 Welcome to Dispatches from India, a show by People's Dispatch, where we bring you some of the top stories from across the country, what Indians are talking about and the impact it will have on politics, economy and society. First we get into our News This Week section. Five Indian states went to the polls in February and March 2022, we now have the results. The Legislative Assembly elections were held for the states of Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Punjab in the North, Goa on India's west coast and in the country's northeast Manipur. The BJP, which is the ruling party at this centre currently emerged as the single largest party in all but Punjab. But was this a victory one on the basis of good governance? Or did a campaign of bigotry and hate and targeted welfareism triumph? And India Chakravarthy, Senior Journalist, explains. So it is pretty clear that what we are seeing here is that the BJP is completely in command of the biggest and when I say the BJP, I mean India's ruling party, the Bhaskya Janta Party, who is now widely seen across the world as a right-wing party which is driven by religious nationalism, which is the majoritarian nationalism of Hindus and English, which is the majority religion as most of your viewers would know. It is perceived as that, although the BJP itself that says that we are not that, but widely even by voters it is perceived like that and what these local state elections have done. The fact that the BJP has swept India's largest state in terms of the number of seats it brings to the parliament house at the centre, it determines almost 15% of the seats in India and more often than not decides who's going to be the prime minister in the country. The fact that the BJP has swept it, retained it and the fact that it has the biggest other national party, the oldest national party, Indian National Congress has been wiped out virtually off the board of every state that it existed in tends to show us that the BJP's rule is now almost unchallenged. It's become the party of rule. It is the dominant party around which all other issues will be, all parties will have to react and the opposition is fragmented and in some senses this is great for those who believe in a unitary system, a centralized authority and strong state, but those who believe in pluralism, more dialogue oriented democracy, definitely they should be worried about it. However, a few things to know. As I said, one of the elections was in India's largest state called Uttar Pradesh and in Uttar Pradesh we have seen in the past there used to be a lot of fragmentation of the vote. For the first time we are seeing a two-party system emerge or a two-race horse emerge in Uttar Pradesh and that could hold a lot of interest later on because the gap between the first party which as I said is the ruling Indian National Party, the Bhartya Jamta Party and the next which is a regional party has reduced. So in two years can that gap be surmounted? In another few years can it be surmounted? That's the question to watch out for which will have significant impact on future governments whether these will be coalition between regional forces or the central national party continues to rule. The other point that I'd like to make is that Indians have seen that unemployment is a huge problem in India. Employment is actually reduced in absolute numbers compared to the fact that population has grown, employment has reduced and this started well before COVID hit India. It started in 2017 and it has continued and we have not recovered from that yet it does not seem to affect the Bhartya Jamta Party, India's national party because it follows a two-pronged strategy. One is a religious nationalism, a nationalism which brings the majority together. It believes in that policy. It picks up on that and it builds on that. It's critics say that it is a politics of polarization, anti-minority polarization. As I said the BJP will never accept it so the support the BJP will not accept it. At the same time it also follows the policy of handouts and feeding of subsidies to the poorest people. No jobs mind you but just a government sustenance of their subsistence level which means they just are able to have two meals a day. It is made cheap for them. Some facilities are given to the poorest and that has allowed them to subsist which has become extremely difficult. Post reforms, post pro-market reforms in India where the poorest have actually become even poorer. Their growth, their real income has been absolutely stagnant from whereas the rest of India, the top one percent of Indians, top 10 percent of Indians have become very rich. The BJP is able to maintain this tension, get a lot of votes from the poor. So we are seeing a politics in which there is monopoly, the top big business which is getting a lot of concessions from the government in budgets and the poorest are being sustain this. So the money funding comes from big business and the votes come from the poorest of the people. No jobs, no progress, no economic development. This seems to be the politics that we are going to see for the next few years. Still the opposition comes together and there is a certain degree of coordination at that level. Regional elections in India have a particular and particularly under reported impact on women. This cycle, the implication has been exacerbated by the wide-ranging consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic to get a better understanding of the issues faced by women as well as the challenges faced by the people's movements in the country. We spoke to Mariam Dhavali, the General Secretary of the All India Democratic Women's Association, a mass Pan India organization. The impact of the results of the elections that have been declared on 10th of March are going to have a very adverse reaction in our country. We know we are aware that the ruling regime is extremely authoritarian and clams down on any kind of descent. This is going to really hamper building a social, political, economic movement on people's issues. But on the whole, women as a part of the population will have to struggle because the price rise and the issues connected with women's lives are going to worsen. They have made a slew of policies and promises, which we are sure they are never going to keep. The attack on women is also going to increase because in this past seven years, we have seen because of propagating the regressive Manusmuti ideology, women have been targeted in every sphere, right from employment, right from education to even carrying out their day to day responsibilities. The increase in violence on women, the decreasing sex ratio, the women being thrown out of the educational sphere, all this is taking us back into the dark ages and which the BJP RSS very much wants and is propagating. So the days to come are going to be of very severe challenges for us and the Indian population that believes in a secular democratic India will have to come together and the All India Democratic Women's Association is going to mobilize women further and trying to intensify its struggles to preserve the rights of women that we have won all these years through very hard struggles and also in the defense of our constitution and the rights that the constitution gives us. We now move to our in focus section where we take a deeper look at some of the burning issues in the country. For this story, we go to the Kanyakumari district of the state of Tamil Adu where those employed in temples are facing a variety of issues regarding livelihood. These include salary, promotion and retirement benefits. These workers are under the Hindu religious and charitable endowments department of the state government. Ironically, it is the left wing center for trade, Indian trade unions, C2, which has taken up their issue. We bring you this feature on the kind of problems the workers are facing and what they are doing about it. And finally, the Kashmir Valley was known for its beauty much before it was turned into the most militarized place in the world. For generations, people have kept alive traditional art, craft and music including traditional methods of production of daily use items. But the current generation of crafts people are finding it close to impossible to even subsist much less thrive in the economic and political reality of today. These artisans artisans may well be the last of their kind. That's all we have for you today. To read up on more such stories visit our website www.peoplesdispatch.org and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. See you next week.