National
It’s all a ruse: Landless people’s take on polls
The election candidates of Kamal Village Council-5 in Jhapa have promised food, shelter and clothes to the landless people in exchange for their votes.Arjun Rajbanshi
The election candidates of Kamal Village Council-5 in Jhapa have promised food, shelter and clothes to the landless people in exchange for their votes.
There are 75 landless families living near the Ratuwa river dam for the last 20 years.
With the election season at its peak, these families have become a prospective vote bank for the parties contesting in the June 28 local level elections.
The parties like the Nepali Congress, the CPN-UML and the CPN (Maoist Centre) have mentioned in their election manifestos, among other things, addressing the concerns of the landless people.
However, most of the landless people here do not buy the promises made by the parties and their candidates.
Pre-election promises mean very little to them. Moreover, they seem to detest politicians and their talks.
This lack of trust is clearly a result of past elections of Constituent Assembly of 2008 and 2013. In both elections, the parties had promised to address the problems of the landless people and both times let them down.
Binod Kumar Rajbanshi, one of the landless settlers, no longer believes in politicians and their talks.
“Everything they have promised, we have heard it all. The leaders had promised to address the concerns of the landless in the past as well. What has changed?” he says.
This time the UML is trying to secure votes of the landless people by promising jobs for them at the local level and building them homes. The NC has committed to implement the decisions of the commissions that were formed in the past to resolve the problems of the landless. Similarly, the CPN (Maoist Centre) has announced to form a powerful commission to address the concerns of the landless.
“They sound pleasing to the ear, but none of those promises will be kept,” says Shantikala Limbu, who is convinced that all politicians are liars. “Ahead of every election, they seem to have a solution to our every problem. After they have won, we do not exist for them,” she says.
“I have seen politicians of all stripes and they were nothing but cheats. I have no interest whatsoever in this election.”
NC’s village chairperson candidate, Hukum Singh Rai, says the anger and frustration among landless people are not surprising, but he insists that what happened in the past will not be repeated this time.
“This is an election for local representatives. This will give the local body the greater decision-making power, the means and the resources to execute them. Earlier, when a commission was formed to address the concerns of the landless, its validity expired with the government that had initiated its formation. Such situation will not occur when the local bodies are in place,” he says.
The other party candidates hold a similar opinion: that the local bodies will have more autonomy and resources to address local problems.
The landless voters are not ready to accept that the local elections will bring positive results for them though.
It is not that the candidates have not tried to convince them, it is just that they have grown tired of being used by political parties just to reach to power. “It will be absolutely foolish to trust the politicians and go vote for them,” says Rajbanshi.