Mayawati’s garland of note

Aditya Sinha
First Published : 20 Mar 2010 12:20:00 AM IST
Last Updated : 20 Mar 2010 01:25:59 AM IST

The newspapers and the internet are swamped with speculation on the value of the first garland of notes presented to Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati earlier this week. Her Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) says it cost Rs 21 lakh; a Congress estimate stood at Rs 20 crore; and an income tax estimate at Rs five crore. This column’s guess is that it is priceless. That’s the kind of political mileage Mayawati got out of it.

Regarding the mundane fact of the garland’s market value, the BSP’s declaration is no less hypocritical than the kind of under-valuation that regularly features in the affidavits that candidates submit to the Election Commission about their wealth. One VIP opponent of Mayawati, for instance, lists a 4-acre property in Mehrauli, Delhi, as worth just under Rs 10 lakh, a valuation so ridiculously low that it is surreal. Whatever its worth, many argue that it represents ostentatious and unproductive expenditure (even though the BSP says it bought the garland and not the state government). Again, such an argument seems hypocritical when some VIPs choose to enjoy the good times on vulgar yachts, littering the uninhabited beaches of the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago with emptied beer bottles.

Then there is the good governance argument. The fact that Mayawati spends her time constructing statues and elephants all over UP, and the corruption and land-grab cases against the chief minister (including the Taj Corridor scandal) are all shown as evidence of her disdain for development. Firstly, this argument is irrelevant to the fact that Mayawati wore a garland of notes at a rally. Wearing such a garland is itself nothing new in India; it’s just that earlier garlands were modest constructions of ten-rupee notes in a fan-like display, the entire thing costing no more than a few hundred rupees (when Mayawati’s garland first appeared on TV, it took me a while to figure out what the massive velvety thing was that took seven men to hold up while it framed the CM).

More importantly, though, the same argument was used against Lalu Prasad when he ran Bihar: that he spent all his time and cunning on political symbolism and less on development, which he famously dismissed as a media/upper-caste concern. Lalu ultimately lost Bihar. The first thing that current CM Nitish Kumar did was to fix law and order. Doctors in Patna are now making house calls again, a practice suspended during Lalu’s reign because all doctors were being kidnapped; people are walking the roads of Bihar after dark again. This is what has made Nitish still the man to beat in the coming state assembly elections, despite the niggling problems he is facing within his party. In UP, the law and order was terrible when Mayawati took over (it was a contributing factor to her election triumph), so it could only improve; and she tasked her bureaucracy with tackling the terrible power situation as soon as she took over. So this good-garland-is-a-sign-of-bad-governance argument is a bit lame.

To understand this garland episode, you have to contrast it with another political gimmick in UP: Rahul Gandhi visiting and spending the night in Dalit homes. When he started this in the run-up to the last Lok Sabha elections, you might remember that Mayawati was peeved: she accused him of returning home and “bathing with soap and purifying himself with incense” after spending the night at a Dalit home. Her reaction meant the gimmick had worked. And of course, Rahul Gandhi pulled off a sensational win in a huge chunk of UP seats, which helped his party retain power. Perhaps Mayawati was still puzzling over how to retaliate; she was perhaps taking her time over it because the UP assembly elections are still two years away. But events the previous week may have goaded her into action, after Congress chief Sonia Gandhi pushed the Women’s Reservation Bill through the Rajya Sabha.

Of all her opponents, Mayawati is most wary of the dynasty. Mulayam Singh is still trying to return his Samajwadi Party back to its roots after jettisoning Amar Singh; Nitin Gadkari is clearly following the RSS formula for building Varun Gandhi as the BJP’s future in UP, but that process will take its time. The only real threats are Sonia and Rahul, and so Mayawati reacted in the way she knew best. She showed off the kind of power and influence and wealth that a Dalit woman could hope to wield in the 21st century, symbolised by an unimaginably-over-the-top garland of notes.

The difference between Rahul’s gimmick and Mayawati’s gimmick is that Rahul showed his sincere empathy for Dalits; he made a genuine effort to come down to our level, a Dalit voter might have thought. Mayawati on the other hand showed her pride; she through her own efforts rose to their level and does what she wants without giving a damn, a Dalit voter might think. The BSP’s defiance of other parties by garlanding Mayawati a second time was confirmation of this pride, for defiance is just a manifestation of pride. The BSP would have gauged how the whole garland episode went down with its core support base.

Now, no matter how many huts Rahul visits, to the Dalits he’s still “one of them”, while Mayawati is “one of us”. The Women’s Reservation Bill? I wonder how many Dalit women will now choose Sonia over Mayawati; the imagery of women congratulating Sonia has been rapidly replaced in the Dalit memory by Mayawati and her garland. The Congress will have to recalibrate its coalition-building in UP, and if Mayawati continues to make the Dalit option difficult, then the only choice before the Congress will be to ensure that Muslim voters don’t go to Mulayam (who’s already wooing them by casting the Women’s Reservation Bill as inimical to Muslim interests, arguably a dubious proposition). Expect Rahul to go visiting Azamgarh soon, a trip he postponed for fear that opponents would brand him as soft on terrorists. Now he has no choice.

Of course, it bothers a lot of intellectuals (and other upper caste folk) that Mayawati’s gimmicks are so in-your-face. Yet that is true of most Dalit activists and thinkers. Take Andhra Pradesh intellectual Kancha Illaiah: a recent review in Outlook of his latest book Post-Hindu India (by Ajoy Bose, Mayawati’s biographer) squirmed at Illaiah’s call for an all-out civil war by Dalits on Hindu society. Yet Illaiah has always been combative, feisty, uncompromising; it makes the upper castes very uncomfortable and they wonder why he has to be so aggressive. No wonder they don’t get the real significance of Mayawati’s garland.

editorchief@expressbuzz.com

About The Author;

Aditya Sinha is the Editor-in-Chief of ‘The New Indian Express’ and is based in Chennai