But their policies to cut prices by slapping export bans on some goods including on onions and sugar, or by allowing duty-free imports of lentils, has made the key voting demographic of farmers furious.
They say the politicians’ decisions flood the markets, and that the savings shoppers make are at their expense.
“The governments talk a lot about us,” said onion farmer Kanha Vishnu Gulave. “But their actions only hurt us — to keep the easily agitated city people happy by keeping our produce cheap.”
Gulave, 28, comes from India’s onion-producing heartland of Nashik district in Maharashtra state, which produces some 40 percent of onions nationwide.
He felt cheated when prices crashed after a sudden export ban in December.
“We dread elections,” said Bharat Dighole, onion producers’ association president for Maharashtra. “The most unwise interventions come around polls.”
After the ban, prices dropped to sometimes less than a third, Dighole said.
That sparked dozens of small-scale protests in Maharashtra.
At the same time, production expenses have more than doubled since 2017, Dighole added.
But the slump in wholesale prices meant that was not passed on to the consumer — or voter, from the politicians’ viewpoint.
They paid the same for their onions as they had done for years.
“All polls are fought in the name of farmers, but the government policy clearly favours the consumers,” said Dighole.
India will vote on Saturday in the seventh and final phase of a general election, stretched over six weeks to ease the logistical burden of polls in the world’s most populous country.
Two-thirds of India’s 1.4 billion people draw their livelihood from agriculture, accounting for nearly a fifth of the country’s gross domestic product.
In India, onions can be a barometer of a government’s popularity.
Runaway prices have triggered mass protests and toppled governments in the past.
In 1998, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Narendra Modi — at the time a local politician — lost control of the capital Delhi in state elections.
The defeat was widely blamed on voter anger at high onion prices.
While Prime Minister Modi is expected to sweep a third term in the ongoing national elections, the BJP has been out of power in the capital’s state legislature ever since.
