Mayawati: The making of a dalit icon

New Delhi, May 11: As one finds dalit icon Mayawati poised to take the reins of the country's biggest state for the fourth time, one is tempted to leaf through her recently published autobiography.

It provides interesting insights into how and why a woman born in a low caste jatav community in a village of Uttar Pradesh overcame heavy odds to assert herself and lead dalits to power.

The book is 'Mere Sangharshmay Jeevan Aur Bahujan Movement Ka Safarnama'(A travelogue of my struggle-ridden life and Bahujan Samaj Movement), which was released recently on the occasion of the Bahujan Samaj party supremo's 50th birthday.

Ms Mayawati, who was born on January 15, 1956, was the youngest politician, at the age of 39, to assume the Chief Minister's post in Uttar Pradesh, for the first time on June 3, 1995.

The journey was not easy.

There are several engaging passages in the book which describe how she had to leave her house after her father, Prabhu Das, pressurised her to sever ties with her mentor, guide and BSP founder Kanshiram.

The father was against her joining politics and wanted her to join civil services, but the mentor saw in her the promise of a leader.

Mayawati knew her worth too. One day, she finally decided to make an exit and enter a new life with a new mission.

She says Mr Kanshiram told her that she could do more for the country and dalits by joining politics. "You can achieve much more.

Not only a collector, you can become a successful leader too, and then hundreds of collectors would take orders from you." It did not take much time for the young woman to know what her mission in life was, as from her very childhood she had started experiencing the indignity, humiliation and discrimination meted out to dalits.

"Whenever I would visit my grandparents with my mother, we were asked at the entry of their village about the locality we wanted to visit, whether it was of Jatav, Brahmins, Thakurs, Gujaras or Chamars, and when we would tell that it was Chamar locality, the person would make no efforts to hide his indignation," she says.

Ms Mayawati rues that her father spent a lot of money and care on the education and upbringing of his sons, leaving her and her sister to a government school. However, she exults in the fact that she overcame all odds to be what she is today.

She sees in her success, an assertion of women-power and of all other downtrodden sections of the society against the 'Manuwadi system,' which she terms as discriminatory against women and lower castes.

Ms Mayawati also recalls in the book that how after becoming Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh for the first time she rebuffed her father, reminding him of his "'pro-son bias", when he came to her for getting some work done in their native village.

The incident is recalled with a sense of pride and feeling of triumph over the patriarchal setup of her society.

"Why don't you go to your sons who were supposed to carry forward your family name. Ask them to construct roads, set hospitals and schools and run buses," Ms Mayawati bluntly told her father when he came to her along with residents of her native village Badalpur, in Gautambuddha Nagar district of Uttar Pradesh bordering Delhi.

Ms Mayawati recalls that people of Badalpur would say to her father that his daughter could do a lot for her village as had been done by Mr Mulayam Singh Yadav for his Saifai village. They would come to him daily and say that they had come to know through newspapers that his daughter had become "super chief minister of Uttar Pradesh". And one day, they prevailed upon him to accompany them to her, not knowing that the father would be referred back to his sons.

However, her curt reply was taken with magnanimity by her father and he admitted without any hesitation that he was mistaken in his notions and it was she not his sons who could get things done.

In the foreword of the book, Ms Maywati says intellectuals, both foreign and those from the country had so far not been able to understand the philosophy of her movement."We are working for social change and not for social justice, ''she says.

"If the meaning of the two concepts is to be explained in one sentence, one would say that replacing manual disposal of the night soil by mechanical is social justice, whereas social change would require this work to be done not only by people of a particular caste but of all castes," says Ms Mayawati.

The Congress leadership of both pre-independence and post-independence period has come under scathing attack in the book for its "anti-dalit" policies.

Ms Mayawati would be donning the mantle of chief minister of the state for a record fourth time. Earlier, Mr Chandrabhan Gupta, Mr Narain Dutt Tewari and Mr Mulayam Singh Yadav have been chief minister of the state thrice, though serving a longer term in total.

For the first time as Chief Minister, Ms Mayawati remained in office for only four months. She held the post again from March 21, 1997 to September 21, 1997. She became Chief Minister for the third time on May three, 2002 and served till August 29, 2003.

She is currently a Member of the Lok Sabha.

UNI