Sun, May 10, 2009 page5

• ‘Untouchable’ could lead in Indian elections

  • THE GUARDIAN
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  On the wall of his office, sculptor Shravan Prajapati has nailed a typed list of exacting instructions from his most important client.

  Statues of his client must: one, show her looking slim; two, make her neck look long; three, not make her chest look too pronounced; four, not include a double chin.

  The specifications will guide him as he begins work on the most ambitious statute of his career: a 15m bronze monument of a woman in triumphal pose. That woman is Mayawati Kumari, a diminutive former schoolteacher whose supporters believe she may soon hold the balance of power in the world’s biggest democracy. So confident is she of victory in India’s general election that she has already commissioned Prajapati to start work on the enormous statue that she plans to install in Delhi if she is named Indian prime minister.

  This confidence is not shared by many outside her party and with a week to go before results are announced, on May 16, there is little certainty about which parties and individuals are ahead. But no one doubts the size of her long-term ambition or the crucial power-broking role her party will play as the new government is formed.

  As chief minister of India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh (UP), Mayawati, 52, already controls a region of 190 million people — which, were it a country and not a state, would be the sixth largest in the world.

  Born a Dalit — the preferred term for what was once known as an “untouchable” — to poor parents in a Delhi slum, she has defied deep-rooted prejudice throughout her political career. Unmarried, she is one of the few women in India to claim power in her own right, and not as a daughter or a widow.

  Her supporters cast her as a symbol of hope for India’s 160 million Dalits and for other low-caste, oppressed members of society. They compare her journey from the lowest rung of society to a position of national power to the rise of US President Barack Obama and keenly hope the end result will be similar.

  India’s election is widely expected to end in messy compromise, with no one party able to command a majority. Uttar Pradesh has more seats than any other state in India’s 543-member parliament, and Mayawati’s party, the Bahujan Samaj party (BSP — Party of the Majority of Society) is expanding its reach far beyond the state borders, fielding more than 400 candidates nationwide.

  If she wins sufficient seats, there is a scenario — conceivable, if unlikely — in which her party’s support could be so crucial to either the Congress party or the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party as they scrabble together a coalition of allies that the prime ministership is offered to her in exchange.

  “I’m 99 percent certain she will become prime minister,” said Prajapati, who has already completed 18 statues of her and is delighted at the latest and most grandiose commission.

  His most famous piece to date was the statue of late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein that was pulled down by angry crowds the day the US army arrived in Baghdad.

  Uttar Pradesh is scattered with Prajapati’s statues of Mayawati and India’s two other most prominent Dalit leaders, Dr BR Ambedkar, author of the Indian Constitution, and Kanshi Ram, her personal mentor and a fervent campaigner against the caste system. He has also completed 300 elephants, the BSP’s symbol. His work is at the center of an impressive cult of personality that Mayawati has nurtured since she became chief minister for the fourth time in 2007.

  He charges about £92,000 (US$138,000) for each 5.5m set of the three leaders. Commentators have remarked with growing disquiet on the combined cost of this and other self-aggrandizing ventures — most notably the vast 50 hectare Ambedkar Park that is being completed in the city center. It is a stupendously ostentatious venture, perhaps four times the size of Trafalgar Square in London, and has no grass but is paved entirely with highly polished, shimmering marble and dotted with giant elephant statues, red sandstone domed buildings and rows of tall marble pillars, each topped with more bronze elephants.

  Prajapati, who comes from what is known in curious officialeze as a “backward caste,” shrugs off the criticism, arguing that the aim is to honor the achievements of India’s most oppressed communities.

  “This is public money which is being returned to the people. It’s not as if it is being deposited in bank accounts in Switzerland. Monuments are a good way to educate people,” he said. “Dalits worship her as a goddess, as someone who has come to free them from the misery into which they were born. Maybe it is wrong to worship a politician, but it’s their choice.”
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