Another statue for Behenji?

Behenji --A Political Biography of Mayawati: Senior journalist Ajay Bose has timed this book well and is on the dot. Perhaps, in the current, hopeless flux in Indian politics, this feisty woman politician is strategically poised to become the most prominent threat to the ‘national' parties, especially Sonia Gandhi's bumbling Congress. Mayawati's ‘socially engineered' rise to power is evidence of the churning within the political sphere in ‘India at 60' -- because this Dalit supremo might well become a pan-India personality in the not-so-eventful days to come.
Mayawati's political base relies mostly among Dalits for whom she is a symbol of dignity and aspiration after centuries of "Manuwadi oppression" -- her favourite rhetorical paradigm of the past which has been currently strategically discarded. In order to broaden the social base of the BSP, she has wooed the upper castes now. In a process of ‘reverse social engineering', since the mid-1990s, she has made it a point to give party tickets to a significant number of upper-caste candidates, including money bags and history-sheeters. This was partly in tune with Kanshi Ram's belief that state assemblies should reflect the caste composition of society.
Mayawati's brand of politics has attracted attention of political observers far and wide. Amy Waldman wrote in the New York Times, in 2003: "In a state where Dalits are nearly one quarter of the population, Mayawati has used caste as a mobiliser, building on a social and political revolution 50 years in the making. It is a phenomenon that has reshaped the politics of India."

Her unprecedented rise to the top job in one of the most feudal and caste-entrenched states of the cow belt has broken stereotypes. The ‘sarvasamaj' combination of the ‘Savarnas and Dalits' along with Muslims and other castes has decisively restructured power equations. With the subaltern Dalit vote-bank as a permanent scaffolding, Mayawati's ‘impossible' strategy of sewing up a rainbow coalition by wooing Brahmins, Muslims and other dominant groups led to her unprecedented and massive victory in the 2007 assembly elections in UP.
The UP formula might have a strong impact on electoral politics across India. UP, a politically significant state, has for long been the testing ground for new ideologies - be it the Hindutva wave or bahujan politics that banked on Dalit votes. Clealry, the new BSP rainbow alliance is a formidable combination.
Bose skilfully and sympathetically sketches Mayawati's ‘struggle' from her humble beginnings in the cramped Jhuggi Jhonpri shanty town of Delhi's Inderpuri, to her consequent consolidation as a UP chief minister, having been elected four times. He then draws the big picture: her uncanny, persistence presence in India's larger political landscape, much to the discomfort of other parties, especially the Congress. However, sometimes, Bose's ‘saga' of her childhood ‘valour' smacks of a court chronicle of a medieval era where kings were projected as larger than live figures ordained by celestial bodies to rule the earth.

Along with the rather glorified tale of Mayawati's ‘achievements', the book has given due space to the stoic founder and catalyst of BSP: Kanshi Ram . Ram is rightly said to be the original crusader of Dalit rights in the BSP scheme of things. His relentless work among the Dalits which started in Punjab, his nuanced understanding of grassroots social change, his native cunning in terms of alignments and realignments, even with enemies, and ruthless realpolitik, enabled the unification of fragmented sections and provided them a united voice in the ‘power game'.