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[September 3, 2003](Reproduced from Femina July 1999)You can count them on fingertips-though they wouldn’t appreciate it. Margaret Thatcher is the glorious West’s only contribution (though Hillary Rodham just might make the grade one day; more likely if she drops the Clinton from her handle). Two West Indians- the current president of Guyana, Janet Jagan; American born widow of the legendary freedom fighter and former president of Indian origin, Cheddi Jagan. Mary Eugenia Charles, prime minister of the island-state of Dominica for 13 years. And Golda Meir of Israel, an Asian country which baulks at describing itself thus. All other women heads
of state or government have been South Asians: Indira Gandhi; Sirimavo
Bandaranaike and now, her daughter Chandrika Kumaratunga; Benazir Bhutto
and Begum Khalida Zia and Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh. It would be only
fair to add to this roll call of high distinction the name of Aung San Suu
Kyi. This, though the Myanmar army has held her under house arrest, not
letting her take up the Prime Minister’s post after her party won a
convincing majority in the elections of a few years ago, the first in that
country in decades. Potentially, there is another woman prime minister
waiting in the wings: Sonia Gandhi. The election this coming September
will tell whether her time has come. It is a list which
makes most South Asians blush with pride and redden with embarrassment at
the same time, for though South Asian women far outstrip the
political performance of women anywhere else in the world, all owe
something of the heights they have scaled to the families they were born
or married into. What does this tell us about women in South Asian
politics and politics in South Asia? Put bluntly, it tells
us that democracy in South Asia is a matter of right womb or the right
bed. Indira Gandhi was Nehru’s daughter (she was assassinated in
1984); Sirimavo is the widow of Solomon Bandaranaike (assassinated in
1958) and Chandrika is her daughter (and the widow of
actor-turned-politician Vijaya Kumaratunga, assassinated in 1990); Benazir
is of course, the daughter of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was successively Chief
Martial Law Administrator, President and Prime Minister of Pakistan
(executed in 1979); Khalida is a widow of Zia-ur-Rahman (assassinated in
1980); Sheikh Hasina, the daughter of Sheikh Mujib (assassinated in 1975);
and Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of independent Burma’s first prime
minister (assassinated in 1947). Potential PM Sonia Gandhi is, of course,
the daughter-in-law and widow respectively, of two assassinated prime
ministers. Yes, they are all daughters or wives of political leaders of
high eminence, but related to politics, all of them, by the tragedy of
political assassination. It takes great courage to take up the reigns of politics in the shadow of assassinations and live through grief and personal sorrow that’s read about in distant impersonal headlines. Besides, not everyone has it in them to live in imminent danger. None of them reached
the heights they did because they were forced upon an unwilling people.
They may have become candidates for high office because their
respective parties saw them as the potential electoral trump card, but
they got themselves sworn in only on receiving the mandate of the people,
usually with overwhelming majorities. More over, all most of them have
suffered reversals-at the hands of the same electorate that voted them to
office. Some have clawed their way back to the people’s favour; some are
awaiting their opportunity to do so. But the swings and roundabouts of
their political careers hardly bare out the thesis of ‘dynastic’
politics; theirs is much more the stuff of high-wire democratic politics. Thus the Indira who did not succeed her father warded off feint of her main competitor, Moraji Desai, to get the Syndicates nomination on the sudden death of Lal Bhadur Shastri in Thashkent. She was then thrown out of the Congress by the Syndicate that had brought her in, went on to worst them in electoral battle in 1971 saw herself utterly routed in 1977, made a miraculous recovery to the premiership in 1980, after once again thrown out of her party, and was then assassinated as she prepared for an electoral battle once more. To suggest that all there was to Indira Gandhi is that she was the ‘gungi gudiya’ who happened to be the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru would be to trivialize things greatly. Four over four long decades, Sirimavo has been now in, now out; Benazir has been in and out, her husband is rotting in a Karachi jail and she herself is in exile. Khalida has been in once and then out, and is now bidding her time. Hasina’s is a saga of indomitable courage-it took twenty years from the massacre of her entire family, 12-year old Russell included, to her assuming her father’s mantle. Suu Kyi’s is, perhaps, the most inspiring epic of grit and bravery in the annals of contemporary history. Sonia Gandhi goes into the electoral fray haunted by the need to protect her children from the worst of dynastic vengeance. It takes unusual
strength of character, unusual qualities of leadership, determination,
patriotism and political skills to make ones self worthy of one’s
political inheritance. Inheritance gives you a boost, but inner strength
is required to sustain the ascension. Chandrika’s brother, Anura,
is not the leader of his party. Bhutto had two sons-one prisoned, the
other murdered like a dog on the road-neither with what their
sister had and has. Maneka is the other widow, the other daughter-in-law,
a girl of many interests and varied talents-but high-flying politics is
not one of them, which is why she languishes, albeit as a minister in a
camp every fibre of her being must loath. It is not dynastic
politics that propels these women to the heights they attain; it is
democratic politics that takes them there. And if the repeated call to the
women of eminent families is to be faulted, the fault lies with our
democracy that so restricts openings for women in our public life that the
women who make the grade tend, for the most part, to be well connected.
The Geeta Mukherjee Ammendment will go far towards rectifying this,
but I am skeptical about the prospects of promoting gender justice through
gender injustice. If, therefore, the 84th Amendment does not
get through, I suggest double member constituencies which will ensure that
half the House is made up of women without men being cast out merely
because they are men. That is the way forward.
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