Nita has a good post here that looks at Mayawati and Obama, there is an interesting discussion that is also taking place. I began putting my two bits in and it just got so long that i decided to blog about it (thanks Nita, it has been a long time since i posted anything that i thought too much about 🙂
When we look at Obama, we need to look at him beyond his colour and see him for what he is – the child of two post graduate students, who has seen the world – not as immigrant labor or an army brat — but as part of the academic intelligentsia. His father was from Kenya – and the elite there, foreign education is not for the truly down trodden. His mother was an anthropologist and development worker. That is his background — and his value systems have possibly been shaped by that. If the US was not such a colour conscious country – they would look beyond the colour and see him as another one of the ‘upper class’ elite. If he was typically African American – he wouldn’t have got this far :). If he was typically white working class – he wouldn’t have got this far either 🙂
Contrast that with Mayawati. She is the second generation to gain from reservations. Her father was a government clerk. Her origins have more in common with the mainstay of the BJP vote bank. She was the protege to Kanshi Ram – possibly one of the most charismatic leaders of India post independence. In a way she is also part of the political elite. which is why she has got this far ….. the question is whether she will go further. Will she become Prime Minister ?
For me, caste and gender are not the only defining factor here. You possibly also need to look at region. She is a UP leader. If you want to be more charitable – she is a North Indian leader. Talk to the electorate in Maharashtra (even the ‘dalit vote bank’)- and she doesn’t have too many takers, talk to them in TN – they possibly would not even have heard of her. Talk to the in West Bengal – and she possibly does not even feature in the top 20. The problem with Mayawati is not that she is woman or Dalit or autocratic or corrupt. She faces the same problem that Sharad Pawar and MGR had, that Mulayam and Lallu have — they are regional heroes. Unless Mayawati positions her party and herself beyond where there are now — she will not be the PM. It has nothing to do with being either Dalit or Woman.
The Dalits in India are as diverse as any other community – in terms of language, culture, rituals, gods, heroes and even voting patterns. Pan Dalit identity is as difficult as a Pan Hindu or a Pan Muslim or a Pan Christian or even a Pan Indian identity. Unless Mayawati or anyone else overcomes their regional & caste persona and project a national persona – it is going to be difficult to be even a pan Indian Dalit leader . And, i am not sure that she should be positioning her self that way. If she has to succeed then she has to be a pan Indian leader and the BSP has to be a pan Indian party.
It is difficult in India to have an Obama or even a Clinton or a McCain. Our system is different. Our nation is different. We may follow the same broad principals – but our cultural variations make it impossible to project the one ……
btw – when all commentators talk about where is our Obama, he happened 70 years ago … despite the variations in culture, and the complete stranglehold of caste ……he was called Dr.Babasaheb Ambedkar…..:)
Interesting analysis. I particularly liked your analysis of Obama, I think it’s brilliant! You have made some good points about Mayawati too…however there is one thing. Even if she doesn’t have much acceptance in other regions of India,there is another aspect. If the so-called Third Front comes to power, then she will be part of a coalition where she will command the maximum MP’s. They might be forced to agree to her becoming PM. Ofcourse anything can happen…
However I don’t think the Third Front is going to be able to cobble together enough votes, particularly as no one even knows which parties are part of it! We will know soon.
hi nita
thankyou…
the third front, as you rightly point out, is this ragtag bunch of parties that no one else wants to deal with . And their composition is, at best, nebulous.
if she accepts the leadership of the third front — it may be political harakiri !!
she – if she wants to be PM – needs to break out of the UP election mode — and address the whole country ….
“The Dalits in India are as diverse as any other community – in terms of language, culture, rituals, gods, heroes and even voting patterns. Pan Dalit identity is as difficult as a Pan Hindu or a Pan Muslim or a Pan Christian or even a Pan Indian identity.â€
Thought about about pan everybody and tried to get one image, one thing that came to mind for each group, something the each group would relate to either positively and negatively:
Pan Hindu: idol worship
Pan Muslim: Mecca
Pan Christian: Jesus
Pan Dalit: Oppression
the last something is the only thing that came to mind and to create an icon out of this and build into identity politics and leadership is as tough as it gets.
As to Mayawati emerging as a Dalit leader, a reading of Badri’s “Women heroes and Dalit assertion†would come in handy. Here the author stresses on the painstaking processes that have gone into the creating of a Mayawati image for Dalits in UP and that even within a particular region it has been a far more a complex process than one would think. The process is slow but it is on……
nice post Harini!
h,
as nita says, you’ve placed obama possibly in the right socio-economic class, but has race ceased to matter because he belongs to the socio-economic elite? i can’t really express an unambiguous opinion on that because my understanding of american politics is very limited. but i can’t agree with you on mayawati. two/three points on why i think different:
pan indian: what’s pan indian or who’s pan indian? nehru? indira? rajiv? the social elite did succeed in projecting them as pan indian. now, the rise of mayawati represents a success of dalit and lower caste assertion more than acceptance by the elite. the question remains: will they accommodate her in their pan india? since the late seventies (the first janata experiment), that question, has slowly and very painfully started to become less significant.
two: is she part of the political elite? the elite in india had a major problem with accepting even v.p.singh or narasimha rao (who ruled for a longer time than singh) as one of them. neither the congress/bjp political elite nor their voice, the mainstream press of india, accept them as anything but aberrations at best and upstarts at worst. mayawati possibly belongs to the social elite among the new dalits or the newly formed but small dalit middle class (not the old, congressi collaborators): aware, independent, assertive.
three: can she become the prime minister? oh yes. for the elite, india was fully formed in 1947, for a majority of the social classes in india, it is still being built.
lastly, when the elite in india say they want an obama, they don’t mean mayawati. they mean someone like rahul gandhi or one of the younger politicians from the parivar.
very interesting
ur comparing obama with ambedkar which i think is not quite right in my line of tht obama is yet to come to indian politics
first ur comparing caste with race that too when obamas race is secondary and what is primary is the issue between big business and working class american
second obama is not for reservation or selectively persuit of caste politics but instead championing the working class american
the nearest comparison to obama is the new modi 🙂
hi anu
welcome to this blog.
it isn’t that there isn’t stuff that we don’t have in common. it is just that the pan identity is elusive.
you say that these could form part of identity –
Pan Hindu: idol worship
Pan Muslim: Mecca
Pan Christian: Jesus
Pan Dalit: Oppression
but it hasn’t. if it would – then all hindus would vote BJP. all muslims would live in peace with each other without shia’s and sunnis and the rest having issues with each other; ditto with christians. we have a neighbor who is a Syrian christian who threw a fit when her daughter wanted to marry a goan catholic on religious grounds.
pan dalit opression – oppression has never been a good enough reason for an identity. it has been good for a movement – shared pain and all that… but not long term identity.
Mayawati is not a Dalit leader or a woman leader. She is a political leader. we don’t refer to Modi as a OBC male leader or a Advani as a Sindhi male leader – so lets’ not define her as female, Dalit leader.
i still believe that she has to go beyond her ‘dalit’ ‘woman’ tags to be seen as an all india leader
hi kufr
i agree that when the elite say ‘obama’ they mean one of the gora chikna political inheritors and not Mayawati.
a) Pan Indian is the Nehru Gandhi family, vajpayee and that’s about it. I would think that Pan Indian is someone without strong state affiliation. someone not strongly involved in state politics.
the problem with a lot of Indian political leaders – Pawar, Mulayam, Mayawati, Modi, is that their political base is state politics. And, unless they can step out of the state politics zone … they will find it very difficult to be accepted as PM material. alternatively, their party has to make substantial political inroads in other states -at least in terms of organisation and machinery, if not seats.
the elite don’t matter – the political commentators don’t matter. if we are talking about the caste elite (i.e., the Brahmins) they have seen value in an alliance with her in UP — they may see the same utility elsewhere. But, the Brahmins aren’t a political bloc either they behave and vote differently in different parts of india.
b) When i say she is political elite – it is by virtue of the fact that she was personally groomed by Kanshiram. Just as Sachin Pilot is political elite by the fact that is Pita was Rajesh Pilot, Mayawati is political elite by the fact that her guru was Kanshiram. She is not some outsider to the system who broke in and tried to take over. Kanshiram was. She is not. But, that is also the issue with a patriarchal system like ours where power passes to the woman via a man – pati, pita, guru …. we aren’t considered seriously without that 🙁
b) political elite is those who rule. the guys who control political systems. both V.P.singh and Narasimha rao were very much part of the political elite both historically , and in terms of the paths that had chosen for themselves. VP singh became an outsider by the sheer silliness of 3 bitter old men sabotaging his government to become PM. Narasimha Rao was definitely not an outsider. He probably channeled Chanakya during his reign 🙂 seriously
VP singh is a key example of why the third front is such a disaster. A bunch of people no one wants and each of who is obsessed with being PM. If Mayawati is serious about being PM she needs to find better alliance partners !
the msm in india is a misnomer – i keep telling my students that the trouble with the English media is that it has some 1% or less of audience share. and they think of themselves as MSM :). the regional press is more representative. yet there is no pan indian media voice. there can’t be !!
Mayawati forms more than the part of the Dalit elite. It is first generation achievement of small town, outer suburbs India. She, Sunil Mittal, Dhoni, SRK — are really all part of the same dream. she has the ability to break beyond Dalit, woman and UP. She needs to represent our dreams – if she wants to be PM, she has to look beyond Dalit, woman, and UP. she has to look at large chunks of India (even urban India) and be accepted by them as leader !
3) can she become PM – of course she can. but, she has to reach out to all India. not just to elite India. the point that no one mentions is that the largest caste grouping is what is called OBC. And the BSP sees the OBC as the ‘foe’ . But, the OBC is also possibly the largest chunk of India. How does she resolve that ?
it will take political will, vision and ambition …..
and, it is not impossible.
hi
prax i am saying that Obama is in contention becuase he is acceptable. he is the white elite’s definition of what a black leader ought to be….
i am not comparing Obama to Ambedkar.
I am saying that a person who is from a deprived community, who comes out of nowhere to offer the message of hope and equality to all — Ambedkar did it first. and, in a society and a time more cruel to his caste than the American people are towards colour today.
@ Prax – on modi being like Obama. i wasn’t aware that Obama oversaw the ethnic targeting and murder of thousands of people people in his watch. I didn’t realise that it was part of his political resume.
Thanks! sorry about the typos, should have been sleeping instead of commenting….no, actually I make them even when I am wide awake….
I was playing with what comes to mind when a group is referred to, not intending that any of this form a concrete reason for throwing up a leader for a group or for all, least of all the whole nation. I want a visionary there. Period. Man, woman, transgender, dalit, parsi, elite, poor, jain anybody………………
Pan…..
Dalits have nothing like the powerful iconography that other groups have……….. except their woeful tales of oppression. And oppression, I guess I was being tongue in the cheek, to bring a group of diverse people who may relate to each other on the basis of non inclusion in civil society, and maybe common stories of rape, homes burnt, exploitation………. like you point out is hardly grounds to call them under a tree and say you are all one and I am the leader, am going to take care that our women are not going to be gangraped and paraded naked……no no no, was only pointing out that even within a region a leader being able to talk to dalits as a single group is not easy………….because, think about it what is it that is common to them, to call them a group? And then, except that this leader step into the national scene by shaking of the tenuous web that seems to have happened….sigh! wish……
/ i am not comparing Obama to Ambedkar.
but u did contradict urself with the way u compared both of them
/on modi being like Obama. i wasn’t aware that Obama oversaw the ethnic targeting and murder of thousands of people people in his watch.
modi came from a poor background – essentially was a nobody
i said new modi because the current term he won mainly because of change in his attitude and his economic development plank – something that broke the castist lobbys like the patel or koli lobby,
being essentially very secular in ur outlook as defined by the pseudo secular bunch i didnt expect u to read between the lines when i said new modi
ps there were hindu deaths too if u compare the statistics as a ratio to the total population, and even the most secular leaders of india from the family have seen riots and killings in their watch…so no politicians are saints here
@ anu
a visionary is a good idea. someone who inspires all of us, not just a few of us 🙂
i am not sure that the rest of india has common iconography. there is a standardisation that the right would like to impose on all of us. especially when it comes to ‘hindu’ icons and independence icons and historical icons — but we actually have different histories and heroes and iconography .
@ prax
obama is not about economic develeopment – he is about ‘hope’. Obama didn’t come from a poor family. he does not have an exclusion policy. he is not a fascist.
i am neither secular nor pseudo secular. i am Hindu – and dislike murderers operating in my name…… it is actually quite simple.
it is not about hindu deaths or muslim deaths. it is about an attitude towards citizens – what ever be their community.
peace 🙂
Interesting post and discussion. Mayawati and Modi are, in a way, nearest to being India’s Obamas, for entirely different reasons.
Obama is really an idea, a vision, the likes of which is, sadly, not visible in the India of today.
Is it a coincidence that Obama has a picture of Gandhi in his office, when there is no obligation to do so in the US? Obama is the Change that India needs even more desperately than the US. I am sure the day is not far when he will emerge to take India out of the mess that our petty politicians have put it in.
last things first:
‘And the BSP sees the OBC as the ‘foe’ . But, the OBC is also possibly the largest chunk of India. How does she resolve that ?’
the bsp doesn’t see the obcs as the foe. far from it. in truth, in the 2007 polls they constitute the second largest social base among her voters. and it has been steadily increasing over the years. the sp was never truly a pan-obc party and has been a party of yadavs/muslims and some thakurs for more than a decade now. and now, (even) the muslims are moving away- they constitute another large social base of bsp..the upper castes and the brahmins actually constitute a distant last among her supporters.
and how does the media present that reality? every rag in the country almost makes it seem like mayawati won because of he brahmins. that’s because every rag in the national media is overwhelmingly staffed by brahmin reporters (remember the csds survey and the praful bidwai informal survey earlier?)
except for a couple of dalit intellectuals excessively promoted by a fawning national media no one among the dalit intelligentsia sees the obcs as foes. and definitely not mayawati. she had been doing every other obc caste in u.p. apart from the yadavs since quite a long time. only the yadavs remain somewhat solidly behind mulayam singh.
that’s a major reason why she has a national appeal now, cutting across divisions among the lower castes. the third front, so derisively dismissed by more than one commentator here, has support from a wide range of mainstream ‘regional’ parties beyond the hindi heartlland. in a.p., and karnataka, except for the congress, every political party has expressed support for mayawati. the tdp, for instance, derives its support, mainly from the obcs and the kammas in the state. deve gowda, despite recent reverses, represents a solid social base among the upper and other obcs in karnataka. and when some of the dravidian parties in tamil nadu join the alliance (as they will before or after polls) the mayawati-dalit-obc alliance would gain a more respectable shape.
those parties (that i referred to) represent the visible face of obc-intermediate caste politics..but in other states (except for up and bihar) you might see fewer (lok dal and chautala’s party) such visible faces- obc driven political parties which have survived over more than two decades. but the social bases are there, and they’ve been shifting their allegiance in every election since the late sixties, moving away from the mainstream parties (that’s one visible trend). it’s only the failure of the formation of a strong (and coherent) anti-caste socio-political movement by the leadership of these sections that’s stopping the rise of a credible alternative (in the form of a ‘national’ political party). now, mayawati perhaps would bridge that gap (not fully, but through tactical alliances). the voters are there, have been there since the late sixties, looking for leaders and organizations. the third front will mostly be marked by more ‘disasters’ and squabbling and then regrouping and again ‘disaster’ in the next one decade, as i see it. but the emergence of strong leaders like mayawati represent change- a stronger leadership with a stronger individual social base (unlike charan singh, v.p singh, gujral, gowda) might make all the difference. and one of the two national parties (and the communists) would’ve to support her from ‘outside’, even if she wins, on her own, fewer seats than them- they’d have limited choices.
political elite:
as i hinted earlier, brahmins are not important to mayawati as voters, except in u. p and a couple of smaller states where they constitute more than 5-6% of the voters there are other important reasons for her to woo the brahmins.
it’s not because the ‘mostly urban’ brahmins have little ‘class conflict’ with the ‘mostly rural dalits’, as painted by some vocal sections of the academia and the media, that she has sought to court the brahmins and other upper castes. it is because of the power that they wield in the bureaucracy, the media and academia, the bar and modern industry, and other important institutions that make and sell ‘opinion’, ‘expertise’ and ‘knowledge’- it would be useful (for her) not to antagonize them totally. they’re more important to her in that sense. it is they who decide who’s a ‘natural’ candidate for prime ministership- it is this elite which decides who’s the ‘political elite’.
but i see your point and this debate would go on. it’s a good post and thanks for responding to my comment, at such length.
But then again he is also for the small person change and the likes
agree with you
but me – i consider most politicians crooks and murderers – and dont single anyone out
Mayawati is a political elite? beats me. race is a factor everywhere. right from selecting the fair husband or wife for our sons and daughters to the elections. McCain is an ex POW who served in the Vietnam war. His entire campaign is about lies and distortions including the race slant. We have many in India. India has the politicians, but it doesn’t have the leaders. Even Mahashweta Devi, grudgingly accepted that Modi has done better for his state than the communists in 30 years, but he is not the kind we are looking for.
What Obama represents is a break from tradition and old styles of thinking. He has over the last 18 months inspired the nation. Who in India can do that, without using emotive issues of Religion, Caste etc. The day that happens – somebody inspires a nation because of ISSUES; issues that the common man faces, we have our Man or Woman.
Some thoughts on the basic difference between Obamas election and a possible mayawati win:
http://amuseandmore.blogspot.com/