Mayawati celebrates her birthday in Uttar Pradesh next week. Or going by past experience, Uttar Pradesh celebrates Mayawati’s birthday next week. The gala event will invite more than the usual interest and exclamations.

This year, the day the BSP calls “swabhiman divas” (self-respect day), aka “aarthik sahyog divas” (financial help day), has been given another name. The BSP will observe it as “dhikkar divas” (day of condemnation), to denounce the opposition charge after the murder in Auraiya. The Samajwadi Party, which earlier labelled the day “durbhagya divas” (day of misfortune), has also announced a renaming. The party will call it “thu thu divas”.

But there is another reason why the nation’s gaze will be drawn more irresistibly to UP on January 15. This year, Mayawati is the unofficial prime ministerial candidate of the yet-to-be Third Front. Pared down, it means the BSP chief is in the queue for the top job in Delhi and, more importantly, is seen to be there too.

While Mayawati has asserted her prime ministerial ambition several times over, it was the Left parties’ imprimatur on it during the trust vote last year that sealed it in the national imagination. The Third Front flounders. Left leaders, prime movers of the idea, have almost nuanced it out of reckoning. CPM’s Prakash Karat describes it as a “third alternative”, CPI’s D. Raja prefers “political cooperation”, while RSP’s Abani Roy totally denies its pre-poll existence. But it has already powered Mayawati into the top league.

This thrusting of Mayawati into the prime ministerial stakes may have come a little too early for Mayawati and the BSP. If every political movement and party has a trajectory, the BSP is still on its way. It has yet to think through the dilemmas and sort out the difficult choices that come with the territory for a “national” party in a country as large and diverse as India. Today, the party is caught in a harsh and demanding spotlight it is unprepared for in terms of its organisational growth and political maturity.

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