COLUMN ONE : In India, a Leader Rises From the Depths : The new head of the nation’s most populous state is an ‘untouchable.’ Her startling ascent epitomizes the power and volatility of caste politics.

The transformation took place one warm evening in June around midnight.

Mayawati, 39, had begun her professional life as a schoolteacher. But thanks to her gifts as a firebrand orator, the vagaries of politics and the trends now shaking the core of Indian society, she was sworn in as chief minister of India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh.

Suddenly this small, round-faced woman who had never run anything larger than a classroom was in charge of the welfare of 139 million human beings. No female politician in the world governs more people.

But for Indians, it is not Mayawati’s gender that shocks and inspires wonder. It is her caste.

She belongs to the lowest of the low in the traditional Hindu social order, the achhuts , or untouchables, that today are grouped under the label of Dalits--”the downtrodden.”

“It was impossible, unbelievable that a person from there [the Hindu hierarchy’s bottom rung] could reach that chair,” said Alok Agarwal, a Lucknow accountant who comes from a higher caste.

“This is greater change than Nelson Mandela being elected president of South Africa,” said Jang Bahadur Singh Patel, state leader of Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj (Social Majority) Party.

And more earthshaking developments may lie ahead, given this northern state’s historically pivotal role in India’s public life.

Cradle of the Hindi and Urdu languages and the place where Hinduism’s most blessed rivers, the Ganges and Yamuna, converge, Uttar Pradesh has been the birthplace or power base of no fewer than seven of nine prime ministers since independence in 1947.

“Whoever was in power here has ultimately ruled the country--whether it was the Moguls, Britishers or Congress (I) Party,” said S. K. Misra, executive director of the Lucknow-based Indian Industries Assn.

And Mayawati agrees.

“Now it’s the largest state. Next it will be the central government,” she predicted during an interview at her official residence, a walled compound fronted by palms where orderlies in livery serve sweets topped with shreds of ornamental hammered silver.

In India’s often-raucous politics, cleavage along communal and caste lines is becoming increasingly common, and Mayawati’s ascension has set off alarm bells.

“Those who once were marginalized have become politically assertive,” said Karen Saxena, chairwoman of the Center for Political Studies at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University.

The ruling Congress (I) Party is particularly worried. For like the Democratic Party in the United States, it has traditionally drawn strength from its capacity to ally with and satisfy diverse voting blocs, from Muslims and Dalits to Cambridge-educated socialists.

Now, however, debacles in the last two rounds of state elections have shown that disgruntled constituencies like the Muslims and lower castes are abandoning Congress candidates in droves.

Ruling-Party Overtures

Little wonder, then, that on the heels of Mayawati’s inauguration, Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao, who will be fighting for his own political survival in India’s next election, summoned her to New Delhi for a tete-a-tete and called her “my daughter.”

A few generations ago, a scholarly Brahman like Rao might have fled even the shadow of an acchut .

“They had no right to study, go to the temple or fetch a drink of water out of a community well or tap,” Mayawati said of her ancestors. “They had just one right: to become slaves of high-caste people.”

Over the past half a century, social and legal reforms and the one-person, one-vote system of democratic India have altered some of the traditional givens. The Dalits, who number more than 223 million, or more than the populations of all but a few countries, have become simply too large a “vote bank” to ignore.

That too is an essential--and controversial--ingredient of Mayawati’s rise. For were it not for the political calculations of India’s leading opposition faction, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, she would still be a mere member of the Uttar Pradesh legislature and the upper house of India’s Parliament, with a role in government limited to giving fiery speeches.

India has had many Dalit politicians and activists, including the untouchables’ great hero, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. Before his death in 1956, Ambedkar, a Columbia University Ph.D. and chief drafter of the Indian constitution, sought to forge a broad coalition for social justice embracing progressives from among the Brahmans and other higher castes.

In stark contrast, Mayawati has made her political fortune by waging verbal caste warfare. She denounces the more privileged social strata as “black Britishers” who inherited power and “all the perks in life” from India’s former colonial masters.

“We are trying to mobilize the other 85% [of Indians],” she said, talking in rapid-fire Hindi with an accent that betrays her family’s modest rural origins. “Though the law is in our favor, those who implement the law aren’t.”

Last year, she scandalized millions of Indians by blasting the country’s politician-saint, Mohandas K. Gandhi, as a two-faced enemy of Dalits.

Roots of Prejudice

The roots of the Dalits’ grievances run deep in Indian history and culture. Between 200 BC and AD 200, researchers say, Aryan scholars codified the division of society into four castes of descending blessedness: Brahmans, Kshatriyas, Vaisyas and Shudras.

Some Shudras, as well as a fifth category so reviled that it wasn’t even included in the caste scheme, became literally “untouchable” for other Hindus.

“Their dwelling shall be outside the village, and their wealth shall be dogs and donkeys,” said one edict. “Their dress the garments of the dead, and their food shall be eaten from broken dishes. Black iron shall be their ornaments, and they must wander from place to place.”

They performed society’s most repugnant tasks, like cleaning out latrines or handling the dead. Some were so poor they ate rats.

Gandhi, himself a Vaisya, defended the four-part caste system but vigorously campaigned to end discrimination against untouchables. He called them Harijans--”God’s children.”

True to the Mahatma’s inspiration, Article 17 of India’s constitution proclaimed the “abolition” of untouchability 45 years ago and threatened legal action against anyone practicing it.

Laws Not Enough

But much as with racial discrimination in the United States, passing laws has not been enough to uproot an ancient institution that was long held to be part of the divine order.

Three days after Mayawati took the oath of office on June 3, some Dalits were beaten up for drinking from a public tap in Agra, the Uttar Pradesh city that is the site of the Taj Mahal.

A few weeks earlier, in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, a 5-year-old Dalit girl was blinded in one eye when a teacher lashed her with a cane for using a water jar and mug reserved for higher-caste Hindus.

The seeds of Mayawati’s own outrage and revolt were planted when she was a schoolgirl in New Delhi. Ten miles outside the capital, in the village of Badalpur, her grandparents had to build their house apart from their neighbors.

“I would ask: ‘Why this discrimination? Why are there separate locations for Brahmans, Chamars, Balmikis?’ ” Mayawati recalled. She never got a satisfactory answer.

Her success has been all the more spectacular because there is a hierarchy even among Dalits, and her subcaste is near the bottom. She is a Chamar, the offspring of a clan of leather workers who were especially shunned because they handled the skins of dead animals.

Mayawati was born Jan. 15, 1956, into the family of a New Delhi-based supervisor in the post and telegraph department. Despite her impassioned rhetoric about caste injustice, she also derived some benefit from being a Dalit.

She was given an education at state expense, thanks to India’s system of reserving a share of government jobs and school admissions for members of specified, or “scheduled,” low-prestige and traditionally poor castes.

“When the fees were waived and I received a scholarship, the other students said I was a scheduled caste and looked down on me,” Mayawati said. But she graduated two years early and earned three degrees at the University of Delhi.

Turning Point

She began work in 1977 as a teacher in New Delhi with the dream of becoming a government functionary. The turning point came the next year when she met Kanshi Ram, the silver-haired founder of the pro-Dalit Bahujan Samaj Party, at a rally.

Mayawati remembers Ram telling her, “I want to make you a big leader.” The energetic teacher soon became Ram’s protege.

Frontline, a respected weekly magazine, reported this summer that the two began living under the same roof in 1991, with Mayawati serving as the 61-year-old Ram’s confidante and housekeeper. Mayawati said she took a vow long ago not to marry “so I can dedicate my life fully to the uplifting of Dalits.”

Mayawati ran four times for the Indian Parliament before being elected in 1989. Ram made her the BSP’s national secretary, and last year he confided to journalists: “I am grooming her to become the prime minister.”

Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Saxena doubts that Ram will get his wish. Instead, she sees Mayawati as significant because nobody better personifies the growing polarization in India along caste lines--a trend evident in this year’s elections in the states of Maharashtra, Orissa and Bihar--and Dalits’ rising political and economic aspirations.

“Mayawati represents an important segment of society that’s coming up,” Saxena said.

Caste, a crucial element in mobilizing India’s population even in the anti-imperialist politics of British times, moved to center stage in much of southern India in the late 1940s and 1950s with the election of low-caste chief ministers there. But it was the toppling of upper-caste dominance in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, northern India’s political heartland, in the late 1980s that signaled a national trend.

Volatile Alliances

Caste militancy, however, may be a two-edged sword that harms Mayawati as much as it helps her. “The rise of low-ranking groups tends to increase conflicts with other low-ranking people,” noted Sudhir Hindwan, a fellow at the Center for Policy Research, a New Delhi think tank. Forming an Indian “Rainbow Coalition” then becomes impossible.

And true enough, that has been Mayawati’s recent experience. Her party had been the junior partner in a 17-month-old coalition government dominated by another party championing the rights of Uttar Pradesh’s poor and the large Muslim minority.

Her party, however, concluded that its own support base and political chances were being undermined by its supposed partner. So it pulled out of the arrangement on June 1, braving goon tactics to do so.

Mayawati’s party had only 58 seats in the Uttar Pradesh legislature, not enough to form a government on its own. So, after shadowy dealings, it accepted the 117 votes of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, a party dominated by upper-caste Hindus.

That gift from the BJP, which hopes to take over India’s government in the national elections that must be held by next spring, was an overt courting of the Dalits, 24.8% of the country’s population, as well as another disadvantaged segment, the “backward castes and tribes,” who are twice as numerous.

The BJP claimed no posts in Mayawati’s Cabinet. But some Dalits are furious at her anyway for accepting the backing of a party that promotes a romanticized nostalgia about the reign of the Hindu god-king Ram and social values that antedate India’s parliamentary democracy and equal rights.

“For centuries, the Dalits were suppressed by these very people in the name of Hinduism,” fumed longtime Dalit crusader Chhedi Lal Sathi, 75, a Lucknow lawyer.

Mayawati’s immediate challenges are daunting. She runs a state the size of Arizona, one so ethnically and socially diverse, and so politically volatile, that one British wag has dubbed it “complete and Utter Pradesh.”

In her government, she retained 61 ministerial portfolios for herself. Of her 11 ministers, one is a Brahman, another a Muslim and three are Dalits. The rest are from the backward castes and tribes.

Some unhappy constituents say Mayawati hasn’t done much so far. “She has held five rallies and built a traffic circle, that’s all,” van driver Arun Misra said one recent morning as he weaved through dense traffic in Lucknow.

One of the chief minister’s major accomplishments has been the banning of lotteries that were ruining many of the state’s poorest residents. She has also made full use of the spoils system to award plum jobs to Dalit functionaries and her supporters.

“Those who are not loyal to us will be transferred within 24 hours,” Mayawati told a news conference in June. True enough, the next month one hapless civil servant was shifted four times in as many days.

Uncertain Future

Uttar Pradesh politics are notoriously unstable, and Mayawati’s continued presence in the chief minister’s chair depends less on her than on the national campaign strategy of the BJP. Meanwhile, the state’s more than 29 million Dalits are closely watching what she will do to benefit them.

Lucknow rickshaw driver Sham Lal, 19, a Chamar like his chief minister, is already a skeptic.

“Thrilled” at Mayawati’s election, he and four fellow drivers called at her residence two weeks ago. They wanted her help in acquiring rickshaws, so they would not have to spend part of their small income renting them.

“We never got in the door; they turned us away,” Lal recalled. His optimism that a new day had dawned was dashed.

“At the moment, I have no hopes,” he sighed, leaning on the handlebars of his rickety vehicle. “So how can I say what will happen?”