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By Ritwik Agrawal | July 17, 2009 4:59 am

Recently there has been a fair bit of comment on the Mayawati government’s decision to build statues and memorials to “Dalit icons” [including herself] at a cost of thousands of crores of taxpayer money.

While the commentary on this matter has been relatively recent, large scale edification has been on Mayawati’s radar ever since she first assumed chief ministership of India’s largest state, back in the mid nineties. Over the last two decades and more, erecting statues of Ambedkar and other Dalit icons has been seen as a potent symbol of the shift in the dynamics of power. Like all manifestations of identity politics, Dalit leaders sought to give their followers “pride”, as a substitute for real improvement in the ground situation.

Much of the reporting and “analysis” regarding the latest statue building exercise, in newspapers and on TV [between such vital topics as "dhoni ke dhurandar" and "rakhi ka swayamwar"] hasn’t touched upon the topic of electoral gain: will this statue building spree benefit Mayawati electorally? A happy exception is Gautam Bhatia’s article in Open magazine, in which Bhatia lambasts Mayawati for wasting not only vast amounts of money, but also a real opportunity of providing change.

Bhatia’s piece aside, the lack of electoral speculation is hardly surprising – the Indian media [particularly of the English language variety] has a terrible record of predicting electoral outcomes.

We must not forget that this is the same media which was projecting no more than 150 seats for BSP in the 2007 UP assembly elections [BSP finally got 200+ for a simple majority]. After that stellar performance, the media pendulum swung the other way, with commentators falling over themselves projecting 40+ parliamentary seats for the BSP. Some went so far as to project Mayawati as a viable candidate for Prime Ministership.

The people, sadly for the commentators and happily for the country, gave Mayawati a total of 19 seats, way less than any opinion poll prediction.

The media, still licking its wounds, has apparently decided not to stick out its neck once again, and is thus refusing to speculate about the electoral dividend [if any] generated by what one reporter has charmingly called the ‘BSP School of Architecture’. The reporter, an avid propagandist of the BSP movement, seems to have temporarily stopped writing on Dalit issues ever since the Lok Sabha results. Now, he wisely devotes his attention to matters such as LGBT rights and persecution of Uighurs in China.

Since I am not a journalist, nor connected to the media in any way, I will go ahead and do what most Indians are very happy doing in their drawing rooms/paan shops/offices/playgrounds etc etc – predict the fate of politicians and political parties.

I contend that this grand architectural exercise is not going to help Mayawati in any way. The fact remains that BSP candidates lost 15 out of 17 reserved constituencies in UP in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections. This clearly implies that BSP’s trustworthy core votebank of Dalits deserted it in large numbers. It is my hunch that non-jatav dalits didn’t vote for Mayawati this time as enthusiastically as 2007.

Mayawati seeks to win back these sections through the tired old formula of “pride”. I firmly believe that his formula is now past its sell-by date.

How will I prove my assertion?

Well, certainly not through a “caste based voting pattern survey”, or whatever the hell it is called, brought out by comedian-in-chief Yogendra Yadav and his team at CSDS, election after election. In a secret ballot, how the hell does the CSDS team know that 33.67% leuva patels voted for BJP? Were Mr. Yadav and his cohorts hovering as invisible angels near the voting machines?

I have a much more reliable formula on which I base my political predictions. My weather vane is our ever unreliable Indian English media. Much as when the Met department predicts rain, I apply sunscreen, when I see a topic garnering massive attention in the English language press, it is clear that the issue has no great resonance with the masses.

For example, almost nobody wrote about Mayawati’s “social engineering” [going on since at least 2003] before the 2007 UP elections. After her stunning victory,social engineering was the buzz in town. This time, the English press focused only on social engineering, forgetting about such petty matters as crime and ganglordism, and the BSP was swept aside. In much the same way, statues had resonance in the 80s and the 90s, when the press was busy elsewhere [high number of beauty queens from India, for example]. Now that the press focuses on statues, I am sure the real issues lie elsewhere, such as water scarcity in Bundelkhand.