At Rajkamal Chowk, a campaign vehicle carrying a life-size cutout of Navneet Kaur Rana, BJP candidate from Amravati, passes by with a recorded voice message asking voters to elect the actress-turned-politician for “all-round development of the constituency”.
Businessman Mayur Pable, who was near the chowk, looks at the plastic trees set up on the dividers of the mainroad. “This is the development that has happened in the last five years in the city,” he says.
Rana is the sitting MP. She fought the 2014 Lok Sabha elections on an NCP ticket but lost to Shiv Sena’s Anandrao Adsul. She turned the tables in 2019, when, fighting independently with the support of the NCP-Congress alliance, she defeated Adsul by over 37,000 votes. Rana and her husband then sided with the BJP.
Sitting MP Navneet Kaur Rana
“The city voted for Rana with the expectation that the airport would be functional and an IT park would be set up to provide jobs to the educated youths. Since there is no medical college here, people expected her to set up an institution. Last time, too, she promised all-round development for the constituency but all the city got were a few plastic trees for beautification, as you can see,” Pable says.
He points out that Nagpur, around 160km from Amravati, has an airport in the Vidarbha region.
“No industrialist would like to invest in Amravati because there is no air connectivity. Thus, the Vidarbha region is still backward and Amravati is the darkest spot,” he says.
An airport — under construction for the last 10 years — in Amravati has been a long-standing demand. Pable says it wouldn’t have taken more than three years to build one had the government been serious about it.
Despite being Maharashtra’s cotton hub, there is no major cotton processing unit or textile mills in the region. The prominent mills are in western Maharashtra, Mumbai, and Pune region.
Smirking, Pable says the city planners should have planted real trees instead of plastic ones. “The plastic trees are worth nothing. They neither provide shade nor fruit or flowers,” he says.
A section of voters, mainly those in the IT sector and the salaried few, however, favour Rana. Two IT professionals, sipping tea, said they work from home these days though their workplace before the pandemic was Mumbai. One of them argued Amravati would vote for Rana again.
“She is contesting on a BJP ticket. This is enough. People vote for the party and not the candidate,” he says.
Sunil Tiwari, a college dropout from Jasapura village, tried his luck at farming this year. He cultivated six acres of land without any profit. “This year was bad. I grew cotton, soybean, and tur dal. I spent around ₹30,000 and made the same amount. Maybe next year I will have better luck. I do not want to blame the government. We will vote for Narendra Modi,” he says.
The Amravati constituency is reserved for the Scheduled Castes in the Vidarbha region comprising 10 seats. Though Rana had contested submitting a Mochi caste certificate, Bombay High Court cancelled it in 2021, concluding she belonged to the Sikh Chamar caste. The matter went to the Supreme Court, which gave her a clean chit to contest on a Mochi certificate.
Rana and her husband ran into controversy again in May 2022, when they tried to chant the Hanuman Chalisa outside Matoshree, the residence of then Maharashtra chief minister Uddhav Thackeray in Mumbai. They were arrested on sedition charges among others.
Raju Ramekar, who works as a security guard in a market complex, says he belongs to the Mochi caste, too, but the community was disappointed with Rana.
“We all voted for Rana with the hope that our children would get residential schools or special scholarships. They have been deprived of any special welfare measure,” Ramekar, who lives on rent with his wife and two schoolgoing daughters and earns ₹10,000 a month, says.
Amravati votes today
