…that means “Mayawati has returned.”
Today is Tuesday. Mayawati, the Dalit (untouchable) leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party (the swastika elephant party) in Uttar Pradesh came to office as the equivalent of governor in UP on Sunday. This is her second time in that office. For the last five years, Mulayam Singh Yadav of the bicycle party has been governor. The five years before that, Mayawati was governor.
The last time she was governor she built a beautiful park in honor of Dr. Ambedkar in Lucknow. I saw the park from a distance while riding the freeway during my last visit. I liked it from afar and I liked it more up close – the buildings, the green grass, it is a sweet place to chill.
When Mulayam Singh Yadav was in office he completely neglected the park because his political opponent had built it and put her name under Dr. Ambedkar’s on all the plaques. As I reported in my last blog entry, I had heard that Mayawati’s first action when she came to office was to fire two officers who had the responsibility of maintaining that park. I looked up their names- they are B.B. Singh and S.K. Aggarwal. Both of these men will really miss having their government jobs. I suspect that “screwed for life” would be an apt description of their current status. Undoubtedly they were under orders not to maintain the park, though.
Nandan told me the story of Mayawati firing some people because some Ambedkar statue was not being maintained, but I did not make the connection between that and the huge Ambedkar park. Being in Lucknow, I told Nandan I wanted to visit that park purely because of having seen it previously.
When I arrived I saw strange things. I have never seen a bigger, faster working, or better equipped maintainance crew anywhere in India. Apparently, the day after she returned to office, she ordered the park to become glorious. All the construction she did not finish in her last term will be finished now. I am doubly in wonder to see that the wheels of contracting have turned so quickly so as to all have been organized just the day after her rise.
Check out my photos for documentation. I know that social scientists would get a big kick out of the things that I got to see. There were low-level politicians-a-plenty there that day, with their families. Nandan told me those were all Dalit leaders who invited their rural relatives there to celebrate the power that they will have for the next five years.
Nandan is currently at the passport office. He has a relative who works there – he has a relative working in every place – but still he is having difficulty retrieving his babi’s (brother’s wife’s) passport. It is in the office, but there is an order to sit on it in place. No one wants to do anything with it, but it is not supposed to be mailed until next week.
In front of the office are crowds of people wanting bribes. The children sell forms. That is low level – the forms can be had by waiting in a line, and the children save that wait. Then there are street types who have friends inside the building waiting in line. The line can take hours, so if you pay the man outside then he takes you to the man inside, who leaves the queue while giving you his place in it. The top touts are those who can help you skip the queue and meet someone in an office. Those are the employee’s personal peons. They also take bribes for the employees. Nandan tells me that no one respectable takes bribes; always a peon does this.
Aside from the Ambedkar Park we went to the zoo again. This time I had my camera and I saw the rest of the animals, or at least their pens. Some of the bears and other big animals stay inside their homes to hide from the heat, so I doubt they can easily be seen this time of year.
Though the pens are big, I wish the animals had more access to fresh water. The elephant looked like he wanted a shower. The hippo pen had too much algae. The otters were swimming but the water was too dark to see them through the underwater window. I suppose it does not bother the animals too much, because they all have water. And at least the expensive infrastructure is in place and now all that is needed is inexpensive improvements.