By AMITA VERMA
Lucknow, May 12: Exactly a year ago, she had shocked her rivals when she led her party to a majority in the UP Assembly to become the chief minister for the fourth time. A year later, Ms Mayawati has emerged strong enough to position herself as the kingmaker — if not the king (or queen) — in national politics. She is now revered by her supporters and feared by her rivals.
Ms Mayawati, who completes one year in office on Tuesday, will go down in history as a leader who changed the social equations in a caste-ridden state and ushered in the formula of social engineering.
Being an astute politician, Mayawati has realised that the support of dalits alone can never take her beyond Uttar Pradesh. To broaden the BSP base, she coined the slogan of "Sarvjan Hitaye, Sarvjan Sukhaye" and began wooing the Brahmin community with a vengeance.
She even appointed Mr Satish Chandra Misra as the BSP national general secretary to indicate that the party was now open to upper castes.
The forging of the dalit-brahmin alliance consolidated her position in UP politics and led the party to a majority. The experiment proved a success and the victory of the BSP in five byelections, held here last month, indicates that the alliance has now consolidated considerably.
Ms Mayawati is now on her way to wooing the Thakurs and Vaishyas. The support of these two communities could catapult her to national politics and assign her a crucial role in the formation of the next government at the Centre.
The chief minister has assigned the task of bring Thakurs into the BSP fold to four Thakur ministers in her Cabinet and former Union minister Akhilesh Das has been entrusted the responsibility of bringing Vaishyas closer to the BSP. The appointment of Dr Das as the second national general secretary of the BSP, incidentally, is reflective of the party’s growing fondness for upper castes.
In one year of governance in UP, Ms Mayawati has successfully destroyed the Opposition’s armoury. For the first time, she displayed her flexibility as a politician when she rolled back her own decisions — decisions that could have given the Opposition a weapon to hit back at her.
She withdrew the ban on student union elections, rolled back her decision to allow contract farming in the state and revoked the suspensions of IPS and IAS officers when rumblings of dissent began in the bureaucracy.
Her critics may find it strange that Ms Mayawati, during the past year, repeatedly attacked the Congress, which has a marginal presence in UP, and has ignored the Samajwadi Party and the BJP.
However, her strategy behind this is to "expose the Congress as an anti-dalit force" and position the BSP as a viable alternative at the national level. According to her, the Samajwadis have no presence at the national level.
However, as an administrator, Ms Mayawati has not been able to bring about a qualitative change in the past one year and the state continues to clamour for basic civic amenities. She has obviously spent more time fulfilling her political obligations and her left the administrative work at the mercy of her trusted officials.
However, in her eagerness to reach the national politics and broaden the BSP’s base, she has not forgotten her base vote — the dalits. The innumerable memorials for dalit icons being constructed in Lucknow and the various welfare schemes initiated in their names are proof of this.
