Indian Idol

To capture political power at any cost, to make no secret of its national ambitions, to insist that the BSP is a revolution and not just a political party (the BSP never releases manifestos) have been the cornerstones of the BSP's politics. Mayawati increasingly holds press conferences at the Taj Mahal hotel, BSP house dominates Delhi's elite Sardar Patel Marg and Mayawati on the campaign trail even wears socks and gloves. Now a new English-language biography by a seasoned chronicler of Indian politics has brought Mayawati to exactly where she wants to be: as bedside reading for India's elite. Ajoy Bose's unauthorised biography Behenji is a comprehensive and detailed account of Mayawati's life and political career.

Though political analysis dominates the narrative, there are many glimpses of her personal universe as well. Her troubled relationship with her father Prabhu Das, who preferred to send his sons to private schools with extra tuitions and left his daughter to study in a government school. The evening that Kanshi Ram came to visit her for the first time in her father's house and talked her into joining the political movement, saying, "Our community has provided many collectors ... but we need political leadership to point these collectors in the right direction," is hauntingly described. Through the book, a portrait emerges of the evolution of a natural born leader. Mayawati's not pretty, she does not look terribly good on television, she's badly spoken and uses foul language, but when she smiles from ear to ear, a flood of charm descends on the adoring hordes for whom she is the main reason to be hopeful about India.

The late BJP leader Pramod Mahajan once described Kanshi Ram as the most formidable political organiser ever in the politics of modern India. Bose shows how the indefatigable Kanshi Ram set about organising the bahujan samaj, with Ambedkar in his heart and fiery speeches on his lips. Daily humiliation would no longer be the stuff of private sorrow; humiliation would be a heuristic device to carve out a political future. Bose recounts how Kanshi Ram first heard of Mayawati when she was a 21-year-old schoolteacher who had made one of the boldest and fearless speeches ever by a Dalit at Delhi's Constitution Club. Today, that vital exercise in talent spotting has been vindicated. In the political version of Indian Idol, Mayawati's on-stage performance has never flagged. Behenji shows how theirs was the most unconventional and politically potent public relationship ever in India.

As far as written material on Mayawati is concerned, her own biography Mera Sangharshmay Jeevan Evam Bahujan Movement Ka Safarnama (My struggle-filled life and the journey of the bahujan movement) already exists, but as Bose rightly shows many of the tracts about Mayawati written by her or by BSP sources are part of image-building, to create an empowered identity and mythologise a leader whose very existence, for her voters, is miraculous. In breaking with myth-making and showing her as an ordinary girl who became an extraordinary politician, Bose's book is an important attempt at a reasoned scrutiny of Mayawati's persona, for the first time for an English-speaking audience. A long personal interview or personal anecdotes with the author perhaps would have enhanced the book's determinedly political tone.

Yet Behenji is an important milestone in the BSP movement: it eschews such condescending or sensational words as "fascinating" to describe Mayawati and errs squarely on the side of the power of Indian democracy. It shows that our political system still rewards political talent and passion and that leaders of people can still emerge.

The reviewer is senior editor, CNN IBN

BEHENJI
A POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY OF MAYAWATI

Ajoy Bose
Penguin
264 pages; Rs 499