On 15th January 2019, a young man was standing beside his aunt and her new-found ally Akhilesh Yadav, on the grand political stage of Lucknow. That young man was seen again in pictures of his aunt receiving Tejaswi Yadav. These were both preliminary chai dates before the Maha Gathbandhan marriage.

Ms. Mayawati introduced him as Akash Anand, son of her brother Anand, till 2017 a Vice President in the BSP, the party of which she is designated Supremo. Ms. Mayawati doesn't have a legal heir per se, like another unmarried peer Ms. Mamta Banerjee. She protested that Akash was in the BSP only to learn by her side, asserting that "If some casteist and anti-Dalit section of media has a problem with that then let it be. Our party doesn't care."

However, to all intents and purposes, the Golden Age of The Nephew is upon us, the hapless electorate of this great democracy. 

Akash has studied in Delhi, where Mayawati was born, raised and where she cut her teeth in Dalit politics, and then, London. For the past few years, he's been assisting his father in their family business. While rumors of monumental corruption and grumbling against nepotism drove Anand Kumar's political fortunes underground, his son seemed to shine bright. 

In his petrol-blue suit, Akash looked every bit the political dynast before the transformational compulsions of electoral politics. That is how both sons of Lalu Prasad looked before they discovered their roots in rural Bihar, and after they had been kicked out of a few discotheques in Delhi. However, in one key matter, he stood apart from the current lot of sons and nephews. To viz., his glorious fur-lined red tartan slippers with interlocking Gs, which every casual observer recognizes as the sign of the high-end Italian fashion brand, Gucci. 

Now. If you take a look around the Indian political landscape, you'll find men and women who have spent a lifetime sucking the coffers of the Indian exchequer drier than the leather on the outside of a Gucci shoe. These men and women are staggeringly powerful. They might have a first cousin directly involved in the massacre of the royal family of Nepal. They may have caused a few accidents on the roads, in the skies, in trains or in hotel rooms themselves. They may have made unthinkable amounts of money selling state secrets, smuggling ancient art and artefacts, made cuts off defense deals and kidnappings, misused state machinery to redirect entire flights for their kids. In other words, Indian politicians have unlimited power, very little to no accountability as to how they wield it, and whispers of oceans of wealth.

But. They all look like they bought their shabby, unironed, occasionally even torn, clothes off the 70% Sale racks in Khadi Gramodyog. Their hideous PT shoes won't pass muster at any soirée in the area codes they inhabit. The women may wear handspun, organic cotton sarees off the loom, or stockpile karakul shawls. But that's written down to class and taste, as long as the colors are muted, the necklines demure. The mien, then, is one of the extremely rich doing the general public a favor by dressing like them. But never to be mistaken as one of them. 

Indeed, Mr. Yadav, whose bungalow in his ancestral village cost ₹200 crores, was dressed in plain white cheesecloth and unpolished Rexine shoes. Ms. Mayawati, whose favorite on-stage accessory is a massive garland made entirely of crisp notes, looked like a regular middle-class, primary school teacher. In that crowd, why would the nouveau prince dare wear Gucci?! 

As a reasonable follower of fashion magazines and websites, I can see his inspiration was from the several achingly hip cool people in the West who have been wearing these slippers on the runways and red carpets with slim Gucci suits. The slippers are a sort of cross between Gucci's famous louche loafers and the open-heel jootis all of Lajpat Nagar likes to rock. It's a *lewk* as they say in fashion language, and one has to belong to that world to be able to carry it off.

Young Akash is neither a fashionista nor a media and entertainment personality. He's a wannabe politician in a third world country, of its possibly poorest state, who has to convince enough of his caste allies to vote for his party. He has to assure the electorate of freebies and reservation, his allies that they are free to help themselves to state revenue (or state borrowings), and his family that he will be a Tejaswi, not a Tej Pratap. 

How do the Guccis fit in this story?! If anything, they show he favors Italian brands, unlike Mr. Gandhi who goes for Burberry and NorthFace when he's not on poverty-tours around the country. 

Well, here was someone brave enough to openly flaunt his wealth while hoping to make a name in the caste cesspool of hinterland politics. This foolhardy youth was unashamedly wearing a thousand dollar shoes, because they screamed insider fashion knowledge, prestige and money, the halo effect he was going for. The other millennials he hangs with, would have loved it and he didn't care what the fuddy-duddies thought. 

But he ought to have known there would be blowback. Because let's not deceive ourselves. We are by and large forgiving of the private lives of leaders in politics and other fields unlike, say, Americans. We're forgiving of shameful amounts of public loot, corruption, a criminal past. BUT, we want our leaders and public figures to LOOK poor, appropriately poor.

Educated Indians made much mockery of this get up - combined with his barely-concealed arrogance, floppy hair, and open neck shirt, he seemed to be going for a Bruce Bigelow than bekhauf bhateeja. They largely decried his lack of taste, of class, of wearing slippers with a suit, of no sense of occasion-appropriate dressing. They pointed out the hypocrisy of so-called Messiahs of Dalit politics actually looting and fooling the same folk they pretended to protect. 

As this conversation played out, I realized what was happening. Political image makers in India know that the electorate likes poor-looking leaders. This *slip-up* must be covered up quickly somehow. Readers were handing out the dynast his first media sob story to cover up the sartorial suicide. A foreign-educated, non-upper caste youth (insert comparisons with Baba Saheb here) tries high fashion on his dad's money, not the public's, and gets skewered by snotty middle-class, largely upper-caste Indians. 

Can non-upper caste kids not wear high fashion, headlines and anchors will scream. Because there are no two words more embarrassing to regular hard-working, tax-paying Indians than elitism and casteism, they will flap about in distress.

No one exploits this distress better than landed gentry like Yogendra Yadav, or Ms. Mayawati. Behan ji has survived in this (quite literally for her) cut-throat business by manipulating emotions, aspirations and guilt to tremendous electoral advantage. Sending an airplane to fetch her sandals from Mumbai, to getting her security detail to polish her shoes in full public view, to getting civil administrators obsequiously kowtowing to her, she's a master in the art of displaying power. Her electorate, supporters and backers in the hinterland see it as *Shakti Pradarshan* and ambition. She's been called casteist slurs in newspapers at the behest of her OBC foes-turned-friends in the SP, her private life torn open for scurrilous scrutiny. Through it, ugly handbag on arm, dupatta at neck, shiny sateen salwar-kurta in place as an armor, she has cast her image and brand in sandstone. She has stood her ground as a self-styled *Dalit Ki Beti*, owning the title of Behan Ji, the eternal sister figure to be protected and heeded and followed. She has used both to command vengeful power among hard core patriarchy. 

Ms. Mayawati probably doesn't understand nor care about Gucci, but she does know what to do once clothes start getting top billing over work. 

Since his aunt has reportedly ticked him off about this display, I fully expect to see young Akash campaign by her side in barely ironed cheesecloth for the Lok Sabha Maha-Gathbandhan. He will be looking like a sophomore version of Mr. Gandhi, Yuvaraj Scindia, Messrs. Yadav, and Mr. Abdullah, and a marginally less socialist version of Abhishek Banerjee, the Other Nephew. If he keeps his thousand-dollar slippers out of sight, we won't mind seeing him wearing massive garlands of crisp notes over shabby clothes. The fault then, lies not with the brand, the lewk, the loot. It lies with us.

More Indians are breaking into the middle and upper middle class, and spend on clothes, eating out, foreign vacations and fancier cars. Yet, we don't want public figures, who have risen above their circumstance and overcome systemic apathy to get success, riches or power, to forget their roots. We can take a fifty-year old dynast rumored to be among the richest citizens in the world, in torn clothes. But we demand that a humble man who has overcome every adversity through sheer purusharth to become the prime minister of this country, should always look like he never forgot his circumstance.