Battle of Begusarai between beta vs neta

As you criss-cross the Barauni zero mile after surpassing the 4.4 km-long serpentine queues of trucks, buses and other heavy vehicles stranded on the national highway near Begusarai, the first enquiry you make is: Where is Bihat village?

And prompt comes the reply: You want to visit Kanhaiya Kumar’s village?

As you nod, the youth on his two-wheeler escorts you for a few kilometres till you reach Kanhaiya’s ancestral home.

Slapped with sedition charge by the Narendra Modi Government, but enlarged on bail, Kanhaiya Kumar, the former JNU students’ union leader, is now a national figure, with journalists from across the country, besides a few from foreign media, scurrying to cover him.

HOME TRUTH: This is Kanhaiya Kumar’s ancestral house.
Bereft of Centre’s ambitious scheme ‘Ujjwala Yojna’ where a BPL card holder gets free LPG connection,
Kanhaiya’s mother Meena Kumari uses this ‘mitti ka chulha’ to cook food. (DH Photo/Abhay Kumar)

As you enter his thatched hutment, where his mother Meen Kumari, an aanganwadi sevika (worker) stays, you find there is a clay ‘chulha’ where she used to cook food till a few days back. With Modi’s Ujjwala Yojna (of providing LPG connections free of cost) yet to see the light of the day here, there is a community kitchen where food is cooked everyday for hundreds of volunteers who have come from JNU and other metros to root for Kanhaiya, the CPI nominee from Begusarai.

With his fleet of campaign vehicles ready to hit the dusty lanes of other villages, Kanhaiya leaves for electioneering, while his volunteers chalk out strategy how to counter BJP’s Giriraj Singh, a tall Bhumihar (the dominant upper caste) leader, who has tremendous support among the urban voters of Begusarai and Barauni (the twin town) in this industrial belt.

Kanhaiya too is Bhumihar, but unlike Giriraj, is soft-spoken, suave and measures his word carefully. “In rural areas, Kanhaiya enjoys full support of OBCs, EBCs, Dalits, Mahadalits and Muslims, besides his fellow castemen,” Ram Prit Paswan of Bihat, a CPI supporter, tells Deccan Herald, while dwelling at length why Begusaria is a Left bastion and rightly called 'Leningrad of Bihar'.

Making the direct contest between Giriraj and Kanhaiya a triangular one is RJD’s Tanveer Hasan, runners-up of 2014 polls. “Tanveer shot in his foot when he made controversial remarks: Hindu, Hindu mein mail nahi, Tanveer ko harana khel nahi.(With Hindus divided, it’s not easy to defeat Tanveer),” said Saroj Rai, a local trader. “Kanhaiya is apna ladka/beta (son of the soil). While the BJP neta Giriraj is from Barhaiya. In this battle of two Bhumihars, the Muslims could play a decisive role,” Rai opined.