Mayawati: Destiny's queen?

Mayawati. In the glossary of Indian politics, it is a one-word name as resonant and lethal as that of a Brazilian striker. What makes the narrative of Maya the Mighty all the more engrossing is the sheer singularity of her power.

In 2007, she triumphed spectacularly without any support from the media or the corporate world, or, most significantly, any political partner. This time round, the stakes are only higher.

As the supreme leader of India's fastest growing political party, Mayawati has always wanted to reduce the distance between Lucknow's Kalidas Marg and Delhi's Race Course Road. Another victory will turn the speculation about Candidate Mayawati for Prime Minister into a distinct possibility. The powerful symbolism of a Dalit diva as the leader of the world's most volatile democracy is too hard to resist in the politics of social justice, and her ambition has always been transparent.

In the 23 years that she has spent in public life, she has often outpaced her rivals with speed, stamina, perseverance and tenacity. Mayawati, the daughter of a government employee, joined her mentor Kanshi Ram in 1984. She fought her first poll for a Lok Sabha seat from Muzaffarnagar the same year but lost. Her crowning moment came in 1995 when she became Chief Minister for the first time with the help of Mulayam Singh Yadav - the coalition lasted only four months.

Mayawati has been in and out of stormy affairs with her bitter rival, the BJP. She joined hands with the saffron party for the first time in 1997, citing the reason that she wanted UP to be freed from the goondaism of Mulayam's reign. Her mentor Kanshi Ram openly said it was a short term arrangement. He was right but it was not the last time that the elephant got cosy with the lotus in UP.

Mayawati became CM for the second time again in coalition with the BJP but did not complete her side of the deal by pulling support when it was Kanshi Ram's turn to become the boss. She again ascended the throne in 2002 with the help of the BJP but quit within 18 months in the light of the Taj corridor scam.

BSP, with 206 MLAs and 21 Lok Sabha members, is not a stereotypical party of the dispossessed. Neither is its paramount leader a one-dimensional social revolutionary. She won the state decisively, polling over 30 per cent of the votes in 2007, by projecting herself as the only alternative to Mulayam. Her social re-engineering was not just meant to acquire additional votes but to ensure that none of her rivals retained even their traditional vote banks. She won over Muslims from SP, upper castes from BJP and the Jats from Ajit Singh's RLD.

The proverbial political refrain in UP is: It's the caste, stupid! The Dalit-Brahmin matrix that sustains her electoral base is intact, and she is still the only leader in the country who can transfer her votes from one caste to another.

To achieve the miracle, Mayawati had worked relentlessly over the few years, even shunning a few byelections and the state municipal elections, in much the same way that football teams rest key players for minor matches to keep them fit for the big one. As a precautionary measure against coalition whims, she avoids pre-poll alliances. She never defines her agenda of governance either. She contests without a manifesto. She is the agenda; it is me-alone politics at its worst. And that is how the cult of the saviour is built.

While Maya never failed to whip up a frenzy over issues of corruption and crime at her meetings prior to the 2007 elections, what really paid handsome dividends for her and the BSP was her effort at social engineering. By wooing the upper castes, Mayawati showed her acumen as a master strategist, perhaps even better than mentor Kanshi Ram.

This was a different BSP from the one that Kanshi Ram had founded in 1984 to create a political identity for the Dalits with the slogan 'Tilak, tarazu aur talwar, inko maro joote chaar'. The reference was, of course, to the party's rallying cry against the upper castes represented by the Brahmins (tilak), the Banias (tarazu, the trader's weighing machine) and the Thakur (talwar or sword).

The first Brahmin National General Secretary of the party, Satish Mishra had advised her to resign from chief ministership in August 2003 and fight when CBI was asked to probe the Taj Heritage Corridor scam. He not only successfully defended her in courts but also played a key role in bringing Brahmins closer to Mayawati. Elephant of the BSP was marked as Ganesh for the upper caste Hindus.

In Uttar Pradesh, the upper castes constitute about 30 per cent of the population, while the Dalits account for 21 per cent. Add to that the Muslims at 17 per cent and it was clear that Mayawati had a winning combination. It was with this in mind that she allocated 117, 113, and 85 tickets to upper castes, OBCs and Muslims respectively for the 2012 polls.

Observers believe that in her first three terms in office, she pursued an aggressive Dalit agenda because she was always dependent on the crutches of first Mulayam and then the BJP on two occasions. This time round too, her focus has been on dalit villages and muslim ghettos.

The region where UP's ruling BSP seems to be clearly losing its grip is the impoverished Bundelkhand that contributed to CM Mayawati's rise to power in 2007, giving her 15 of the total 21 seats. But Behenji appears to be on the wrong side of this caste calculus this time. The caste factor, that mainly prompts the electorate's voting pattern, and voters' disenchantment with the lack of progress in their region are the main reasons touted for Mayawati's apparent decline in her pocketborough.

From the concrete elephants, parks and statues to murder of doctors overseeing the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati is facing allegations of corruption along with accusations of betrayal by various social groups, including Brahmins this time around. Mayawati had to sack several of her MLAs involved in heinous crimes and adding insult to the injury is the fact that many victims of their lawless run were Dalits.

She has argued consistently in the past couple of months that the pace of development in the state was slow because of the non-cooperation of the Centre and shortage of funds, as the Congress-led UPA did not grant a Rs.80,000 crore special package to UP. She also claimed that the criminals and corrupt members in her government were actually those who had "strategically infiltrated" her party from the SP and the BJP.

What has no doubt helped her resilience in the face of the unrelenting barrage of attacks by the media and her opponents is her ability to fight back from situations of extreme adversity and an uncanny knack of taking politics by the scruff of its neck and making it do her bidding. In this she is perhaps quite like two contemporary sister politicians - Jayalalitha and Mamata Bannerjee - and the three could well form a unique trinity dominating Indian politics for the next decade at least.