GADDOPUR, India (Washington Post) -- On a muggy monsoon-drenched afternoon, Shakuntala, a rail-thin girl with bloodshot eyes, cooled her father’s visitors with a bamboo fan, trying to ward off the heat and the flies while they feasted on lentils, stewed chicken and hot bread.

Like many women in this village of Dalits -- the lowest caste in India’s social pecking order -- Shakuntala, 16, lives a meager existence. Her opportunities in life, beyond domestic servitude, are limited. If she remains in the village, she will probably be pressured to marry before she makes it out of her teenage years. As she was in her father’s house, so she will be in her husband’s.
But Shakuntala has one role model, a woman who overcame the limitations of caste: Mayawati, a Dalit daughter of the soil and, as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, one of the most influential politicians in the world’s largest democracy.
Mayawati, who like Shakuntala uses just one name, is a powerful symbol of possibility for Dalits, once known as untouchables. By putting the issue of caste at the center of political debate, she is shaking the very foundations of this country’s centuries-old social order, a system by which Indians’ professions and status are inherited at birth.
Caste is seen by some as the most corrosive aspect of Indian society, much like racism and past slavery in the United States. But oppressed castes, including Dalits, represent a majority in India. Most Dalits cannot afford to educate their children in the private, English-language schools that prepare them for higher-paying jobs. Though illegal, violence against Dalits is still widespread.
Over the past decade, Dalits have achieved some progress, particularly in access to higher education and government jobs. There is now even a small Dalit middle class, thanks largely to affirmative-action programs and urbanization.
Mayawati is a symbol of such changes, but an imperfect one. She has repeatedly been accused of corruption. Critics say she has enriched herself and her family rather than her fellow Dalits, whom she publicly and passionately professes to represent.
She shows no compunction about flaunting her diamond rings and bejeweled necklaces. Her real estate holdings are vast. And a colossal bronze statue of her has been erected on a hilltop in the state capital of Lucknow, bathed in golden light bulbs, with the inscription “A Symbolic Place of Social Change.”
Still, Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party (Majority People’s Party) won a resounding majority in last year’s elections in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state. She is now trying to use that momentum to help her party win in other states. According to analysts and aides close to her, she is positioning herself to become the country’s prime minister.
“People have seen my work, seen my record. Now the nation is watching what I am doing,” Mayawati, 52, said recently in a rare interview with a pair of American journalists in her sprawling residence in Lucknow.
“We have this culture in India and, being a Dalit woman, I faced more of it -- doubly -- as a Dalit and as a woman,” she said later. “Slowly things are changing.”
For Shakuntala, the 5-foot-tall, unmarried chief minister is a towering figure.
“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.
Kneeling over a soapy bucket to wash the lunch dishes, Shakuntala said she admires Mayawati for her largess.
“She should have those things, which we all want,” Shakuntala said, trudging off to get more water.
Treating the patient
Mayawati lives in a salmon-colored mansion, and on a recent day she wore socks with sandals, a simple cotton Indian pantsuit and a diamond ring.
She was confident and relaxed, a posture that may reflect her party’s new national prominence. In her drawing room, images of Dalit leaders adorn the walls, along with two busts of Buddha. Mayawati converted to Buddhism from Hinduism, which sanctions the caste system.
In state elections last year, Mayawati drew into her party Brahmins, India’s highest caste of priests and intellectuals. With the ruling coalition fraying over a controversial nuclear deal with the United States, she now appears to be courting Muslims and communists as well.
“An intelligent doctor would treat the disease step by step. What we are doing is step by step. I understand that for centuries people fought, so it’s not easy to bring them together,” Mayawati said. “We have done that in U.P.”
Asked whether she wanted to become prime minister of India, she seemed to demur: “I don’t indulge in self-praise, I’ll become this or that. It all depends on the people. I believe in doing rather than saying.”
Still, she is clear about her determination to expand her party’s national footprint. She said she is so focused on her political career that she has no time for romantic relationships, movies, even extended family.
“That’s why I am unmarried,” she said. “I don’t even keep my parents here.”
‘An icon for untouchables’
In her village about 250 miles east of Lucknow, Shakuntala attends a government school. Her teachers sometimes fail to show up for work, a widespread problem across India.
Shakuntala wants to learn English, but her father is disabled and unemployed. He can’t afford to send her to private schools, which teach English and afford wealthy Indians access to higher-paid jobs.
When pressed about her ultimate dream, Shakuntala disclosed that she would like to become a schoolteacher, like Mayawati. Her eyes are weak and slightly crossed, however, making it difficult for her to read.
She wants to get them examined, but the local government health clinic is an empty, crumbling structure. In the nearest town’s district hospital, only two full-time doctors serve nearly 300,000 people. Stray dogs wander in and out. There are no surgeons or eye doctors.
The clinics are basically drug dispensaries. Serious health issues are treated at hospitals in New Delhi, an overnight train ride from Lucknow. In effect, the clinics are like the government schools, more symbolic than functional.
“We are like pilots without planes,” said Vijay Parkash, one of the two doctors at the health clinic. He said he hoped that Mayawati’s recent promise of a 30-bed hospital would be more than election-year prattle.
With the aim to increase her national profile, Mayawati has embarked on several high-profile development projects, including the construction of a $9 billion highway connecting her home state to New Delhi. She wants to provide round-the-clock electricity to the state.
Critics say Mayawati’s goals are too lofty for a state more in need of basic projects, even if those projects don’t have the high-profile panache befitting a political leader who might soon be the country’s prime minister.
“I like her for her anti-caste ideology. I like her as a woman who has become an icon for untouchables,” said Kancha Ilaiah, an author who has tried to raise awareness about the injustices of caste. “But that shouldn’t erase the painful lack of clean drinking water, education and health care.”
For Shakuntala and many other Dalits, the symbol of Mayawati is enough, for now at least. The symbol itself gives hope to a people broken by generations of discrimination. It’s a symbol that keeps Shakuntala in school, even if she wishes her school taught English and the teachers showed up more often.
“I am happy just to go,” she said, shrugging.