Ms Social Engineer

She’s not the same. Her open-ended, catalytic rainbow coalition across castes and communities might push the threshold of Indian politics beyond archaic equations and twilight zones. And for all you know, she might succeed. This insightful essay enters the depths of her social engineering process and rediscovers a changed Mayawati and the dalit factor – Editor

A K Verma Kanpur

After roughly four months in office, many UP watchers are wondering whether Chief Minister Mayawati's charisma is waning away. Has she lived up to the expectations of her electorate? Has she been able to check the alarming rise in the crime graph during former chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav's rule? 

What about her promises of development? Are her experiments in social engineering sustaining on the ground? 

The general impression is that Mayawati is maturing. She is maturing in looks and manners. She is becoming careful in choice of words and expressions, sophisticated in her admonitions of the bureaucracy. Most importantly, she is maturing in respect of her policy decisions that are in tune with her philosophical transition from bahujan samaj to sarvajan samaj.

That is a good sign, not simply for the strengthening of her party in UP and elsewhere, but also for the unity and integrity of a society as diverse and multi-cultural as ours. After ages, the ruling party is trying to generate a sense of cohesiveness among the people of UP, cutting across all shades and denominations. That is good politics.

That got reflected in the recent by-polls in three assembly constituencies of the state — Farukkhabad, Gunnur (Badayun) and Swar-Tanda (Rampur), the results for which were announced in the first week of September, 2007. In the assembly elections earlier (April-May, 2007), all the three seats had been won by the Samajwadi Party (SP). In the by-polls, Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) won the first two seats, and even in Gunnaur (a Yadav bastion vacated by Mulayam Singh), it lost by only 13,663 votes. It is interesting that the three seats represent the dominance of three different communities: Farukkhabad is dominated by Brahmins, Swar-Tanda by Muslims and Gunnur by Yadavs and other backward    castes (OBC).

The analysis of the by-poll results gives some inkling of the under-currents of Mayawati's social engineering at the grassroots level. In the April-May assembly elections, the BJP were runners-up in Farukkhabad with Major Sunil Dutt Dwivedi getting 35,512 votes. This time, Dwivedi had crossed over from the BJP to BSP, and the BJP was reduced to just 2,119 votes — a transfer of possibly 33,393 Brahmin votes to BSP! The BSP vote share this time went actually up by 42,792 votes (from 22,904 in May to 65,696 in September), which indicates not only the transfer of Brahmin votes but also 9,397 Muslim votes. In Swar-Tanda, BSP's Muslim candidate trounced the SP's Muslim candidate, so much so that SP was relegated to the third position, behind the BJP. With a victory margin of 49,225, there was proof enough that there was a substantial Muslim shift towards the BSP. Even in Gunnur, where all the main contestants were Yadavs, the Yadav candidate of the BSP got 51,569 votes as compared with 65,232 votes polled by the SP. Thus, it is clear that in all three constituencies, the three communities — Brahmins, Muslims and OBCs — have shown a substantial shift towards the BSP.

How are Dalit-Brahmin relations at the grassroots level?