Everybody wants a good caste fight today, at least in Uttar Pradesh, as this latest battle over name-calling has shown. The political parties who support the 79-year-old Jat farmer Tikait see it as a way of splintering Mayawati’s winning formula, a “realignment” that they hope would favour them. And Mayawati too is happy to use the opportunity to signal, to the north at least, that she is the single Dalit leader being targeted and that she will take them on. And she has taken them on, not through protests and slogans, but through the police and state power. The mistake that critics like Tikait make is to route (often legitimate) criticism of her politics via her identity. Whether you like it or not, because of the nature of the shared past of a Dalit, the minute you do that, you make her stronger than before.

It has been 31 years since Mayawati, in the apocryphal story, stood up in the debate and criticised the term “Harijan”. Now, Harijan has certainly morphed into the power of the majority — the Bahujan. Look through her eyes and you might see just how much there is in a name.

seema.chishti@expressindia.com