Bronze, Concrete and Debt: Mayawati\'s Legacy to the Yadav Administration

Strdel/Agence France-Presse - Getty ImagesA 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. May awati 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 carr ying 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 somew here 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 c urrent 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.