Saturday, May 12, 2007
Cow Country gets Maya again
LUCKNOW/NEW DELHI: Uttar Pradesh woke up to a Blue Sunrise on Friday. Across the populous state, BSP’s elephant emerged triumphant garnering a phenomenal majority of 206 seats in a House of 403 , smiting its rivals into surrender. Samajwadi Party came a distant second at 97 seats while BJP folded up at 50. Congress's performance was even worse despite all the exertions of Rahul Gandhi — it finished a poor fourth with a paltry 22.
UP has broken its jinx of serving a "mili-juli sarkar" at every election since 1993. While it may be too early to judge whether it is prelude to a two-party system in the state which sends 80 MPs to the Lok Sabha, but the BSP tsunami has ominous portents for national players like BJP and Congress. Cruelly for them, and whatever the UK crap 'liberal' papers like the Guardian would like to say, the excuse that the caste overran all else is not available. Mayawati's surge pointed to the caste being trumped by the common intent to unseat Mulayam
.
Mayawati is a Delhi University graduate and a former government school teacher, a key arbiter on the national stage and the first Dalit leader to wrest power on her own steam. Her gambit to pitch for upper-caste support by fielding 86 Brahmins paid handsome dividends.
Mayawati celebrated a win that has been powered by her exceptional success in weaving together a rainbow coalition of Dalits, upper castes and Muslims that had once sustained Congress. But there was a critical difference. Now UP's Dalits, particularly the assertive Jatavs, who are the engine of this social alliance, have the upper castes playing a supporting caste.
IMO: She looks nice and cheerful in her photos. She says she thinks she could be Prime minister in 10 years and makes even that sound possible. But this is cow country, not the whole of Bharat. Let us hope we get enough improvement in UP now to somehow justify her comments.
People, perhaps sentimentally, say the BSP elephant this time was unveiled as the friendly, generous, beloved Ganesha, who could embrace believers across the divide. Ganesha is usually the first idol I see in the morning. Let's hope all goes well and pray to Ganesha for that.
UP has broken its jinx of serving a "mili-juli sarkar" at every election since 1993. While it may be too early to judge whether it is prelude to a two-party system in the state which sends 80 MPs to the Lok Sabha, but the BSP tsunami has ominous portents for national players like BJP and Congress. Cruelly for them, and whatever the UK crap 'liberal' papers like the Guardian would like to say, the excuse that the caste overran all else is not available. Mayawati's surge pointed to the caste being trumped by the common intent to unseat Mulayam
.
Mayawati is a Delhi University graduate and a former government school teacher, a key arbiter on the national stage and the first Dalit leader to wrest power on her own steam. Her gambit to pitch for upper-caste support by fielding 86 Brahmins paid handsome dividends.
Mayawati celebrated a win that has been powered by her exceptional success in weaving together a rainbow coalition of Dalits, upper castes and Muslims that had once sustained Congress. But there was a critical difference. Now UP's Dalits, particularly the assertive Jatavs, who are the engine of this social alliance, have the upper castes playing a supporting caste.
IMO: She looks nice and cheerful in her photos. She says she thinks she could be Prime minister in 10 years and makes even that sound possible. But this is cow country, not the whole of Bharat. Let us hope we get enough improvement in UP now to somehow justify her comments.
People, perhaps sentimentally, say the BSP elephant this time was unveiled as the friendly, generous, beloved Ganesha, who could embrace believers across the divide. Ganesha is usually the first idol I see in the morning. Let's hope all goes well and pray to Ganesha for that.
# posted by uv : 2:11 AM
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