur district, who retained his seat during the Modi wave; leader of opposition in the assembly Vijay Wadettiwar in Brahmapuri in Chandrapur district; and state Congress president Nana Patole in Sakoli in Bhandara district. There is also a hope that the five newly elected Congress MPs from Vidarbha will boost the party’s campaign.
The BJP, too, has played it safe, relying on old warhorses and introducing new faces only to counter serious local anti-incumbency or to accommodate younger leaders allied with Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis or Union Minister Nitin Gadkari.
The Congress hopes that anti-incumbency will favour them at least in pockets. In Chandrapur district, party members told THE WEEK that there was deep, longstanding anger against Sudhir Mungantiwar, minister and the BJP’s six-time MLA who represents Ballarpur. Mungantiwar had lost the Lok Sabha polls to Pratibha Dhanorkar, Warora MLA and widow of Suresh Dhanorkar, the Congress’s solitary Maharashtra MP in 2019 who passed away in 2023.
Buoyed by the poll victory and her appeal among the Kunbis, Dhanorkar demanded the Warora seat for her brother Pravin Kakade. The party has obliged, even though Dhanorkar was recently involved in a public spat with Wadettiwar, the opposition leader.
Water for votes
Across Vidarbha, recent announcements of irrigation projects and money disbursed for delayed schemes have caught the attention of voters and village officials. “Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis wants to exponentially increase the area under irrigation in Vidarbha and Marathwada,” said a revenue department official in Yavatmal district.
In August, the state government said it had allocated Rs5,441 crore for the Vidarbha Irrigation Development Corporation to complete delayed irrigation projects. It also announced a project worth Rs88,000 crore to link the Wainganga and Nalganga rivers in Vidarbha, to divert water from the ongoing Gosikhurd project (under construction for 40 years, prompting it to be likened to the deity Hanuman’s tail for its infinite length) to drought-prone areas in western Vidarbha.
Originally proposed in 2009, the Wainganga-Nalganga river-linking was pitched as a project backed by Fadnavis until it was put into cold storage during Uddhav Thackeray’s tenure as chief minister. Once complete, it will irrigate 3.7 lakh hectares across six districts with a high number of farm suicides.
However, in Tirora, floods from the Wainganga river in September have devastated local paddy farmers. “Seventy per cent of our paddy was destroyed,” said Gopichand Uprikar, sarpanch of the group gram panchayat of Savra Bondrani, twin villages along the banks of the river. Officials reported similar devastation in nearby villages. The floods affected more than 4,000 farmers, covering an area of 1,853 hectares. Compensation demands totalled Rs5 crore for September alone. There is also widespread discontent over issues such as wild boar attacks.
Mostly small and marginal farmers, Savra Bondrani’s residents have begun to migrate as far as Pune looking for work. “There is no work available anywhere nearby,” said Uprikar. “When a standing crop is destroyed, there is also no work for agricultural labourers, and this is just before Diwali.”
The state’s recent generosity has eased some of the discontent. Farmers were paid Rs27,000 per hectare for damaged paddy and Rs36,000 per hectare for damaged crops in orchards. “We waited over a year for this compensation for the damage caused by a hailstorm,” said Uprikar. “The money finally came fifteen days ago.”