Mayawati heralds new seasons of change

JYOTI MALHOTRA
The Edmonton Post, July 2007

In India, when the seasons change, it’s time to celebrate. With Delhi on fire these days, with temperatures touching 47 degrees C, the collective yearning for the monsoons has been transformed into delirious expectation. Hindi films have notoriously articulated this national intimacy with rain. The difference between hunger and forgetting, between a bumper harvest and drought, depends upon just how much it pours.

The only other national obsession, besides the rain and Bollywood, as the Hindi film industry is popularly known, is politics. From municipal polls to nationwide elections, the act of going to a polling booth and depressing the trigger on the electronic voting machine, after which the polling officer inks your forefinger with indelible ink, is like a coming-of-age ritual. If you can vote in India, you can pretty much do everything.

Which is why the recent elections in Uttar Pradesh, a major north Indian province with a population of 175 million – larger than every European country, including Russia – is such a triumphal milestone. For the first time in the history of the 60-year-old republic, the party that won is largely made up of the lowest Hindu castes, the Dalits, which have been socially and historically reviled by the upper castes over the centuries.

Mahatma Gandhi, in his effort to socially reform India alongside the historic freedom struggle against the British Empire, called the lower castes `Harijans,’ or `children of God.’ But despite the Mahatma, the Dalits have been considered anathema by the upper castes and even described as ``untouchables.’’

The new chief minister of Uttar Pradesh is both Dalit and a woman, by the name of Mayawati. And although India has been used to women on top, whether Indira Gandhi or her Italian-born daughter-in-law Sonia Gandhi ( the president of the Congress party in power, and acknowledged by Forbes as one of the most powerful women in the world), Mayawati goes against the grain in every way.

For a start, Mayawati won because she was able to sew up a political rainbow coalition that cut across caste and religion. Apart from the Dalits who voted for her, because they believed she is their messiah, the lady sought out winning candidates, whether Hindu or Muslim, upper caste or lower caste, in every constituency.

Clearly, Mayawati has sown the seeds of a social storm in the heart of India. In the first few weeks since she took over, she has shown she means business. She has called into question the allocation of 25,000 acres of land to one of India’s largest industrial houses, the Anil Ambani group, supposedly meant for a special economic zone. She has questioned how and why Amitabh Bachhan, India’s billionaire-actor, was allowed to break the rules and call himself a ``farmer’’, so that he could buy reserved land in a beautiful valley in western India.

And she has flagged off her social agenda by naming ten women district magistrates in her state, synonymous with the worst socio-economic indicators in health, education, woman and child mortality.

Most important of all, Mayawati has exercised power by allying with national parties like the Congress. When Sonia Gandhi calls on her, and not the other way around -- not once, but twice in a matter of days -- to discuss the next president of India, she sends a powerful signal that the Dalits can no longer be taken for granted.

So, does Canada care? More to the point, does western Canada, possibly the world’s last outpost as far as Uttar Pradesh is concerned, even know that this province has been transfixed these last couple of months from within, with carrying out one of the largest electoral exercises in the world?

In a country like India, this democratic experiment – with its origins in Athens, more than 2500 years ago -- has had unprecedented success. For a start, unlike neighbouring Pakistan (Musharraf has said he will fight the next elections in his uniform), where martial law regimes have largely ruled the roost, except for a three-year emergency period in the 1970s (at the end of which Indira Gandhi lost the elections), India has been defiantly democratic.

The historian, Ramachandra Guha, believes that it is this widely accepted idea of the election, held every five years for the last 60 years, that has actually held India together. And when the people deliver their verdict, demolishing one party and crowning another, the transition of power has always been peaceful.

So why is Uttar Pradesh important? Firstly, because size matters. When 50 million people vote anywhere in the world, what they say is significant. Secondly, when they are as poor as these voters are, and despite their underprivileged status believe that the ballot rather than the bullet must be the instrument of change, then it must be an exercise worth applauding.

In Canada, on the other hand, the Indian interest is largely restricted to the memory lapses of James Bartleman, lieutenant-governor of Ontario, who recently remembered that he had told two gentlemen from the RCMP (he doesn’t remember who) that there was a threat to the Air India flight 182, in June 1985, which subsequently blew up over the Irish coast, killing all 300-plus people on board.

When Canada released those believed to be guilty a couple of years ago because of a lack of sufficient evidence, India could only react in silent horror. For an investigation to reach such a conclusion after 20 years, that too in a First World nation !

Mr Bartleman has certainly succeeded in putting Canada back into Indian newspapers. Now New Delhi waits and watches, wondering what the questioning of those retired RCMP officers will bring. Most of us know it won’t be much. Still, it’s worthwhile checking the Canadian dailies, just in case.

Why, then, is Mayawati important ? Because, without firing a single shot, but through masterly use of the ballot box, she has shown that power is not the permanent preserve of a few, but the destiny of many. Hers is a trajectory, both the East and the West would do well to follow.

ENDS