UP middle class uninterested in polls

NO MIDDLE GROUND: While the rural countryside is alive with excitement about polls, the urban middle class is indifferent.

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Varanasi (Uttar Pradesh): While UP's poor queue up to vote, the urban middle class prefers to drink tea instead. Pappu's tea shop is Varanasi's most popular cafe. Every evening, professors, civil servants and lawyers come here to drink tea under portraits of dead student leaders.

The hot air rises and so do tempers, but its not voting that interests the educated middle class of the state.

Says a government servant, Ravindra Kumar, "The urban middle class is too busy to vote. We have too many problems. The politicians have nothing for us. On the other hand, rural folk have all the time in the world."

Assi Ghat in the evening is another middle class hang out. Umesh Tripathi is a schoolteacher. He loves ghazals and cigarettes and comes to Assi Ghat every evening to think about his life. Politics, however, he says is not his passion.

"The middle class has lost interest in politics," he puts it succiently.

In the 2002 elections in Varanasi, the polling percentage among urban voters was 30 per cent, whereas in rural constituencies, it was 60 per cent. This year in eastern UP poll percentages in urban constituencies have dropped to 20 per cent, rural constituencies have remained at 60 per cent.

While the rural countryside is alive with excitement about polls, the urban middle class is indifferent. 'Whom should they vote for' is not the question? 'Should they vote at all' is the question instead.

Another resident of Uttar Pradesh, Chandrakala Padiya has taught at Benares Hindu University for 30 years. She says she has to force herself to vote.

"There's such a vacuum. Who to vote for. There's no inspiring figure," says Chandrakala, who is the Head of Department Political Science at Benares Hindu University.

UP may be called a politicised state, but for the urban middle class, the choice is clear. Vote? Forget it. It's much better to read a book instead, they say.