India’s Anti-Obama

As a city dweller, Mayawati escaped some of the hostility Dalits face in rural areas and was able to attend a government school. But she was forcefully reminded of how the other half lived when she would visit her grandparents in their U.P. village. Other travelers on the bus would shun Mayawati's family, and her grandparents were forced to live in the most squalid section of their hamlet. These experiences left their mark: "From a very early age, I learned to hate the caste system with all my might," she writes in her autobiography.

As a student, Mayawati, like many of her generation, longed to join India's prestigious national civil service. At university she toyed with radical Dalit politics, but after graduation she worked as a schoolteacher while studying law at night and prepping for the difficult government- service exams. In September 1977, she attended a political convention in Delhi at which India's health minister outraged many Dalits by referring to them as Harijans (literally meaning "God's children," the term was coined by Gandhi but most Dalits now find it condescending). Mayawati, speaking after the health minister, castigated him for his use of the term and attacked mainstream political parties for ignoring Dalits' concerns.

Her outburst caught the attention of Kanshi Ram, the BSP's founder. Ram was a union activist whose vision was to organize Dalits working in government to give them a voice. Ram persuaded Mayawati to join him and ditch her civil-service ambitions, beginning a close partnership that would continue until Ram's death in 2006. The ambitious young teacher soon became the Lenin to Ram's Marx, in the words of Dalit researcher A. K. Gautam: "He was the thinker, she was the doer."

Ram, a confirmed bachelor, was often rumored to be romantically involved with his much younger protégée, though both of them denied it. Still, Mayawati has never married and has no children (a fact her opponents sometimes try to use against her). In 1984, Ram put Mayawati in charge of establishing his new party in Uttar Pradesh. The state controls 80 seats of the 545 in India's Parliament, more than any other. A party that can win big there automatically earns a big voice in national politics. This is especially true as the influence of Congress and the BJP has declined, forcing them to rely on fragile coalitions of smaller, regional players.

Caste and communal divisions run deep in U.P., and Mayawati quickly acquired a reputation as a demagogic caste warrior. In fiery speeches, she lambasted Brahmins, telling Dalits that they were kept enslaved by upper-caste conspiracies and should "beat the Brahmins with their shoes." "We all know that upper-caste [Brahmins] do not want Dalits to eat well, dress well or do well," she told packed rallies in the late 1980s.

Three times—in 1995, 1997 and 2002—Mayawati managed to become U.P.'s chief minister with the support of other political parties. But these clumsy coalitions each disintegrated in a matter of months. Still, she had enough time in power to promote Dalit causes, often at the expense of others—for example, by replacing more than 1,000 upper-caste civil servants with low-caste ones and upgrading roads, water and electricity in 11,000 villages with large Dalit populations while neglecting almost equally deprived ones with higher-caste populations. She also pushed police and prosecutors to rigorously enforce a law that made it easier for Dalit victims of caste-based violence to bring charges against their assailants and promised stiff jail terms for those convicted.

Such programs helped consolidate her base but rankled those from the upper and middle castes. Nearly one in five U.P. voters is a Dalit, and most now support the BSP. "There is no other party in India that has ever received nearly 80 percent of the vote from a single ethnic group," says Ajoy Bose, a journalist who wrote an unauthorized biography of Mayawati. (The Gandhi dynasty, which controls the Congress party, is also based in Uttar Pradesh and once could count on attracting most of the Dalit vote, but the party today has just nine seats there.)

Yet there is little evidence that Mayawati's policies actually did much for her devoted supporters. Dalits in U.P. today remain worse off than those in many other states: about 45 percent of rural Dalits there live below the poverty line, a rate 8 points worse than the national average for the caste and one that has improved only slightly under her reign.