The Outsider: Former Miss India runs a campaign with a difference Gul Panag may or may not be successful in her maiden bid at Chandigarh’s only city-wide elected office, but her candidature is a refreshing change to the city’s traditional politics of divide and conquer, says Ajachi Chakrabarti Ajachi Chakrabarti 5th Apr 2014 Gul Panag on the campaign trail fternoons are not the best time to search Chandigarh for signs of life. As the sun begins to switch roles from benevolent dictator to oppressor, Chandigarh's citizens recede into the safety of the indoors. While the city's main commercial districts retain some of their bustle, the residential sectors adopt the soporific air that gives the city the tag of retirement paradise. Gulkirat Kaur Panag's campaign reaches Sector 40 on one such lazy afternoon. The shops in the sector's market are still awaiting their evening clientele; the shopkeepers lounge about. Followed by AAP supporters chanting slogans — "Gali gali mein shor hai, maama-bhanja chor hain", referring to the appointment scandal that forced the three-term incumbent Pawan Bansal to relinquish charge of the politically lucrative railways ministry, is chanted, if not most often, with the most gusto — Panag visits each individual shop, making a quick appeal for people to vote on 10 April, preferably for her. "This is the last chance for honest politicians to come into the system," she tells one group. It remains to be seen whether this will indeed be the last chance. (If she does lose the 10 April vote, she says, she will be back to contest next time, but five years is a long time for a party that has taken the conscious decision to live and die by the daily news cycle.) What 2014 represents, for Chandigarh at least, is the first chance for any politician outside a triumvirate of two lawyers and a veteran socialist to be a viable candidate, for what is the only city-wide election in Chandigarh, in the past two decades. The two lawyers are Bansal and Satya Pal Jain, a National Executive Committee member of the BJP who was until last year the head of the party's legal cell. The two have been the candidates for the two national parties in every election since 1991 (barring 1999, when Jain, the sitting MP, was denied a ticket to accommodate party vice-president K.L. Sharma, who lost). The veteran socialist is Harmohan Dhawan, a former president of the Janata Party who was civil aviation minister in the Chandra Shekhar government. Dhawan has a mass following among the city's poor, who have for years waged a squatting campaign against the administration's utopian attempts at making Chandigarh a slum-free city. He has fought Lok Sabha elections from the city since 1984, for the Janata Party (1984), the Janata Dal (1989), the Jharkhand Party (1991), the Samata Party (1996), the SJP-R (1998), the INLD (2004) and the BSP (2009). He joined the BJP in 2010, spending the next three years jostling with Jain and party state president Sanjay Tandon for the 2014 ticket. That was until Savita Bhatti, widow of the satirist and local icon Jaspal Bhatti, ended her stillborn candidature on the AAP ticket on 9 March for personal reasons and Panag successfully applied for the post. Panag, who has worked on gender issues in the city for years, including partnering the public health department on a campaign against female foeticide based on the successful Nawanshahr model, says contesting the elections was inevitable. "For the last three years, whenever I visited Chandigarh, the first question I'd get asked was: which party are you standing for? People just assumed that I'd be doing it. Also, I'd have remained an alternative actor-activist were it not for social media. It wouldn't be wrong to say that a lot of what I am today is amplified courtesy social media. The last few years have put me on the national map, into the consciousness of most educated Indians. This isn't something that I have suddenly jumped into. I've always been an activist, and I think it's a natural extension for an activist to go into a movement that is trying to clean up the system." For Panag, the AAP is an alternative "between the devil and the deep blue sea". She was part of the anti-corruption agitation that birthed the party, never on stage, but part of the masses that showed their support and anger both at Jantar Mantar and on Twitter. Her father, Lt. Gen. (Retd.) H.S. Panag, a former member of the Armed Forces Tribunal, also joined the AAP in February and is advising the party on strategic affairs. "You can say I was a party sympathetic," she says, "even though I have been vocally critical of AAP in the past. Ultimately, you realise that you can't be on the sidelines. You have to pick somebody you have a degree of similarity with and that's why I am here." Before Bhatti announced her decision not to contest, Panag had already agreed to campaign for advocate H.S. Phoolka, who is fighting on an AAP ticket from Ludhiana. Panag's candidature had the immediate impact of ending Dhawan's hopes for the ticket (and seat). Conscious of the name recognition and popularity she enjoys in the city, especially with the 10,000 or so families of defence personnel who live in the city likely to support the daughter of Lt. Gen. (Retd.) H.S. Panag, the BJP nominated Kirron Kher, another actress belonging to a Chandigarh military family, in a meeting that ended with different sets of supporters coming to blows. Dhawan and his supporters protested at the local BJP office for days and greeted Kher with black flags. It took the intervention of Rajnath Singh and Arun Jaitley to get him to relent and finally extend his support. nce her rounds of the Sector 40 market are done, Panag climbs aboard a pickup truck and commences a roadshow through the residential areas. Afternoon is turning into evening, and a group of children have come out to play. They clamber aboard as well as the cavalcade — the truck, an autorickshaw and a group of supporters on foot — makes its way through the empty streets. Women and children come out of their houses to lay eyes on the candidate; some of them are prepared with garlands and Fanta. I’ve always been an activist. It’s a natural extension for me to join a movement trying to clean up the system. — Gul Panag Addressing a group of senior citizens that has gathered to meet her in the formal Punjabi she uses on the campaign trail, Panag launches into her stump speech on two Chandigarhs. It's a question that the three perpetual candidates have engaged with only tangentially, in ways that benefit their electoral calculus. But it's a question at the very heart of Chandigarh's development discourse. "Chandigarh's been divided into two Chandigarhs," she said during our interview. "There's that Chandigarh, which is north of Madhya Marg, that has access to everything. And there's the Chandigarh of the southern sectors — it progressively gets worse — where the parks are full of Congress grass [Parthenium hysterophorus]. Mr. Bansal would win if he stood from a park, but unfortunately grass can't vote." Designed by Le Corbusier as a world-class city for five lakh residents, Chandigarh has seen its population grow to 10.5 lakh in the 2011 census. By 2021, the population is expected to hit 19.5 lakh. The administration's solution was to add to Corbusier's original 29 sectors — Sectors 1 through 30; there is no Sector 13 — and build 17 more. These southern sectors were designed to house more people, and the three- and four-storeyed blocks of tiny apartments make a depressing contrast to the sprawling kothis of the northern ones. In a city dominated by bureaucrats, most of whom live in the posh northern sectors, the southern sectors face the brunt of power and water outages in the summer. Their roads are broken down, and often choked with traffic. Real estate prices have gone through the roof and the city has a serious low-cost housing problem. "Unlike the rest of India," says Panag, "we have the complete infrastructure to fix this. Every sector, every village, every colony has a school and health centre, but they don't work. A city that's 100% safe for women can be ensured. Women's safety and public transport are correlated. We once had the best public transport; I remember when I was a girl, people used to set their watches by the buses. Today, it's suffering the apathy of the administration. If equitable access to opportunity is not possible in Chandigarh, I can assure you it isn't possible anywhere else." The southern sectors also have most of the votes. Sectors 1 through 26 — north of Madhya Marg — have less than 30,000 of the 6.5 lakh or so votes in the constituency between them. The rest live in places like Sector 40 or the urban villages that offer the most affordable housing. Panag's message resonates with the senior citizens, who are livid at the lack of attention southern sectors like theirs have had to suffer. "These roads here are worse than rural Punjab," says D.S. Chahal, who feels the other established parties are essentially parties of leaders and not people. There is widespread anger among the gathered residents against Bansal, both due to the charges of corruption and a perception that he is interested in grabbing power more than addressing their problems. Bansal's involvement in Railgate, Panag says, shows either that he was complicit or incompetent. But mere charges of corruption aren't enough to derail the candidature of the four-time MP, who not only enjoys tremendous clout with the elites but also the support of a large section of the city's poor, who depend on him and his party machine for basic needs. "My vote is for Pawan Kumar," says Asha Devi, a 78-year-old resident of Colony No. 4, "as I have never seen any of these film stars. He has always listened to our problems and has given priority to people of his city." Colony No. 4 is set to be demolished as part of the latest slum clearing drive, but rather than debating the rationale behind the demolitions or Chandigarh's lack of adequate low-cost housing, the city's politicians have successfully used the long battle of attrition at a means of consolidating votes. Breaking this dependence is crucial to Panag's chances of success, and part of what Niraja Gopal Jayal calls "the AAP's promise of cutting out the slumlord" in providing effective governance unencumbered by political patronage. That promise has its share of takers even in Chandigarh, and Panag says her campaign efforts are often curtailed because the people whose votes she is seeking are already AAP supporters. "I have never seen Gul Panag doing anything for the country or for Chandigarh for that matter," says Prem Kumar, a resident of Mauli Jagran village, "but my vote is for her as she represents AAP in our city." Bansal's candidature is boosted by his national status, which is valuable currency in Chandigarh's union territory politics. Without a state government's budget, the city administration must rely on the central government for funds, and a man who has influence in New Delhi is a far more amenable candidate to the city's power brokers. He is also the man who the slum dwellers will come to when their homes are demolished, and while one section of the residents of Chandigarh's urban villages holds him responsible for the demolitions, another equally sizeable section says it will vote for him because of the support he provided when their slums were last cleared. In the uncertain world of the urban squatter, a sympathetic party boss is more reassuring than an empathetic political outsider. That label of outsider has been hurled at both Panag and Kher in the election. Panag brushes off the charge; she says she's spent at least a week of every month in the city despite the peripatetic existence of the military brat. "Every time my father was posted some place that didn't have a decent school, I came here," she says. Her grandfather, also a soldier, had a house in Chandigarh. The Panags now live in the satellite town of Panchkula, and her campaign is based out of her aunt's house in Sector 34. Both Panag and Kher refer to themselves as "Chandigarh's daughter" on the campaign trail. As his daughter takes a couple of phone interviews, Gen. Panag sits at the dining table, making calls to a list of Chandigarh's prominent citizens, asking for their support. For a campaign that has had to rely mostly on the candidate's personal funds and on her friends, many of whom have taken time off from work to join her on the campaign trail, to augment the small but spirited AAP cadre in the city, every bit of support is crucial. Panag is optimistic about her chances. "Much of the time, my campaigning has to be curtailed, because whoever I go to says they are already with me." As she travels from sector to sector, people driving past her SUV give her a thumbs up or a wave. She waves back, asking them to get everyone in their neighbourhood to vote for her. But it is a different thing to wish someone luck and to vote for them. How much of the goodwill Chandigarh's citizens have extended to Panag will translate to votes will only be known on March 16. (There isn't any polling available, since nobody polls Chandigarh.) Her two opponents — one a deep-rooted incumbent, the other a representative of a prime ministerial nominee riding a nationwide wave with the support of an important local mass leader — are certainly formidable. Her candidacy might be in part a creation of Twitter, but she recognises that this election will not be fought and won on social media, that it must be fought and won in the real world. 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