The seamless drive from South Delhi to Baghpat in Uttar Pradesh will have you believe you are heading straight to El Dorado. You first swing onto Barapullah flyover which sweeps over the city and zoom into the expressway along Akshardham temple, which then enjoins the Delhi-Meerut freeway, to cruise onto the country’s first green highway, both high-speed and signal-free, to exit at Baghpat toll plaza. In a nanosecond, the fantasy is blown to bits as soon as you leave behind the gleam of asphalt and lurch into the potholes and cavities of Baghpat district’s road that leads to its more than 100 villages and five Assembly constituencies.

The Jat-dominated Baghpat parliamentary constituency, in western Uttar Pradesh, which goes to polls on April 11 in the first phase of the Lok Sabha elections, could put the Mahagathbandhan’s (Opposition alliance) in a stiff fight with the Bharatiya Janata Party. The Opposition which is an alliance of the Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party and Rashtriya Lok Dal is pitted in a straight fight against the BJP (the Congress Party has in an electoral pact decided not to contest the seat), and the caste arithmetic is loaded in its favour.

The alliance’s candidate, the RLD’s heir apparent Jayant Chaudhary, will face sitting BJP MP and junior minister Satyapal Singh. The former carries the mantle of his late grandfather, Jat patriarch and former prime minister Charan Singh; the latter is a son of the soil who had returned as police chief of Mumbai to contest the election. However, those Jats who have voted for the BJP are still in the thrall of Modi and the party, as will be seen as one travels in the constituency.

The last poll result in 2014 is revealing. The BJP won with a resounding margin of over 2 lakh votes. Of the total 10,04,263 votes polled, the BJP got 4,23,475 votes; the SP’s Ghulam Mohammed got 2,13,609 votes; RLD came third with 1,99,516 votes; and BSP’s Prashant Chaudhuri got 1,41,743 votes. The RLD’s Ajit Singh, Jayant Chaudhary’s father, has his vote share among Jats steadily declining since 2004—when he had won with a resounding 3,53,181 votes—but he won both the 2004 and 2009 general elections in Baghpat. Ajit Singh has now moved to Muzaffarnagar this time. Muslims comprise 28 per cent of the population; scheduled castes 11 per cent.

Today, the Opposition, wary of taking any chances in the face of the indomitable Narendra Modi challenge and Hindutva nationalism consolidating Hindu votes, has been forced to come together, and the numbers are intimidating for the BJP. It’s not just that the Opposition’s combined votes that add up to a robust 5,54,868 votes. According to the last Census 2011, nearly 79 per cent of the population lives in rural Baghpat—and herein lies the rub.

Sitting in a chai shop in Katha village on the main Baghpat road, a group of Jat farmers look towards the Eastern Expressway glinting in the sun. Their expressions are not without resentment. Memchand, Jitendra and Parminder sneer at their road as it whips up a swirl of mud every time a vehicle passes by, but it’s the rural distress and sugarcane price crisis that really gets them to a boil.

It’s a cruel irony that a bumper sugarcane harvest, especially in the last two years, have forced sugar prices to fall, and cane farmers are yet to get their dues from sugar mill owners. Carts piled with towering canes dot the roadside along the routes to Baghpat’s various villages and the districts of Baraut to Chaprauli. On the other hand, sugar mills are shutting down as they cannot get the price of production because it is capped by the state government. The crisis is so deep in the sugar belt of western UP that it has been marred by agitations and protests by angry farmers over the last year as they dumped cane on the roads. They delivered a stinging slap on the BJP by defeating its candidate last year in the crucial parliamentary by-election in neighbouring Kairana. So much so, in his first election speech in Meerut five days ago, Modi raised the ₹10,000 crore arrears owed to the cane farmers, but he blamed the previous Akhilesh Yadav government for the disaster.

However, it’s a smirking Parminder who refers to Modi as a phoney who gave only broken promises: “The BJP had promised to clear our dues within 14 days of coming to power, but payments have come staggered. And all they released a few months ago was barely ₹500 crores, and we are still waiting to get some of it.” He’s referring to the ₹4,000 crore soft loan given to sugar mill owners to tide over the payment crisis.

His brother Parminder is dismissive of the state government led by BJP’s chief minister Yogi Adityanath. “Yogiji has given loans of crores to sugar mill owners but they are yet to pay our dues. The crushing season has come and gone, we are all in debt of ₹1 lakh at least. Where are we going to get the money for school books, medicines, marriages, in the next few months?” he asks angrily.

It’s a story that is repeated by farmers along the route to Baraut. However, small businessmen like Harendra Singh Tomar are dismissive of his Jat clan hostility and is all praise for the Modi-Yogi jodi. A fierce BJP supporter, Tomar and his wife run a public swimming pool, Shiv Ganga, flanked on the main road in Shapaur Badauli village by a small grocery shop cum canteen selling samosas and tea. “Modiji is here for development, the Opposition believes only in politics,” says Tomar.

He reels out the benefits he got from Modi’s government schemes. “My mother-in-law had zero money but after Modiji opened a bank account for her, she has already received ₹5,000 two years ago. I got a cashback of ₹1,000 using the BHIM scheme. We’ve got a health insurance card that allows us the use of private hospitals too up to ₹5 lakhs…”

The public swimming pool run by Harendra Singh Tomar, who is all praise for the BJP.

Tomar rattles on, much to his wife’s disbelief. To prove his point, he calls out to the local boys and men who are waiting to pay their ₹30 pool fee and prods them to tell who they would vote for? “The BJP,” they chorus cheerily, even as Tomar sweeps his arms wide and says his whole town supports the BJP. With a dramatic flourish, he spits out: “Muslims are here to take over us, and Maulana Mulayam helps them do it. I will drink water from a Dalit, but never a Muslim.”

It seems the BJP’s Hindutva has decidedly breached the once agrarian and proud Jat community, and they no longer all flock to the RLD.

But it’s all about “bhaichara” or brotherhood among Jats aligned to the RLD-SP-BSP, as they sit in the whitewashed mansion office in Baraut. They rue the day they clashed with Muslims in the murderous communal riots of 2013 in the neighbouring towns and villages of Muzzafarnagar. The BSP’s Rajpal Singh candidly says that even after Independence, for 50 years until Mayawati ruled UP, the scheduled castes were the labourers who toiled in the fields of prosperous Jat farm lords, but today, they have risen to own land and even sit together with Jats, their former oppressors.

The RLD’s Suresh Malik is grateful when he says it was after all the BSP’s “Behenji” Mayawati as UP chief minister who made Baghpat into a district. One community leader pipes up to say that a Jat is like a candle, “hard when it is standing, but goes soft when it is lit”—alluding to their tough exterior but their inner soft-heartedness. Muslims who constitute 21 per cent of the population in the district will firmly back the Opposition, they say confidently.

Mukesh Bawra, head of the Kisan Majdoor Utthan Samiti, rolls off the government’s crimes against cane farmers, while other district heads and leaders chorus the litany of Modi’s broken promises. “Awara” vagabond cows destroying fields and crops, joblessness among youth, lack of medical facilities and hospitals, education—the list is endless. It’s a political coup that Jats, Brahmins, Tyagis and Dalits not just dine together but have the same list of grievances, now that caste walls have fallen and the cursed caste purity is slowly disappearing—at least for the moment.

It is this Jat-OBC-Dalit-Muslim consolidation that should send shivers down the BJP leaders’ spine.

The Expert Men’s Saloon run by Javed Ahmed still thrives in the “bhaichara” ideal of a mixed community. The owner of the building is Lala Deepak Jain, a devout and possessed Shiv Bhakt who even converted his car into a lurid, mobile Bholenath Shiv temple. Ahmed says, unlike Meerut where colonies are segregated by religion, in Baghpat, everyone lives together. He voted BJP last time but is determined to defeat them as Modi did not live up to his promises. His assistant Akhil Malik, proud of his gold highlights, is a Class 12 graduate, and is equally disappointed with Modi. He says he took to hairstyling as there’s no other job for him.

It’s Lala Deepak Jain who has the answer below: