MAYAWATI: SPOILER OR SAVIOUR?

Mayawati’s hug of death is finally beginning to choke the Congress party.

Before reading on, please carefully go through what I had written way back in August last year. In the post entitled "Mayawati’s Hug of Death”, I had then itself warned about the dangers that the Congress party was being exposed to in accepting Mayawati’s warm and reassuring sisterly hug after she had won the UP elections. Despite the many unconcealed signs to the effect given out over the years by Mayawati and her mentor Kanshi Ram, the Congress kept getting sucked into her death trap. The article needs to be read in its entirety; there is little need to repeat what I have already stated there with some lucidity.

It has taken a very long time for the Congress to realize that Mayawati is quietly removing the ground from beneath its feet. The lady is now being dubbed, again incorrectly, by the Congress a “spoiler” outside UP where she is causing the defeat of many Congress candidates by luring away dalit voters from the Congress. Her base in these states being small presently, her candidates do not win but eat enough into the vote bank of the Congress to ensure that its candidates are defeated due to this splitting of votes.

The embrace of Mayawati, who spares no opportunity to threaten the emasculated Congress party that she will withdraw support to the government at the Centre if it does not toe her line (the Congress has given in every time so far, any surprise?), is at last beginning to be seen as what it always has been. Possibly the overwhelming need for instant gratification of the lust for power had blinded the party till now.

Maywati is not in the political arena to make or mar the fortunes of other parties. She is in the game to get to power at the Centre on her own. She is not putting up candidates in states other than UP to ‘spoil’ the chances of the candidates of other political parties, primarily the Congress. That is happening as a bye product of her strategy to build an all India base, like she did in UP, to eventually get enough MPs to be the Prime Minister entirely on her own steam. Yes, in the interim she will spare no effort to get a critical number of MPs to ensure that no other party or alliance can form a government on its own. With the BJP and the Congress being at the opposite ends of an irreconcilable ideological spectrum, she will inevitably be in the unique position of choosing her political mates entirely on her own terms, doling out crumbs to salivating nobodies whose sole objective of being in this game of politics is to find the shortest route to the ill-gotten spoils that power showers in complete abundance.

There has been a lot of debate lately about the prospects of Mayawati outside of UP. Most analysts have comfortingly concluded that she has virtually no base or organization in place in many states; regional aspirations and dynamics will ensure that she cannot make any headway; her new fangled alliance with Brahmins in UP is going to fall apart; dalits will soon be disenchanted with her as they realize that upper castes have benefited more from her etc. Were not they similarly dismissive when Kanshi Ram started out with the then hopelessly impossible idea of empowering dalits politically on their own rather than as fringe players in other political parties?

Forget BSP. Remember how even seasoned politicians had written off BJP in the not too distant past as an urban party of banias limited to pockets of North India? See how the party reinvented itself and where it is now? From almost nowhere, it has emerged a one of the two leading national parties in the country, the other being the Congress, of course!

Mayawati is going to do a BJP on the national political scene sooner than most of us would like to even contemplate.

Mahatma Gandhi had dreamt of the day when a dalit would be the Prime Minister of India. That dream could not have been in the limited political sense of a dalit physically occupying that chair like Dr Manmohan Singh is doing now. Mahatma Gandhi would have visualized proper empowerment of dalits in all walks of life as well as the in the political hierarchy. He would have wanted transfer of real power to the dalits and other long downtrodden sections of our society, culminating in a dalit getting to the top job on his own, not due to condescending charity or circumstantial compulsions.

Without doubt, Mahatma Gandhi would have envisioned this shift in the power balance to be spearheaded by his own party, the Congress, from whose ranks a dalit would rise to be PM. He could have never dreamt that this grand old political party would one day mutate into a family property, making the rise of anyone else impossible.

In a larger sense, Mayawati is giving shape to the Mahatma’s dream. A Mayawati could simply not have risen in the Congress. Paradoxically, after stridently talking only about dalits, she is mutating into echoing the very soul of the Congress party that Gandhi had dreamt about. To some Congressmen, she may be appearing to be the ‘spoiler’ of the party; in reality she may be well on the way to becoming the saviour of the party, both in spirit and on ground.

I do not know whether Mayawati has given thought to this possibility: For perhaps the first time since Independence, she is in the unique position of being able to cause a split in the Congress party, to lead the breakaway portion on to becoming the real party with the remaining rump withering away faster than anyone can even imagine now. Alternatively, of course it sounds fanciful and will not happen I know, Mayawati can be made the Congress President and projected as its Prime Ministerial candidate for the next elections! In one stroke, dalits, for long the cannon fodder of the Congress, will get the empowerment that Mahatma Gandhi had dreamt for them within the Congress and the Congress will come back to power with a thumping majority in the next general elections.

It is for Congressmen to decide whether they want to treat Mayawati as a ‘spoiler’ or start acknowledging the fact that she can indeed be the saviour of the Congress party. The choice they make may well determine whether they and their party survive or dissolve into oblivion.

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Readers may also like to read:

1. Mayawati and Dalit Power
2. Single and on a mission: India's alpha (ge)Ms.
3. Mayawati's hug of death
4. Is Modi BJP's answer to the Manmohan Mayawati challenge?
5. Looking for India's Obama in Harvard!

MAYAWATI'S HUG OF DEATH

Some years back, BSP ideologue and Supremo, the late Kanshi Ram had described the BJP and Congress parties as 'Saanp Nath'(King of Snakes) and 'Nag Nath'(King of Cobras). Both, he said, were equally dangerous and any opportune and momentary understanding with either of these parties would be entered into by the BSP only and only if it benefited the march and rise of the bahujan samaj (dalits) to power. His words never got past the ears that should have been listening and the minds that should have been trying to analyse his conceptual and strategic framework . He was lucky, as the political class at large has become almost completely focussed on winning the next election alone, and has lost the ability to see beyond. Perhaps this is due to the huge money involved in gaining political power, a subject of a separate discussion some other time.

A series of alliances with both the Congress and the BJP, including electoral and power sharing, followed, particularly in Uttar Pradesh, the home turf and laboratory of the BSP. Both the Congress and the BJP thought they had an unbeatable winning combination with the BSP, and that Mayawati, Kanshi Ram's heir, really had no choice but to align with either of them, and depend on them, if she wanted to get and keep power in any state. It probably never even crossed their mind that Mayawati's ambitions were far more encompassing, both for herself and the dalits, at the national level. Even more unrealistic to them, as well as to most experts and the media, seemed the possibility of Mayawati doing it virtually on her own from a dominant position, given the complex distribution pattern of dalits in various constituencies and states. Also, the dalits had many claimants to their votes, the Congress being historically the most prominent, and no one thought Mayawati could wean them away almost en block.

Both the Congress and the BJP have wooed Dalit voters in completely different ways. The BJP has used the hindutva plank to garner Hindu votes, while the Congress has, since independence, projected itself as the saviour and protector of the downtrodden. The BJP's emotive plank worked briefly on the Ram Mandir agenda which, obviously, could not could not continue to attract voters of lower castes indefinitely. The Congress, on a steady decline for the last 30 years, but for electoral successes in the wake of the assassinations of Mrs Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, has increasingly lost touch with the masses, by banking solely on the Gandhi brand.

Crucially, both these major parties have also completely failed in throwing up credible dalit leaders, who can give a sense of real empowerment to the dalits. The BJP and the RSS, have traditionally been, and continue to be, dominated by the upper castes.Their brand of hindutva is mostly focussed on the Hindu-Muslim divide, and is nicely comfortable with the gross and cruel inequities in Hindu society and the continued exploitation and suppression of dalits. The Congress, on the other hand, has seen the systematic elimination of all leaders of stature who could mount even a remote challenge to the Gandhi family. The last dalit leader of any significance in the Congress was Jagjivan Ram, decades ago. Other than the Gandhis, the core of the Congress of the future is now nothing more than a bunch of young, westernised, English speaking, urbane 'leaders' whose main claim to leadership is in 10 Janpath rather than the hot and dusty 'jan paths' of real Indians who live out in the country.

Kanshi Ram realised that dalits constituted an extremely significant chunk of voters with the potential to grab power in a democratic setup, on their own. He was also quick to realise that all political parties were dominated by upper castes, and that centuries old prejudices, practices and mindsets would continue to ensure that dalits would always play second fiddle to them in these parties. The only, and extremely tough, option was to galvanise dalits as a new and separate political force. When the BSP won just two seats in the Lok Sabha, political 'pundits'(pun intended), were quick to dismiss the dalit challenge. They remained smug in their caste determined intellectual superiority and the belief that dalits could never rise uncomfortably and would continue to accept the 'condescending, patronising, laptop empowerment'(words of Sagarika Ghose) that Congress and other parties had on offer. Real power would remain securely beyond the reach of dalits.

Mayawati saw the opportunity which most analysts and the media thought was non existent. First she placed a healing, dalit hand on the dalits which gave them unprecedented confidence and assurance, almost as if an unbearable load of a thousand years had been taken off their aching backs. This phenomena just could not be comprehended by the elite who have never been touched by caste discrimination which their 'untouchable' countrymen face even today. Having got the dalits solidly behind her in UP, Mayawati dextrously made both the 'snake kings' dance to her music, which they did almost like zombies. They thought they were too smart for this crude and brash Hindi speaking dalit lady who had to be kept in good humour, to keep their own loyal dalit voters in the flock! Then, thanks to Mandal commission which enabled reservations for all but the upper castes, Mayawati touched the very raw Brahmin nerve, telling them that they no longer needed to go begging to anyone to get their due. To everyone's disbelief, Brahmins of UP hastily shed centuries of prejudice and accepted a dalit as their leader. And, Mayawati, to everyone's 'shock and awe', won the UP elections on her own.

Mayawati's hug of death has almost killed the BJP in UP. It has also ensured that the almost dead Congress is not even able to feebly raise its smashed head, despite the strongest available antigen of the Congress, Rahul Gandhi, being made available in full measure. She is set to repeat her strategy in other states too, though the operational details might be different, depending on local factors. After getting to power in UP, Mayawati seems to be becoming a trustworthy ally of the Congress. Her votes in the Presidential and Vice Presidential elections, lifting the ban on movement of Delhi buses into UP, turning the screws on Anil Ambani and Amitabh Bachchan etc, have won her the favour of 10 Janpath. Mayawati has embraced the Congress again, a warm, sisterly embrace.

The Congress is literally on the huge horns of a fateful dilemma. Mayawati's hug is of death again, howsoever warm and reassuring it may feel now. If the embrace is spurned, death is again inevitable, but it will be painful, as Mayawati will emerge the victorious victimised dalit. The BJP is unwanted for the moment by Mayawati but is no safer. Kanshi Ram had correctly identified the worst enemies of the dalits and had forged a formidable weapon in the shape of the BSP to counter them. Mayawati has finally found the right explosive mix needed to deliver a fatal blow.

Both the BJP and the Congress have to find a way quick to deal with this weapon of their mass destruction. Will they find it? The answers are certainly not going to be found by westernised, alien urbanites who are 'blind to religion', a la Rahul Gandhi. Nor will they be unearthed by tilak wearing hindutva protagonists, inherently disdainful and unaccepting of dalits rising even a notch above them in the social power matrix.

The stark fact is that the rise and rise of dalit power has to be accepted without flinching and with due dignity and respect. The power balance in the mainstream political parties has to move to the lower castes unambiguously. That can only happen if the final authority in the party is a dalit. Will it happen? Till it happens, one can be certain that there will be no really effective challenge to Mayawati, who is certain to become the Prime Minister of India much sooner than we think. And given her enormous intelligence and indomitable will , she just might prove to be the best thing that has happened to India since, yes, Mahatma Gandhi.
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Readers may also like to read:

1. Mayawati and Dalit Power
2. Single and on a mission: India's alpha (ge)Ms.
3. Mayawati: spoiler or saviour?
4. Is Modi BJP's answer to the Manmohan Mayawati challenge?
5. Looking for India's Obama in Harvard!