Lower-Caste Politician A Lofty Symbol in India

"Mayawati is like a mother to me," Shakuntala whispered as a relative scolded her to return to washing the pots. "She's like a god."

'Triumph' of Democracy

Mayawati was born to a working-class family. Her parents had migrated from the villages of Uttar Pradesh to New Delhi. Her mother was illiterate and pressured by her husband to have sons, a fact Mayawati said in her autobiography that she resented. She was also angered that Dalits had to live in separate quarters from other castes.

After school, Mayawati became a government teacher and received a law degree. She often gave speeches at anti-caste rallies in New Delhi and planned to become a lawyer in the government service.

But Kanshi Ram, a well-known anti-caste activist, had other ideas. With her feisty popular appeal, Mayawati seemed to Ram to be the perfect candidate to go into politics and turn the caste system on its head. He told her so.

By the early 1990s, she was campaigning on a motorbike, darting through villages with her signature pigtails flowing behind her. In 1995, she was elected chief minister in a short-lived coalition government. She has held the post three more times. Her terms, however, have been bogged down in bitter political infighting; only one of them lasted longer than six months.

Today, with her hair cut short, Mayawati -- now referred to unflatteringly by some as the Queen of the Dalits -- travels by helicopter, a common mode of transport for India's politicians.

The shift in her ways has not gone unnoticed. Newspapers brim with stories questioning how the daughter of a postal clerk amassed a $13 million fortune.

She has said that at least $3 million of that sum came from admirers. But India's Central Bureau of Investigations discounted that claim and is looking into the possibility that the money was siphoned from a $40 million road project linking the Taj Mahal to other tourist destinations.

Other investigations have turned up inconsistencies in her persistent claims of how she derived her wealth.

Corruption allegations against Indian politicians are so common that they frequently fail to dent their reputations. Mayawati is used to such scrutiny, which she says is politically motivated to discredit her. And in any case, arguments over whether she is a Dalit savior or sinner are frequently eclipsed by her historic achievement as the first Dalit woman elected to high office.

"Mayawati is the single largest triumph of India's democracy, much like what Obama is for America but perhaps even more significant considering she has overcome both handicaps of being a Dalit as well as a woman," said Ajoy Bose, who wrote a political biography of Mayawati. "People ask me whether she is good or bad, but I am not in the business of giving character certificates. All I know is that she is very relevant and a political phenomenon not just for India but the entire world."

Mayawati's penchant for self-aggrandizing statues is seen by supporters as an act of defiance in a culture in which Dalit leaders have never had a place in the national iconography.