Challenging-Obama Mayawati

There are indeed parallels between Mayawati and Obama. Like America's president, Mayawati is young—just 53 in a country where most political leaders are in their 70s. She is also an outsider who comes from a long-oppressed segment of society: the Dalits, the politically correct term for India's Untouchable caste. The lowest of the low in the traditional Hindu social order, Dalits were long consigned to jobs such as waste collection and considered so impure they were denied education and other basic rights. India's Constitution outlaws caste discrimination, but the age-old hierarchies continue to play an outsize role in life there. In fact, the gulf between high and low caste in India is arguably bigger than that between black and white in America. And the political impact of low castes is potentially larger: they represent 60 percent of the Indian electorate by some estimates, with Dalits alone making up nearly 20 percent. Blacks, by contrast, represent just 12 percent of U.S. voters.

So Mayawati is both a bigger underdog and a potentially bigger threat to the established order than Obama was. While he benefited from a first-class education, she grew up in a shantytown with eight brothers and sisters and attended poor state schools. Obama enjoyed the backing of a long-established party, while Mayawati's organization, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), has been built up largely by Mayawati herself—and in a part of the world where women have made it to the pinnacle of power only as wives, widows or daughters of beloved male leaders.

But unlike Obama, who promised a new politics that would transcend not only race but traditional ideology and corrupt Washington ways, Mayawati has built her power on demagogic class warfare. As her national ambitions have grown, she recently began reaching out to upper-caste voters—but by playing on their fears of the upwardly mobile middle castes, not by appealing to their better, caste-free angels. She has accumulated a suspiciously ostentatious fortune, and is dogged by corruption charges. She is admired by many Dalits, but often more for her power and jewels than for her limited accomplishments on their behalf. Her victory, if it comes, may be seen as a great leap forward for India's oppressed—but, ironically, will end up bolstering the caste system that has kept them in chains.