The first woman elected to head a Muslim state was also a Southasian. The two-time Prime Minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto (1953-2007), was first sworn in when she was barely 35 and was assassinated during a campaign that could have made her head of government for the third time.
In Bangladesh, politics has revolved around two “Battling Begums” for decades. Leader of the Awami League Sheikh Hasina Wazed is the current Prime Minister, and the leader of the opposition is Begum Khaleda Zia, Chairperson of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and another two-term Prime Minister. Between them, they control the destiny of the eighth most populous country in the world.
Though Indira Gandhi (1917-1984) once lost a parliamentary election in 1977 after a short flirtation with an authoritarian regime, she remained centre-stage throughout her political life in what is claimed to be the biggest democracy in the world. Her daughter-in-law has preferred a low-key, though decisive nonetheless, role of a patron. Sonia Gandhi is the all-powerful President of the ruling Indian National Congress Party and the de facto ruler of India even though the country has a woman de jure head of state and a politically inconsequential technocrat as the head of government.
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Nepal is arguably the most politically conscious country of Southasia. It is the oldest nation-state of the region, got the very first written constitution of sorts in the form of Muluki Ain compiled on the orders of Jang Bahadur in mid-nineteenth century, and has flirted with at least seven supreme laws of the land since then. But somehow no female prime minister has flown the national flag in Kathmandu. The last woman that ever came closest to reaching Baluwatar was Deputy Prime Minister Shailaja Acharya. Unfortunately, she failed to keep up with the aspirations of ordinary Nepalis and had to accept an inglorious exit from a tumultuous life in politics.
Sujata Koirala does not seem to have learnt any lessons from the experiences of her late-lamented cousin. She probably thinks that a Benazir or Hasina model of politics can ensure her ascendancy in politics, despite some hiccups. However, a chosen legatee giving continuity to ancestral politics is now passé. Experiences in neighboring India show that role models for future female leaders are Jayalalitha Amma, Mayawati Behenji, and Mamata Didi, rather than Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, Vasundhara Raje Scindia, or Maneka Gandhi. With so much injustice in Southasian societies, the poor of the region need warriors to fight for their rights, not dowagers determined to maintain family traditions, or princes desirous of giving continuity to their fathers’ vocation.
Lone warriors
Jayaram Jayalalithaa is Amma (Mother) to her supporters and Puratchi Thalaivi (Revolutionary Leader) to her followers. A former film star, she had the courage of conviction to remain outside wedlock and yet inherit the political mantle of her male mentor. Even though born to an Ayenger Brahmin parents, she has created an image of being a protector and promoter of so-called backward castes.
Mayawati Behenji (Respectable Sister) is the first Dalit head of government—whether of the states or the center—of the Indian Republic. At age 39, she became the youngest politician to be elected chief minister in strategic and populous Uttar Pradesh, a heartland province that has traditionally played critical role in government formation at the central level. In an attempt to right the wrongs of at least 5,000 years of institutionalized discrimination of Hindu society, she fights back with the aplomb of a newly crowned princess, to the chagrin of her upper-caste and comfortable class detractors. Happily unmarried, she took pride in her special relationship with the late Kanshiram, founder of the Dalit Bahujan Samaj Party. Astride the elephant—the electoral symbol of her party—Behenji revels in her arriviste image and loves to annoy the cognoscenti, as it helps her win and keep the support of the downtrodden.
Mamata Didi (Elder Sister) was needed to challenge the staid and old order of Marxist Bhadraloks (Genteel Folks) in West Bengal. Mamata Banerji is short of built—hardly five feet—but her political stature is taller than her cabinet colleagues in New Delhi from where she runs the railway ministry like a private fiefdom. She dresses in rough cotton sari and wears plastic sandals but makes executives in designer suits cower in fear. Contents of her trademark jhola (a cotton sling bag)—the list of nominations for assembly elections, petitions for favors, and schedules of her whirlwind tours—are believed to make or mar political careers in what is perhaps one of the most politically sensitive states of India. Over the last few years, Didi has successfully courted the Bengali intelligentsia, befriended Maoists, and opposed libertarian economic policies of the state government, and challenged Marxists with all her might. The poor adore her, and she in turn revels in her role as a Didi to all. A western journalist once asked her what she did for entertainment. Predictably, she was intrigued and answered back with a counter-enquiry, “Entertainment?” Mamata Banerji too remains wedded to an idea rather than to a person, and leads the crowded life of a single woman.
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These three lone women warriors have little in common. Jayalalitha Amma leads the lifestyle of a film star. Mayawati Behenji dresses in silk and gold, loves to bark orders at bureaucrats and never bothers to pay attention to her critics in the media. Mamata Didi has carefully cultivated the image of a street fighter, and has her eyes and mind focused on the Chief Minister’s chair in Calcutta. Yet, the common thread of sisterhood binds them together. Even more importantly, they have managed to raise the flag of revolt wherever they are and whatever their politics. The future is a different country, but aspiring female leaders of Southasia need to learn to challenge the status quo and speak against institutional injustices of the entrenched social order of the region.
The image of Jayalalitha Amma is that of a benevolent Laxmi, sitting atop the wise owl as usual, for the poor and toiling masses of Tamilnadu. Mayawati Behenji is the avenging Durga astride an elephant, which has made her upper-caste opponents meekly accept the fact that the pachyderm is actually Lord Ganesha, embodying the virtues of the Hindu troika—“Haathi nahi, Ganesh Hai; Brahma, Bishnu, Mahesh hai.” Mamata Didi rides the Royal Bengal tiger of militant politics to tame lapsed-Marxist wolves on her home turf. Their Nepali version will have to be all those rolled into one in order to cleanse Nepal of the twin menace of mindless Maoism and heartless Hindu orthodoxy, both with an element of reckless globalism.
The new Manjushri
Legends have it that Manjushri was a sage from the North who helped drain the Kathmandu Valley and made it fit for human habitation. He may have been Mahadev himself in mufti, taking a leisurely break from his ice-cold Mansarovar hideout at the height of winter. The new Manjushri would have to be a female to drain this impossibly filthy and putrid capital city. There is no need to argue over the name of the new avatar—in Tibetan tradition, names are gender-neutral, and Manjushri can be Shiva or Parvati. It better be a Parvati this time.
Unfortunately, Comrade Parvati, or Hisila Yami to non-Maoist Nepalis, fails to make the grade required of a ferocious avenger. She is too proper and urbane to mouth obscenities and drag obstinate Bahuns of the ruling oligarchy from their air-conditioned SUVs out into the streets. Sujata has neither the sophistication of Hisila nor the erudition of Sahana Pradhan to be a slow but steady social reformer. Being a lady with a branded purse in hand and in a tearing hurry to reach to the top with the help of a political escalator, she is unfit to be a revolutionary in the mold of Mamata Didi. Come to think of it, doesn’t she take offence when her admirers call her Suji Di? Elitism is so pronounced in that address that it appears to be designed to keep her off the great unwashed masses that make up the majority of this country.
Chitralekha Yadav functioned admirably as the Chairperson of the “Parliament in the Street” protests preceding the April Uprising in 2006, but she is far too decorous to be a challenger to the regime. The other Yadav woman in the Constituent Assembly, Renu of the Madheshi Janadhikar Forum Nepal, has the ability to stir the pot, but she lacks the political fuel to heat up the hearth—party-hopping is not conducive to the evolution of a revolutionary personality.
The chattering classes of Kathmandu are going to hate it, but Nepal actually needs a new Nani Maiya Dahal, or at least someone like former Minister of State for Agriculture and Cooperatives Karima Begum who boldly courted controversy by slapping a Chief District Officer. Which one of us at one time or another has not had a very strong urge to slap an obdurate government official in this country? It needs a woman of courage to bring the dysfunctional bureaucracy to its senses.
Ramrati Ram of CPN (UML) had the potential of becoming a Nepali Mayawati, but she became a victim of the scourge that has devoured political activism—NGOfication. What the Balkhu Palace badly needs is a woman leader capable of lighting firecrackers below the thrones of party oligarchs and putting some kauso plants (stinging nettles) in the starched labeda-suruwals of quintessential status quo party leaders. Sapana Pradhan Malla is capable of holding her own in the boardroom negotiations, courtroom battles, parliamentary debates, or international consultations. However, she does not have what it takes to fire the imagination of those who neither care nor know the meaning of the elusive word called Sambidhan or Constitution. They have been yearning for a revolution for decades, and all that they have got so far are lousy Mao P-caps and blood red Che T-shirts.
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Nepal is desperately waiting for woman warriors. This country has become too complex for ageing Hindu males who consider it their divine right to replace each other with little or no perceptible change in their mindset. Take the plunge, Manushi Yami Bhattarai! Get out of the deadly embrace of donor-prescribed politics of compromises, Ram Kumari Jhakri! Show your presence in the Constituent Assembly, Kiran Yadav! Better still, go and challenge the armed groups in Dhanusha-Mahottari.
Nepalis have a long tradition of Kumari worship, and virginity in politics has nothing to do with one’s conjugal status.
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