All is Maya, Meira

Mayawati, the Uttar Pradesh chief minister, on Friday revealed what has recently been doing the gossip rounds in Delhi: that the Congress Party was thinking of appointing Meira Kumar, the Lok Sabha Speaker, as the next prime minister. This would have been logical had it not been for the fact that the incumbent, Dr Manmohan Singh, is digging his heels in. Meira Kumar is an articulate former diplomat (who entered politics in 1985, swept into Parliament by the Rajiv Gandhi tsunami, defeating, incidentally, Mayawati); her father was Congress Dalit heavyweight Jagjivan Ram; she’s an MP from Bihar, an electorally barren state for the Congress; and she’s the first woman Speaker. Her elevation as PM would fit in with her party president’s preference for placing women in high office.

Mayawati says Meira Kumar’s appointment would be solely directed at the UP assembly elections, due by May. Since the CM’s core voter is the UP Dalit, and since an inevitable anti-incumbency factor is likely to erode parts of the coalition that swept her into power in 2007, the Congress thinking is presumably to impact Mayawati’s core voter by selecting a Dalit PM. Also, the Congress party’s stakes are far higher in UP than they were in either Bihar or Tamil Nadu, both states with large parliamentary seats and where assembly elections were recently held, but both also places where the Congress emerged with a single-figure tally despite the best efforts by Rahul Gandhi. The UP 2012 poll will be a referendum for many things: on Mayawati’s reign the past five years, on Rahul Gandhi’s politics in India’s most populous state (expectations heightened by the surprise Congress tally in the 2009 Lok Sabha poll), and on what politics will determine the election of the next president of India two months later.

Yet the UP poll will revolve only around Mayawati, no one else.

Things are not alarmingly bad for her, despite what the media says; sadly, our media is casteist in its approach to India’s foremost Dalit leader. It is difficult to argue against the allegation that she is a megalomaniac, but this is true of all our politicians. M Karunanidhi has Tamils address him as “Kalaignar” (great artist); Narendra Modi sees himself as corporate India’s saviour; and even the Congress leadership practices a kind of vanity by cultivating an air of mystique around itself. Vanity, it seems, plays an important part in political projection the world over.

The media goes on and on about how Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has eradicated the atmosphere of fear that pervaded Bihar during his predecessor Lalu Prasad’s reign. Crime has decreased and there is finally law and order: doctors in Patna now make house-calls and people go out for dinner. The same courtesy, however, is not extended to Mayawati: the atmosphere of fear prevalent in UP during her predecessor Mulayam Singh’s time exists no longer. Instead of lauding Mayawati, the media focuses on her autocracy (Nitish’s autocracy is played down).

Additionally, the media rarely speaks of the developmental work done by Mayawati the past five years. True, much more needs to be done, but that’s because UP is so massive; it will take time before real transformation registers.

Still, the word from UP is that Mayawati’s vote will erode and that Mulayam Singh will benefit (the other parties will slug it out for the number three position, simply because they can’t even identify a CM candidate). It looks at the moment like UP will have a hung assembly; the top three parties accumulating anywhere between 100 to 150 seats and the Congress around 30 seats (the halfway mark is 203). The Samajwadi Party may emerge the single largest, which means the UP Muslim voter has returned to Mulayam, and which explains Congress panic; to stay relevant it needs to at least play kingmaker, for which it will not have enough seats.

Hence, the idea of Meira Kumar as PM; yet it is bound to fail. Meira Kumar is technically a Dalit, but Mayawati’s voters will hardly identify with someone who had a privileged upbringing. The things that make Mayawati gaudy to upper castes are the very things that endear her to her voters: that she has arrived, and on her own strength. Meira Kumar may turn out to be a good PM, and she may as PM even deliver to the Congress a few seats in Bihar; but as a strategy to unsettle Mayawati, this is dead on arrival.

Then there is the matter of Dr Manmohan Singh. You might have noticed that he’s gotten a bit aggressive of late, uncharacteristically. Returning from the US, he sneered at the BJP for thinking the government would fall; in a letter this week he told Anna Hazare to cool it, saying a Lokpal Bill was on its way; and he even signaled, anti-democratically, that the RTI was getting out of hand. These do not seem like the actions of a PM who has given up and is on his way out. They seem more like those of a PM who is settling down for a fight. Congress may worry about UP but Mayawati need not worry about Meira Kumar. Manmohan Singh, it seems, will be around for a while.   

— The writer is the Editor-in-Chief, DNA, based in Mumbai