Mayawati is certainly not an angelic crusader and she too has her dark sides (clean politicians in India? what’s that? we don’t like them. that’s why we choose bad politicians) but Mr. Swaminathan in his article titled Don’t go gaga over Mayawati seems to be doing nothing constructive and simply nitpicking, and to such an extent that he even downplays the anarchy unleashed by the Mulayam government. He refers to Yogendra Yadav’s electoral analysis and asks:
Yogendra Yadav is normally India’s best electoral analyst. But on this occasion he claims that “the feeble voice of the ordinary Indian” can finally be heard through Mayawati’s victory. Really? Have all other elections been a democratic sham, drowning out the ordinary voter?
To an extent yes. Our elections haven’t exactly been the vanguards of democracy. Some want Yadav votes, some want Muslim votes and political outfits like the Congress perpetually play the dirty politics of caste and religion. So what’s so cynical about Mayawati bringing all the castes and religions, even tokenly, under one umbrella? People are simply jealous because she succeeded.
He further says:
Those who think that Mayawati’s rainbow politics can transform class or caste relations in Uttar Pradesh are confusing electoral opportunism with social revolution. Only 46% of voters voted in Uttar Pradesh, and Mayawati got only 30% of these votes. So, only 13.8% of eligible voters actually voted for her. In a first-past-the-post electoral system, this is enough to ensure an election victory. But it is totally inadequate for engineering a social revolution.
Could be. But the reality is, whether one likes it or not, she got to form the government with her opportunistic arithmetic. Forget about the percentages, the main point is, she got the absolute majority because of what they call, her ”rainbow politics”. Mr. Swaminathan belongs to a pessimistic era. No numbers are inadequate for engineering social revolutions. He must remember that small rivulets create big rivers.
The point is not whether she can do something or not. May be she’ll turn out to be just another power-hungry, corrupt politician only concerned with filling her own coffers. Still, she is far better than the current crop of politicians we have. I was watching her recently giving an interview to Prabhu Chawla of Aaj Tak. All the politicians, to whichever political party they belong, look pigmies in front of her. At least she knows what she is talking about. There was so much clarity of purpose in her eyes and her body language. I hope she very soon becomes the PM.
[tags]mayawati, up elections[/tags]
