Miracle Of Democracy
By Deepak Thimaya
The ‘miracle of Indian democracy’, as former Prime Minister Narasimha Rao called Mayawati post the BSP wresting the UP Assembly crown in 1993 may have lost the State tiara 19 years later, she may be down but not out and is all set to fight another day! By choosing to enter the Rajya Sabha she has sounded the bugle of her entry into national mainstream politics.
Importantly, but before she plans her next move the BSP supremo should think about her Party workers in UP and other States. Leaders survive but it is the workers and the campaigners at the grassroots level who bear the brunt of a bad defeat.
True, this rout was coming for sometime, notwithstanding the upbeat mood in the BSP camp for over six months. Even though UP’s ordinary voter knew it was not going to be the elephant’s (BSP symbol) march to victory.
Perhaps, the BSP workers positive disposition was due to loyalty to their great leader. Towards that end, they did not take their eyes off from the goal laid down: Be it erecting statues, or designed programmes for the people or else the way she ran the Party. Things continued unhindered.
Besides, even as critics lambasted Mayawati for wasting public funds on erecting statues and making parks to honour herself, family and a few Dalit icons and called her a ‘megalomaniac’, her rapid followers thought otherwise. Raising a fundamental question: Why not?
Pertinently, if India got submerged in a huge tsunami and was re-discovered after thousands of years, the discoverer would only find statues of the Nehru Gandhi dynasty and think that the country did not have any other icons at all, her followers reasoned. Let her opponents and others call the statues an eyesore and suggest that one park or sthal would have been proper instead of making so many all at once and being seen as trying to ‘psyche out’ her rivals.
But then, Mayawati has her own Party and flock to appease and to keep. Also, she might not do politics like the Congress, BJP and Samajwadi or for that matter, even the brand and kind of politics people expect of the BSP. Mayawati has always done what she thinks is right — for now and the future.
It stands to reason, if the Dalit icon came to power by engineering a new Brahmins-Dalit social alliance, she certainly should have been smart enough to foresee that the results of her parks, stone elephants along-with educational reforms would get her nowhere. Alas, Mayawati failed to read the voters mind, and lost. No matter, that she was confident of winning till the end.
What of the BSP workers? Most are shocked, because such was their faith in the words of their “dear leader Mayawati” that if she said she would win UP they believed her. If she asserted she would be the Prime Minister one day they agreed. Today, the BSP supremo is silent and her flock is bewildered.
Especially against the pre-poll backdrop when the media reports talked of the BSP not faring well, the Party sympathisers got agitated. Making it difficult for Party leaders to explain to workers in zones and districts that the media was conspiring against Dalit power and how they had to continue working and wait for victory. Everything was turned on its head.
Significantly, many wonder how a street smart savvy player like Mayawati or her Party not see defeat coming. From renaming districts, to forcible castes integration, down proposing to split UP into smaller States, to empowering Dalits, everything Mayawati did she thought was for the peoples’ good and would be rewarded.
Mayawati’s downfall came as she failed to realize that the large backward classes perceived her as a threat. They realised that they had to assert themselves politically otherwise UP would belong to the upper castes and Dalits. Worse, the BSP ideology does consider the backward classes as a class at all.
Compounding this, while a majority of Dalits were with Mayawati, the Brahmin community which had enjoyed power and importance under the BSP five-year rule were today sitting on the fence. Thus, all backward classes were determined to throw her out and put their votes on Mulayam’s Samajwadi. Indeed, the vote was not pro-Samajwadi as much as it was anti-BSP.
As matters stand, the biggest task for 38-year old Samajwadi Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav is to not only undo all that Mayawati did and do all that she did not do. More. While Mayawati was firm the Samajwadi has to be perceived as liberal. It has to get rid of its goonda raj image, give precedence to law and order and social justice. Else, trouble lies in store. Mayawati who lost by only a two per cent shift in voter percentage is waiting for her successor Akhilesh to falter and make a mistake.
In the ultimate, Mayawati needs to understand that even as the BSP is heavily dependent on her charisma and strength, it takes more than just one leader to keep a Party in power for more than one term. All is not lost for Mayawati and this defeat might turn out to be good for the Dalit diva.
Five years in politics, till the next Assembly polls, is a long time to forgive Mayawati for her acts of commission and omission and forget the way the BSP had stagnated. Time now for the ‘miracle of democracy’ to change her thinking, set her house in order as also go in for an image makeover. Equally, for the Samajwadi, the challenge is to keep UP from becoming a free-for-all State. —- INFA