For over a decade Arvind Singh has worked as a watchman in New Delhi, doing the rounds of the streets with a whistle and a wooden stick to keep vigil at night.
Watchmen like him are so ubiquitous, guarding everything from offices to homes and stores to factories, that their presence goes almost unnoticed.
But because of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Main bhi chowkidar” campaign, the watchman has dominated headlines over the past week.
“We both work day and night. You guard homes and I guard the nation,” Modi said in an audio speech addressed to watchmen on Wednesday. “The watchman has become a symbol of the country’s nationalism,” he said.
The campaign is in response to the Congress’s slogan “Chowkidar chor hai” — or the nation’s “watchman is a thief” — which it began using late last year to refer to Modi in connection with allegations of corruption over the Rafale deal.
Modi and many of his cabinet colleagues have changed their social media names to add the prefix “chowkidar”.
But for many watchmen, Modi’s campaign is a political gimmick that is unlikely to improve their lives.
“I don’t know why they started it,” said Rakesh Yadav, a 37-year-old watchman from Uttar Pradesh. “In the last four years they have done nothing for us,” he said, looking up from a newspaper while on duty outside a residential complex in New Delhi.
“If the PM was a chowkidar, would Nirav Modi (have managed to) run away?” said another watchman, Mohammed Nayyar.
Nirav, a billionaire diamantaire accused of loan fraud in India, had last year fled to Britain where he is now in custody after being arrested a few days back.
Watchman Singh remembers being unable to feed his children for some days and standing in long queues at banks to exchange voided currency for new notes following the Modi government’s shock move to ban high-value currency notes in 2016.
“What has changed in our lives? We are doing the same duty we were doing some years ago,” he said, adding that his salary had not increased from about Rs 9,000 a month in three years.
The chowkidar campaign is a distinct reminder of Modi’s 2014 “chaiwallah” campaign in which he flaunted his past working as a chaiwallah (tea vendor).
It may be a gimmick, but such things have worked for Modi in the past, said Priyavadan Patel, a veteran political scientist from Modi’s home state of Gujarat and scholar at the Lokniti research programme of Delhi’s Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. “The chaiwallah campaign worked in a big way,” Patel said.
Some of the most challenging battleground states for the BJP are those that depend on the farm economy. “The chowkidar campaign may not work in such areas,” Patel said.
One of those states is Bihar, where the watchman Singh migrated from 12 years ago. He said he wouldn’t go back because working on the farm back home was not profitable.
Yet, he said he believes in Modi, and praised him for air strikes on Pakistan in response to Pulwama bomb attack.
“I feel like Modiji has done a lot,” he said. “And I think he will do a lot more in the coming years.”
