Feature: ‘I am hopeful about Mayawati’

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Lucknow, January 21:: For a leader dubbed the "Untouchables Queen" who runs one of India's poorest states, it was indeed a birthday bash fit for royalty.

Dressed in a diamond necklace and matching earrings, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati stood as her mostly higher-caste party aides and the state police chief each scooped up slops of her 52nd birthday cake in their hands and finger-fed their boss.

"This is her revolution," said Cabinet Secretary Shashank Shekhar Singh, one of her closest aides who participated in the birthday ceremony.

Since culminating an astonishing rise from "untouchable" or Dalit caste school teacher to head of India's most populous state by winning last year's election outright, Mayawati has stamped her presence in Uttar Pradesh with eyes on being the next prime minister.

For supporters she is reaching out nationally to millions of lower castes who feel left out from an economic boom, a new caste politics that will eat into the support of India's traditional parties like the ruling Congress at the Centre.

Critics say she and her Bahujan Samaj Party are exploiting Dalit votes to gain power while siphoning off state funds to pay for her personal whims, from expensive houses to bronze statues.

On her birthday, loyal party workers decked out Lucknow, the state capital, with hundreds of thousands of lights and donated thousands of dollars in a shadowy birthday "financial support" scheme that she said would be channelled to the poor.

Elected representatives were asked to donate about $7,500 to birthday coffers. Tax authorities made life easier for her by declaring her birthday gifts could be a tax write-off.

"My birthday is celebrated in a way that no other leader's is. People donate money in my name," Mayawati told India Today magazine this month.

Musical CDs praising her blared out across the city. "You'll live for thousands of years and each year should have 50,000 days," proclaimed one billboard.

Since her election win, she has inaugurated one of India's biggest highway projects, spent millions on parks and statues celebrating her party, published a volume of her autobiography and wielded what critics say is a blatant authoritarian stick.

Some analysts believe she now has the political momentum to win enough seats in a likely 2009 general election to hold the balance of power in any hung parliament.