Advocate Manish Kumar Dwivedi, 31, had never imagined that one day he’d be contesting a Lok Sabha election. But ahead of the second phase, dressed in a kurtapyjama, he was walking around the lanes of UP’s Gautam Buddh Nagar, greeting people with folded hands. His supporters handed out pamphlets bearing his photograph and a symbol : the humble chai kettle .
For the last two years, Dwivedi was part of a social campaign that voiced the concerns of small businessmen and entrepreneurs who were trapped in debt as a result of Covid lockdowns. “While big corporations often get debt waivers, there are small people who are getting no relief as they struggle to pay back bank loans and credit card bills. Who will speak for them?” Dwivedi asked.
In order to push for a waiver and extension of time for repayments, Dwivedi and his team wrote to multiple political parties and MPs, but no one responded, he says. That’s when the group decided to enter the arena of politics. In fact, the Akhil Bharatiya Parivar Party had plans to contest all the 543 seats.
All of them are first-time contenders, and come from various walks of life. The idea of the symbol, he pointed out, was crowdsourced as they asked people for suggestions. It not only represented a symbol of livelihood, but also was a barb at PM Modi’s ‘chaiwallah’ image, he said.
“The symbol was a way of saying: hamein sirf chai nahi chahiye, poori ketli chahiye (we don’t want just the tea, we want the whole kettle).” The.
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