UP chief minister Mayawati and Kanshi Ram, her mentor and founder of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), had never promised to play by the rulebook or follow etiquette of any kind. They declared their intent clearly and loudly to break all norms and overturn all conventions as a way of riding to power. Mayawati has not let down her master’s show of naked and brute power. Whether it is her grandiose statues enterprise, celebration of her birthdays or flaunting her opulence, she has done it with vengeance and with no pretence of panache. The latest act of offending middle classsensibilities is that of the garland of rupee notes — it was the thousand-rupee ones at the party’s 25th anniversary rally at Lucknow — that Mayawati was offered on Monday. It has triggered both criticism and outrage among her political rivals and among members of the genteel class.
Mayawati and her acolytes in the party remain unfazed by the outburst and they have gone on to declare that they intend to make the garland of notes a feature of their party’s future events. They refuse to be shamed by those whom they consider fellow-travellers in the business of chicanery.
There is also the fact that the Congress and the Samajwadi Party (SP) — BSP’s chief political opponents in Uttar Pradesh — do not have much of a moral leg to stand on. Congress leader Digvijay Singh’s taunt that Mayawati is not any more a ‘Dalit ki beti’ (daughter of Dalits) and that she has become a ‘daulat ki beti’ (daughter of wealth) has no sting in it because it is his party that had set the ball of corruption rolling in this country.
Even in an anarchic world, where a sense of right and wrong has been blurred and even obliterated, cries of protest will rise from the very bottom. At the moment Dalits and the poor may appear to be silent witnesses to Mayawati’s crimes of hauteur and even indulgent towards her. What Mayawati and her advisors will have to contend with is not the criticism of their political peers — which can be dismissed out of hand — but the wrath of their own people at some point.
Murmurs of disapproval will soon gather momentum and rise into a storm of fury that could blow Mayawati and her cohorts from their pedestals of pride and power. The oppressed people who have catapulted her and her party to power will also throw her out. Democracy has its own ways of righting wrongs.
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