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India’s Political Women: Progress or Window Dressing?
December 4, 2003
By AMY WALDMAN
REHTI, India - Uma Bharti emerged from her helicopter in
the saffron robes that mark her as a Hindu holy woman,
pushing through a crowd that bent to touch her feet. She
berated a party worker for poor directions - "How can you
be so irresponsible?" - then drove to town and ascended a
small stage.
There, as usual, she was almost the only woman in a crowd
of men. Oblivious to her singularity, she delivered a
gripping speech in a raspy voice, invoking the Hindu
scriptures whose recitation first defined her public
persona. But her goal here was not to edify the spirit, but
to win the vote.
Ms. Bharti, 44, one of the most well-known women in the
Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which leads
India's national coalition government, is her party's
candidate for chief minister in assembly elections in
Madhya Pradesh whose results will be announced Thursday.
She is one of three women selected to contest for chief
minister in four states that went to the polls this week.
The elections, which pit the Janata Party against the
Congress Party in four major states in India's Hindi
heartland, are seen as a bellwether of both parties'
prospects for general elections next year.
Ms. Bharti, and this year's elections, represent the latest
chapter in the evolving, often contradictory story of women
in Indian politics.
India has produced strong female leaders, notably Indira
Gandhi, and this year's vivid characters are among them.
But despite the women at the top of their party's tickets,
the feminine cast to these elections does not extend very
deep. And the message about the role of women tends to hue
closely to tradition, even in cases where the messenger
does not.
Ms. Bharti, for example, who exit polls suggest will win,
became a preacher at 6, defying the traditional role of
mother and homemaker allotted to Indian women, not least by
the Hindu nationalist movement she represents.
The women selected to lead their parties' campaigns this
year "are filling roles neatly carved out for them in an
establishment that continues to be male dominated," said
Yogendra Yadav, a political analyst with the Center for the
Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi.
He said that in this state, there are only 52 women among
407 candidates for the two major parties. The proportions
are roughly the same in the other three states.
In the current Parliament, only 8 percent of the Janata
Party's members are women, and only 11 percent of Congress
Party members are women. A bill to reserve a third of the
seats for women has long stalled - held up, its advocates
say, by the men who hold the votes to pass it but also want
to hold onto their seats. The problem is not that women do
not win elections, Mr. Yadav said. It is that the parties
do not let them contest.
That was the experience of Bindu Raj Modi, who left the
Congress Party this year because she felt she was being
denied the opportunities she deserved. She is an ambitious,
gregarious and self-made politician, who was married off
just shy of 16 but, more than two decades later, has found
her public self.
She is now running on the ticket of the Rashtriya Janata
Dal, a party based in Bihar with almost no base here, but
one that welcomed her. "Even in my second life I would not
have gotten a ticket in Congress," she said.
The problem was not the voters, she said, who in fact
seemed to think women were less corrupt. But big parties
simply did not want to give tickets to women, she said.
When a woman entered politics party leaders started
questioning her character.
Wendy Singer, a history professor at Kenyon College who
specializes in women in Indian politics, said that many
women frustrated by the "ticket ceiling" simply went into
other kinds of political, or even social, work.
The question, she said, was whether a decade-old law that
reserved one-third of the seats on village councils for
women would change the status quo, creating a larger pool
of women with the connections to run for state assemblies
and Parliament.
Unlike many women in Indian politics who entered on the
names of their fathers or husbands - Indira Gandhi, who was
Jawaharlal Nehru's daughter, among them - Ms. Bharti, the
Bharatiya Janata Party candidate, rose on her own.
A village-born child prodigy, she is more intelligent than
educated, a populist who says she feels more comfortable
with the common people than the political class.
"In my opinion, I am a very ordinary person, having very
ordinary desires," she said.
She credits "God's grace and the people's support" for her
rise. Others credit a tide of anti-Muslim rhetoric she
unleashed in the late 1980's and early 1990's, in a
flamboyant mix of piety and hatred. Hindu nationalist
leaders relied on her powerful, often rabid speeches to
rally crowds. She helped lead the destruction of a 16th
century mosque at Ayodhya, which many Hindus believe is the
birthplace of Lord Ram, and is still facing charges in the
case.
Her charisma partly accounts for her party's selection of
her as a prospective chief minister. She is also a member
of a lower caste, an important voting bloc in the state.
But Arun Jaitley, one of her party's top political
strategists, said that the party also believed Ms. Bharti
could neutralize the Congress Party's traditional 3 percent
to 4 percent advantage among women.
Ms. Bharti's status as a sannyasin - she took a vow of
renunciation in 1992 - has allowed her to evade many of the
tropes and judgments that confine many Indian women in
politics, although she has been dubbed the "sexy sannyasin"
in the news media, and had political opponents raise her
romantic life and unmarried status.
In her freedom to operate in a man's world, Ms. Bharti is
unusual, said Christophe Jaffrelot, the author of "The
Hindu Nationalist Movement in India." "She is progressive
in that sense," he said.
The Hindu nationalist movement with which she is
associated, in contrast, holds largely traditional views
about the role of women. "Woman is first of all mother" for
the Hindu nationalist movement, Mr. Jaffrelot said.
In its rise to power, the movement has been dominated by
men, and by an aggressive masculinity that has stoked fears
of Muslim men preying on Hindu women. Its parent
organization, the Association of National Volunteers, is
exclusively male.
But inadvertently, perhaps, Ms. Bharti and a few women like
her helped change the equation: after seeing the fervor of
women leading up to and culminating with the 1992
destruction of the mosque in Ayodhya, Hindu nationalists
have also tried to harness the power of women as militants.
In the last decade, the middle class and upper caste women
who make up the party's base have become more active in
groups like the Durga Vahini, or Durga's Army, the sister
organization of the hard-line World Hindu Council. Its
president in this state is Sarog G. Soni, a jeweler's wife
who devotes herself full time to Hindu nationalist causes.
A star athlete in school, her ambitions for a life beyond
domesticity were thwarted by marriage at 16, then rekindled
by Durga Vahini. She runs camps where young women learn
Indian culture and martial arts.
"We try to prepare women, that if there is an Indo-Pak war,
the whole army will go to the border, and if there are
internal problems, women should come forward and do
something," she said, meaning fight.
The ideal for these women is Rani Laxmi Bai, the 19th
century queen who went into battle against the British with
her son tied to her back.
"With one hand she was holding her sword, with the other,
patting the back of her son," said Sushma Swaraj, India's
union minister of health and family welfare and another
high-profile woman in the Janata Party. "This is the role
model."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/04/international/asia/04INDI.html?ex=1071558389&ei=1&en=18515fd99dcbb8f3
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