Which way Mayawati?

Good leaders sometimes evolve to meet higher expectations placed on them. On her the jury is still out

THERE is arguably no leader more important to India8217;s political evolution at this moment than Mayawati. Not only will future coalitions depend on how the BSP fares; the future of India will, in substantial measure, be determined by how her administration fares in Uttar Pradesh. As a symbol of the disempowered, she is a locus of great hope. As a political tactician, she has proved to be second to none. But embodying high aspirations and having organisational acumen is not enough for statecraft. India8217;s tragedy is that there is, at the moment, no leader who can marry these assets to real statesmanship; a leader who can not only secure their power, but govern well. Part of the excitement Mayawati generated was because of the hope that she just might provide this unlikely combination: a popular leader, a formidable coalition builder, who also could be a good chief minister. Of course, the fact that she became the locus of hope was not always a reflection of her qualities, as much as a reflected despair over finding them elsewhere. But then good leaders can sometimes evolve to meet the higher expectations placed on them.

So, on the one hand, there is the story of hope: a leader evolving with the responsibilities placed upon her. On the other, there is the sceptical view: this is not so much a story about creating new possibilities for development, creating new institutional norms, or bringing social justice. This is simply another episode in the Caesarism that has plagued UP politics. In his biography of Caesar, Heinrich Meier has written: 8220;Caesar was insensitive to political institutions and the way they operate8230; he was unable to see Rome8217;s institutions as autonomous entities. He could see them only as instruments in the interplay of forces. He had no feeling for the power of institutions to guarantee law and security, but only what he found useful or troublesome about them. In Caesar8217;s eyes no one existed but himself and his opponents. He classified people as supporters, opponents or neutrals. The scene was cleared of any suprapersonal elements. Or if any were left, they were merely props behind which one could take cover or with which one could fight. Politics amounted to no more than a fight for his rights.8221; What Meier meant by 8220;rights8221; was more akin to power.

There is a sense in which state after state in India has been reduced to this spectacle: Lalu in Bihar, Jayalalithaa in Tamil Nadu or now Vasundhara Raje in Rajasthan. UP was a special case of this kind of politics, tempered only by the fact that power was fragmented. Almost every sentence in this description of Caesar captures the way in which Mulayam stripped the state of all form, all pretence of legality, and all sense of higher purpose. The question is: will Mayawati continue in the same vein? Or will she inaugurate a new chapter in UP politics?

It is in this context that her administration is being watched. It was too much to expect UP to be transformed overnight. But there was some cause for hope in Mayawati8217;s early pronouncements. The raising of the wage for agriculture labour, the new policy on transfers, the attempts to get law and order under control to overcome the massive suppression of FIRs that happened under Mulayam, the radical idea of, to use Chandrabhan Prasad8217;s phrase, industrialising agriculture, seemed promising portents.

But what is left in its wake is now massive confusion. The government8217;s flip-flops on agriculture policy suggested two things. First, that the ideological trajectory of this government is not clear; and this leaves national politics uncertain. Second, it was an acknowledgment that her hold on law and order was tenuous. It is a fair supposition that she feared violence, and did not want to risk even one Nandigram-type incident exposing just how fragile law and order in UP still is. The violence in Agra that followed is a grim reminder that, for all her hold on power, making the state a source of law and security is not going to be easy.

It is in this context that her decision to cancel en masse the recruitment of police recruits in previous years appears to be somewhat fraught. Most people do not doubt the proposition that there is widespread corruption in police recruitment. There is also a widespread perception that dalits were often targeted by the police recruited under the previous dispensation. And there is the great political pressure to include groups who were marginalised by the previous regime into structures of the state. In fact, Mayawati is getting criticised in sections of her core constituency for not moving fast enough in this direction. There may be a good justification for this action depending on the inquiry reports.

But on the face of it, the manner in which these recruitments have been cancelled weakens Mayawati8217;s case. The test of her intentions will be if she introduces new procedures, on the lines suggested by so many committees, that insulate police recruitment from political interference 8212; procedures that made Mulayam8217;s perfidy possible in the first place. Merely cancelling old recruitment and doing new ones under the same procedure will open her to the charge of being interested more in discretionary power than institution building. Second, the UP administration has become deeply partisan, with individual officers identified with particular parties. But it would be in the interest of the state to depoliticise administration rather than perpetuate a vicious cycle of partisan identification. It may be that the best way to break the vicious cycle is to practise an inclusive politics of a different kind: try and bring together elements of the state that have hitherto been at war with one another. And finally, there is a real danger of actions of this kind fuelling a politics of resentment. Six thousand-odd police recruits have just been stripped of their jobs, their superiors demoralised and humiliated en masse, rather than an odd example here or there. Whatever the legal justifications, this group is going to add fuel to UP8217;s already combustible mix. And if these decisions are aligned with the politics of caste and community then UP is going to see tough days ahead.

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Will Mayawati build a genuine state, or does the road from popular acclaim end as Caesarism? The jury is still out.

The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research