Colourful characters stand in India state poll

INDIA: A woman from India’s untouchable classes who now often wears diamonds and a wrestler turned regional strongman are at the fore in elections which begin Saturday in the country’s largest state.

As many as 50 million people are likely to vote in the month-long Uttar Pradesh ballot dominated by one-of-a-kind characters, including the chief of the ruling Congress party, Italian-born Sonia Gandhi.

Mayawati Kumari’s party, which bases its support on Dalits, as untouchables prefer to be known now, hopes to best former wrestler Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav’s ruling party.

Yadav’s Samajwadi won 145 seats in state elections in 2002 but enjoys support from other local parties, while Mayawati’s Bahajun Samaj Party took 98 seats. Polls have the two parties neck-and-neck with roughly 30 percent of the vote each.

The fiery Mayawati, who was born into a lowly leatherworker caste at the bottom of India’s rigid hierarchy but went on to become one of India’s most powerful women, has called herself a “living goddess.”

More recently she told voters if she wins she will thoroughly investigate Yadav, who counts on his own large Yadav caste and Muslims for support.

This prompted Yadav to make a rather unusual electoral appeal.

“Do you want me to go to jail or do you want me to work?” Yadav asked voters at a rally in the state on Monday.

“Vote me in to power. Otherwise I will go to jail”. Mayawati herself is also under investigation for her role in a heritage project that would have had a giant mall built near the Taj Mahal, the medieval Mughal monument to love, which is located in Uttar Pradesh.

Allegations of corruption are small fry in a state where murderers, gangsters and gun molls are among those competing openly for 403 seats.

Officials in Uttar Pradesh were on edge as they geared up for the epic voting exercise in a state with 100 million voters on the rolls, though past elections show only about a 50 percent turnout.

“It is not an easy job to conduct elections in a state where criminals and mafia lords also vie for political power,” the state’s chief electoral officer, A.K. Bishnoi, told AFP in state capital Lucknow. On the first day of elections on Saturday, voters will choose among 783 candidates competing for 62 seats under the gaze of some 60,000 paramilitary troops.

Almost 200,000 electronic voting machines will be used and voters have been issued new voting photo identification in an attempt by the Election Commission to clean up elections.

Personal appeals, attacks and promises notwithstanding, analysts say people are likely to vote much as they did the in the last election and the election before that — along caste lines.

Those loyalties often prove more powerful than promises of schools, roads, water and electricity.

Lucknow, Thursday, AFP