The Prime Minister inaugurated the latest Vande Bharat Express, the fourth one, from New Delhi to Amb Andaura in Himachal Pradesh, via Una.
Notably, the commercial operations of the train will start next Wednesday. But with the schedule for Himachal’s state elections expected to be announced any day—it was revealed today as scheduled for November 12, with results due on December 8—bringing in force the Model Code of Conduct, such inaugurations would have effectively got adjourned till after the polls.
This was the second Vande Bharat train the PM launched within a fortnight, the previous one being from Ahmedabad to Mumbai. Gujarat, too, is due to go to polls later this year. A fifth Vande Bharat is scheduled to be launched on the Chennai-Bengaluru-Mysuru route on November 10, with Karnataka also set to go for elections soon after that.
In Gujarat, the PM travelled in the Vande Bharat while inspecting its various new features. In Himachal, he boarded the train at Una and interacted with passengers.
The premium and super-fast Vande Bharat trains are supposed to have few stoppages. The new one touches the major Sikh pilgrimage of Anandpur Sahib in Punjab on the way to Amb Andaura, the station that serves the town of Amb, known for the Hindu deity Amba in nearby Chintpurni.
The optics of launching shiny new trains, billed as latest technological wonders in India’s archaic rail sector—in two poll-bound states—is not lost on anyone.
Prior to the 2019 General Elections, the first Vande Bharat, an earlier iteration with fewer features, was launched by the PM from New Delhi to his constituency in Varanasi. The second one was rolled out from Delhi to Katra, aimed at pilgrims bound for the Mata Vaishno Devi shrine in Jammu, another BJP stronghold.
In Railway scheme of things, launching any new train on a route requires either commercial justification—that the train will find adequate patronage to make commercial sense, or a socio-economic one—that the region needs to be connected as a mark of development, irrespective of patron numbers. The New Delhi-Amb Andaura route already has one mail/express train, the daily Himachal Express. There is also the Nanded Superfast that runs once a week.
Often, the reason for few trains between stations is explained by poor patronage, i.e., low demand. If establishing connectivity is socially desirable, it is usually fulfilled by the introduction of a low-key, passenger train, not the expensive Vande Bharat or even a Rajdhani.
But there is a third reason behind the launch of trains in India—one that is rarely acknowledged officially—politics. Yet, it’s such a big factor that it often overrides the other two.
Trains have always been a vehicle of politics for governments of the day. Railway ministers in previous regimes have launched trains at will through their Rail Budgets, mostly keeping an eye on their “home” states or constituencies—be it Mamata Banerjee for West Bengal or Lalu Prasad Yadav for Bihar.
This practice was so entrenched that during the presentation of one Rail Budget by the then Railways Minister Mamata Banerjee, when Opposition benches protested that most new trains were being launched for West Bengal, a fiery Banerjee shot back: “The trains are going from Bengal to other states. Are they not trains for the people of those states?”
Further back in history, the Congress’s A.B.A. Ghani Khan Chowdhury is still remembered as the Railways minister who extended Railways-related sops to Bengal, and especially his constituency Malda.
As Railways Minister, Ram Vilas Paswan in 1996 oversaw the creation of a new railway zone—East Central—carving out portions of the mammoth Eastern Railway and North Eastern Railway. The headquarters of this new zone was chosen as Paswan’s home constituency Hajipur in Bihar.
Even after trains are launched, getting them to stop at their constituencies, if only for a few seconds, is a perennial demand made by politicians to the Railways.
Notably, the Shatabdi Express was also no less a political project when it was launched by the Congress government.
The name Shatabdi or “century” was to mark the birth centenary of Jawaharlal Nehru in 1988. The then Railways Minister Madhavrao Scindia launched the first Shatabdi from Delhi to Jhansi. It was later extended to Bhopal.
While Rajdhanis by nomenclature followed the logic that all state capitals were to be connected with the nation’s capital, the Shatabdis were bereft of any such justification. They were basically premium day trains for short distances between two big cities.
“If you see, several Shatabdis have been rolled out over the past decades that don’t fetch great numbers. Obviously, there is an element of political demand. But yes, on paper, the bureaucracy always finds justification for traffic, demand, etc.,” a former Principal Chief Operations Manager of the Northern Railway told The Indian Express.
Unsurprisingly, it is hard to imagine that the launch of the Vande Bharats are immune from politics. The fourth and latest Vande Bharat is one of 75 such trains the government has decided to roll out by Independence Day next year.
The all-seater Vande Bharats are meant to be an upgrade from the all-seater Shatabdi Express trains, which have served—and still do—as comfortable, premium day-journey trains in India.
The Vande Bharats of the future, with sleeper berths, are aimed as an upgrade on the Rajdhanis and similar premium long-distance trains.
The government has a tentative list of routes where the 75 Vande Bharats may run. But at the same time, several big and small states are going to polls between now and the 2024 General Elections.
In other words, the Vande Bharats’ pilgrimage across India may have just begun.
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