Karnataka - Bangalore

The spectacular maya of Indian democracy

— Photo: K. Gopinathan

Ajoy Bose in Bangalore on Wednesday.

Bangalore: The maya of Mayawati has been keenly watched with shock and awe. Even her detractors would admit that her rise from a non-descript school teacher to a protégée of Kanshi Ram to a possible Prime Ministerial candidate is spectacular.

Ajoy Bose’s Behenji, a Political Biography of Mayawati, maps this mercurial journey of the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister as a reflection of the “vast social upheaval sweeping away age-old stereotypical caste equations across Indian civil society”.

While the book is “not a hagiography that whitewashes the controversies, scandals and corruption charges,” that surround her, the author’s admiration for a woman from an oppressed class “who has overturned the established electoral traditions of a state that virtually invented modern Indian politics” cannot be missed.

The author, a senior journalist, started researching for Behenji about four years ago when most political observers had predicted that she would “fade away” after Kanshi Ram’s death.

However, she has not only grown into a larger-than-life figure but has also “done what was thought the impossible” by forming a single- party government in Uttar Pradesh.

“Mayawati has her flaws as an individual, but the ‘phenomenon of Mayawati’ is a great affirmation of Indian democracy,” says Bose. “Politicians are made in their contexts. It is not something singularly intrinsic that builds them up,” he says.

The present political context which is “open-ended and confused”, especially after the trust vote, Bose believes, has a lot stacked in favour of Mayawati.

Even as political pundits seem inclined to bet on BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, L.K. Advani, Bose firmly believes that “both the BJP and the Congress are going down”.

There is no predicting the “capricious beast” called Indian politics, he concedes. But says that Mayawati will have a “big chip to play with” if she manages a 50-plus number from Uttar Pradesh in the coming Lok Sabha polls.

“Pieces on the political chess board are about to move,” Bose says and adds, “Mayawati is surely one of the “front-runners”.

But what is Mayawati beyond the number-game of realpolitik? Hasn’t Behenji sold out the core ideology of Bahujan Samaj Party by her controversial “social engineering” that has brought people she once dismissed as “Manuwadi” into the party’s fold?

Bose calls this a “pragmatic strategy” worked out with a keen eye on “contemporary reality”.

The Dalit-Brahmin alliance is, he believes, a “feasible alliance” where Brahmins are not necessarily the direct oppressors in rural India.

“Many Dalits, on the contrary, see it as a situation where the pyramid has been reversed and Brahmins are seeking out ‘protection’ from their Behenji.”

More importantly, Dalits are not comparing Mayawati with “any ideal” but with her political adversary, Mulayam Singh Yadav. Surely, Dalits “practically gain much more in comparison if they vote for her”, says Bose.

Bose agrees that this strategy has miserably failed in other States, including Karnataka, where the BSP did badly in the Assembly elections.

This underlines the fact that one “cannot make pat predictions in Indian politics” and things can change dramatically when they go through the “regional prism”.

This is not an “authorised biography” and Bose did not seek her out for special interviews for the book. “That would have been as good as killing the book,” laughs Bose. She probably has not read the book either. With the Hindi translation of the book being released on August 7, the author will be personally giving her a copy.

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