Just a week ago, Mahendra Singh Tikait’s futile attempt to claim political relevance in western Uttar Pradesh provided a measure of how much our politics had matured. Tikait, by using casteist references to UP Chief Minister Mayawati, was trying to revive the kind of tensions between Dalits and the middle castes that has for long kept caste-based leaders in business. In the end, even the politicians who would use him to break Mayawati’s rainbow coalition instinctively distanced themselves from the offensiveness of his words. It was a reminder that the language of caste’s brutal oppressions would not be tolerated. It is unfortunate, therefore, that Mayawati chose this week to take recourse to the idiom of caste politics that we seemed to have transcended last week.

Addressing a public meeting in Azamgarh on Monday, Mayawati mocked Rahul Gandhi’s visits to Dalit homes. She alleged that it was just a political ploy and that the Congress general secretary follows up such visits with a purification regimen, adding that he employed a “special soap” for the purpose. This is not reflective of a politician who seemed to promise the empowerment of oppressed communities by winning a majority in the state assembly in last year’s elections. In building a rainbow coalition bottom up, she showed that democracy could transcend the oppressions of the caste system. It was an inversion of the top-down social coalition that made the Congress party so dominant electorally for the first decades after Independence. Mayawati is too smart to believe her own words. Her ludicrous allusion to “special soaps” clearly comes from an anxiety to hold on to her voters, and possibly to create issues that she could carry into the assembly elections this year in northern states.

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