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UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 03 NEW DELHI 000933 
 
SENSITIVE 
SIPDIS 
 
E.O. 12958: N/A 
TAGS: PGOV PTER PREL PINR KDEM IN
SUBJECT: BHARAT BALLOT 09: BATTLEFIELD BULANDSHAHR -- TAKE 
THREE 
 
REF: A. NEW DELHI 800 
     ¶B. NEW DELHI 710 
 
¶1. (SBU) Summary: This is the third in a series of cables on 
Bulandshahr, a rural market town of 175,000 two hours 
southeast of Delhi in the state of Uttar Pradesh. On May 5th, 
two days before its parliamentary district went to the polls, 
PolOff and PolFSN ventured back to Bulandshahr to see how 
preparations for the election were going. The goal for this 
trip was to solicit the political views of the aam admi, the 
common man, vice the elites, so we stopped to talk to 
different groups of people in tea houses, motorcycle shops, 
and at farmhouses in the outskirts of town. Our interlocutors 
consistently based their political choices upon consideration 
of their caste or religious community. Despite that, everyone 
said there was no social tension surrounding the upcoming 
polling. Another oft-heard message was that after two years 
of rule, the bloom had definitely fallen off of Chief 
Minister Mayawati's rose in Bulandshahr as a result of her 
cutting off previously established funding for the poor. 
 
Into the Heartland 
 
¶2. (U) As PolOff and PolFSN left the outskirts of Delhi and 
started on the two-lane road that would lead us to 
Bulandshahr, in a few short miles we left behind the wide 
avenues of Lutyen's capital and its accompanying suburban 
sprawl and entered the Indian countryside, dotted with 
roadside villages, the occasional mango orchard, and tidy 
rectangles of sugar cane, wheat, and vegetables. These 
villages mostly consist of flat-roofed brick houses, 
sometimes only one room deep and a few rooms wide, often with 
a corrugated tin roof over a bit of porch and a patch of dirt 
in the front with one or two cows or water buffalo tied up 
nearby. Storefronts are  shallow brick structures with 
roll-up doors or small wooden lean-tos where one can get a 
cup of tea or sundries to nibble on. With wood for cooking 
and heating scarce, dried cow dung is the fuel of choice. 
Many farming families build up large squared-off 
smooth-walled solid structures made of dung, often five or 
more feet in height, around four feet across, and four feet 
deep, shaped like small shacks complete with steeply pitched 
roofs. They often thatch the roofs and sides to better 
protect the structures from erosion during the monsoon. 
Sometimes several of these structures will be co-located, 
resembling a small group of huts several feet from the road, 
waiting until they are needed. 
 
¶3. (U) We reached Bulandshahr a little after 9:00 am and 
followed a stream of fruit and vegetable vendors pushing 
their two-wheeled wooden carts piled with oranges, bananas, 
cucumbers, and the like into town where they would set up for 
business for the day alongside the main road. Getting to 
Bulandshahr was made more difficult by the many horse- and 
water buffalo- drawn carts pulling bulging loads, measuring 
10-12 feet high and just as wide, of recently harvested 
cattle fodder.  In town, the streets were bustling with 
auto-rickshaws, horse carts, buses, motorcycles, cars, and 
water buffalo galore. Although there was commercial 
advertising on nearly every visible wall and storefront, 
there was next to no political advertising, showing how much 
the local branches of the main political parties fear the 
Election Commission's funding limits for campaign materials 
like banners and posters. 
 
¶4. (U) When asked about the election atmosphere, everyone 
said there was no communal, religious, or other social 
tension. No one reported any of the parties trying to buy 
their vote either. Most seemed happy to talk to us candidly 
about the elections. Many of the roadside tea houses comprise 
two or three rickety wooden benches under a shade tree, a 
small charcoal burner to heat water and milk for the tea, and 
a tiny wooden shack to hold the wares of the merchant. These 
have a primarily male clientele, so in an attempt to find 
some women voters to talk to, we stopped at a Public 
 
NEW DELHI 00000933  002 OF 003 
 
 
Distribution System (PDS) outlet where a group of about ten 
to fifteen women were waiting to get oil and grain rations. 
No one would speak to us there though, with one old lady 
brushing us off with a "we'll vote for whoever we like." 
 
A  Case of Groupthink 
 
¶5. (SBU) A few themes came up again and again in our 
discussions. Most Hindus will vote for the candidate that 
their caste supports. The Muslim vote thus far seemed to be 
split among the Congress party, the Samajwadi Party (SP), and 
the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), and will serve as the swing 
vote in this election. One group of Muslim voters said that 
they were fine with the SP joining hands with Kalyan Singh, 
the Bharatiya Janata Party chief minister of Uttar Pradesh in 
1992 when the Babri Masjid (mosque) was destroyed by Hindu 
nationalists. Our interlocutors assessed that because Singh 
is from the district, he would bring his caste group's votes 
along with him and thus help defeat the BJP candidate. Some 
Muslim villagers visiting town told us that their respective 
villages would vote as units, but their village leaders had 
not yet decided which party they should support. Our 
interlocutors only talked about local issues; they showed no 
interest in national issues such as security, terrorism, or 
foreign relations. 
 
No More Mayawati 
 
¶6. (SBU) Although we did run across a few BSP supporters, 
many of the poor farmers and townspeople we talked to said 
that after two years they were sick of Mayawati because she 
had done nothing for them. Instead, she had taken away the 
benefits that SP leader Mulayam Singh Yadav had bestowed 
during his previous stint as chief minister, such as 20,000 
rupees for poor girls who graduated from the 12th grade, the 
same amount to poor girls getting married, and a stipend of 
300 rupees a month to old age pensioners. One teahouse 
philosopher said that in Bulandshar, might and money make 
right and that the division between the haves and the have 
nots was growing. 
 
Getting Pumped Up For the Election 
 
¶7. (U) A few days prior to our visit, both Mulayam Singh 
Yadav and Mayawati had held rallies in town. The general 
consensus seemed to be that Yadav's rally was bigger than 
Mayawati's, and that both rallies had been attended by people 
bused in from outside of town, but no one gave us specific 
numbers of attendees. When asked if they received any sort of 
benefit -- money or lunch -- for attending the rallies, 
everybody gave a negative answer. One respondent laughed, 
saying all they got were speeches, nothing else.  They didn't 
even get to see a film star, unlike the SP rallies held in 
some other towns. The respondents did not miss the banners 
and posters used in previous elections. They felt they didn't 
need such symbols because they knew the candidates and their 
credentials, the primary one being their caste. A group of 
young men outside a motorcycle repair shop were looking 
forward to voting in their first election, although one had 
yet to receive his voter registration card. The owner of a 
small fleet of sound trucks, which are often used to 
broadcast political or religious messages,said the prices he 
was able to charge had not gone up as a result of the 
election campaign; in fact, sound truck rental rates had 
actually dropped recently. 
 
Congress Party Working To Get Out The Vote 
 
¶8. (SBU) Along one of the main thoroughfares that radiate 
from a central roundabout, we found the Congress party 
campaign headquarters. A throng of people were milling about, 
getting ready to go out and canvass neighborhoods on the last 
official day of campaigning. They gave us samples of the 
flyers they were using, one with a picture of Congress party 
President Sonia Gandhi and the local candidate, Devi Dayal, a 
 
NEW DELHI 00000933  003 OF 003 
 
 
former Indian Administrative Service official and Petroleum 
Secretary. Another showed Dayal with Congress party General 
Secretary Rahul Gandhi. (Note: We met Dayal the first time we 
visited Bulandshahr; he was a thoughtful candidate who 
believed then he would win with the votes of secular and 
educated voters.) The party workers were a mix of young and 
old, male and female, with some of the women wearing burkas. 
They said they would go by car, motorcycle, and on foot to 
talk to people. Some of them practiced their pitch on us, 
regaling us with the qualifications of their educated 
candidate with many years of experience in the central 
government who would bring development to the area, in 
contrast to some of the other parties' candidates who had not 
finished high school, drank, and gambled. 
 
College Turned Camp Site for Election Workers 
 
9.(SBU) With the intention of talking to a few students at a 
local college, we discovered one of several Election 
Commission-sponsored bivouac sites for its poll workers and 
security forces in the Bulandshahr district; this one was 
housing 1100 people. (Note: The Election Commission itself 
has a comparatively small permanent staff. In order to carry 
out the Indian elections, which involve polling at over 
800,000 polling places, Indian civil servants below the top 
ranks are subject to being called for election duty.) One of 
the officials gave PolOff and PolFSN a tour of two large 
courtyards, where the men were living in spartan conditions, 
cooking, napping on thin pallets on the college's porches, 
and using communal taps to wash themselves and their clothes. 
They had come in on several buses and we saw a field of jeeps 
waiting to help them carry out their duties. Our guide told 
us that they had come from Basti in the eastern part of Uttar 
Pradesh, and they had worked the previous phases of the 
election in other parts of the state. The poll workers and 
guards had all received their polling station assignments and 
would leave the next day to set up at their designated 
locations. 
 
¶10. (SBU) Comment: It was clear to Poloff that there was no 
uncertainty among Bulandshahr's voters. They knew how they 
would cast their votes and it would be based on 
caste/religioun calculations. Even the group of Muslim voters 
who said they had not yet decided who they would vote for 
knew that their vote would be based on identity politics. 
This third trip to Bulandshahr to talk to the average voter 
showed how thoroughly caste politics permeates the society, 
as well as the cynicism that goes along with it. The reason 
often given for voting with one's caste is that that 
candidate was the least likely to do something bad to the 
group later. Although some of our interlocutors said they 
were excited about the election, it was not clear to PolOff 
why that was the case, given the lack of hope they displayed 
that the circumstances of Bulandshahr's average citizens 
would be bettered as a result of the election. 
 
BURLEIGH