Indian Heroes: Mayawati for Queen?

Potential Indian prime minister, Mayawati, the Dalit (untouchable) Regina: To Mayawati and her mentor, Kanshi Ram, goes the credit of finding a strategy that allowed Dalits to parlay their numbers and position in the lower echelons of the state structure into real political power. Today, BSP supremo Mayawati wields power not as a subordinate member of a coalition led by privileged groups, but as the head of an electorally potent coalition of diverse social groups with Dalits in the vanguard.

Assembling a list of 60 people to represent sixty years of the Republic of India is a kind of indoor game, fundamentally no more important than arguing about the ten best Hindi films of the sixties.

But the nation-state is a charismatic beast: it invests everything it touches, even the trivial business of list-making, with significance. When our jurors sat down to the impossible business of finding sixty names to stand in for the nation, there was agreement, argument, accommodation.

Sometimes there were differences of opinion that couldn't be reconciled. And this despite the fact that the three jurors agreed, before they started, to exclude villains from the list, no matter how historically significant they were. See their choices>>