In one of those brief clips that appeared on television during the run-up to the polls, a young journalist claimed that Mayawati would be one of those who would play a crucial role in the formation of the next government. Well, she did not live up to these expectations.
What was worth noting, however, was that ever since Mayawati’s success in the UP assembly elections, the assessments of her political prowess tended to be romantic in the sense that they were not very realistic.
A major factor which was ignored was that the fortunes of a political party normally tended to follow a zigzag course rather than a straight line.
True, sometimes the ups and downs can be widely separated — in Lalu Yadav’s case, the interval was 15 years, in West Bengal it’s been more than 30. But the fluctuations are inevitable. Yet, in Mayawati’s case, her 2007 success was seen by political commentators to lead straight upwards. She herself thought so. Hence, the talk about her becoming the prime minister.
There was also perhaps a sentimental element born of upper caste angst in these predictions as if destiny had chosen her as a means of recompense for all the indignities which her community had suffered through the centuries. There were the inevitable comparisons, therefore, with Barack Obama.
If these balloons have now been punctured, the fault is not hers so much as of her starry-eyed backers. Their first mistake was the fatuity of the comparison. For all her feistiness, Mayawati evidently lacks Obama’s charisma and intellect. To expect her political juggernaut, therefore, to roll on unchecked from Lucknow to Delhi was naive.
There was an element of cynicism as well in these grandiose hopes in the sense that a fractured mandate was expected to create conditions where the number of MPs in her party would assume crucial importance.
However, if these calculations went awry, the reason was the electorate’s eminent good sense. It was they, rather than the analysts, who saw through the hollowness of her pretensions, apparently because of the signs of megalomania which she displayed by her extravagant birthday bashes and penchant for building statues of herself.
The earlier optimistic evaluation of Mayawati’s future was based on the untenable conviction about the durability of her so-called rainbow coalition of Dalits and Brahmins. It was seen as a magic mantra which would spread her influence all over the country. Yet, it should have been obvious from the start that the Dalit-Brahmin alliance would be less viable than the Congress’s earlier Brahmin-Dalit-Muslim alliance since the upper castes would resent the loss of their dominance under Mayawati.
In any case, such opportunistic tie-ups tend to crack after some time, as has happened with Lalu Prasad’s MY (Muslim-Yadav) combination. It hasn’t taken long, therefore, for Mayawati’s rainbow to vanish.
Mayawati is not the only one in recent years who has failed to deceive the voters long enough to achieve her objective. As mentioned before, Lalu Prasad was another such person even if it took a decade and a half for the people of Bihar to wake up to his false promises and another five years to bring him crashing down to earth.
His latest tally of four seats compared to 22 in 2004 shows how wildly a party’s prospects can fluctuate. In the cases of both Mayawati and Lalu Prasad, the political trick was to inflate the self-esteem of their core groups of supporters without any intention of building on their backing by focussing on the administration.
Only a self-defeating lack of vision, probably born of a limited education, can explain such a failure.
It is the same with the BJP. If Mayawati held out the hope of emancipating the Dalits by raising their social status by ending discrimination, the BJP tried to rewrite history by depicting Hindu-Muslim relations as a long period of confrontation going back to the medieval ages while promising a new era of dominance by the majority community.
Like Mayawati, the BJP leaders, too, saw a straight upward line of political advancement. But it didn’t take long for the voters to realise that they were being taken for a ride and that the party’s sole interest was in advancing its own cause by sowing seeds of communal discord.
If the BJP’s upward line has been reversed, the Congress’s revival shows that the opposite can also happen for two reasons. First, the electorate’s disenchantment with one party can make it turn to its opponent. Secondly, a new generation can grow up which is unaware of the latter’s earlier sins.
In the Congress’s case, it has largely succeeded in overcoming the earlier stigmas of corruption, vide Bofors, and cynicism, as in the Shah Bano episode because the voters do not seem to care. So, the zigzag continues.
The writer is a Delhi-based commentator
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