India's Anti-Obama.(International Edition; ASIA)(Mayawati)

Byline: Jeremy Kahn

Unlike Obama, who transcends old divides, Mayawati has built her power on demagogic class warfare.



Shortly after Barack Obama's election last fall, a banner appeared in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state. OBAMA IS PRESIDENT OF THE U.S. NOW IT IS TIME FOR MAYAWATI TO BE PRIME MINISTER OF INDIA, it read.



Mayawati (she uses only one name) is Uttar Pradesh's chief minister. It's a big job; if U.P. were a country in its own right, its 190 million inhabitants would make it the sixth largest in the world. Yet Mayawati is now gunning for a bigger one. With national elections beginning this month, her supporters are trying to position her as India's answer to America's youthful black president. There's no chance that her party will actually win a majority of the seats in Parliament. But the likely outcome is that the two main parties, Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), will be forced to rely on coalitions. Mayawati's followers hope she'll emerge as kingmaker in the negotiations, with enough clout to grab the top job herself. Her party's aim is "to make Mayawati prime minister," as her top strategist puts it, and there's a chance it will succeed.



There are indeed parallels between Mayawati and Obama. Like America's president, Mayawati is young--just 53 in a country where most political leaders are in their 70s. She is also an outsider who comes from a long-oppressed segment of society: the Dalits, the politically correct term for India's Untouchable caste. The lowest of the low in the traditional Hindu social order, Dalits were long consigned to jobs such as waste collection and considered so impure they were denied education and other basic rights. India's Constitution outlaws caste discrimination, but the age-old hierarchies continue to play an outsize role in life there. In fact, the gulf between high and low caste in India is arguably bigger than that between black and white in America. And the political impact of low castes is potentially larger: they represent 60 percent of the Indian electorate by some estimates, with Dalits alone making up nearly 20 percent. Blacks, by contrast, represent just 12 percent of U.S. voters.



So Mayawati is both a bigger underdog and a potentially bigger threat to the established order than Obama was. While he benefited from a first-class education, she grew up in a shantytown with eight brothers and sisters and attended poor state schools. Obama enjoyed the backing of a long-established party, while Mayawati's organization, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), has been built up largely by Mayawati herself--and in a part of the world where women have made it to the pinnacle of power only as wives, widows or daughters of beloved male leaders.



But unlike Obama, who promised a new politics that …