PM Modi sees election danger in Dalit Queen

Uttar Pradesh votes early 2017

LUCKNOW, India, Oct 24, (RTRS): When Amit Shah, president of Narendra Modi’s ruling party, meets with the Indian prime minister, he is sometimes asked a question he struggles to answer: “What is behenji thinking?”

By “behenji”, or “older sister”, Modi means Mayawati, the enigmatic politician and former ruler of India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh.

Modi’s keen interest in what the 60-year-old is up to reflects concern about his political prospects, amid an economic recovery that many poor Indians have yet to feel and rising social tensions among sizeable minority communities.

With a near-devotional following from tens of millions of people who, like her, belong to the bottom rung of India’s social hierarchy, Mayawati is emerging as Modi’s chief challenger in a key state election set for early next year.

“Mayawati is the biggest threat to our victory,” Sanjeev Balyan, a federal minister in Modi’s government, told Reuters.

“The one who becomes the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh gets to be the most powerful political leader after the prime minister.”

Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept Uttar Pradesh, home to 200 million people, in the 2014 general election, handing him the biggest parliamentary majority in three decades.

A repeat of that success would help Modi, who remains popular among most Indians, wrest control of the federal parliament’s upper house, making it easier than it has been to pass key reforms.

It would also significantly advance his chances of retaining power when India chooses its next prime minister in 2019. But violent attacks on Dalits, as those on the lowest social rung are known, are turning the opinion of some against the BJP and its Hindu nationalist supporters, giving Mayawati a new lease of life as she seeks a political renaissance.

Mayawati is calling on minority groups to reject the BJP, whose roots are in Hindu nationalism that many Dalits and Muslims see as a threat to their way of life.

“Communal forces are becoming stronger,” she told 300,000 cheering supporters, as she kicked off her election campaign at a sprawling park she built to honour lower caste Indians, previously known as “untouchables”, in Uttar Pradesh’s capital Lucknow.

“I want to ask the prime minister ... where are the jobs for Dalit boys and girls?” she said. “He will never understand the problems faced by us.”

Speaking on the sidelines of the rally, Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) general secretary Satish Mishra said Dalits and Muslims “were totally unsafe” under Modi, a view that reflects Mayawati’s strategy to try and convince the two groups to vote as one.

Some lower caste voters deserted her BSP in 2014, allowing the BJP to win 71 out of 80 seats. But a series of attacks on Dalits this year has re-energised Mayawati.

Self-styled hardline Hindu cow protectors have targeted Dalits and Muslims who make money skinning dead cows, accusing them of killing animals sacred to Hindus. In July, footage emerged of four lower caste men tied to a car, stripped and being flogged in Modi’s home state of Gujarat, triggering violent protests.

Dressed in her trademark beige salwar kameez, Mayawati has sped across the country to appear at the side of victims. “Mayawati has herself a godsend,” said Ramesh Dixit, a former professor of political science at Lucknow University, referring to the attacks.

A “Dalit Queen” to the millions destined to a life sweeping streets or rag-picking under the Hindu caste system that defines people by job, critics have accused her of lavishing money on luxury homes and diamond necklaces while ignoring the poor.

Mayawati