Don't demonize Mayavati!

I write but rarely on purely political stuff, but this is election season, and this article in The Telegraph of the 16th April caught my eye. I remember hearing lots of people – including some very nice and well-informed people – lamenting or expressing horror at the prospect that Ms. Mayavati, maverick chief Minister of India’s most populous state, seems to be becoming more strident and confident about the chances of her becoming Prime Minister of India, if not this time round, then soon. Mukul Kesavan’s article should come as a very good rejoinder (and maybe even reassurance) to all of them!

Ms. Mayavati may be guilty of everything she is accused of – arrogant, ruthless, greedy, autocratic, crude, devious, sneaky and occasionally violent when it suits her. She is not even pretty to look at. But if these were criteria that seriously ruled out anybody from becoming PM in India, the vast majority of our MPs would be disqualified (as indeed they would be in most democratic countries of the world – politics is not for nice and gentle and seriously moralistic people, yet it is more socially necessary than almost every other profession, so it attracts the tough-hearted, flexible and ambitious everywhere!). She is not, by our elastic standards, uneducated (she holds LlB and B.Ed. degrees, and has been employed as a teacher). She is a very big income tax payer (if wikipedia has got its facts right) - not a common virtue among our politicians. She has now acquired as much experience at ruling vast masses as any other aspirant for the country’s top job can claim to have, and has done no worse a job than ten other CMs I could name. Numerous other people, blessed by high pedigree and privilege (a combination of high caste, big money and wide and powerful family connections) have come into politics only to display the same nasty characteristics she is accused of, in equal if not greater measure.

Our real complaint against her, I am sure, is our visceral hatred of a woman, and a Dalit (once called ‘untouchable’) woman at that, wielding power in what is supposed to be exclusively a man’s world, and frequently getting the better of lots of men at it. We have again and again forgiven, even applauded lots of male and high-caste, ‘cultured’ (“one of us”) politicians for all the sins that we want to crucify her for. And it is precisely for this reason that I shall root for her along with Mukul Kesavan, despite lamenting all her faults: if we were a slightly more civilized, slightly more honestly progressive society, we would cheer and celebrate Ms. Mayavati as the poster girl of Indian democracy – the woman who is embodying the secret, hardly ever articulated, highest aspirations of maybe two-thirds of the Indian population (if you add up all the poor people in India who are also Dalits, and most particularly all deprived and marginalized women, Dalit or otherwise). If that two-thirds can get together and vote singlemindedly for this cause, Mayavati should get the throne on behalf of all of them. That will be a social revolution to cap all social revolutions – the biggest blow to several thousand years of cruel, systematic, institutionalized, countrywide discrimination against the real deprived silent majority.

After that, we can only pray that she will be a better ruler than we had dared to hope. And that, Mayavati having shown the way, a far better, greater, grander specimen of humanity – someone like Joan of Arc, maybe? – will rise from the ranks of the great unwashed masses of India someday and follow in her footsteps to lead India into an age of glory. It is good to have big dreams, but it is better to give little ones a chance!