The sheen has dimmed from the Mayawati story in two years. Travelling through Uttar Pradesh, it doesn’t take long to discover that 2009 is not 2007.
The sheen has dimmed from the Mayawati story in two years. Travelling through Uttar Pradesh, it doesn’t take long to discover that 2009 is not 2007; that this time, the chemistry is missing and that the arithmetic too may be a little shaky.
For Mayawati, the challenge in these Lok Sabha polls is not just to prevent her historic Dalit-Brahmin alliance from going awry. It’s also to rekindle the magic of 2007 to snuff out the first stirrings of Dalit disillusionment with her government.
The electricity that marked her election rallies two years ago was missing at the school ground on the outskirts of Ayodhya where a huge crowd waited patiently in the midday sun for Behenji to appear in her chopper. In 2007, it crackled and snapped as starry-eyed Dalits dared to dream the impossible dream, of voting in a state government headed by one of them.
In 2009, few seemed fired by similar enthusiasm for Mayawati as prime minister. “If it’s in her fate to become PM, she will. What’s in it for us?” shrugged Sadhoo Ram. He’s been waiting for one year for the BSP government in UP to give his school-going daughter the promised cycle and Rs15,000 for her education. “Leaders only do things for themselves, not for others,” he said.
It was a complaint but his grouse hasn’t made him change his vote preference. At least not this time. But there’s a niggling resentment that the dream hasn’t quite turned out the way it was supposed to. Ram Kumar, an activist with a Dalit human rights group called Dynamic Action Group, declared that a section of Dalits are starting to rethink their allegiance to the BSP. “The Dalits are going to give Mayawati a big shock this time,” he insisted. “They want to teach her a lesson, to not to take them for granted. Don’t be surprised if a section of the Dalits vote for the Congress.”
Ram Chander Gautam from Mubarakganj in Faizabad district disagreed. He maintained that the advent of a Dalit government had definitely reduced oppression in villages, which is why he will stick with the BSP. But he admitted that he hadn’t got anything tangible out of voting in UP’s first Dalit chief minister. “There’s no work for my sons.
They were supposed to get employment under the Indira Awaas Yojana but nothing has happened. I was promised land but I haven’t got a single patta in two years. Having a Dalit chief minister hasn’t made much difference to my life,” he said.
According to Ram Kumar, disillusionment is slowly setting in. “Dalits have no option today but to vote for the BSP, but they are feeling frustrated at the way they are ignored by official apathy. Nothing has changed in the way government officers deal with them,” he stated.
In a village situation, the local administrative machinery is all important for the power it wields in doling out the benefits of different welfare schemes, settling land and money disputes and maintaining the social equilibrium. As Gyan Prakash Tiwari, a human rights activist who works with Dalits, pointed out, Mayawati has filled these posts with Brahmins, as a consequence of which there’s been no social transformation in the old caste structures. “The Brahmin-Dalit alliance in 2007 was purely a bureaucratic and political alliance. It never became a social alliance. Dalits remain where they were,” he said.
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