The magical figure: 211

Has come a long way. If the first slogan is a vestige of the days when the BSP needed to reinforce its identity among dalits by pillorying ‘highborn’ caste groups such as brahmins (symbolised by the vermilion mark or tilak), bania (of the weighing scales or tarazu) and thakur (with the sword or talwar), the second shows how far the BSP has travelled in the twenty-three years of its existence.

For, this election’s slogan equating the elephant with the Hindu trinity and Mahabharat’s scribe, Ganesh, is meant to touch an aspirational nerve, but not just among the dalits.

The BSP that Mr Kanshi Ram founded from the Dalit emancipation forum called DS4 (Dalit Soshit Samaj Sangarsh Samiti) in 1984 does have a Jatav or Chamar-caste woman firmly at the helm of affairs but Ms Mayawati’s commander-in-chief, Satish Chandra Mishra, as the name makes it amply clear, is a dyed-in-the-wool brahmin.

Mr Mishra’s presence in the BSP is meant to signal the return of power to the brahmins who had been orphaned in the post-Mandal era which saw the rise of OBC politics. In keeping with its strategy of wooing brahmins, the BSP has shed its anti-upper caste baggage in the last few years. Now “Bahujan nahi Sarvajan” is its new credo.

But the BSP’s out-of-the-box social-engineering experiment of bringing together brahmins and dalits is not unchallenged. Ms Mayawati’s opponents have been merciless in coining counter-slogans to the BSP’s sanskritised turn of phrase.

For instance, a caste swipe that hits out at the ‘highborn’ and the ‘lowborn’ simultaneously says: ‘Brahma Nahi Chamar Hai/ Haathi Par Sawar Hai” (It not Brahma but an untouchable riding the elephant). A variant is a couplet that is being attributed to the brahmins themselves – ‘Rakhlo Pathar Chaati Par/ Mohar Lagao Haathi Par’ (Silence your heart and vote for the elephant).

A surrogate advertisement for the SP that flooded newspapers during the campaign targeted Mayawati by reminding people: “Kursi ke liye bhenji ne kya kya nahi kiya/ Jise joothon se mara usae kursi ke liye gale lagaya” (To what extent has Mayawati gone for power, she has now embraced those she ridiculed).

If Ms Mayawati has been able to hold her own in UP with this new strategy, it is because blue the elephant’s resemblance to its celestial brother, Iravat — the white mount of the king of Devas, Indra, – is not all that new.

Reactionary slogans of the ‘Brahmin, Thakur, Bania Chor/ Baki sab hain DS4’ variety had been eclipsed by more politically direct messages such as ‘Vote Hamara, Naam Tumara/ Nahi Chalega, Nahi Chalega’ and ‘Jis ki jinti sankhya bhaari/Uski utni bhaagidari’ (proportionate representation) by the mid-1990s.

This was the period which also saw the BSP join hands with BJP to get a shot at power for the first time in 1995. Post the alliance with the BJP, the venom of the BSP’s anti-Manuvaad attack receded, though, in the popular imagination slogans such as ‘Tilak, Tarazu aur Talwar...’ were still very fresh (in fact, some scholars claim this infamous line was coined during the 1996 assembly election campaign by Kanshi Ram).

The 1996 poll also saw him take a shot at the Dalit-Muslim-backward vote bank. From there to 2002, as Kanshi Ram slowly withdrew from active politics on account of his health, Ms Mayawati first tried her hand at wooing the Muslims aggressively in the ‘02 polls and now the Brahmins.

This election has witnessed a political party for the first time after the Congress till the late 1980s, wield two caste extremes, that were seen to be mutually exclusive, into one entity. This move meant to overcome the fragmentation of votes in UP has by default led to the emergence of new category in in the state’s caste atmosphere.