The message couldn’t be closer and louder on the evening of May 11. Just a few metres away from Shatrughan Sinha’s ancestral house, a crowd which included Bharatiya Janata Party workers gathered outside St Severin’s School campus at Kadam Kuan in Patna. Sinha is the sitting MP and Congress candidate from the Patna Sahib Lok Sabha constituency.

In the next two hours, they became part of a massive show of strength as BJP president Amit Shah led a roadshow through the narrow lanes of Thakurbari, Hathwa market, Khetan market and Bakarganj before reaching the dispersal point at Udyog Bhawan near the historic Gandhi Maidan. Shah was campaigning for BJP candidate Ravi Shankar Prasad, Union Minister for Law and Justice, Electronics and Information Technology.

The choice of venue for starting the roadshow didn’t go unnoticed, as the Patna edition of a leading Hindi daily, Hindustan, remarked: “‘Shatru’ ke ghar mein Shah ka roadshow (Shah’s roadshow in Shatru’s/enemy’s home)”.

Mr Prasad also didn’t miss a chance for wordplay. Sinha’s signature “khamosh (silence)” line, a throwback to his days as a Bollywood star, has been used by his opponent to come up with the campaign slogan: “Ab Patna Sahib khamosh nahi rahega (Patna Sahib will not be silent now)”.

Patna Sahib, one of the two Lok Sabha constituencies which covers the areas of the Patna Municipal Corporation besides Patliputra, will vote in the last phase of the 2019 Lok Sabha polls on May 19. If perceptions are anything to go by, there seems an air of inevitability about what awaits Sinha on May 23. A huge win for the BJP wouldn’t surprise anyone in Patna Sahib, though Sinha’s highly improbable win would. In a way, the BJP’s chief concern in its stronghold isn’t the Opposition but the disgruntled elements within the party.

Following the delimitation process in 2008, Patna Sahib was carved out as a constituency out of areas included in erstwhile Patna and Barh Lok Sabha constituencies. In the two Lok Sabha elections held since, in 2009 and 2014, Sinha won on the BJP ticket, before developing sharp differences with the party leadership and getting quite vocal in his criticism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Quite expectedly, he was denied the BJP ticket this time before he decided to join the Congress for his shot at re-election from Patna Sahib.

In 2014, despite resentment against him among BJP workers and core voters, Sinha’s smooth sailing was largely attributed to the Modi factor. Patna Sahib is considered a BJP stronghold because of the significant number of BJP-inclined Kayastha voters and the trading community in the urban and suburban parts of the constituency. It’s a constituency with 19,46,249 voters (8,93,971 female and 10,52,278 male), and consists of six Assembly segments: Digha, Bankipur, Kumhrar, Patna Sahib, Bakhtiarpur and Fatuha. In the 2015 Assembly polls, the BJP won five of these six constituencies, Fatuha being the only one won by the Rashtriya Janata Dal. The RJD is now a key ally in the Grand Alliance which has fielded Sinha as the Congress candidate in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.

Both Prasad and Sinha belong to well-known, upper-caste Kayastha families in the city and being family friends, they have largely refrained from making personal attacks against each other. However, that wouldn’t rule out the chances of a split in Kayastha votes—a significant factor in deciding the outcome of Patna Sahib polls.

Different estimates vary with their count of Kayastha electorate in the constituency, ranging from three lakh to five lakh or approximately 15-20 per cent. Consolidating this vote bank has been key to the BJP’s success in the last few Lok Sabha polls in the constituency. Prasad, however, is facing twin challenges in doing so. Besides another Kayastha contesting on the Congress ticket, the denial of a ticket to Ravindra Kishore Sinha, billionaire businessman and BJP Rajya Sabha MP, is also threatening to chip away a part of Kayastha support for Prasad. Quite uncharacteristic of the BJP, known for not making ticket distribution grievances public, the supporters of Prasad and a visibly sulking Security and Intelligence Services owner (Ravindra Kishore) had a heated exchange of words and slogan-shouting at the Patna airport when Prasad visited the state capital after being declared as the party candidate for the constituency.

In recent years, RK Sinha gained popularity among a significant section of Kayasthas because of his association with a number of community welfare programmes and events. The BJP’s ability to placate him and limit his capacity for sabotage will play a role in deciding the outcome.

The influence of Kayastha voters is largely viewed as an urban phenomenon in Bihar, limited to urban and semi-urban pockets of the state. The urban segments of the administrative district of  Patna, the largest in Bihar, show clear imprints of the influence. Its origins could be traced to the political demography of pre-Independence Bihar when colonial governance and state apparatus had shaped the higher visibility of Kayasthas in Bihar’s urban public space. It was gradual though and Kayasthas were at the forefront of urban encounter with the colonial state.

Being associated with literate professions of record-keeping and clerical work in kuchehris (lower courts) in pre-British times, they adjusted to low demand of urbanised professionals in 19th century colonial Bihar. As Calcutta (now Kolkata) was the administrative headquarters for governing Bihar till 1912, the demand for intermediaries in the process of governance—clerical staff, legal or subordinate workforce from other education-based professions—was very low. Perhaps spurred by the need to find professional relevance for themselves in changing times, Kayasthas took the initiative to avail for themselves Calcutta University-centric higher education and then articulate demands for Bihar’s claim on professional opportunities and a distinct administrative identity.

“It was only at the turn of the century (20th) that a substantial number of Bihari boys—many of them Kayasthas, like Sachchidanand Sinha and Rajendra Prasad—managed to venture to Calcutta and enter the portals of literate professions, the most attractive of which was law. It was this group which started demanding, somewhat hesitantly, the separation of Bihar from Bengal Presidency, and setting of a High Court in Patna,” writes scholar Arvind Das in his work The Republic of Bihar (Penguin, 1992).

The growing influence of Kayasthas in urban centres could be seen as intrinsically linked to the process of the emergence of a professional and literate urban middle class in colonial Bihar. This process was catalysed by Bihar’s separation as a separate province in 1912 and setting up of Patna as its capital in 1913. This meant “the ever-expanding clerkdom beckoned many middle-class youth, a large number of them from the traditional clerical caste of Kayasthas, who had passed through Macaulay’s education mill,” Das observes.

The leadership of this urban professional class in Bihar coincided with caste interests of Kayasthas and it coalesced to integrate itself with the politics of the national independence movement itself. No wonder that Sachchidanand Sinha, the first President of the Constituent Assembly of India (followed by Rajendra Prasad), set up journals which were named Kayastha Samachar and The Hindustan Review. Das is of the view that his writings were instrumental in shaping the worldview of a whole generation of the urban middle class in Bihar and helped it take its place on the political stage—a platform to which it had been a late entrant in colonial Bihar.

After Independence, Kayasthas have been joined by other caste groups in constituting the urban middle class in the state, though it continues to be electorally important in urban centres like Patna. To a large extent, the battle of Patna Sahib is being seen as the race to either win Kayastha votes or minimise the damage caused by its split.

Ravi Shankar Prasad would be hoping that the possible split in the Kayastha vote is minuscule. If it exceeds that, the BJP would be heavily dependent on retaining its hold over the trading community in the constituency—the Banias and the Sarrafs (jewellers). It’s in this context that the route of BJP president Amit Shah’s Saturday rally is being seen. It passed through the narrow lanes that house traders and busy markets—Thakurbari road, Khetan market and Bakarganj.

Besides Kayasthas, the BJP is also eyeing the support of other upper caste groups like Rajputs, Bhumihars and Brahmins. Being back in the National Democratic Alliance, the Janata Dal (United)’s support base in non-Yadav Other Backward Classes, mainly Kurmis and Economically Backward Classes, may also work in favour of its ally, the BJP.

Similarly, the Congress would be hoping that its candidate Shatrughan Sinha could compensate for his loss of the core BJP vote and a split in the Kayastha vote through the RJD support base in Muslim-Yadav combined and Nishad vote. If that social aggregate can stand behind him, he can hope to put up a strong defence. Congress president Rahul Gandhi’s campaign rally on May 16 will try to cement support for Sinha from these groups.

Chances of that, however, seem bleak. There is a strong possibility that the talk of a split in Kayastha vote is exaggerated as that voting group’s allegiance is as much to the party as it is to an individual candidate. That’s probably one of the reasons that despite being unhappy over a disconnected and absent Sinha, Kayastha voters backed him in 2014 as an expression of their support for the party. At an individual level, even Mr Prasad, making his Lok Sabha election debut, might face the same problem of more visibility on the national stage than in the constituency. He has been campaigning vigorously to allay such concerns, emphasising his family’s presence in the city, including the fact that his wife teaches at Patna University.

As the talk of the inevitability of Prasad comfortably snatching the seat from Sinha gains momentum in Patna Sahib, there is no clarity on how a different arrangement of the voting behaviour of different groups may dent that certainty. What, however, would be interesting to see is to what extent the famed Kayastha vote in Patna Sahib is about allegiance to the party.