Forty-nine-year-old Ramesh Kumar was born and brought up in a makeshift house on the squalid banks of Lucknow’s Haider canal, a hellish place strewn with rotting garbage and used polythene bags. Ramesh, from a Scheduled Caste (SC), made ends meet for his two schoolgoing children and wife by doing whatever menial work came his way. Today, Ramesh lives in a well-constructed one-room house with a separate bathroom, and balcony too. How did this come about? “Behenji ki kripa se (thanks to Behenji),” he says. Ramesh got his pucca house under the Kanshiramji Shahri Garib Awas Yojana, a Rs-1,500 crore scheme launched by Chief Minister Mayawati three years ago to give one-room houses free to the disabled, widows, orphans, poor, and those living below the poverty line in urban areas. “Nearly one lakh houses have already been constructed and handed over to needy persons,” says Navneet Sehgal, secretary to the Chief Minister.
Ramesh is but one of the millions of beneficiaries of Mayawati’s many social welfare schemes (see box) that entail lavish spending to uplift the poor and needy, mostly Dalits. The schemes are a double-edged weapon: the socially and economically disadvantaged get a helping hand in life, and Mayawati gets to consolidate her votebase of the deprived. She’s only following the guiding principles of Bahujan Samaj Party founder Kanshi Ram, her political mentor, who believed in using the power of the state as a key to bring about socio-economic change and transform society by eliminating the upper-lower caste divide. It was Kanshi Ram who further taught Mayawati the value of ideological compromise in order to get hold of that key.
Mayawati learnt her lessons well, and applied them even better. During her first shortlived tenure of 1995, she launched the Ambedkar Village Development scheme under which villages with more than half cent of their population from the SCs were covered. Over Rs 3,000 crore have been sanctioned since then for about 18,000 Ambedkar villages. Mayawati takes the villages seriously, inspecting them personally, deploying teams of senior bureaucrats to oversee their development, and punishing with suspensions and transfers those who do not deliver. She has even opened a full-fledged Ambedkar Village Development department headed by a principal secretary-rank officer for overall supervision. It’s worked. The most recent proof of that is the BSP’s impressive performance in the recent panchayat elections when 64 of the 70 new zila panchayat chiefs were from the BSP. This rural consolidation has been good enough for the BSP to try and replicate the effort into the whole new world of the urban poor, including the upper castes. In her fourth avatar as chief minister, Mayawati has launched a series of schemes to cater to the needs of education, housing and healthcare in urban areas. Nearly 30 lakh needy people, who have not been covered under any poverty alleviation programme, would get Rs 300 a month under the Uttar Pradesh Mukhya Mantri Mahamaya Garib Arthik Madad Yojana (MMGAMY). To provide social and financial support to girl children under the Mahamaya Garib Balika Ashirvad Yojana, Rs 1 lakh is deposited in the account of a girl child, born after January 15, 2009. For young girls pursuing higher education, the government gives Rs 25,000 in cash and a bicycle under the Savitri Bai Phule Shiksha Madad Yojana. Under the Health Insurance Scheme for the poor, a number of super-speciality hospitals at the district level and proper treatment to people belonging to the SCs in government hospitals is being ensured. Mayawati’s initiatives aren’t monumental only in their scale or the inequities they seek to address. She has built a number of monuments and maidaans across the state, naming them after Dalit icons, despite strong criticism from all around for “wasting” over Rs 10,000 crore on them. The majestic Ambedkar Samajik Parivartan Sthal in Lucknow is now seen as sacred land by the Dalits and has become a main tourist attraction in the state capital. Many such monuments in Lucknow feature larger-than-life statues of Mayawati and Kanshi Ram in the company of Dalit icons from the past.
In all this, Mayawati is trying to maintain the fine balance between her core constituencies—the SCs and the new allies in the upper castes—that won her the last state elections in 2007. And that’s the challenge this time: to cement the fragile bond between the two caste groups and keep them in the BSP bandwagon, till the Assembly elections next year at least. Mayawati fielded 89 Brahmin candidates in the 2007 Assembly elections; nearly three dozen of them won. In order to retain upper caste support, Mayawati has decided to field a good number of Brahmin and other upper castes again. The Sarva Samaj card is in play again. Mayawati’s schemes for the SCs have yet to make an impact at a deeper level, however. The latest Planning Commission statistics reveal that the levels of poverty among SCs remain high at 37 per cent, compared to the national average of 28.3 per cent. The commission has hinted that the state government could do better than to spend on populist schemes, advising it to concentrate on livelihood, employment and training programmes.
Whether the state’s deprived will be satisfied with the symbolism inherent in Mayawati’s schemes and remain firmly behind the BSP is a question that will be answered in the polling booths of Uttar Pradesh next year.
THE SCHEMES THAT MAYAWATI BUILT
Mukhya Mantri Mahamaya Garib Arthik Madad Yojana (for the poor)
Mahamaya Garib Balika Ashirvad Yojana (for the girls)
Mahamaya Sarvajan Awas Yojana (for non-Dalit BPL families)
Savitri Bai Phule Balika Shiksha Madad Yojana (for minor girls)
Savitri Bai Phule Shiksha Madad Yojana (for young girls)
Manyawar Kanshi Ram Shahri Samagra Vikas Yojana (for urban slums)
Manyawar Kanshiramji Shahri Garib Awas Yojana (for urban poor)
Sarvajan Hitaya Gharib Awas Malikana Haq Yojana (for urban slums)
Dr Ambedkar Urja Krishi Sudhar Yojana