Empower Dalits? All Maya

from beneath her feet yet again. She knows that if she doesn’t muster the numbers — which must necessarily mean plundering the 24-member Congress camp — before the UP assembly convenes for the budget session, she will be history.

In Mayawati’s profoundly inward looking (read, self-serving) vision lies the tragedy of those who, against great odds, continue to vest their hopes of social advancement in her. She has — and this has been proved in election after election — the Dalit vote in the state properly locked up for safe keeping. But if politics is a means to achieve social empowerment, of increasing life choices, as it is supposed to be, then all that can be said is that Mayawati’s politics has proved resoundingly empty. Sure, if social empowerment is measured in terms of parks and statues, or in having some Dalit bureaucrats in positions of power and renaming districts, she may be reckoned to have done pretty well. But given the reality of the lives of Dalits in the state — people still eking out a miserable existence without the benefit of access to health, education, or sustainable livelihoods — this amounts to nothing but a gigantic magic show.

Things could have been so different. Because Mayawati, when she first appeared on the political scene, represented a symbolic shift in UP politics: one, because she was a Dalit; two, because she was a woman. With Kanshi Ram providing intellectual direction, here was someone filled with determination and, yes, anger. The slogan made famous during this phase — tilak, tarazu aur talwar/Inko maaro joote char — reflected that fervid, if evanescent, energy. But this conscious carving out of a political constituency did not translate into a transformative project. The moment passed, leaving the state’s Dalits still very much in the rut that a troubled history has left them. Today, Mayawati’s statecraft is all about short term opportunism; of manipulating the levers of power — including transferring bureaucrats constantly to the extent that today they prefer to live out of suitcases — for personal aggrandisement. As for the bahujan samaj, it continues to exist on the margins, even as Uttar Pradesh continues to go down the tube.