Her signature colour is pink and she loves diamonds—wearing them, getting them as gifts, collecting them. There was a time when, for a woman of her caste, these ‘weaknesses’ could cause her eyes to be gouged out by the upper castes, or her ears cut off for coveting something denied to her on account of her low birth. But as Chief Minister of India’s most powerful state, Uttar Pradesh, Mayawati (53) can have all this and more—may be one day, the prime ministership of India.
Mayawati is very much a product of the Indian system, the beneficiary of reservations for deprived sections in educational institutions and government establishments. This gave her access to education and then a teacher’s job in a government school. She is also the product of a political system that equally values the vote of rich and poor, educated and unlettered, upper and lower caste. As she says it, she was studying for the elite administrative services examinations—her dream was to be a senior government official—when Kanshi Ram barged into her home one night, brainwashed her and pulled her into the world of politics. He told her that instead of being an officer in the administrative service, she would have legions of such officers carrying out her orders. How right he was.
Kanshi Ram propelled Mayawati into Parliament; she was elected three times to the Lok Sabha before she moved to the Rajya Sabha. Along the way, she became Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh in short stints as the BSP formed alliances and then broke them—with Mulayam Singh Yadav, the BJP and the Congress. She was Chief Minister for the first time from June to October 1995; the second time, from March to September 1997; the third time from May 2002 to August 2003; and finally, for the first time in her own right, without being part of an alliance, from 13 May 2007 till date.
Buoyed by her stunning caste coalition and a solid power base in the crucial state of Uttar Pradesh, Mayawati is plotting a career at the Centre.
©Business Standard. Excerpted from Business Standard Political Profiles: Of Cabals and Kings, by Aditi Phadnis. Published by Business Standard Books in 2009; available in bookshops and also on www.business-standard.com/books. For more details, contact vineeta.rai@bsmail.in
The book carries detailed profiles of: Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh, L K Advani, Pranab Mukherjee, Prakash Karat, Mayawati, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Rahul Gandhi, Jayalalithaa Jayaram; Amar Singh, Sharad Pawar, Lalu Prasad, Raj Thackeray, Uddhav Thackeray, Rajnath Singh, P Chidambaram, Jaswant Singh, Narendra Modi, Omar Abdullah, Ahmed Patel, Arun Jaitley, M Karunanidhi, N Chandrababu Naidu, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, Y S Rajasekhara Reddy, Naveen Patnaik, Sheila Dikshit, Nitish Kumar, Om Prakash Chautala, Mamata Banerjee, Parkash Singh Badal, Sukhbir Singh Badal, Chiranjeevi, Vijayakanth, B S Yeddyurappa, H D Deve Gowda, Digvijay Singh, Murli Deora, Sushma Swaraj, Jairam Ramesh, A K Antony
