Bisara Goes to Vote

In the village where Mohammad Akhlaq was lynched communal tensions simmer below the surface. Not surprisingly, most villagers intend to vote along religious lines.

- Shalini Sharma Dadri

On the face of it, Bisara is like any other village in Uttar Pradesh – longing for pucca roads, better electricity supply and infrastructure. However, there are two things that set it apart from the rest of the villages in Dadri: the village witnessed the mob lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq over rumours of eating beef in September 2015 and it wears its affinity for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on its sleeve. As soon as you enter the village, you see flags bearing the lotus symbol hanging from rooftops.

An open ground in the heart of the village is the centre of all activity as the village prepares to receive Home Minister Rajnath Singh the next day. Hariom Singh, who serves as a proxy for his wife and sarpanch Kaushalya Devi, asserts that Rajnath shares a ‘special bond’ with Bisara because he is a Thakur and the village is dominated by the community. “It is only natural for him to visit this village. He is close to us and we are close to him. For Bisara, the mood on the ground is aligned with the lotus symbol, as it has always been,” Hariom says. Ask him about the lynching that hurled the obscure village into the limelight and he tells me to stop looking for nuances as the incident will have no bearing on the upcoming assembly elections. “It’s a thing of the past and was unfortunate. We do feel that the victim’s side of the story got more attention than the accused but it won’t have any impact on the polls.”