Mayawati has won the UP elections

Good for her! Till I saw the news on TV the last time, the BSP had won 208 seats and was leading on 3-4 more seats. It’s a clean sweep for Mayawati and now she won’t need support from another party. After 14 years UP is going to have a government that should last for the next 5 years on its own. In a few days she’ll become the chief minister of UP.

I don’t know how she is personally — her past arrogance and the Tajmahal corridor controversy considered — she has kicked in the butt the communal politics of the BJP, the caste and communal politics of the SP and the shady, slimy politics of the Congress. She has proven that the people of UP, given a choice, can disregard the caste moulds and vote for a person who, it seems, can usher some new changes in the state. Just imagine: so many upper caste Brahmins are ready to work with a Dalit as their leader. The mere fact that she got such a majority is an indication of a gargantuan social change taking place. It seems the other political parties have been living in a time warp and they’ll ignore this trend to their own peril.

She got the Dalit votes, she got the Brahmin and Rajput votes, she got the Yadav votes and heck, she even got the Muslim votes! This is exactly the kind of politics the country needs; where they vote for the person, and not for the caste or for the religion. The anchors on various “secular” channels were sneering at her cocktail politics but I think that they were merely licking their wounds because most of there psephological predictions went askew.

In her various pre-election speeches she had hinted that she would put the pair of Mulayam Yadav and Amar Singh (who incidentally has developed some kidney infection after the election results) behind bars. She also has an anti-industry image. People like Anil Ambani were quite close to Mulayam and party (quite weird, actually) but I hope she doesn’t drive people like him away just for their political affiliations. More than vendetta, she’ll have to focus on development and employment generation opportunities and for this she’ll need an unmitigated support from the industry. As far as the politicians are concerned, she can throw them all in a ditch and then cover the ditch with cement, for all anybody cares.

There was another sad statistic they showed: 30% criminals have won various seats compared to 22% non-criminals. Now this is an alarming trend.

Here’s an article by the Chief Election Commissioner explaining how they accomplished fair elections in a criminal-ridden state.

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