[Akhilesh Yadav, 39, son of the Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam
Singh Yadav, was elected
earlier this year as the youngest chief minister in the history of Uttar
Pradesh, and the breathtaking desolation of places like Baudh Vihar Shanti
Upvan are a big reason for his success. Mr. Yadav's election victory over Ms.
Mayawati, the Dalit leader who goes by only one name, came on the heels of one
of the most controversial spending sprees in modern Indian history.]
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Strdel/Agence
France-Presse — Getty Images
A statue of Bahujan Samaj Party
(B.S.P.) leader, Mayawati, left, and B.S.P.
founder Kanshi Ram in Lucknow,
Uttar Pradesh in this March 4, 2012 photo.
|
Visitors to the Baudh Vihar Shanti Upvan in
Lucknow, which calls itself a library, may wonder what they're getting for
their entrance fee of five rupees (9 U.S. cents). The shelves hold only a few
dated copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica and a set of something called the
Encyclopedia of Buddhism in an attempt to appear like a place of study.
The actual purpose of the building becomes clearer once they
step into the courtyard, where three clusters of large, four-sided white
statues of the former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mayawati, the Bahujan Samaj
Party founder Kanshi Ram and Buddha greet visitors. Elsewhere, huge
cartoon-eyed paintings of Ms. Mayawati line the walls.
On most days, the only people inside the sprawling building are
a handful of students, who are not studying but instead trying to escape from
their parents or the heat.
Akhilesh Yadav, 39, son of the Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam
Singh Yadav, was elected
earlier this year as the youngest chief minister in the history of Uttar
Pradesh, and the breathtaking desolation of places like Baudh Vihar Shanti
Upvan are a big reason for his success. Mr. Yadav's election victory over Ms.
Mayawati, the Dalit leader who goes by only one name, came on the heels of one
of the most controversial spending sprees in modern Indian history.
When Ms. Mayawati first became chief minister of Uttar Pradesh
in 1995, Mr. Ram joked that he had transformed his rebellious young protégée
into a "maharani" overnight. Seventeen years and four terms later, as
one rides through the dry streets of the state capital of Lucknow, the Dalit
icon's boast feels like an understatement. At nearly every intersection, Ms.
Mayawati's lavish expenditures erupt from the ground in the form of parks and
statues she commissioned during her fourth and most recent tenure as chief
minister, which lasted from 2007 to 2012.
While an outsider might see these creations as evidence of Ms.
Mayawati's continued influence over India's most populous state, local
residents view them as reminders of Uttar Pradesh's long history of corruption,
mismanagement and debt.
Foreigners have a different point of view about Ms. Mayawati
"than we locals do," says Ram Advani, a 90-year-old bookseller.
"You see her with a glow. Her ego is fascinating to you," he said.
"For us, however, there is no glow. She was just another politician
spending money."
During a visit to Lucknow in May, one of the state's hottest
months, a series of prolonged blackouts virtually stopped parts of the city.
Power shortages are common throughout India, but in a city where state
expenditures appear in your face at every turn in bronze and stone, such problems
feel weighted with a bitter sense of irony.
Uttar Pradesh, according to government estimates from June, is
now an estimated 2.2 trillion rupees ($41 billion) in debt. In 2007, Ms.
Mayawati's first year in office, the debt was 1.6 trillion rupees. Anubhuti
Sahay, an economist with Standard Chartered, said that it's extremely difficult
to know exactly how much the parks and statues played into the state's rising
debt, but that the expenditures nevertheless could constrain the current
administration.
"At the state level, a rising debt won't make a large
difference in carrying out basic functions," said Ms. Sahay, "but if
the foundation of the economy is weak enough, it can create problems for the
current administration."
Anil Sultar, along with his father, Ram, formed the sculpting
team responsible for much of the bronze work done during Ms. Mayawati's
prolific period of construction. The pair has worked on many political statues
throughout India, including the world's tallest Gandhi statue, which was erected
on Oct. 2 in Bihar.
In Lucknow, the Sultars focused on Ambedkar Park, as well as Eco
Park, of nearly equal size, and the Kanshi Ram memorial, a large dome with an
interior decked out with statues detailing Mr. Ram's life. The dome's exterior
is flanked by scores of life-sized stone elephants.
While the sculptors declined to reveal exactly how much they
were paid by the state to make bronze statues, the younger Sultar said,
"Our rate was 11,000 rupees per kilogram. The larger sculptures and
fountains weigh somewhere about 20 tons each."
That would put a large bronze sculpture, of which there are
dozens in Ambedkar Park alone, at slightly less than 200 million rupees each.
And that figure doesn't include the Rajasthan-exported sandstone work, which
snakes through every corner of Lucknow.
Most of the discussion about Ms. Mayawati's excesses have
centered on Lucknow's monolithic Ambedkar Park, with its dozen-plus statues of
Ms. Mayawati, Mr. Ram and other Dalit icons, 36 elephant-headed pillars and its
breathtakingly surreal corridor of 60 life-size stone elephants, leading to a
behemoth stone altar that supports a giantess statue of Ms. Mayawati.
But the handful of other surrounding parks have gone somewhat
under-reported. Where Ambedkar Park astonishes the visitor with its ego-driven
visual audacity, Baudh Vihar Shanti Upvan and Eco Park, which features a
collection of bronze hippos, bored-looking lions and inquisitive chimps, are
simply inexplicable.
The current chief minister has not yet put forth a detailed plan
to deal with the massive legacy of construction projects left behind by his
predecessor. Ranjana Bajpai, speaking on behalf of his Samajwadi Party back in
2002, demanded that a hospital be built in Ambedkar Park so that it would be
more useful to citizens. But such ambitious plans have not been articulated
since the Samajwadi Party took power.
So far, the only thing Mr. Yadav has actually done with Ms.
Mayawati's landscape-dominating creations is to turn an abandoned construction
site into what he called a "milk stand" for Parag, the state's
largest milk distributor. The state also announced earlier this month that it
would rent out places like Eco Park for weddings.
The elephant, the symbol of Ms. Mayawati's party, appears
sporadically throughout Lucknow as a result of the former chief minister's
work, which cannot be very pleasant for the current chief minister. But one
reason that Mr. Yadav might not tear these down is that he hopes to be
re-elected in 2017, and it would be difficult to achieve that without at least
a decent share of Dalit votes. Preserving the history of Dalits and
untouchables was one of Ms. Mayawati's expressed intentions for creating the
statues and parks in the first place.
Ms. Maywati "believes that she's given her people a
history," says Maria Belli, assistant art history professor at the
University of Texas at Arlington, who traveled to Lucknow last year to study
the parks. "So I think these parks will be around long after we're dead
because there will be riots from Dalits if they took them down."
For now, however, not even the Dalits are helping to fill the
parks with visitors. One Dalit woman named Ashanti, who works as a sweeper at a
Lucknow guesthouse, said she likes the idea of the monuments, but she has only
seen them from the outside. Ambedkar Park's entry fee of 10 rupees is a luxury
she cannot easily afford.
Earlier: For
Akhilesh Yadav, the Honeymoon is Over. An interview with the new chief
minister.
Michael Edison Hayden
is an American
writer currently living in Mumbai. You can follow him on Twitter @MichaelEHayden.
@ The New York Times
[All
these good signs come with caveats. Europe continues to weaken. The fiscal
cliff looms ominously. But the fact remains, compared with the rest of the
industrialized world and the arc of previous post-bubble recoveries, the United
States is ready for a robust revival. This is partly because of the dynamism of
the U.S. economy but also because of the timely and intelligent actions of the
Fed and the Obama administration. ]
The International Monetary Fund’s latest World Economic
Outlook makes for gloomy reading. Growth projections have been revised
downward almost everywhere, especially in Europe and the big emerging markets
such as China. And yet, when looking out over the next four years — the next
presidential term — the IMF projects that the United States will be the
strongest of the world’s rich economies. U.S. growth is forecast to average 3
percent, much stronger than that of Germany or France (1.2 percent) or even
Canada (2.3 percent). Increasingly, the evidence suggests that the United
States has come out of the financial crisis of 2008 in better shape than its
peers — because of the actions of its government.
Perhaps
the most important cause of America’s relative health is the Federal Reserve.
Ben Bernanke understood the depths of the problem early and responded
energetically and creatively. The clearest vindication of his actions has been
that the European Central Bank, after charting the opposite course for three
years with disastrous results, has adopted policies similar to the Fed’s — and
averted a potential Lehman-like collapse in Europe. (Mitt Romney’s two most
prominent academic advisers, Glenn Hubbard and Gregory Mankiw, seem to recognize
this, but Romney apparently doesn’t. As recently as August the Republican
presidential nominee repeated his criticisms of the Fed and promised to replace
Bernanke at its helm.)
In
addition to providing general liquidity, the Fed and the Treasury rescued the
financial system but also forced it, through stress tests and new rules, to
reform. The result is that U.S. banks are in much better shape than their
European counterparts. Consumers have also been paying off debt, thanks to a
series of tax cuts and other forms of relief.
A
McKinsey
& Co. study of crises in recent decades found that the United States is
mirroring the pattern of countries with the strongest recoveries. It noted that
“Debt in the financial sector relative to GDP has fallen back to levels last
seen in 2000, before the credit bubble. US households have reduced their debt
relative to disposable income by 15 percentage points, more than in any other
country; at this rate, they could reach sustainable debt levels in two years or
so.”
Kenneth
Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, the leading experts on financial crises, argue
that the United States is performing better than most countries in similar
circumstances. U.S. consumer
confidence is at its highest levels since September 2007.
Every
recovery since World War II has been led by housing, except this one. But
finally, housing is back. Two weeks ago, Jamie
Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, declared that housing had
turned the corner and predicted that, as a consequence, economic growth in 2013
would be so strong the Fed would have to raise interest rates. Given his firm’s
vast mortgage portfolio, Dimon has a unique perspective on housing, and he is a
smart man who knows that the Fed has promised to keep rates flat for three
years. Last week, data
on new housing starts confirmed Dimon’s optimism.
U.S.
corporations have also bounced back. Corporate profits are at an all-time high
as a percentage of gross domestic product, and companies have $1.7 trillion in
cash on their balance sheets. The key to long-term recoveries from recessions
is reform and restructuring, and U.S. businesses have been quick to respond.
Government
intervention assisted this process with banks, auto companies and even in
housing. Romney is correct to point out that the Obama administration
supervised a managed bankruptcy in Detroit — forcing the kind of reform a
private equity firm would have (though, crucially, providing the cash that a
President Romney would not have). The Economist magazine, which
initially opposed that bailout, reversed itself because of the manner in which
General Motors and Chrysler were made to cut costs and become competitive.
And
then there is America’s energy revolution, which is also bringing back
manufacturing. U.S. exports, which have climbed 45 percent in the past four
years, are at their highest level ever as a percentage of GDP.
All
these good signs come with caveats. Europe continues to weaken. The fiscal
cliff looms ominously. But the fact remains, compared with the rest of the
industrialized world and the arc of previous post-bubble recoveries, the United
States is ready for a robust revival. This is partly because of the dynamism of
the U.S. economy but also because of the timely and intelligent actions of the
Fed and the Obama administration.
The
next president will reap the rewards of work already done. So it would be the
ultimate irony if, having strongly criticized almost every measure that
contributed to these positive tends, Mitt Romney ends up presiding over what he
would surely call “the Romney recovery.”
