Disrespect for women. Threat to take away citizenship. Indifference to livelihood problems.

A chat with some people in the audience at a street-corner meeting in Garia on Wednesday evening and a few bystanders revealed the anxieties on their minds.

A bustling market near the taxi stand at the Garia crossing was the stage for the meeting called by a group campaigning for “No vote to BJP”.

Teacher

A man stood around 30 metres away from the dais near a series of yellow cabs parked in the stand, listening to the speakers, occasionally nodding his head in approval.

A local resident, he is a computer science teacher at a private engineering college. The 40-year-old said he stopped by on his way home from work because the speakers on the dais were “talking about his fears”.

A couple of years ago, he and other teachers of the institute had visited the home of a colleague who had become the father of a girl. One of the visiting colleagues happened to be a “member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh”.

“We wish all the best to your daughter. But next time, when a boy is born in the family, I want a bigger treat,” the man remembered his colleague telling the new father.

“The colleague is now a leader of sorts, leading local BJP rallies and giving fiery speeches,” said the teacher.

He gave another recent example of the “looming threat”.

Two weeks ago, he had attended a virtual conference, billed as a “faculty development programme”. A senior official of an Indian Institute of Technology was the keynote speaker. While discussing “optimisation”, the speaker gave what he called a “relevant example”.

“If an Indian man earns a foreign degree, his worth as a groom goes up several times. He can demand a hefty dowry,” he quoted the IIT official as saying.

“These are not isolated incidents. It is not only the BJP that is making electoral gains, the right-wing majoritarianism is rearing its ugly head in all spheres of our lives,” the man told this newspaper.

Shopkeepers

Stores selling everything from shoes to lottery tickets dotted the area where the meeting took place. The owner of an optical store stepped out and stayed put for almost 30 minutes, listening to the speeches.

The 46-year-old man, burly and wearing a thick pair of glasses, was hesitant to talk at first. “I don’t support any party,” he said. Asked about his business, he said with a wry smile: “I stepped out because not a single customer had entered my store. That is how business is like these days. Forget profit, I can barely meet fixed costs like power bills and trade license fees.”

The man, a physics graduate, used to give private tuitions to secondary students till March 2020. The pandemic has almost robbed him of the additional income.

Business is going south but the man is more worried about something else. “We (he is unmarried and lives with his parents) are genuinely scared of the National Register of Citizens. My grandfather came from Bangladesh in 1946 but we don’t have any proof of that. He lived in Jadavpur before shifting to Garia in 1955,” the man told Metro.

A few metres away, a shoe seller was busy with two customers. A woman, part of the organisers of the meeting, was distributing leaflets among the shopkeepers. The shoe seller refused to take one.

But the customers left soon, without buying anything. The man then took the leaflet from his neighbouring shop and started reading it.

“I don’t know about religion. But business is very, very bad and the government does not seem bothered. Ten years ago, I was thinking of buying or renting another store. Now, I am not sure if I will be able to continue running this store,” the 54-year-old man said.

The main problem, according to him — “people are afraid to splurge. They are uncertain of the future.”