The challenge of being Mayawati (BHARAT CHRNIOCALE)

Vidya Subrahmaniam


Mayawati’s 2007 victory was a result of mature, sensible politics. She must reclaim these qualities if she is to recover the ground lost in 2009.

In the summer of 2007, as the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party galloped towards an absolute majority in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly election, a bureaucrat in the outgoing regime took a bet on the fourth-time Chief Minister’s career trajectory. “You will see a very different Mayawati this time,” he told journalists. “Her goal is Delhi, not Uttar Pradesh, and she will want the world to see a forward-looking, mature leader capable of running a large and diverse country.”



There was no reason to doubt his words. Ms Mayawati’s implausible journey from a Dalit background of deprivation and discrimination to Chief Minister on her own strength was a story without precedent. (Barack Obama came later.) It had been made possible as much by grit, struggle and courage as by strategy, craft and a keen understanding of what to do when. Ms Mayawati plotted her victory with precision, making a gradual but astute shift from the exclusivist, strident Dalit-centred agenda of the past to a pragmatic politics of inclusion and reaching out.



The dividend came in the form of what U.P. referred to as the “plus” votes — votes of castes and communities other than Dalits. The plus voters were the key to winning an electoral majority but they were also the hardest to get because of their historical prejudices against Dalits. It did not help that the BSP was itself born in fierce opposition to the manuwadis. That in the end she breached these barriers is a tribute to Ms Mayawati’s perseverance, intelligence and willingness to adapt to the demands of changing times. In the hands of new-age Mayawati, bahujan (depressed classes) became sarvajan (all classes), while an innovative new jingle — haathi nahi Ganesh hai, Brahma Vishnu Mahesh hai (not elephant but Ganesh; Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh) — displaced the rabble-rousing slogans of a previous era. Who could miss the symbolism in the transformation of the aggressive BSP elephant into a genteel, universal God?



The embrace of conciliatory, sensible politics had expanded Ms Mayawati’s support base and placed her at the head of U.P.’s first majority government in 16 years, and it stood to reason that she would go along on the same path — both to consolidate her position in the State and to extend her appeal beyond it.



Rashness

However, in office, she showed a rashness that turned on its head the very logic of her recent makeover. Having worked so hard to achieve the most important milestone of her career, Ms Mayawati seemed to have wantonly squandered it all — the goodwill, the votes, the respect, the admiration. Even without the extraordinary significance of her ascent to power, the slide would have seemed too quick, too apparent. But this government had come with high expectations; its historic import was acclaimed internationally. Indeed, from the vantage point of where Ms Mayawati stood in May 2007, it seemed entirely in order that the next stop in this incredible odyssey should be the Indian prime ministership.



And yet as one travelled in the State for an assessment of the voter mood prior to the Lok Sabha election, it was impossible to miss the disillusionment. The two-year-old Mayawati government carried a heavier burden of anti-incumbency than Manmohan Singh’s government of five years at the Centre. Nothing the Chief Minister had done since assuming office seemed designed for any great future role. What was evident on the ground was quite the opposite of the responsible politics that pundits prophesied would take her to the high seat of power in Delhi.



Ms Mayawati’s 2007 victory was the result of an accommodative politics whose key elements were prudence and moderation. In office, these were dumped for a self-obsession that was excessive even allowing for the exigencies of history. Her unique position as a self-made Dalit woman politician allowed Ms Mayawati liberties not granted to others. In a country where dynasties habitually came to power, she had single-handedly overcome debilitating discrimination to reach where she had. That in the India of Ms Mayawati Dalits continued to be subjected to unspeakable crimes might have seemed an unacceptable paradox, but surely the fact was also a pointer to her own struggles en route to power.



Viewed from this perspective, many things acquired clarity, be it the admiration she evoked in her community or her own urge to embark on a grand celebration of Dalit power. In her previous three terms, Ms Mayawati had devoted considerable time and energy to erecting memorials and statues to Dalit icons — which was small compensation for the entrenched institutional prejudices against the community. The gesture went down well with her core voters who saw it as sweet revenge for centuries of exclusion and humiliation. Ms Mayawati also afforded a measure of security to Dalits by strictly enforcing the Scheduled Castes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. However, significantly, she also earned a reputation for running a tight, disciplined administration that many in U.P. would later cite as the reason to have voted her to power in 2007.



Had Ms Mayawati dedicated a few more projects to the Dalit movement in her fourth term, few would have objected. But she made building of memorials and statues the centre piece of the BSP government’s programmes. A score of gargantuan new projects aside, hundreds of crores of rupees were lavished on razing and redoing projects already executed at a huge cost in her previous stints in office. From Lucknow to Noida on the Delhi border, the pink dholpur stone was omnipresent, testifying to the culture of waste and self-indulgence made into a credo by the BSP government.



Even this excess might have passed scrutiny if the Chief Minister had not erected dozens of her own statues, obsessing over their exact dimensions, and indeed ordering that they be re-made if they were not to her satisfaction. The immaturity was evident in the treatment meted out to a bust of Rajiv Gandhi originally placed at the centre of a modest roundabout just off the chief ministerial bungalow in Lucknow. The Mayawati government banished the bust, minuscule compared to her own statuesque versions, to a far corner of the roundabout, and installed a fountain in its place.



Poetic justice for what the savarna jatis (forward castes) had done to Dalits? Not really. In Ms Mayawati’s fourth term, her supporters expected more than token gestures from a leader who had brought them out from the seclusion of their condemned Dalit existence and taught them to think independently. True, Dalit support for Ms Mayawati was undiminished, some even compared the Dalit memorials to the profusion of samadhis dedicated to the elite Nerhu-Gandhi clan, but a vast majority wanted a better standard of living, and a greater and more visible share in the power structures, which continued to be dominated by the forward castes thanks to Ms. Mayawati’s sarvajan formula.



At Baraipur, an Ambedkar village en route to Phoolpur, residents pointed to the disproportionate influence of forward castes on the Mayawati regime, and nostalgically recalled the BSP’s founding slogan, vote hamara raj tumhara nahi chalega (we will not brook a system where our votes got your rule): “It is still our vote and their rule.”



Irony

The irony was too large to miss. In its current term, the Mayawati government had gone all out to placate the Brahmins, handing them plum posts in government and allotting them a ticket share of 20 of 80 Lok Sabha seats in comparison to only 17 for Dalits. Brahmins are roughly nine per cent of U.P.’s population while Dalits form 21 per cent. But the Chief Minister’s generosity was largely wasted on the community which harped on her preoccupation with statue-building and rued the migration of goonda elements from the Samajwadi Party to the BSP. Brahmins and other forward castes saw this as a deliberate slight by a party that had made ending the “goonda raj” of the Mulayam Singh government the central plank of its 2007 election campaign.



A lot rode on the Mayawati government, which was expected to show the same enlightened vision that brought it to office with a full majority. That vision meant directing the government’s scarce resources towards larger programmes aimed at the uplift of the poor and the deprived. The many claims in the BSP government’s publicity brochures notwithstanding, in the public perception, governance under Ms Mayawati remained confined to a single agenda: promotion of the Chief Minister. The BSP chief campaigned widely outside the State, projecting herself as a potential Prime Minister. The travels did not bring the expected dividends, and the neglect of her own backyard showed up in the form of the BSP’s far from respectable performance.



Until 2009, the BSP was on the up and up; its vote and seat shares increased with every election. Election 2009 has broken that trend. But there is a message in the BSP’s 27.42 per cent vote share: That all is not lost yet, and she can recover the ground lost provided she reclaims the qualities that brought her to power two years ago.