http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18753772/site/newsweek/
Reordering India's Caste System How one politician has begun reordering the country's politics—and its notorious caste system. By Sudip Mazumdar Newsweek International May 28, 2007 issue - The election two weeks ago of Mayawati, a member of India's oppressed Dalit castes, as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh (UP) shocked the country. The surprise wasn't her victory per se. Dalits (once known as untouchables) have occupied high office before. The stunner came from how Mayawati got there this time: by building an unprecedented coalition of Dalits, marginalized Muslims and upper-caste Brahmins, long viewed by Dalits as their oppressors. Now this most unlikely of combinations threatens to seriously shift politics, not just in India's most populous state, but in the entire country. Mayawati's revolution brings to an end 14 years of shaky UP coalitions; the 206 seats (out of 403) won by her BSP (Bahujan Samaj, or "Majority Society," Party) should ensure stable rule for an entire five-year term. If she decides to stick around: for Mayawati managed not just to thump the incumbent Samajwadi (Socialist) Party, but also the two dominant national parties, Congress and the Hindu nationalist BJP. By doing so in a bellwether state with 114 million voters, Mayawati has made herself a serious contender for prime minister in the general elections less than two years away. It's clear what she has in mind: shortly after the election, Mayawati told supporters, "We have won Uttar Pradesh, now get ready for Delhi." But can the Mayawati miracle be replicated on a national scale? Though Dalits constitute nearly 22 percent of India's 1.1 billion people, most mainstream parties treat them as an afterthought. Mayawati, one of eight children born to a low-level government employee and his illiterate wife, spent her life fighting this exclusion. After university she became a schoolteacher and advocate, joining the BSP in 1984. For years, Mayawati, who often speaks in rhyming couplets, would spew vitriol at Brahmins and call on Dalits to "beat them with shoes." By the 1990s, many Dalits had begun to abandon the stagnating Congress Party, and some poor Muslims gravitated toward the BSP as foil to the surging Hindu nationalists. Starting in 1995, Mayawati became chief minister of UP several times, but always at the head of unstable coalitions that soon collapsed. This lead her to "realize that she [couldn't] really have lasting power only with a narrow base of Dalits," says Ajay Mehra of the Center for Public Affairs in New Delhi. Mayawati's masterstroke was to recognize that upper-caste Brahmins also felt ignored by the middle castes, which had come to dominate regional politics in the 1990s. These middle castes owned land, got the most jobs under India's generous quota system and managed to win electoral control of big states like UP and Bihar. They "terrorized the Dalits in villages," says Dipankar Gupta, who has written several books on India's caste system, and "they also usurped government jobs in cities, alienating the Brahmins." During the three-year rule of the middle-caste Samajwadi Party in UP, for example, nearly 12,000 new police were hired—but few were Brahmins or Dalits. So "Behenji" (the term means "respected sister") began to forge a solid high-low alliance. She made a Brahmin lawyer named Satish Mishra into one of her closest advisers and her envoy to his fellow caste-members. Mishra, who called this "the beginning of the BSP's mission to establish a parallel society, sans the traditional vertical hierarchy," held hundreds of meetings in villages and towns to let disgruntled Brahmins air their grievances. Mayawati dropped her angry anti-Brahmin rhetoric. And she started fielding Brahmins and Muslims in local council elections and the recent statewide vote. The strategy paid off, but can it work nationwide? Yes, says political scientist Ajay Mehra: Brahmins all over India feel the Congress has abandoned them in favor of the middle castes, which it has tried to win over by extending quotas in jobs and education. Poor Muslims feel similarly neglected. "Congress has tried to be all things to all people," says Dipankar Gupta. "Mayawati, on the other hand, has clearly defined friends and enemies." Her real challenge now will be to quickly generate new jobs for all and crack down on corruption. "If she can be magnanimous, provide good governance and curb her impulse to collect diamonds and property, she would be a force to be reckoned with," says Mehra. The Congress and the BJP are now scrambling to recover and regroup after their crushing defeat. In the run-up to the 2009 election, Congress will try to revive its traditional rainbow coalition and the BJP may try to raise the pitch of its Hindu radicalism. Whether or not such strategies succeed, one thing is clear: Mayawati will have changed Indian politics—in the short term at least and, if she plays her cards right, for many years to come. -- Subscribe to ZESTCaste by sending a BLANK email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] OR, if you have a Yahoo! ID, by visiting http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTCaste/join Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTCaste/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTCaste/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! 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