All is Maya, Meira
Aditya Sinha | Sunday, October 16, 2011
Mayawati, the Uttar Pradesh chief minister, on Friday revealed what
has recently been doing the gossip rounds in Delhi: that the Congress
Party was thinking of appointing Meira Kumar, the Lok Sabha Speaker,
as the next prime minister. This would have been logical had it not
been for the fact that the incumbent, Dr Manmohan Singh, is digging
his heels in. Meira Kumar is an articulate former diplomat (who
entered politics in 1985, swept into Parliament by the Rajiv Gandhi
tsunami, defeating, incidentally, Mayawati); her father was Congress
Dalit heavyweight Jagjivan Ram; she's an MP from Bihar, an electorally
barren state for the Congress; and she's the first woman Speaker. Her
elevation as PM would fit in with her party president's preference for
placing women in high office.
Mayawati says Meira Kumar's appointment would be solely directed at
the UP assembly elections, due by May. Since the CM's core voter is
the UP Dalit, and since an inevitable anti-incumbency factor is likely
to erode parts of the coalition that swept her into power in 2007, the
Congress thinking is presumably to impact Mayawati's core voter by
selecting a Dalit PM. Also, the Congress party's stakes are far higher
in UP than they were in either Bihar or Tamil Nadu, both states with
large parliamentary seats and where assembly elections were recently
held, but both also places where the Congress emerged with a
single-figure tally despite the best efforts by Rahul Gandhi. The UP
2012 poll will be a referendum for many things: on Mayawati's reign
the past five years, on Rahul Gandhi's politics in India's most
populous state (expectations heightened by the surprise Congress tally
in the 2009 Lok Sabha poll), and on what politics will determine the
election of the next president of India two months later.
Yet the UP poll will revolve only around Mayawati, no one else.
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Things are not alarmingly bad for her, despite what the media says;
sadly, our media is casteist in its approach to India's foremost Dalit
leader. It is difficult to argue against the allegation that she is a
megalomaniac, but this is true of all our politicians. M Karunanidhi
has Tamils address him as "Kalaignar" (great artist); Narendra Modi
sees himself as corporate India's saviour; and even the Congress
leadership practices a kind of vanity by cultivating an air of
mystique around itself. Vanity, it seems, plays an important part in
political projection the world over.
The media goes on and on about how Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar
has eradicated the atmosphere of fear that pervaded Bihar during his
predecessor Lalu Prasad's reign. Crime has decreased and there is
finally law and order: doctors in Patna now make house-calls and
people go out for dinner. The same courtesy, however, is not extended
to Mayawati: the atmosphere of fear prevalent in UP during her
predecessor Mulayam Singh's time exists no longer. Instead of lauding
Mayawati, the media focuses on her autocracy (Nitish's autocracy is
played down).
Additionally, the media rarely speaks of the developmental work done
by Mayawati the past five years. True, much more needs to be done, but
that's because UP is so massive; it will take time before real
transformation registers.
Still, the word from UP is that Mayawati's vote will erode and that
Mulayam Singh will benefit (the other parties will slug it out for the
number three position, simply because they can't even identify a CM
candidate). It looks at the moment like UP will have a hung assembly;
the top three parties accumulating anywhere between 100 to 150 seats
and the Congress around 30 seats (the halfway mark is 203). The
Samajwadi Party may emerge the single largest, which means the UP
Muslim voter has returned to Mulayam, and which explains Congress
panic; to stay relevant it needs to at least play kingmaker, for which
it will not have enough seats.
Hence, the idea of Meira Kumar as PM; yet it is bound to fail. Meira
Kumar is technically a Dalit, but Mayawati's voters will hardly
identify with someone who had a privileged upbringing. The things that
make Mayawati gaudy to upper castes are the very things that endear
her to her voters: that she has arrived, and on her own strength.
Meira Kumar may turn out to be a good PM, and she may as PM even
deliver to the Congress a few seats in Bihar; but as a strategy to
unsettle Mayawati, this is dead on arrival.
Then there is the matter of Dr Manmohan Singh. You might have noticed
that he's gotten a bit aggressive of late, uncharacteristically.
Returning from the US, he sneered at the BJP for thinking the
government would fall; in a letter this week he told Anna Hazare to
cool it, saying a Lokpal Bill was on its way; and he even signaled,
anti-democratically, that the RTI was getting out of hand. These do
not seem like the actions of a PM who has given up and is on his way
out. They seem more like those of a PM who is settling down for a
fight. Congress may worry about UP but Mayawati need not worry about
Meira Kumar. Manmohan Singh, it seems, will be around for a while.
— The writer is the Editor-in-Chief, DNA, based in Mumbai
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