They left home early in the morning to get a seat at the front of the exhibition grounds for a campaign appearance by their political hero. They settled in on the rough mat floor, in their best bright polyester saris, prepared to wait for hours despite the 113-degree heat.
"I wanted to be sure I'd be able to see and hear her," Rajesh Devi said happily.
Rajesh Devi's devotion, and the loyalty of thousands of marginalized Indians like her, is fueling the phenomenon of India's political season: Mayawati, a woman born to the bottom rung of the country's social order, now aiming for the highest office in the land: prime minister.
Mayawati, 53, is Dalit, the lowest in the enduring Hindu caste system, an "untouchable" born and raised in a shack in a New Delhi slum by an illiterate mother and a father who openly disdained his female children. With determination and unmatched political wile, she rose to the post of chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India's largest state.
Now, as India awaits the results, expected this Saturday, of its marathon election, it is possible that she has succeeded in navigating her country's splintered politics to become the head of this would-be superpower.
That notion strikes horror in the hearts of elites. They see an unpolished woman who speaks no English and is dogged by allegations of corruption and abuse of power, utterly unfit to lead.
But the prospect of a Prime Minister Mayawati thrills her simply dressed, barefoot, callus-handed faithful, who would see the ascension of one of their own as the fulfillment of their aspirations.
"We are the ones who sowed the seeds for the plant to grow big," Rajesh Devi declared with satisfaction as she sat in a circle with women from her village and listed the reasons why they love Mayawati. "And now she should become the prime minister."
Rajesh Devi credits Mayawati for the low-interest 10,000-rupee bank loan she used to buy a buffalo. Now she sells its milk and earns 400 rupees a day. Her neighbor, 60-year-old Maruti Devi (like Mayawati, the women use no surname but add the honorific "Devi" to indicate they are married), is getting an old-age pension of 300 rupees a month.
With mentor and party founder Kanshi Ram, Mayawati launched her political career by uniting Dalits through an intoxicating message -- that they are the "people of the majority" who must use the tools of democracy to end their oppression. Over the past 20 years, they have built the Dalit movement into a national force -- low castes make up about 60 percent of India's voters -- and have four times seized control of Uttar Pradesh, India's largest state.
But with typical political cunning, Mayawati realized some years ago that she would need more than Dalits to make it to the prime-ministerial seat, and so she declared her Bahujan Samaj Party the champion of all minorities.
"She created a new social coalition of everyone who was not part of the newly dominant castes," explained Anand Kumar, an analyst with the Center for Indian Social Systems at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.
This Indian election, which has been under way since mid-April and which ends with the vote count on Saturday, is proving more opaque than usual. None of the big parties is expected to win the numbers needed to govern, and some traditional coalition alliances are in tatters over issues such as the war in Sri Lanka and a nuclear deal with the United States. New alliances and frenzied horse-trading will produce the new regime.
Mayawati is hoping to win enough seats to play kingmaker, and she has made clear her price is the top job.
"There is a reason why the English-speaking elite hates her so much -- she looks too much like the maidservant who works for them," said Ajoy Bose, author of "Behenji: A Political Biography of Mayawati." "But she's not somebody who can be easily co-opted. ... She thinks the way she thinks. She's an unknown." The Indian media have demonized her, Bose added, in part because a villain always makes a better story. Mayawati rarely courts the media and declines all interview requests.
At the rally, the crowd of about 5,000 people was electrified when Mayawati's helicopter touched down in a cloud of dust. Many made a futile effort to rush the stage through metal barricades and rows of stick-wielding police. She mounted the stage in the frumpy beige kurta-pajama she usually wears in public, and in a surprisingly deep, scratchy voice scolded the crowd, reminding those who had gathered that the Indian National Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party have done nothing for them, the poor, despite ruling in turns since independence. She went on to promise the crowd that when she is prime minister, she will work for "reservations" for all "economically backward" classes in both government and private jobs -- that is, work to have even more jobs set aside for specific groups, in the way that nearly half of civil service jobs are now reserved for people from the lowest castes.
"I want to reassure the upper-caste people that if we come to the center we will also look to their concerns and demands," she added repeatedly.
Mayawati has never married, and she is unique in this region as a single female who has achieved political power on her own, rather than as someone's widow, wife or daughter.
Whether she wins or not, Mayawati's mere presence in the race speaks to seismic changes in India.
"The most positive thing about her is not what she is," Bose said, "but what she represents -- that Indian democracy is alive and well and it is possible for a Dalit, a woman, with no political lineage and no money at all to rise to where she is."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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The untouchable who would be prime minister of India
Prabuddha Bharath's Election will Empower 'Queen Of The SC/STs' - THREE BASKETS STUDY CIRCLE
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Mayawati of the BSP
BSP will do well. It would be because of the SC/ST vote advantage and due to many perceptible achievement of the Mayawati regime.
Two years ago, one could travel the length and breadth of State without getting entangled in the peculiarities of individual Assembly segments. The trend towards the Bahujan Samaj Party, re-emerging in a sarvajan (all communities) avatar, was so strong that it held across caste groups, regions and constituencies. Now it has become stronger.
In the U.P. of 2009, there is overwhelming trend.
In U.P., the BSP continue to be the major players largely because of the continuing loyalty of their core voters — SC/ST-Jatavs (12 per cent).
The 2007 buzz around the BSP was still glaring . The SP, which cut an election-eve deal with the former BJP leader, Kalyan Singh, hoping to achieve an Other Backward Classes (OBC)-Muslim consolidation. This strategy was intended to place Mulayam Singh in an unassailable position but obviously the SP chief did not calculate the “Kalyan impact” on Muslims.
Though Muslims have never voted en bloc in U.P., the SP has over the years got the major share of the Muslim vote. In 2007, nearly half of all voting Muslims voted the SP, even though this was a seven percentage point drop from 2002. This time, the Muslim vote seemed to have going to the BSP.
BSP will do well. It would be because of the SC/ST vote advantage and due to many perceptible achievement of the Mayawati regime.
Tamil Nadu’s SC/ST vote
Suresh Mane, national general secretary, says, “Our party alone has the vision to make the oppressed share political power.”
SC/STs want to be decision-makers and have a share in political power, declared Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati, during a rally in Madurai. The Bahujan Samaj Party leader, who is trying to expand her reach, has put up candidates for all the 39 seats in the State.
Her party, with the changing pattern of the SC/ST vote since Independence is a cause for hope. Twenty per cent of the State’s population, SC/ST largely voted the Congress in the early years after Independence. However, in the late 1960s, they shifted loyalty to the DMK and later the AIADMK.
SC/ST intellectuals in the State feel that the Dravidian parties with their populism have failed to retain the SC/STs within their fold. The emergence of SC/ST parties after the birth centenary of B.R. Ambedkar indicates the failure of the social pluralism preached by the Dravidian parties, they say.
Atrocities at the hands of intermediate castes made a section of the SC/STs organise themselves.
The BSP, with its social engineering and politically astute seat allocations for three Brahmins, three Muslims and OBCs, is expecting to make inroads. Suresh Mane, national general secretary, says, “Our party alone has the vision to make the oppressed share political power.”
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