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15 January 1956: Mayawati, BSP leader, was born

YB WEB DESK. Dated: 1/15/2021 11:29:47 AM

Mayawati, the head of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and four-time chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, was born on 15 January 1956 in Delhi in a Dalit family. Besides being among the most important political leaders of Uttar Pradesh, she is a Dalit icon and her clout extends far beyond the boundaries of India’s most populous state. Mayawati had a simple childhood, and her father, Prabhu Das, was employed with the post office. She secured her bachelor’s degree in arts from Kalindi Women’s College, and a law degree from Campus Law Centre, Delhi University. She also did a B.Ed. from Ghaziabad. In September 1977, during a conference on Dalits organised by the Janata Party's Raj Narain, who had defeated Indira Gandhi in the Lok Sabha polls from Rae Bareilly, repeatedly referred to Dalits as Harijans. This angered the young Mayawati, who was present at the event. As the journalist Bhupesh Bhandari wrote in the Business Standard in December 2011: “Even in those early days she used to find the term [Harijan], coined by Mahatma Gandhi, condescending and thus hugely offensive. She walked up to the stage and tore into Raj Narain. A couple of months later, on a cold winter night, Kanshi Ram [founder of the BSP] visited her at home. The burly Sikh [his family belonged to a Dalit community but had converted to Sikhism] had quit his government job to fight the cause of the Dalit community. He needed somebody like Mayawati.” Kanshi Ram succeeded in convincing Mayawati, who was at the time studying for the IAS exams, to join his movement. He reportedly told her that if she followed him, one day she would be giving orders to IAS officers. It was a prediction that would come true. When Kanshi Ram founded the BSP in 1984, he made Mayawati a member of his core team. In 1989 she was elected to Parliament, but electoral success did not come instantly. The journalist and political analyst Paranjoy Guha Thakurta wrote in the Outlook magazine in May 2008: “Far from benefiting from being anointed Kanshi Ram’s successor very early in her political career, Mayawati has experienced defeat many times. She lost the first three Lok Sabha elections she contested. Yet she had displayed an amazing ability to claw back — often at the very point when she appeared to have been convincingly vanquished