Saint or cynic?

As the birthday approaches of Uttar Pradesh's chief minister, who is known by the single name Mayawati, her party workers are fanning out throughout the vast Indian state to ask shopkeepers, traders, civil servants and businessmen for 'donations'. The money will be used to celebrate her birthday, next Thursday - an occasion that Ms Mayawati, an 'untouchable' (known, these days, as dalits) uses to display lavishness and extravagance. It is her way of telling the upper castes that the boot is finally on the other foot.

For the first time in the history of the Hindu caste system, Brahmin and other high-caste civil servants in the Uttar Pradesh government will have to gather around to sing Happy Birthday to a woman whose caste is deemed so 'polluting' that its members are still refused entry to some temples.

It's a delicious revenge which the diminutive Ms Mayawati, 52, clearly relishes and which her followers enjoy vicariously. But, this year, the planned birthday celebrations have brought her name into disrepute.

On December 24, a government engineer, Manoj Gupta, refused to hand over the large sum demanded by Shekhar Tiwari, a senior leader of Ms Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). Gupta was later found dead.

Gupta's family have accused Tiwari, now under arrest, of murdering the engineer because he refused to pay. The controversy has become a huge embarrassment that has put the normally belligerent Ms Mayawati on the defensive.

'Who says the money was for my birthday? This is just a conspiracy by my rivals with the help of high-caste people in the media,' she said angrily at a recent press conference.