How Mayawati, Modi shape up on national stage

Nothing succeeds like success. It is therefore not surprising that as we begin a new year, the two big winners of 2007, Mayawati and Narendra Modi are being touted as the pair of political firecrackers that will set the country alight. With general elections around the corner, there is already considerable hype in the media about the duo even emerging as prime ministerial candidates after the next Lok Sabha polls.

On the face of it, it is tempting to draw parallels between the two leaders. Both are unique original personalities who have delighted in controversy. They have shown equal felicity in snatching famous electoral victories from doomsday prophets who had predicted their political demise. Most importantly, Mayawati and Modi have managed to capture the public imagination as exciting new prospects that stand apart from the conventional netas of Indian politics.

Yet, despite the surface resemblance, a closer examination would reveal vast differences between the empress of Lucknow and the Gujarati warlord. Mayawati cut her political teeth under the tutelage of a social visionary, Kanshi Ram, who viewed the political arena as the battleground for various conflicting castes across the country. His disciple has developed caste alliances into a fine art reaching across the social spectrum to form a tactical partnership between the lowest and the highest rungs of the caste hierarchy.

Modi, on the other hand, has successfully overridden caste divisions in Gujarati civil society on the plea of Hindu unity and resurgence. He has managed to get the better of both the traditional KHAM alliance of the Congress as well as the more recent challenge from the powerful Patel lobby. To the Bharatiya Janata Party strongman, caste is an impediment and not a political tool as it is to the Dalit firebrand.

The two leaders also operate in completely diverse political outfits. Mayawati is in complete control of the Bahujan Samaj Party having ousted every single rival within the party. Indeed, the structure of the BSP unlike any other political organisation in the country has hardly any hierarchy. The Dalit leader along with a few hand-picked aides is perched right at the top directly dealing with a vast and elaborate grass-roots organisation without any middle-level political leadership.

Modi despite his growing clout in Gujarat has to constantly twist and turn to accommodate various leaders and groups not just within the BJP but also allied organisations like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. His vulnerability to rival leaders and lobbies across the Sangh Parivar was underlined when he went on a massive peace initiative to woo his enemies within the organisation soon after winning the Gujarat polls. Even after his massive electoral boost, the Gujarat chief minister cannot take his position within the party organisation for granted.

The biggest difference, of course, is in the size of their political empires. Mayawati rules a state that has nearly 200 million people electing as many as 80 Lok Sabha seats. Uttar Pradesh has traditionally determined the course of Indian politics the most telling example being the meteoric rise of the BJP as a major national force in the 1990s primarily on the steam of its electoral success in that decade in the country's largest state.

In contrast, Gujarat with just over 50 million people elects only 26 members to the Lok Sabha. Despite its commercial progress and burgeoning business community, the state has never really played a major role in national politics. Even Morarji Desai, the only prime minister so far from the state, barely increased the stature of Gujarat to a larger-than-life image in the public mind and is remembered more for his idiosyncratic habits.

As for spreading their wings across the country on the basis of their spectacular victories in Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat, both Mayawati and Modi may find it difficult if not impossible to replicate their success formula at a national level. Mayawati's social engineering drawing Brahmins and Dalits together on the basis of a common antipathy to the rising clout of intermediate and other backward castes may have worked like a charm in Uttar Pradesh. But as we saw recently in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh, the regional nuances of Indian politics are far too many for any single electoral recipe to succeed.

Similarly, Modi's deft orchestration of Gujarati sub-nationalism has delivered stupendous results in his home state. However, one would have to be extremely naive to think that these tactics would work elsewhere. For many decades, the Sangh Parivar has been trying to drum up national support on the basis of a pan-Hindu resurgence but failed miserably. There is no reason why Modi should succeed when others like Vajpayee and Advani failed before him.

As a matter of fact, Mayawati, at least, has an outside chance of expanding her sway beyond Uttar Pradesh while Modi has virtually none whatsoever. This is because she holds a symbolic appeal to the entire Dalit community, which is present all over the country and has a major say in determining the results of many Lok Sabha constituencies. It remains to be seen whether the Dalit leader has the innovative skills as well as the staying power to build a national edifice on the impressive foundation she has already acquired in Uttar Pradesh, but there is undoubted potential to do so.

For Modi, there is no sizeable chunk of expatriate Gujaratis to swell his core constituency and as we have noted before the Hindu community as a whole is unlikely to respond to his appeal. He does have a national following in the urban upper middle class that tends to inflate his countrywide stature through letters and blogs in newspapers and websites.

But democracy involves large numbers of people, in millions rather than thousands, and the Gujarat chief minister simply does not have that kind of support to be a serious contender to a heavyweight like Mayawati.

There are two other reasons why the Dalit leader is well ahead in the race. Unlike Modi who rose in the aftermath of a communal holocaust in Gujarat, Mayawati's success curve is far steadier without the prop of street violence and demagogic excesses. This places her politics on a more stable platform not so vulnerable to changing public passions. It is amazing to think that she has managed to politically empower a community that has perhaps arguably been the most brutalised in the history of mankind and yet not a single throat has been cut.

In sharp contrast, Modi apart from his other handicaps as pointed out above will also have to forever struggle with his demonic image among a major community in the country, Muslims, who carry no mean electoral clout. Far more than any other BJP leader, the Gujarat chief minister even if he tries to play the developmental card cannot but have the albatross of post-Godhra pogroms around his neck as he negotiates a larger national stature in the coming years.

This opposition from the Muslim community may not have mattered in the Gujarat polls in the context of regional sub-nationalism but can burn him on the national stage. Mayawati, who has carefully stayed away from the secular versus communal debate for the past few decades, has obviously far better credentials to represent the interests of a wider civil society.

Ajoy Bose is a senior journalist whose book on Mayawati will be published by Penguin in May this year.