LUCKNOW: A woman from India’s untouchable classes who now often wears diamonds and a wrestler turned regional strongman are at the fore in elections which begin tomorrow in the country’s largest state.
As many as 50 million people are likely to vote in the month-long Uttar Pradesh ballot dominated by one-of-a-kind characters, including the chief of the ruling Congress party, Italian-born Sonia Gandhi.
Mayawati Kumari’s party, which bases its support on Dalits, as untouchables prefer to be known now, hopes to best former wrestler Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav’s ruling party.
Yadav’s Samajwadi won 145 seats in state elections in 2002 but enjoys support from other local parties, while Mayawati’s Bahajun Samaj Party took 98 seats.
Polls have the two parties neck-and-neck with roughly 30 per cent of the vote each.
The fiery Mayawati, who was born into a lowly leatherworker caste at the bottom of India’s rigid hierarchy but went on to become one of India’s most powerful women, has called herself a “living goddess”. More recently she told voters if she wins she will thoroughly investigate Yadav, who counts on his own large Yadav caste and Muslims for support.
This prompted Yadav to make a rather unusual electoral appeal.
“Do you want me to go to jail or do you want me to work?” Yadav asked voters at a rally in the state on Monday.
“Vote me in to power. Otherwise I will go to jail”.
Mayawati herself is also under investigation for her role in a heritage project that would have had a giant mall built near the Taj Mahal, the medieval Mughal monument to love, which is located in Uttar Pradesh.
Allegations of corruption are small fry in a state where murderers, gangsters and gun molls are among those competing openly for 403 seats.
Officials in Uttar Pradesh were on edge as they geared up for the epic voting exercise in a state with 100 million voters on the rolls, though past elections show only about a 50 per cent turnout.
“It is not an easy job to conduct elections in a state where criminals and mafia lords also vie for political power,” the state's chief electoral officer, A.K. Bishnoi, said.
On the first day of elections on tomorrow voters will choose among 783 candidates competing for 62 seats under the gaze of some 60,000 paramilitary troops.
Almost 200,000 electronic voting machines will be used and voters have been issued new voting photo identification in an attempt by the Election Commission to clean up elections.
Personal appeals, attacks and promises notwithstanding, analysts say people are likely to vote much as they did the in the last election and the election before that – along caste lines.
Those loyalties often prove more powerful than promises of schools, roads, water and electricity.
“Voters in Uttar Pradesh are sharply polarised,” said Sanjay Kumar, a fellow with the New Delhi-based Centre for the Study of Developing Societies.
“The sense of identification is what overrides everything.” But Kumar added that parties were trying to woo new support bases while at the same time holding on to their traditional voters.
Mayawati – who once ran on a slogan that told Dalits to beat upper-class Hindus four times with their shoes – is now reaching out to Brahmins at the top of the Hindu food chain.
Her new slogan invites everyone, including the same Hindus she wanted to see beaten, “to come ride on the elephant,” her party’s symbol, noted analyst Kumar.
As the regional parties trade barbs, national parties like the Congress and the opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party appear to be fighting for third and fourth spots.
The Congress party won only 25 of the state’s 403 seats in state elections five years ago. Even so, it won a national election in 2004 and maintains federal power with an intricate web of coalition partners.
But in a state that contains almost a fifth of India’s billion-plus population – and in the last big vote before national elections in two years – the Congress party to looking to improve on previous poor showings.
Party chief Gandhi is in Uttar Pradesh Wednesday and yesterday to make a last appeal to voters ahead of the first of seven voting days tomorrow .
“It’s still crucial for the Congress because any national revival does to a large extent hinge on a revival in Uttar Pradesh,” said political analyst Mahesh Rangarajan.
Voting ends May 8 with counting to take place May 11.—AFP
