Mayawati in Modiland

This essay is an exercise in speculation. Such an act is necessary because sometimes one needs to dream beyond the empirical because an empiricist view of politics is often limiting. It is a strict kind of accountancy which tells you little about alternative possibilities. Consider the political narrative in Gujarat. It is a poor Punch and Judy show between Chief Minister Narendra Modi and a weak Congress. The fight is boring, predictable and repetitive not just because Modi has little that is new to offer but because both parties constrain the possibilities of politics. We need a new term to alter relationships, and create new possibilities. Enter Mayawati. Let us look at Mayawati as a person and as a collection of possibilities, some of which may be unintended. What happens in the long run if Mayawati or a rainbow coalition under her enters Gujarat? What does she offer and what can she change?

Consider her as a person contra Modi or the lesser figures in the Congress. She is as shrewd as Modi, not morally a more convincing figure but socially a more powerful myth. Both offer visions of politics, both offer a packaged vision of modernity. What Modi offers is a vindication of the history of nationalism that is powerfully official. What Mayawati offers is a vision of justice and a collection of opportunities for the marginal and victimised. Hers is a more powerful view of history, of justice in lieu of Modi8217;s promise of mobility. She offers a better theory of citizenship. The dalit imagination is more modern, more cosmopolitan and more global than anything the BJP can offer. Mayawati8217;s Gujarat will have more to offer than Modi8217;s Vibrant Gujarat, which is a magnification, of himself. Both are colossal egos but Modi8217;s does not have a place for dissent or even for the sibling VHP. Mayawati can build a brahmin-dalit coalition in UP which shows her vision of politics is not frozen by her vision of history. Mayawati8217;s politics can offer some new possibilities for Gujarat. Firstly, it could offer a stronger vision of secularism than the Congress8217; cowardly politics. Her vision of justice embraces the marginal and the minority. Dalit, Muslim, Christian and tribal might find a voice, a frame denied to them by the Modi regime. Mayawati offers dalits dignity while Modi8217;s is a carrot-stick approach to the lower castes. Beyond secularism and affirmative action, Mayawati8217;s rainbow coalition might challenge the power of the dominant castes and the dominance of religious sects. It can open up silences of state politics and loosen up its current middle class pomposities. Gujarat might realise that it needs two visions of change, one of the diaspora and the second based on the redemption and mobility of marginal groups.

One needs to state such a positive view of Mayawati as a possibility before one examines the obstacles, the tension, the downside.

Hers is a politics of resentment which needs to recognise that justice is neither monologic nor monolithic. Her entry could amplify other forms of violence. We would move from the communal and the religious violence to the economic. Dominant castes would express a politics of anxiety that could magnify caste atrocities. Her rainbow coalition could face tensions between dalit and tribal demands. For example, dalits could celebrate the arrival of Narmada waters which might have threatened tribal livelihoods. Gujarat possesses three great flows of population which mark it culturally 8212; the tribal, the pastoral and the diasporic. Mayawati needs a theory of modernisation which balances competing demands. She would need a new tribal policy and a theory for the renewal of crafts which understands caste-based communities of skill without being casteist.

What she lacks is a theory of ecology, which an erratic objection to privatisation cannot solve. One wonders whether she would have allowed the privatisation of 40 ports or the creation of the SEZ. Unfortunately one does not clearly see her model of development, her strategy for confronting dominant castes, sects or private corporations, or even how she would involve lower castes in the economics of globalisation.

In an odd way, civil society would have to be in creative tension with her. One is not referring to defunct Gandhian groups but to NGOs. Gujarat has some of the most creative NGOs, many of which are tribal or gender focused. They would have to remind her about democracy as a diversity of justice, a role not easy to play with a regime that could be holier than thou about its politics.

The sceptic could ask: does replacing one form of political egotism with another really offer anything new? Is politics to be cynically reduced to alternative megalomanias or availabilities of corruption? But politics is about small slippages, little revisions with larger consequences. The presence or possibility of a Mayawati could teach the Congress to be Congress again. What we have now is a party which, having done a poor job of imitating its former self now, thankfully, does a poorer job imitating the BJP. It could trigger new dimensions in civil society allowing NGOs, trade unions and marginal groups to forge a civil society coalition if not a party-based one. Otherwise Gujarat is doomed to a univocal politics, where the vibrancy of Modi8217;s Gujarat is like a drum. The louder it beats the more hollow it sounds.

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The writer is a social scientist currently based in Ahmedabad