Over the top

By Nandini Ramachandran

The IPL controversy has so preoccupied the Indian media this past fortnight that they clean forgot to lampoon their favourite whipping-woman, Mayawati. The BBC, uncomfortable with the lull and anxious to contribute to the cause, has thus decided to jump into the fray. The correspondent, who ‘tiptoes around caste’ and mystifyingly manages to cover Indian politics nonetheless, evidently believes his political correctness will eclipse (or excuse) his palpable ignorance.

The entrance to Ambedkar Udyan, Lucknow. Mayawati’s chief architectural legacy till date

The Palazzo delle Civiltà del Lavoro, popularly known as the EUR aka The Giant Beehive, fascist Rome’s most enduring image

The article follows the blueprint for Mayawati-bashing, and was probably written by someone in London after they read a few Times of India articles. It projects Mayawati as a megalomaniac obsessed by her vanity projects, diverting precious resources towards irrelevant architecture when people are starving; someone who exploits her Dalit womanhood to garner votes (isn’t she the lucky one, to be born into such a fortuitous combination of identities) while she spends the rest of her time being irredeemably corrupt. It is a standard-issue rant: misleading, condescending and often plain wrong.

Just one example of this is the the article’s take on the  Lady’s plan for a publicly funded militia to protect Ambedkar statues across UP: “What for, asked one incredulous opponent? Will they lose height or weight? Is someone planning to disfigure them?”  If the reporter had done his job, he would know that these statues have a remarkable tendency to get decapitated and thus while the move might be extraordinary, it is certainly not ludicrous.

But the purpose of this post is not to deconstruct such a mediocre piece of reportage. A small section of media (notably the indefatigable Shivam Vij) has already made a good case for the importance of iconography in empowering identity, and I will not repeat their excellent arguments here.

What puzzles me is the lack of creativity in the mainstream ire. With the column-space the Lady commands, surely editors would find it prudent to break free of the dated formula and be marginally distinctive? I find it incredible, for instance, that no one has drawn (to my knowledge) the Mussolini analogy yet. Here is an architecture-obsessed dictator just waiting to bestow Mayawati with evil-fascist associations, and yet he remains an untapped resource. Mussolini’s buildings display the awesome scale Mayawati seems to be vying for, and the man was as haunted by Augustus as Mayawati is by Ambedkar. The Hindutva branch of bashers understandably will not want to stir such a murky cauldron, but one would’ve expected liberal India to have cottoned on to the connection years ago. It would be a project of dubious historicity to club Il Duce and Behenji into the same fold, but when has that ever stopped anyone in the quest for political expedience?

Nandini Ramachandran lives and writes in Bangalore. She plans to blog about media and politics in the region for Himal.