Maya has also been able to use the Constitution for electoral gain. The Constitution reserves legislative seats for Dalits; the BSP began its rise to power by first contesting and winning reserved seats in UP. The steady consolidation of dalit votes ( around 22 per cent in UP, on average) meant that in a four-horse race where the finish line is short, BSP began to win in other seats too. But even deeper, says Ajoy Bose, whose book on Mayawati has set a benchmark in Indian political biography, is “the psychological use of the Constitution and Ambedkar to provide a sense of history to the BSP movement.”

No other group has leveraged the Constitution the way Dalits have. Tribals enjoy the exact same legal guarantees as dalits, but they are neither as networked within government service nor as politically grouped outside (name one tribal party or leader, barring the JMM’s Shibu Soren?). For ‘Other Backward Classes’, it was political mobilisation that came first; constitutional changes/reservations followed later. Ghosh points out that “even within the Dalit community, Mayawati stands out in how much she defends the system.”

Under siege from the right (former RSS chief Sudarshan once accused the Constitution of being “the root cause of most of the country’s ills”), the extreme left (Naxalism), and regionalists (in Kashmir, the North-East, and lest we forget, Bal Thackeray), the Constitution’s ability to accommodate the intensity of Behenji’s ambition, and variance of interpretation, says something for its elasticity.

Naxalite chief, CPI-Maoist General Secretary Ganapati, vows to capture state power by planting the red flag on the red fort. Mayawati on the other hand, might well capture state power by sticking with the tricolour atop the red fort, but by standing below it on August 15th — and all without ever firing from the barrel of a gun. In her autobiography, My Life of Struggle and the Path of the Bahujan Movement, Mayawati praises the Constitution for empowering “weaker sections”, and suggests its use as a tool to capture power. In between re-reading Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book in the forests of Dandakaranya, Ganapati could perhaps find the time to read Behenji.

... contd.