Recently, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Ms. Mayawati, celebrated her 52nd birthday, and Lucknow was decked like a bride. The birthday cake weighing 52 kg was wheeled in the lawn of CM's Kalidas Marg residence. Candles were blown, cakes were cut and rendition of the birthday song from her family-members, fawning party colleagues, bureaucrats and police officials, and pieces offered to her from all those gathered at the function. She flew into the national capital; conference room in a prominent five-star hotel had been converted into the venue for her press conference held late in the afternoon. Ms. Mayawati was flanked on the two sides by her father and party general secretary Satish Chandra Mishra. She also announced the launching of controversial Rs. 40,000 crore Noida-Ballia expressway projects and favoring a three-way division of the state.
A day before her giant birthday celebrations, Congress party had openly attacked her and her party’s gift culture. They pointed at the Income-Tax tribunal’s clean chit to her for huge cash and properties, that she accepted were gifts, would lead to corruption becoming legalized. The Congress, which had restricted itself to attacking Ms. Mayawati’s government on the law and order front till then, has now chosen to sharpen its attack on her for personal corruption as well. She has properties in all major cities in the country and according to an estimate cash deposit of more than Rs. 500 crore. Her upstart enjoyment of luxury reduced her to a preening caricature.
How could a champion of the backwards the royalty of yore, and not betray her downtrodden constituency, indeed her very roots? No one talks of betrayal by its representatives when they pursue the perks of power and live in the lap of luxury while claiming to serve the people.
Mr. Laloo Yadav, of course, does with an elegant sense of fun what Ms. Mayawati does with a vengeance. He delights in the shock value of taking his rustic boorishness into the political elite’s crystal and porcelain-dotted drawing rooms. He hosts NRIs, sporting a dressing gown and big game hunter hat, with his bare feet placed on a cushion. The political elite and the media display of high comfort levels with Sushil Kumar Shinde. He does not mind at all his party on about his being a Dalit. When he gained national prominence as the Congress’s vice-presidential nominee against the BJP’s Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, it was said to be on account of his caste and he knew how to play up his social categorization, not to his professed constituencies but to his party’s advantage.
It seems Indian political and media elite still refuse to believe the world has long been discovered to be round. The people, who never once sniffed a danger to democracy from dynastic annexation of political space, suddenly saw it menaced by the mob. Everyone forgot there was a consensus on redistributive social justice from the time of Independence and how Indian political class has changed.