Dalit-Brahmin Bonhomie in UP
You have to love Mayavati, the Dalit school teacher tough enough to thrive in the circumambient thuggery of the Uttar Pradesh political scene. Her Bahujan Samaj party resoundingly thumped its competition in the Uttar Pradesh assembly election yesterday. In particular, her recruitment of Brahmins seems to have decimated the BJP vote base, and deservedly so, given that the saffronites were as incendiary in their tactics as ever, releasing an anti-Muslim CD-ROM that can only be described as hate speech. The erstwhile ruler, the Samajwadi party, was equally suspect and "communal" when it endorsed one of its minister’s bounty offers on the head of the Danish cartoonist who messed with Muhammed, besides which it really sucked at governance, giving thugs, low-lifes and assorted factions of organized crime carte blanche to menace the state any way they saw fit.
Many Brahmins will get portfolios in Mayavati’s government, but unlike Congress coalitions, which patronizingly co-opted "lower" castes into an essentially "upper" caste power structure, this one will be run by a Dalit party.
In a way it’s a revolution; in a way it’s not, for caste remains the paramount organizing principle in Indian politics - indeed, Indian society - and those who can temporarily cobble together disparate groups will win elections.
