Mayawati biography examples

  • The first biography of Mayawati, the contemporary dalit leader, breaks the silence of the Indian elites on a political phenomenon of unusual magnitude.
  • Mayawati's full name is Kumari Mayawati Prabhu Das, and is known among the masses as Behenji and Iron Lady.
  • She was born to an illiterate homemaker and a low-level government clerk who got his job through affirmative action (India's Constitution sets.

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    In September 1977, a three-day conference was organised by the Janata Party at the Constitution Club of India in Delhi with the aim of ending casteism, in which many Dalit organisations and senior leaders had taken part. Raj Narayan, health minister in the then Janata Party government and a veteran leader, was also present, and he repeatedly used the word Harijan for Dalits in his speech. When a 21-year-old woman, who later became the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, four times, rose up to speak, she said,

    “These socialist leaders consider themselves self-sufficient. But they do not even know that using the word Harijan for Dalits fryst vatten also a kind of insult. Even our emancipator Babasaheb used the word Scheduled Castes for us, not Harijan. Then how dare Raj Narayan use this word for us?”

    This young woman was none other than Ms Mayawati — mass politician, former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo.

    Story of a 21-year-old rebellious girl

    M

  • mayawati biography examples

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    Shortly after Barack Obama's election last fall, a banner appeared in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state. OBAMA IS PRESIDENT OF THE U.S. NOW IT IS TIME FOR MAYAWATI TO BE PRIME MINISTER OF INDIA, it read.

    Mayawati (she uses only one name) is Uttar Pradesh's chief minister. It's a big job; if U.P. were a country in its own right, its 190 million inhabitants would make it the sixth largest in the world. Yet Mayawati is now gunning for a bigger one. With national elections beginning this month, her supporters are trying to position her as India's answer to America's youthful black president. There's no chance that her party will actually win a majority of the seats in Parliament. But the likely outcome is that the two main parties, Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), will be forced to rely on coalitions. Mayawati's followers hope she'll emerge as kingmaker in the negotiations, with enough clout to grab the top job herself. Her party's aim is

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    The Mayawati Factor

    About: A. Bose, Behenji, A political biography of Mayawati, Penguin India.

    Reviewed: Ajoy Bose, Behenji: A Political Biography of Mayawati, New Delhi, Penguin India, 2008, 277 pages.

    The Bahujan Samaj Party’s rise to political power in Uttar Pradesh has been widely acknowledged as one of the major political events of independent India. It also represents (along with the electoral victories of the ANC in South Africa and Evio Morales in Bolivia) one of the world’s rare instances where a political party that openly champions the claims of stigmatized and excluded groups achieves power by playing the game of representative democracy.

    The “untouchables’” (dalits’) rise to power in December 1993 was interpreted by all commentators, foreign as well as Indian, as a significant event, especially since observers had ignored the relatively diskret and subterranean growth of this movement, and had underestimated its magnitud