BJP calls in magicians, hopes they will do its Jharkhand trick

Possibly taking the slogan of ‘Modi Magic’ a tad too literally, the BJP has hired six teams of magicians to campaign for its candidates in the first phase of elections in Jharkhand. Each team has two persons — a magician and his assistant. But due to poor preparations at Bishrampur, where the BJP has fielded Ram Chandra Chandravanshi, the two teams assigned to the constituency for two days are travelling together.

In this village, Sanjay,who like the other three is from Bhopal, takes the lead. He begins by making a Rs 20 note appear from burnt paper and then invites a youngster from the village to join him. “I am going to make a fool out of him,” he says to laughs all around. Cyclists and bike riders stop by to take a look.

The magician, twirling a baton whose paint has begun to peel off, extensively interacts with the crowd, while at the same time sticking to some basic tricks, with small variations: plastic balls are made to appear in what was previously an empty bag held by the youngster and water drips from an apparently empty funnel held to his ear.

It helps that stage magic is not widely practised in Jharkhand — though people of certain regions believe in witchcraft.

All the magicians performing for the BJP are either from Madhya Pradesh or Maharashtra. The party had apparently signed them up for the assembly and Lok Sabha elections, too. “I worked in Vidisha (Lok Sabha) for Sushma Swaraj madam. I did not go to Maharashtra, but those who went worked across 40 villages,” says Sanjay.

Later, when the team reaches Raksahana village, they are confronted by a group of women who say they don’t want to see magic. “It’s bad. We are scared,” one of them tells Sanjay. He is not flustered. “We saw this in Chhattisgarh too, when villagers would come out asking us not to perform,” he says.

Sanjay says he has worked with the state governments of Chhattisgarh, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh — where the BJP is in power. “It was mostly related to awareness campaigns. When I am asked to work on something, I take time to understand the topic and design a trick based around the theme,” he says.

Thanks to the heckling, the performance at Raksahana starts poorly: Sanjay does not even bother to wear the robe. However, after plastic balls are made to disappear and water poured from orifices, the crowd starts enjoying the show. At one point, Sanjay brings out oversized laminated playing cards. One of them has a lotus printed on one side. A few shuffles later, all the cards show lotus on them. “You should be like this. Give the BJP all your votes,” Sanjay says as the crowd cheer.

This is in contrast to what happened earlier at Goderma, which has a significant Muslim population. Sanjay borrowed a white handkerchief and dropped it into an empty pouch. “What comes out will tell you a lot about who will bring development to Jharkhand,” he said, before pulling out the BJP flag. The villagers, who till then had assumed the free performance was for a government scheme, were caught unawares. Awkward glances at each other followed and there was no applause for the final trick as they silently walked away.