PINKsandstone elephants stand to attention on granite plinths. Fountains leap, as more elephants squirt jets of water. Within a huge dome stand sculptures of prominent dalits, formerly known as untouchables. Most striking is a hefty bronze of the woman who ordered the place built: Mayawati, chief minister of Uttar Pradesh (UP), shown clutching a giant handbag.

A young visitor, craning his neck, suggests tourists will crowd from afar to see all this. Many already have. Ms Mayawati herself visited on October 14th, hurling purple rose petals to inaugurate the dalit tribute park in Noida, near Delhi, in UP's western tip. She brought 40,000 supporters for the night to celebrate their identity.

Opponents carp at her splurging 6.8 billion rupees ($139m) on a few acres of grass, some saplings and walls of self-aggrandising stonework. She retorts, with some justification, that upper-caste Indian leaders, such as the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, have parks and museums aplenty. And, she says, since dalits have been abused by their countrymen for centuries, there is immeasurable value in gestures to lift their caste pride.

In four spells as chief minister she has done plenty of that. Several thousand statues have gone up, mostly of herself, of former dalit leaders and of elephants—the symbol of her Bahujan Samaj Party. Her backers are largely the lowest-caste,who vote by identity and relish success achieved by one of their own. With over 40m dalits in UP alone, Mayawati's political strategy has looked shrewd.

But her opponents, sensing a recent shift away from voting by caste in neighbouring Bihar state, are hoping otherwise. They see the lives of many dalits changing fast, especially for those flocking to urban areas like Noida to do casual labour, shedding jobs as sweepers or tanners that once defined them as outcasts. Such economic mobility may weaken their caste identity, as could better education. And more than half of dalit families in some poor parts of UP depend for their money on remittances from urban migrants. So plenty of voters may yet come to care more about development, misrule and corruption than about dalit solidarity.

If so, they have much to grumble over. The state, home to huge numbers of poor, runs a big deficit, has wretched roads and public services. While Ms Mayawati partied in the park, television news showed underfunded health workers in eastern UP struggling to combat an outbreak of encephalitis that has recently killed several hundred people, mostly children. Now the Central Bureau of Investigation hints that it will at last prosecute Ms Mayawati for corruption over evidence of huge growth in her personal assets.

Voters will soon have their say, as Ms Mayawati must call state elections within months. Since UP is huge—with 200m people, it is as populous as Brazil—these are treated as test-runs for national elections, which must follow by 2014. The UP vote is wide open. Ms Mayawati vies to be a national figure, perhaps even India's first dalit prime minister. Rivals seek to split off dalit sub-castes. Rahul Gandhi, a Congress Party scion, campaigns among all the state's castes, including dalits.

Beneath the changes and the politicking, caste still has a firm hold on politics. Harsh Mander, a social activist who has surveyed ongoing untouchability, talks of “dismaying” caste divisions. He cites a study of ten states which found dalit children fed separately from their peers in over a third of rural schools. Statistics suggest dalit poverty, infant mortality and illiteracy are much worse than the average.

There are more hopeful studies, though. One of them, designed and run by dalit researchers including Chandra Bhan Prasad, who works for the University of Pennsylvania, suggests “huge” changes in dalit social life in UP. The researchers tracked stark new consumer, dietary, grooming and work habits among dalits in two districts. In one, where only 3% of dalits had used toothpaste in 1990, 82% did so by 2007. Those who ate tomatoes rose from 3% to 57%. In another area only 23% of dalits reported sitting with guests of other castes at weddings in 1990, but, by 2007, 91% did so. The studies are now being repeated in five more areas,

Seemingly trivial, such trends in fact describe a rapid weakening of caste identity, says Mr Prasad. He praises the arrival of “caste-neutral” jobs such as delivering pizzas, and says visible consumerism that shows wealth is quickly becoming more important as a sign of status than caste. “You can be any caste you like, but if you don't have a mobile phone you are nobody”, he says. If so, pink elephants and bronze statues may prove less effective in getting out the dalit vote.