India Votes 2024: Anshul Avijit Kushwaha: 'BJP Takes Electorate For Granted In Its Arrogance'

'The ceaseless process of privatisation is shrinking the space of reservation.'
'Where will reservation go if you keep privatising?'

IMAGE: Anshul Avijit Kushwaha, the Congress candidate from the Patna Saheb constituency.
This is his first Lok Sabha election and his opponent is the Bharatiya Janata Party's Ravi Shankar Prasad, who won this seat in 2019, defeating the Congress' Shatrughan Sinha. All Photographs and Videos: Rajesh Karkera for Rediff.com

As Cambridge-educated Anshul Avijit Kushwaha fights his first election, he has made his grandfather Babu Jagjivan Ram's home in Kadamkuan, Patna, his base for the past few weeks.

The house is a memorial to Babuji, defence minister during the 1971 War, agriculture minister during the Green Revolution and later deputy prime minister.

A large portrait of Babuji dominates the drawing room, while black and white pictures of Jagjivan Ram with the likes of then US secretary of state Henry Kissinger hang on the wall of another room.

IMAGE: Anshul Avijit speaks to supporters.

There is also a framed photograph of Avijit's grandmother Sumitra Devi, Bihar's first woman cabinet minister. A framed handwritten letter in Hindi on the wall bears the information that Avijit's mother, Meira Kumar, the first woman Speaker of the Lok Sabha and five-time MP, was born in this house.

IMAGE: Anshul Avijit meets with supporters.

Congress spokesperson and a former journalist, Avijit is getting ready to set out for campaigning for the day. Pictures of INDIA alliance partners are on the tent under which some party workers wait. It is 8 am and the sun is already beating down mercilessly.

IMAGE: Anshul Avijit's election office.

Before setting out for the day's campaign, the Congress candidate spoke to Rediff.com where he attacked the BJP for playing with people's emotions and making false promises.

IMAGE: Anshul Avijit is a Cambridge-educated economist.

"People want a new era to emerge. It is a double engine failure," he says referring to the NDA government in Bihar.

Pointing out the state of the Indian economy, he says, "The country is facing economic devastation. The government doesn't understand macroeconomics. Inflation is a result of mismanagement. They have no way of increasing the treasury without extracting money from the people."

India Votes 2024

"How long will people tolerate this? They will speak."

The first part of a two-part interview:

WATCH: Anshul Avijit speak

Part 2 of the Interview: 'This Govt Is Full Of Amateurs'

Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com

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