http://www.indianexpress.com/news/Her-father-s-daughter/472567
Her father’s daughter Seema Chishti Posted online: Sunday , Jun 07, 2009 at 0233 hrs In an otherwise obscure by-election in Bijnor, a reserved constituency in western Uttar Pradesh, the seeds of a larger battle for Dalit imagination were sown. The year was 1985, a year after Indira Gandhi was killed. The three candidates then were a former IFS officer Meira Kumar, a young and emerging Dalit leader Ram Vilas Paswan and a 29-year-old Mayawati. In the end, the debutant Meira Kumar secured more than 1,28,000 votes, scraping through by about 5,000. Paswan came second and the young Mayawati came third, but interestingly, secured a significant number of votes—61,504. The battle for capturing the Dalit mind, especially in north India, continues between the three ‘Bijnor-ian’ symbols. Meira Kumar, the winner then, is now India’s first woman Speaker and the bearer of an important Congress legacy—a reminder of the time when Dalit votes (nearly 15 per cent of the electorate in India) and minority votes (another 18 per cent, approximately) were the staple fare for comfortable Congress victories. If this election of Meira Kumar as Speaker of the Lok Sabha is a symbolic coup for the ruling Congress, then it’s a mixed metaphor, symbolising and signaling many different things. Meira Kumar, one of the 59 women MPs elected in 2009, is fluent in Spanish, Bhojpuri, Sanskrit and English. She is a graduate in Law, a post-graduate in English, a member of the IFS (1973 batch) with a record of having served in Indian missions in Madrid and London, other than the MEA in Delhi. She is also a poetess and is fond of Sanskrit tomes like Abhigyana Shakuntalam and likes listening to Indian classical music. Her CV even mentions rifle shooting as her hobby. With a strong record in the Congress Party—having served as AICC general secretary and being a member of the CWC for 11 years—Meira Kumar has been elected to Parliament from her home state Bihar twice. But she has also won from Delhi and UP—that’s a rare distinction of winning from three different states. She has been Minister for Social Justice and Empowerment in UPA 1.0 and was also allotted Water Resources in UPA 2.0, before being pushed as the candidate for Speaker. The day she was elected Speaker, as everyone from the Prime Minister to the BSP MPs hailed Kumar as the pride of the Lok Sabha, not just for being a representative of women but for being a Dalit, it was easy to see why she was chosen. Mayawati’s appeal (she has fought more seats in the country than even the Congress) as the Dalit ki beti has been reined in with this one move. The symbolism around Mayawati, her meteoric rise from a Dalit background, is what brought her the Congress’s Dalit votes. Now, with another Dalit ki beti in a visible and prestigious position, the uniqueness of Mayawati gets considerably dented. But Meira Kumar is more than the sum of her being a Dalit, a former IFS officer who speaks five languages or her other accomplishments. She is also Babuji ki beti, something that is acknowledged, no doubt, but the weight of that legacy is sometimes taken lightly. Babu Jagjivan Ram, the son of a family of the cobbler caste, was the first from his village to go to school and graduate—from the prestigious Banaras Hindu University. He went on to become a senior member of Jawaharlal Nehru’s Cabinet but was one of the six Union ministers to resign under the Kamaraj Plan in 1963. He represented Sasaram in Parliament for eight terms in a row. As a minister in Indira Gandhi’s cabinet, he had a reputation of being efficient. He handled a diverse set of portfolios—Communications, Labour and Railways. He was close to Indira Gandhi and was the one who moved the Emergency resolution in Parliament. However, his sudden move out of the Congress, barely a month after general elections were announced in February 1977, also signalled which way the wind was blowing. His parting of ways with Indira Gandhi set the stage for a greater role in the Janata Party government, where he held the Defence portfolio and was Deputy Prime Minister to Morarji Desai. Jagjivan Ram’s work—before Independence and later on in governance as the second most influential Dalit leader in the Congress (the first being B.R. Ambedkar)—was a crucial reason behind the community’s en masse support for the Congress. After his departure, Dailt support for the Congress floundered. So in 1985, when Rajiv Gandhi asked Jagjivan Ram’s daughter Meira Kumar to come to the party and fight the Bijnor by-election, it was to try and recapture for the Congress bits of that magical hold her father had on Dalits. It may have been muted down the years as Meira Kumar too became one of the many Dalits (like Kumari Selja, Sushil Kumar Shinde and Krishna Tirath), their respective biographies getting dwarfed in the larger story of the big party. But now, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi have pulled Meira Kumar out of a box once again, 24 years after that by-election, as they deal with Dalit identity-politics, honed to such a fine art by Mayawati, potentially the Congress’s most dangerous rival. ------------------------------------ ---- INFORMATION OVERLOAD? Get all ZESTCaste mails sent out in a span of 24 hours in a single mail. Subscribe to the daily digest version by sending a blank mail to [email protected], OR, if you have a Yahoo! Id, change your settings at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTMedia/join/ PARTICIPATE:- On this list you can share caste news, discuss caste issues and network with like-minded anti-caste people from across India and the world. 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