AN ARMY of labourers, using truckloads of cloth and plastic sheeting, are racing against time to comply with a federal election commission decree to cover up numerous statues of a flamboyant woman politician ahead of next month’s provincial elections in northern Uttar Pradesh state.
The commission had stipulated last week that about a dozen 15ft bronze and marble statues of Ms Mayawati, who uses only one name, violated electoral rules in Uttar Pradesh and therefore needed covering.
It declared that the statues in the state capital Lucknow and in Noida, a New Delhi suburb, as well as those of 190 elephants, which are her BSP or National Political Party symbol, also needed to be concealed as they could unduly influence voters.
“We have done this to ensure a level playing field for all political parties,” chief election commissioner S Y Qureshi said.
The statues are to be covered by today as under election rules all portraits of the provincial chief minister need to be removed from government offices ahead of elections.
But the election commission’s decision has drawn severe criticism from Ms Mayawati’s party, which demanded to know whether it would also order the removal of lotus flowers from ponds or ban bicycles because they too were rival party symbols.
Other analysts and political parties said covering up the statues, which Ms Mayawati, the ‘untouchable’ or Dalit chief minister of the country’s most populous and backward province, flaunts as a symbol of low-caste empowerment, could even work in her political favour.
They said her party candidates could claim during campaigning that by covering up her statues, the upper castes were deliberately attempting to “deface” Ms Mayawati merely because she was a Dalit.
Workers beavering to get the statues covered were apprehensive of meeting the deadline. “It is an elephantine problem to drape these statues,” Ramesh Shukla, a government officer overseeing the work, said.
In a display of political omnipotence extravagant even by India’s outlandish standards, Ms Mayawati erected the statues after being elected state chief minister five years ago.
She inaugurated 15 substantial parks resembling in Lucknow crammed with massive bronzes, stone and marble statues and friezes of herself, fellow Dalit community leaders and scores of elephants.
In one larger-than-life statue she is clutching a handbag and pointing like a conquering heroine at a fresco.
The carvings are estimated to have cost the state exchequer $250 million, money that her critics maintain could have been gainfully spent on water, power, employment, education and medical care for the state’s 170 million people, a large proportion of them abjectly poor.
If independent, Uttar Pradesh would be the world’s seventh largest country.
The Congress party, which heads the ruling federal coalition, has been campaigning hard in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most politically important state, but many analysts predict Ms Mayawati will be returned to office. If so, it would make the 58-year old politician an influential player in the 2014 general elections.