More Indian Female leaders

More Indian women taking the lead

A DECADE ago when India's government moved a Bill to reserve a third of the seats in Parliament for women, politician Sharad Yadav sneered that the move would benefit only those with short hair. It was a reference to the city-bred in a nation where women have long cherished their tresses.

Last week, as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's administration announced plans to move quickly on the long-delayed Bill, Mr Yadav, whose party draws support from India's teeming backward castes, threatened to drink poison in the manner of Socrates, who was sentenced to death by poisoning for his beliefs.

Too bad, Mr Yadav. Given the startling mandate thrown up by the recent election, the ruling Congress-led alliance is no longer dependent on the support of parties - like his - that oppose theWomen's Reservation Bill. And so, a vision once set out by the late Rajiv Gandhi and nowaggressively pushed by his widow, Congress Party chief Sonia Gandhi, will probably materialise within a few months.

Once the Bill is passed, a third of the elected MPs will be women, starting from the 2014 election - as will half the office bearers of allfuture village bodies and city municipal councils. The proposed legislation - backed by the main opposition group, theBharatiya Janata Party (BJP) - underscores the clamour for givingwomen a bigger say in national affairs, after centuries ofdiscrimination that have kept them behind closed doors and theirfaces hidden by the edges of their saris. In the recent polls, a record 59 women MPs were elected to the 543-seat Lower House. Once the Bill is enacted, India will have, by statute, the highest proportion of women holding public office in any country ofthe world.

Two years ago, Mrs Pratibha Patil was appointed India's first womanpresident in a Congress-inspired move. And last week, Mrs MeiraKumar, a Congress MP from the lowest social caste, became the firstwoman Speaker of the Lower House. For the next five years, this powerful legislative chamber of the world's noisiest and largest democracy will resound with cries of 'Madam Speaker', where only 'MrSpeaker, sir' was heard for six decades.

To be sure, neither Mrs Sonia Gandhi, President Patil nor SpeakerKumar could be said to have risen to their current positions on merit alone.

Much of Mrs Gandhi's popularity is founded on her position as thewidow and daughter-in-law of assassinated prime ministers. Mrs Patilis close to the Gandhi household and owes her position to Mrs Gandhi. Mrs Kumar is the daughter of the late Congress stalwart Jagjivan Ram, a Dalit politician widely recognised as having been a success in everyministry he ran, from railways to water resources and defence. 'Barring striking exceptions where dynastic charisma is seen to matter more than anything else, most women politicians have found it difficult to rise within party hierarchies,' said economist and socialcommentator Jayati Ghosh. Still, she noted, once women do become established as party leaders, another peculiarly Indian characteristic tends to surface - the unquestioning acceptance by the largely male party rank and file ofthe leader's decisions. She cited Tamil Nadu's AIADMK party, led by former screen actress Jayaraman Jayalalithaa, as well as West Bengal's Trinamool Congress,led by maverick woman politician Mamata Banerjee, now minister forrailways.Even so, there are spunky women politicians who are entirely self made.

Take the feisty Mrs Sushma Swaraj. Now the BJP's deputy leader inthe Lower House, she is seen as a future party chief. In Congress, Mrs Renuka Chowdhury, who was in charge of tourism under the previous government before taking over women's affairs,was known in her student days in Bangalore as the only woman toride around town on a motorcycle. However, she lost her seat inAndhra Pradesh in the latest election. Nevertheless, even for the toughest woman, there is no denying thatpolitics will remain a hard game. Apart from the long hours politicians keep, at the ground level, particularly in the hinter land, India's politics tend to be brutish. And the political landscape is almost uniformlycorrupt - which means even the brightest candidates need to deploy large sums of cash if they are to stand a chance of winning. 'Crime and corruption are bigger deterrents to the entry of women into politics than patriarchal attitudes or any other factor,' social rightsactivist Madhu Kishwar said in a recent interview. Anecdotal evidence suggests that women, once empowered, tend to make more useful decisions.

This is particularly so at the level of village councils, where the key issues of the day might be something as simple as where to dig a well for common use or to locate a primary school. In Delhi, Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit's popularity as an efficientadministrator has helped Congress win control of the metropolis for athird straight term.Still, Rajasthan was notorious for corruption under the BJP's MrsVijayaraje Scindia, as is Uttar Pradesh under its current Chief Minister,Ms Mayawati Kumar. Three quarters of a century ago, when Mahatma Gandhi began pulling women into the Indian freedom movement, he gave them major rolesin the civil disobedience programmes targeted at ousting the British. One of these veterans was Ms Sarala Devi, who in 1931 led amovement for a separate Women's Congress because she feltCongress was assigning women 'the position of law-breakers, not lawmakers'. Seventy-eight years later, the party of independence is poised to correct that imbalance.