The crowd, mostly dalits (Hinduism’s former “untouchables”), to whose interests the BSP is dedicated, is restless. Miss Mayawati is a poor public speaker and her message, that the Congress party failed to uplift many wretched dalits while ruling UP and India for over three decades, is familiar. But, as a dalit herself, who won power in UP in 2007 for a fourth time, and who has accrued an admitted fortune of over $12m during her political career, she is an inspiring presence. Asked what it would mean to her if Miss Mayawati one day fulfils her ambition to lead India, Pyari, a poor woman in the crowd, says: “I’d feel as if I was prime minister myself.” Miss Mayawati, moreover, is not only addressing Mirzapuris, who she hopes will elect her candidate, from the low-caste Patel community, out of Hindu caste-loyalty. Rather, she is speaking to all India.
The BSP is expected to put up candidates in around 500 of the 543 seats being contested, aiming to become the first regional party in India to grow into a national one. India’s two biggest parties, the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which will have around 430 candidates, and Congress, which will put up around 400, are in decline and many think Miss Mayawati could succeed in her aim. As evidence, they cite the BSP’s stunning victory in 2007, when it won the first outright majority in UP for nearly two decades. Moreover, Miss Mayawati could become India’s prime minister with a more modest general-election result. With 50 parliamentary seats (80 are up for grabs in UP alone), the BSP would probably be India’s third-biggest party. If this made it a potential kingmaker to any of the three likely coalition mainstays—Congress, the BJP or a host of regional parties called the “third front”—Miss Mayawati would demand to be queen.
Regional wrecker
This would horrify India’s English-speaking elite. Venal, autocratic and nakedly opportunistic, Miss Mayawati is the epitome of the wrecking regional leader, a type that has helped ensure, during two decades of coalition rule at the centre, that India’s governments have mostly been quarrelsome, inefficient and corrupt. And, as a dalit, she stands out in an intelligentsia dominated by high-caste Hindus.
Yet Miss Mayawati’s electoral record is impressive. In UP’s last election, the BSP won 206 out of 403 seats, more than twice its previous tally. It also increased its vote-share from 23% to 30%—even though dalits, who mostly voted BSP, represent only 22% of the state’s 175m people. It achieved this success by appointing non-dalits, including high-caste Brahmins, as candidates. (Though its extra votes came mostly from low-caste Hindus and Muslims; the BSP got only 17% of the Brahmin vote.) At the same time, the party has extended its support among dalits—of whom India has 250m, or one-fifth of the population—in neighbouring states. In a cluster of state elections in December, it increased its vote share in Delhi from 2.5% to 14%; in Madhya Pradesh from 5% to 11%; and in Rajasthan from 3% to 7.5%. To win 50 seats in the general election, it must repeat its success in UP, where its candidates include 20 Brahmins, and pick up a few seats elsewhere.
This seems possible, but—like almost any outcome in Indian elections—not quite probable. The BSP’s main rival in UP, the Samajwadi Party (SP), which was founded to look after low-caste Yadavs, is well-organised and has a similar cross-caste strategy. Its candidate in Mirzapur is also a Patel. In fact, though it lost control of UP in 2007, the SP’s vote-share remained intact, at 25%. If disgruntlement with the BSP’s state government, which has announced some grand road-building plans but achieved little, costs the dalit party non-dalit votes in this election, the SP could even match its tally. A recent poll for NDTV, a television news channel, suggests the BSP will win 35-40 parliamentary seats—an advance on the 19 it won in 2004; but, as far as Miss Mayawati’s prime-ministerial ambitions are concerned, probably no cigar.
AFP
To win power in India—in future elections, if not this one—Miss Mayawati will have to purloin Congress’s traditional base: poor, rural Indians, including dalits. Hence her speech in Mirzapur, a seat Congress has almost no chance of winning. For encouragement, she has only to consider Congress’s recent evaporation in UP, the home-state of its dynastic rulers from the Nehru-Gandhi family. In 1984, the last time it won an outright majority, and the year the BSP was founded, Congress won 83 of UP’s then 85 seats. In 2004, when it came to power in Delhi with 145 seats, only nine were in UP. It is not expected to fare any better in this election.Utter Powerbase
UP was also the cornerstone of the BJP’s former rule. The party surged from nowhere during the 1990s, to head coalition governments between 1998 and 2004, on the back of its campaign to build a temple to the Hindu god Ram on the site of a mosque in Ayodhya, in central UP. In 1998, it won 57 of its 179 seats in UP, more than it won in any other state. In 2004, when it was narrowly and unexpectedly pipped by Congress, the BJP won just ten seats in UP. The BSP and SP won 55 between them.For any party to muster a majority in India, which is impossible in this election, it would almost certainly need strong support in UP. The dalit party also looks well-placed to win dalit votes from Congress outside the state. Miss Pyari, that disciple in Mirzapur, is typical: before being mesmerised by Miss Mayawati, she voted Congress. But it is still hard to imagine the BSP, or any erstwhile regional party, ever coming close to achieving a national majority.
Like almost all India’s parties, the BSP has also emulated Congress’s great weaknesses. Its leader is even more unaccountable than Congress’s recent Gandhi rulers, including Sonia Gandhi, the current one. Like the Gandhis, and the leaders of many Indian parties, Miss Mayawati inherited the job: in her case from the BSP’s founder and her alleged lover, Kanshi Ram. The BSP’s candidates are selected by its leaders, as are Congress’s, the SP’s and most other parties’, and often they are drawn from the same pool of local toughs. Indeed, given the parties’ high rates of candidate-turnover, many would-be parliamentarians oscillate between them. For aspirants who fail to get any party’s endorsement, new parties are formed.
A nearby BSP candidate and alleged gangster, Dhananjay Singh, got into hot water this week when he was accused of murdering a rival candidate, Bahadur Sonkar, who was found hanging from an acacia tree on April 13th. (Mr Singh, incidentally, is a high-caste Hindu; Mr Sonkar was a dalit.) Among the main parties, Congress had the cleanest contestants in eastern UP this week. Only a quarter were criminals.
For those who look to the two big parties to restore order to India’s democracy, a 25% criminality rate is hardly the moral high-ground. And neither party looks likely to make great gains in this election. Between them, in 2004, they got just over half the available seats. According to several recent polls, this election may produce a similar result, with most foreseeing a narrow victory for Congress. At the invitation of President Pratibha Patil, Mrs Gandhi would then be expected to beg, borrow and buy the seats she would need to make a new parliamentary majority—with the irascible Miss Mayawati as her last resort.
Apparently Pivotal
Opinion polls have a poor record in predicting Indian elections, however, and Congress’s fortunes remain perilously balanced. It has reasonable hopes of making some modest advances, including in Kerala and West Bengal, where the formerly-dominant Communists are flagging, and in Punjab, Rajasthan and Maharashtra. But Miss Mayawati, who according to Mahesh Rangarajan, a political scientist, could do Congress serious damage in 100 constituencies, may dash some of these hopes. More important, perhaps, Congress looks dangerously dependent on Andhra Pradesh (AP), where it won 29 seats in 2004. It will surely do worse there this time. The scale of its decline in AP could be the single biggest factor in determining the composition of India’s next government.If Congress can win roughly as many seats as the BJP, however, it does look better-placed to make the necessary alliances. In the run-up to this election, it rejected several possible partners, including the SP, at least partly as a declaration of its long-term hope for a national revival. But it could probably re-enlist these parties after the election, or find new allies. The BJP’s case is different. Since losing power in 2004, it has been abandoned by most of its allies, including the Telugu Desam Party, or TDP, Congress’s main rival in AP, and it is unclear whether they would return to it. Many, including the TDP, think they have lost crucial Muslim votes by associating with the Hinduist party. And the BJP’s prime-ministerial candidate, L.K. Advani, is a well-known Muslim-basher, who spearheaded the Ram temple campaign in Ayodhya in 1992, which led to the mosque’s destruction by vandals and hundreds of deaths in religious rioting.
On April 13th Mr Advani demanded an apology from Mrs Gandhi for needling him on another sensitive matter—his responsibility for freeing jihadist terrorists in a hostage exchange with the Taliban in 1999. Coming from a renowned political scrapper, this sounded rather desperate. Indeed, with a flailing leader, dismayed party and buoyant opponent, the Hindu nationalists are increasingly said to have no chance of regaining power. Then again, the same was said of Congress in 2004.