And then there were three more Mayawatis, and some.

Late in the evening on Thursday, without any announcements or pomp, the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister inaugurated 15 projects — parts of various memorials in Lucknow — and several statues at the touch of one button. And without even driving to any of the project sites, she had raced ahead of a PIL that may have put the curtains down on her latest monumental initiative.

Advocate Ravi Kant, who filed the PIL in the Supreme Court, against “the misuse of money on memorials” by the Mayawati Government, attributed the hasty, hush-hush ceremony on Thursday to the decision by the Court earlier in the day to hear his case on June 29. While the case was originally to come up on July 13, Kant had moved the Supreme Court for an early date after hearing of Mayawati’s plans to inaugurate some more projects on July 3.

Instead, tonight, Mayawati made a short hop to the VIP plaza of the Ambedkar Memorial in Gomti Nagar and pushed a button to unveil the plaques of all the projects stacked at one point, including three of her own statues.

For the inauguation of projects involving thousands of crores of rupees, the gathering consisted of only about a hundred government officers and employees of the Lucknow Development Authority and the UP Rajkiya Nirman Nigam, the two agencies involved in the construction of the projects. Cabinet Secretary Shashank Shekhar Singh, Additional Cabinet Secretary Vijay Shanker Pandey, Secretary to Chief Minister Navneet Sehgal and DGP Vikram Singh accompanied Mayawati.

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