This is Mayawati’s moment. The third prime ministerial contender, we’re told, prepared to sweep her party out of UP and into power. This is her moment — at least, till the bubble bursts on counting day. Replicating her assembly results across UP will be difficult enough — two years have passed since she won, and the caste coalition that delivered that victory seems to have broken down.

Expanding outside UP will be even harder, and will buck the nationwide trend away from three-cornered fights in most regions. And finally, holding on to any gains isn’t straightforward, as the recent defection to the Congress of all six BSP legislators in Rajasthan demonstrated.

And yet, hopes and fears about Mayawati-as-PM dominate discussion everywhere you turn. Why is that? It would be easy, so easy, to assume that that’s because she is a Dalit woman. She raises hope, says this theory, because it might be that the final step in the political assertion of the world’s most subjugated minority, historically, is near; and she causes fear for the same reason. After all, there are so many ways in which all the baggage of our caste-ridden history could

determine reflexive reactions to the Mayawati-as-PM possibility. And so, good liberals that we are, we’re always on the look-out for those tell-tale indicators: sentences that begin “It’s not that I care about caste, but...”; firm yet content-less assertions that Mayawati wouldn’t “fit” or “look” prime ministerial; or easily-disproved claims that what would “work” in UP wouldn’t work at the Centre. (Lalu Prasad’s party, an earlier focus for this doubtful snobbery, has managed to provide some of the hardest-working and sharpest ministers to the current government.)

... contd.