Bahujan Samaj Party leader Ms. Mayawati has reached the pinnacle of the Indian political pole by daring, like the eagle, to fly to the top, unmindful of opposition. It would be churlish to deny her credit for weaving a winning electoral combination in a State dogged by two decades of political fragmentation. It would be equally dishonest to deny that her triumph has distressed many, not least because it is feared she will not pave the way towards a new coherence in public life.
Still, there is much to be appreciated about Ms. Mayawati. She has debunked the hypocrisy of six decades and dared to assert that she is unabashedly in quest of power. She has shunned the craven, defeatist and divisive reservationist route to power, and released her party from the constricting burden of promises on the basis of caste and/or religion. This may be why she did not issue a party manifesto, because she needed time and space to evolve the language of the new political paradigm she is intuitively demarcating.
Ms. Mayawati’s formula is unoriginal because the seeds of the present are embedded in the past; yet it is original in many ways. In one sense, she has picked up the Congress ‘umbrella’ formula centred on Dalits, Brahmins, Muslims, with a sprinkling of representation from other forward castes. Congress lost this ready-made votebank which served it in the first-past-the-winning-post electoral system due to Mr. Rajiv Gandhi’s flirting with Muslim orthodoxy in the Shah Bano case and appeasing Hindu sentiment by opening the locks of the Ram Janmabhoomi.
But the fragmented Congress base was not easy to reconstitute. Mr. Gandhi lost power on the Bofors issue, and it was only when Mr. V.P. Singh shocked the nation with the Mandal Commission’s 27 percent reservation in government jobs for OBCs that the Bharatiya Janata Party took up the ‘kamandal’ and consolidated Hindu upper castes. But this alienated the Muslims, and thus created new votebank formations.
Now, with the nation divided over Mr. Arjun Singh’s attempt to extend Mandal-II in elite educational institutions, Ms. Mayawati invited Brahmins, Banias, Kshatriyas (tilak, tarazu aur talwar), and even Muslims, to join hands with her Dalit base and catapult her to power. Spurning phony talk of a casteless society, Ms. Mayawati appealed to Brahmins and others as jatis/varnas, revalidating their pride in their natal castes. She distributed tickets to all groups, but did not make any special appeal to the OBC oppressors of Dalits, and this, ironically, helped Mr. Mulayam Singh Yadav retain much of his caste base. In contrast, the BJP suffered.
In the process, the BSP leader proved that a Hindu votebank (with Muslim support) can be created by uniting Hindus on the basis of caste, which is nothing but the organizing principle of Hindu society. She proved that caste is not an instrument of division, but social harmony. I am not surprised by her success or her declared ambition to be Prime Minister. Way back in 1998, an astrologer predicted the rise of a powerful woman politician, and most people assumed this referred to Ms. Sonia Gandhi. At that time, I told Mr. Shahid Siddiqui (later Samajwadi Party MP) that the women to watch out for were Ms. Jayalalithaa (who has since disgraced herself in the Kanchi episode) and Ms. Mayawati. I was laughed out of court; today I stand vindicated.
Yet my personal unease is because Ms. Mayawati does not have a Hindu agenda or commitment. She has positioned BSP as a Reinvented Congress Party, to seize the ground slipping away from the Sonia-Rahul Gandhi duo. Thus, a mobilized Hindu constituency, led by freshly resurgent Brahmins, will soon experience disillusionment if not betrayal, if its sensitivities are not nurtured. Her decision to scrap the UP Development Council; suspend IAS officers who neglected the B.R. Ambedkar Park; mass transfers of IAS and IPS officers; inclusion of a notorious Yadav history-sheeter in her ministry; and offer of reservations for the economically backward without specifying if these would be reduced for caste categories, may create unrest.
Meanwhile, the UP results have lessons for all. Mr. Rahul Gandhi, who berated Mr. P.V. Narasimha Rao for his alliance with the BSP, must realize that the BSP will cannibalize the traditional Congress vote in state after state. Indeed, Mr. Gandhi may do well to join the BSP and secure his status as an MP, like the scions of other fading political families. He does not have the spunk to revive the Congress; his whole approach in the current elections only factionalized the party further.
But the real debacle is of the BJP. Mr. Rajnath Singh has paid the price of sucking up to jaded and faded leaders. Besides the scandalous released-but-disowned CD (which sycophants tried to project as grand strategy), the party did not bother to invite its designated chief ministerial candidate for the release of the manifesto, causing doubts about its sincerity towards the elections.
Certainly, BJP did not fight to win. There was only a wish to win enough seats to be wooed as a coalition partner. The party failed to gauge the meaning of the BSP’s ebullient caste rallies, or comprehend the extent of public anger with Mr. Yadav’s lawless reign. By not sending a single leader of status to Nithari, it created an impression of having a tacit alliance with the Samajwadi Party, which proved disastrous. Mr. Advani’s half-clever repudiation of the Ram temple by saying he would speak of it only after it became a reality would have compounded Hindu anguish.
The BJP must make a fresh beginning by putting down the coffins of two living fossils from its shoulders. If the party is serious about the 2009 elections, it must out-manoeuvre Ms. Mayawati by reaching out to Hindus as Hindus, and avoid the secular trap of fighting for a share of the Muslim vote, which has no meaning when divided or unattached to a core constituency. Ms. Mayawati has shown the minority vote can be rendered irrelevant to the outcome of elections, undoing in one stroke the dead weight of the Nehruvian past, which even leaders like Ms. Indira Gandhi were unable to do. The BJP should dare to be true to its Hindu constituency and Hindu Brand Equity.
The Pioneer, 15 May 2007
