Ms Mayavatiji, chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, is a unilingual extremist; she never speaks a word but in Hindi. She outdoes even Narendra Modi, who has a good turn of phrase in Gujarati, and who managed some broken English in the last Vibrant Gujarat celebrations. Her verbal parochialism has earned her the indifference of the anglophone media, and her singleminded love of statues a rebuke from the anglophone Supreme Court. As I drive into her kingdom from Delhi, on the right there is a graveyard of stone elephants, strutting dead politicians, and a Taj-like mausoleum. They have been standing half-built for years following the Supreme Court’s order to her to stop. Now she says that these ruins are amongst the many memorials, museums, statues and parks being constructed in honour of the saints, gurus and other great men — but only provided they were born untouchable or backward — and that she spent less than one per cent of the budget of her public welfare and development department on the monuments. I tried to find out how much that one per cent would come to. The National Informatics Centre runs a website for the budgets of each state. I went to the Uttar Pradesh website. It said that it could provide information for years between 2002-03 and 2006-07, but I could not access data for any of those years. The Reserve Bank is luckier; since it is the governments’ banker, the UP government cannot refuse to give it budget documents. According to it, UP’s social expenditure in the five years to 2009-10 was Rs 140,000 crore; one per cent of it would be Rs 1,400 crore. I guess that even her biggest statues would have cost lakhs rather than crores; so she may be right about the total cost of her army of statues. Now all those monuments need to be saved from vandals and squatters, so Mayavati has recruited an army of ex-servicemen to guard them.

Mayavati has also made plans to increase the police force by 240,000. That, according to her, would raise their density from 83 to 150 per lakh of population — that is, by 67 per lakh. Dividing 240,000 by 67, I infer that recruiting 3,582 policemen would add one policeman per lakh of population; so there must be 35,82,00,000 people in UP. Its population in 2001 was 16 crore; so it has been rising at nine per cent a year. India’s population has been growing at about 1½ per cent a year. Although the people of UP are reputed to be more fecund, I think it is beyond even their capacity to be six times as productive as Indians. I am afraid Mayavati has got her figures wrong. But she is probably right about training 2,000 commandos. That is 13 per minister working three shifts; now anyone who thought of attacking a UP minister had better think twice.

Mayavati has provided a dowry of Rs 10,000 each for 25,445 Muslim girls. Why exactly 25,445, how they will be chosen, and what will happen to the 25,446th girl, are mysteries I have not been able to unravel. Of Muslim schoolchildren, 91.64 lakh have got Rs 342.7671 crore in scholarships. I think Mayavati has made an arithmetical error; the total should have been Rs 343.65 crore. That would have given each student Rs 375. But then, aside from these scholarships, Mayavati has also forgone fees of Rs 14.9015 crore from 31,229 Muslim students in classes XI-XII; that comes to Rs 397.64 per student per month. I suspect the education department of UP sets especially complicated school fees to confuse Mayavati.

Uttar Pradesh has always grown inferior cane with low yields and high costs; it has thus needed the administered price mechanism for sugar. Mayavati boasts that she raised cane price by Rs 25 in one year — more than the most reckless chief minister of UP has ever done before. More pertinently, UP’s statutory minimum cane price was Rs 110 a quintal when Mayavati came to power. By last year she had raised it to Rs 165 — that is, 50 per cent in three years. Uttar Pradesh sugar mills simply could not compete after paying such an absurd price; and cane movement controls prevented them from getting cane from elsewhere. So as a last resort, they started importing raw sugar and refining it. Mayavati banned the import of raw sugar into UP in November from anywhere. Uttar Pradesh sugar mills had 1.5 million tons of raw sugar on the high seas. It landed in various ports, and was stacked up in warehouses. The sugar mills had to pay for its storage, but could not use it. No state has the power to ban imports from the rest of India under the Indian Constitution, but so what? Mayavati was never stopped by such small things like the Constitution. It is the duty of the Central government to enforce the Constitution; but in this case, the Manmohan Singh government preferred to look the other way. It gave the millers permission to sell the imported sugar in other states — if they would allow it — or to get it refined by other mills. Finally in November, UP farmers despaired of getting the fancy prices their government had ordained sugar mills to pay them for cane. They got fed up and started invading neighbouring cities, including Delhi and Lucknow, and bringing them to a halt. But Mayavati waited until all local cane had been sold or burnt for lack of buyers; she removed the ban in February. The country paid for her intransigence; sugar prices more than doubled in a year.

Mayavati boasts a lot about schools opened, scholarships given, hospitals set up, free treatment ordered, wages increased, and such things of benefit to someone or the other — mostly those belonging to scheduled castes and tribes (forget tribes in this context; in UP they are counted in lakhs). In these boasts is reflected her vision of an ideal state — a state which would mollycoddle scheduled castes from birth to death, and would deny even a penny to the rest. It is not an unfamiliar vision. It was first invented by the Bharatiya Janata Party, which wanted all benefits reserved for Hindus, and in competition with it, by the Congress, which wanted to give all benefits to the poor. All three are versions of vote bank politics. The Congress used it brilliantly in the last election; it invented the national rural employment guarantee scheme just in time to turn the tide. The BJP has no answer to it, and is fumbling. The Bahujan Samaj Party is the only competitor, and the Congress is planning to beat Mayavati at her own game. The caste census is one step in that campaign; the next one will be benefits limited to particular castes in the fashion of Mayavati. It is too early to predict who will win a war that has just begun and may go on for a quarter-century. But the loser will be the rest of India. Many democracies witness the courting of the poor. Only in India do we see elaborate tactics of excluding incorrectly born poor.