India’s Anti-Obama

Caste-based apartheid remains particularly nasty in U.P., where Dalits can still be banned from attending regular schools, accessing public water supplies, staging marriage processions and voting. Despite Mayawati's efforts to protect them, Dalit boys are sometimes even lynched for flirting with higher-caste girls, and victims who go to the police are often ignored. Although India's emergence as a global outsourcing center, coupled with national affirmative-action programs, has created a small but growing Dalit middle class, it is particularly small in U.P., which has attracted little of the foreign investment in high-tech companies and call centers that is creating a new India in other states.

Meanwhile, the old adage that in India you don't cast your vote, you vote your caste, is as true as ever. "In India, there are no independent or individual political choices, there are only collective choices," says Bose, the Mayawati biographer. Caste matters in politics because it can translate directly into opportunities—places at universities, jobs in the public sector or government contracts.

In Uttar Pradesh, both Dalits and Brahmins have chafed against the rising power of the middle castes, which have their own political party and have used their clout to secure the most government positions and university spots. Poor Brahmins also resent the power of wealthy middle-caste landowners and were frequently the victims of middle-caste crime syndicates. This presented Mayawati with a unique opportunity, and ahead of state elections in 2007, she boldly appealed across caste lines to her former enemies, the Brahmins, by promising to restore law and order. The strategy worked, and Mayawati managed to capture almost a third of their vote that year, helping return her to the chief minister's residence. Her fans now hail the high-low alliance as revolutionary. "She has succeeded where Mahatma Gandhi failed," says Shahid Siddiqui, an M.P. and a BSP general secretary. The BSP has formed "brotherhood groups" that bring the two castes together to discuss political issues. "All the people now like to meet together, sit together, eat together," says U.P. cabinet minister and BSP state president Swami Prasad Maurya.

But such gestures have actually done little to erase divisions. At her rallies, Brahmins and Dalits still sit in segregated areas, and one of the policies she pushed to win Brahmin votes—reserving them spots in government—has simply extended caste-based politics.

No one should confuse the BSP's brotherhood groups, moreover, with the grassroots groups that brought Obama to power. The BSP is a top-down organization that critics charge is aimed more at advancing Mayawati personally than addressing social ills. Raashid Alvi, a Muslim politician who was once a top BSP official, describes a one-woman party in which Mayawati calls every shot and does "whatever she thinks is in the interest, not of her party, but her own [self]." The chief minister can also be insular and aloof. She often snubs visiting dignitaries and rarely gives one-on-one interviews to the press. (She refused repeated requests for an interview for this story.) Even a top adviser, who requested anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the matter, admits that Mayawati can be "dictatorial" but says that is "necessary" in Uttar Pradesh.

Since becoming chief minister again in 2007, Mayawati has launched a host of large public-works projects. She has built new highways, power stations and water-purification plants that her advisers say are designed to attract big business. She has also launched a progressive scheme to reward families for having daughters and keeping them in school. But her most visible legacy is a slew of monuments to Dalit heroes, many of which glorify the BSP—and Mayawati herself. In Lucknow, on a dusty expanse next to the Gomti River, there now sits a towering pink sandstone hall resembling a Buddhist temple. Inside, a colossal bronze statue modeled after the Lincoln Memorial depicts Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the Dalit lawyer who authored India's Constitution. Nearby, a bronze frieze portrays Ambedkar with other Dalit leaders, including Mayawati. There are hundreds of these monuments under construction in U.P., which could end up costing $250 million, including $142 million for the Lucknow project alone.

Critics see this spending as symbolic of Mayawati's reputation for corruption. She is among India's richest politicians, with a taste for diamond jewelry and glittering silk saris and kurtas (she is especially partial to pink). Her 2007 filings put her cash and assets at 520 million rupees ($10.4 million). In 2003, India's Central Bureau of Investigation, while probing allegations that she had embezzled money from an ill-conceived project to build a giant shopping mall next to the Taj Mahal, found that Mayawati and her family owned 72 houses, including several mansions in Lucknow and New Delhi. She claims all this wealth has come as gifts from her admirers, and in 2003 said that the CBI "has found nothing, and they do not have any case against me." But CBI investigators uncovered evidence of poor Dalit sweepers, rickshaw pullers and hawkers being paid to front bank accounts through which large sums of cash flowed to Mayawati.

In a country influenced by Mahatma Gandhi's ascetic ideals, one might think such riches would be a political liability. But many Dalits, consigned to destitution, seem to view their champion's riches as a source of vicarious pleasure. "Money has to come from somewhere," says Gautam, the Dalit intellectual, with a shrug when asked about the corruption allegations.