includes index and biblioraphy

Mayawati has changed the face po politics in India, turning old assumptions upside down and restructuring power equations entrenched for centuries, if not millennia. the path she has blazed though the Byzantine political system of Uttar Pradesh has been a unique tour de force. Not only has she been the chief minister four times, but she has done so by overturning the established electoral traditions of a state that virtually invented mdern Indian politices. With her in-you-face political syle, unabashed display of accumulation weath and mercurial nature, she is perhaps the most enigmatic Indian politician for decades. How did Mayawati, a studious, diffident Dalit schoolteacher, the summit of whose ambitions was to be an IAS officer, become the iconoclastic, combative politician universally known as `Behenji" today? Her trajectory is all the more impressive not just because her modest backgourng has no privious connection to politics, she has also had to bear the burden of being a Dalit and a woman. Possibly her greatest achievement has been to forge, with the help of her mentor, Kanshi Ram, a completely niw contect ofr dalit politics. bypassing both the slogans of victimhood and of street-level activism, she has negotiated from within the system to create new alliances with lower backward castes, Muslims and now, surprisingly, upper-caste Brahmins as well. Eminent journalist Ajoy Bose brings his in-depth experience of covering Indian politics for over three decades to this pioneering political biography of Mayawati. He explores the background of her meteoric rise and examines the growing national clout of this unique woman who could, quite possibly, determine the shape of the next Indian govenment, and even be the country`s prime minister one day.