India’s Anti-Obama

Shortly after Barack Obama's election last fall, a banner appeared in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state. OBAMA IS PRESIDENT OF THE U.S. NOW IT IS TIME FOR MAYAWATI TO BE PRIME MINISTER OF INDIA, it read.

Mayawati (she uses only one name) is Uttar Pradesh's chief minister. It's a big job; if U.P. were a country in its own right, its 190 million inhabitants would make it the sixth largest in the world. Yet Mayawati is now gunning for a bigger one. With national elections beginning this month, her supporters are trying to position her as India's answer to America's youthful black president. There's no chance that her party will actually win a majority of the seats in Parliament. But the likely outcome is that the two main parties, Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), will be forced to rely on coalitions. Mayawati's followers hope she'll emerge as kingmaker in the negotiations, with enough clout to grab the top job herself. Her party's aim is "to make Mayawati prime minister," as her top strategist puts it, and there's a chance it will succeed.

There are indeed parallels between Mayawati and Obama. Like America's president, Mayawati is young—just 53 in a country where most political leaders are in their 70s. She is also an outsider who comes from a long-oppressed segment of society: the Dalits, the politically correct term for India's Untouchable caste. The lowest of the low in the traditional Hindu social order, Dalits were long consigned to jobs such as waste collection and considered so impure they were denied education and other basic rights. India's Constitution outlaws caste discrimination, but the age-old hierarchies continue to play an outsize role in life there. In fact, the gulf between high and low caste in India is arguably bigger than that between black and white in America. And the political impact of low castes is potentially larger: they represent 60 percent of the Indian electorate by some estimates, with Dalits alone making up nearly 20 percent. Blacks, by contrast, represent just 12 percent of U.S. voters.

So Mayawati is both a bigger underdog and a potentially bigger threat to the established order than Obama was. While he benefited from a first-class education, she grew up in a shantytown with eight brothers and sisters and attended poor state schools. Obama enjoyed the backing of a long-established party, while Mayawati's organization, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), has been built up largely by Mayawati herself—and in a part of the world where women have made it to the pinnacle of power only as wives, widows or daughters of beloved male leaders.

But unlike Obama, who promised a new politics that would transcend not only race but traditional ideology and corrupt Washington ways, Mayawati has built her power on demagogic class warfare. As her national ambitions have grown, she recently began reaching out to upper-caste voters—but by playing on their fears of the upwardly mobile middle castes, not by appealing to their better, caste-free angels. She has accumulated a suspiciously ostentatious fortune, and is dogged by corruption charges. She is admired by many Dalits, but often more for her power and jewels than for her limited accomplishments on their behalf. Her victory, if it comes, may be seen as a great leap forward for India's oppressed—but, ironically, will end up bolstering the caste system that has kept them in chains.

Mayawati would likely be a highly divisive national leader—an anti-Obama—and not only domestically. With his Kenyan father, Indonesian stepfather and inter- national outlook, Obama appeals across national borders and has already begun to steer the U.S. away from George W. Bush's unilateralism. Mayawati, by contrast, is parochial in the extreme. She almost never speaks about foreign policy, and when she does, her pronouncements are so vague as to be practically meaningless. And where she's been specific, the substance is worrisome: she has decried U.S. efforts to secure Indian support for sanctions on what she's called "our old friend Iran," and has promised that a BSP government would renegotiate the nuclear deal India signed with Washington last fall. On trade, she's sounded sharply protectionist notes, promising to safeguard "the interests of small shopkeepers" and "not to make any policy to benefit capitalists." She would be—at the least—a wild card at the international summits attempting to repair global capitalism.

The best place to start evaluating Mayawati's potential is her home base, Uttar Pradesh. Dalits there know her as "Behenji," a term that means "honored sister," and she is a heroine by virtue of her biography. "She makes a difference to history not by what she does but by who she is," says Yogendra Yadav, a political analyst with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi.

To give Mayawati her due, her rise has been impressive. She was born to an illiterate homemaker and a low-level government clerk who got his job through affirmative action (India's Constitution sets aside 15 percent of government-sector jobs and university places for Dalits). Although she grew up in a Delhi slum, Mayawati had it better than many of her caste. Special set-asides like the one her father enjoyed have led to gradual improvement in the living conditions of the country's 165 million Dalits; in the past 10 years in particular, literacy and educational levels have improved markedly. But many have yet to catch up with the rest of the population—slightly more than a third of all Dalits still live below the poverty line, compared with about a quarter for Indians overall.