[ZESTCaste] Maya’s travails (Kancha Ilaiah)

http://www.deccanherald.com/content/39331/mayas-travails.html

Maya's travails
By Kancha Ilaiah

If a political issue is sought to be settled through the legal means,
it would have different implications to our democracy.

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati's response to the legal hurdles
to her plans to set up Ambedkar parks and Kanshi Ram memorials was
quite brave and intelligent. A team of anti-Maya lawyers (belonging to
both BJP and Congress ideology) filed a public interest litigation in
the supreme court pleading to stop the construction.
The supreme court constituted a committee, which held that there is
great danger to the environment of UP because of these parks, though
they are not polluting industries. There is not enough evidence that
in order to construct these statue-parks, they had cut down any trees
at all.

Based on the recommendations of the experts committee, the supreme
court ordered stoppage of work at all construction sites. The court
threatened to forcefully stop the work or otherwise it would take over
the sites by deploying special armed forces. Hence the work was
stopped.

However, within a few days, Mayawati declared that her government
would build massive Kanshi Ram green parks around Lucknow and other
cities of Uttar Pradesh. She also announced that a long stretch of
green corridor would be created on the outskirts of Lucknow. If the
anti-Mayawati forces want to cut her sovereign powers based on the
democratic decision of her cabinet (right or wrong) by using the
court, she wants to assert her power. She wants to appeal to the
psychological alienation of the Dalit masses and show them that she
was bent upon creating alternative sites of socio-spiritual
satisfaction of those people by building more Dalit-Buddhist icon
parks.
After all, the Dalits and green environment are not enemies of each
other. They did not cut down forests to own hundreds of acres of land
nor did they cut down trees to build mansions for their comfortable
living. But to see how much teakwood is there in the houses of the
every principled environmentalist of Delhi and other cities one only
needs to visit their houses.
So like Orwellian principles of 'Animal Farm', the theory of even
simplicity and environment changes from caste to caste and culture to
culture. Even the courts seem to be getting drawn into this
controversy. That it poses a danger to democracy needs to be seen in
future. Already the Dalit-Bahujan masses have been losing faith in our
judicial institutions. If the courts involve in far-fetched
interpretative judicial activism in Dalit cultural life (of statue
building or otherwise) their alienation would become more pronounced.
That does not harm Mayawati but harms democracy, rather irreparably.

Courage
There is a gross mis-reading of Mayawati's abilities to handle her own
affairs. We do not know how much money she has but she has enormous
courage and confidence. Though efforts are on to dislodge and destroy
her legally, she seems to be gaining politically.
On the one hand, Congress is attempting to take her Dalit and Brahmin
vote-bank away and on the other, it is attempting to project the
Brahmin leadership at the top (Rita Bahuguna Joshi, Manish Tiwari and
so on). At the ground level, it is sending Rahul Gandhi into Dalit
huts to eat with them and sleep in their homes so that a psychological
repositioning of them could take place. But will the Congress succeed?

While all her opponents are trying to drag her into litigations so
that her administration becomes totally dysfunctional, she seems to be
gaining strength. If a political issue is sought to be settled through
the legal means, it would have different implications to our
democracy. If Mayawati is spending money on monuments when the masses
are suffering from lack of food, education and employment, such a
government should be faced politically only.
The recent byelections in UP have shown that her voters are not
getting alienated from her. If more and more feeling of harassment on
account of Ambedkar parks is generated, then more and more
consolidation of the Dalit vote would take place and Mayawati will
prove her opponents wrong.

She has an ideological agenda. The rock bed of that agenda is the
Dalit social force. The BSP from the days of Kanshi Ram has an
ideological position on men and matters. The Congress and more so, the
Samajwadi Party cannot convince the Dalits on that count.
The Samajwadi party, in particular, has no ideology whatsoever. The
Lohia-JP ideology has no social basis. The Muslims have no problem
with her so long as she does not allow the BJP to play round.

If Ambedkar parks that are coming up as alternative sites of
socio-spiritual culture of Dalits are shown as anti-democratic by the
Hindu legal pundits, the Dalits will tell them that they will back
Mayawati more and more on religious and ideological grounds.
As these parks are essentially anti-Hindu-Buddhist monuments, she is
constructing history. If they stop her activities in the name of
protection to environment, the Dalits might feel that the so called
environmentalists have saffron threads to their wrists and that is
where they see a common ground between the BJP, the Congress and the
Samajwadi Party.

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