12 Thursday 16th June, 2011 The Island Features Not just a man’s world

BY SUSHILA RAMASWAMY The other women chief ministers were was the of Minister. Her daughter, Mrs Chandrika Nandini Satpathy of Orissa from 1972 to Madhya Pradesh from 2003 to 2004. Ms Kumaratunga was groomed by her mother iss Mamata Banerjee is the first 1974 and from 1974 to 1976. Sashikala Vasundhara Raja Scindia was chief minis- to take on the political mantle. In fact woman chief minister of West Kadokar was the chief minister of the Goa ter of Rajasthan from 2003 to 2008. Sirimavao even served as Prime Minsiter MBengal and the 14th woman chief from 1973 to 1977 and again from 1977 to Of all the women leaders in and filling the vacant office when Mrs minister in India. In Tamil Nadu, Ms J 1979. Syeda Anwara Taimur was the chief perhaps in entire Asia, Miss Mamata Kumaratunga assumed office as President! Jayalalitha has become chief minister for minister of Assam from 1980 to 1981. Banerjee is an exception. She has reached In , the current Prime the third time, the other two terms being Janaki Ramachandran was chief minister the zenith in politics without the help and Minister, Sheikh Hasina Wajid and the for- Tamil Nadu state Chief from 1991 to 1996 and from 1996 to 2001. of Tamil Nadu for a brief period in patronage of any male entity.All the other mer Prime Minister, Begum Khaleda Zia Minister Jayaram JayalalithaAP) Besides them, there are two more, Miss January 1988. Miss Mayawati was the chief successful women leaders ~ Indira came into political prominence after the Mayawati of UP and Mrs Sheila Dikshit of ministr of Uttar Pradesh from June to Gandhi, Mrs , Ms J death of their father and husband, respec- One common factor in most of these cases Delhi making the present tally of four October 1995, March to September 1997, Jayalalitha and Miss Mayawati have had tively.Ms Aung San Sui Kyi, the leader of is that after the death of a male member, women chief ministers. In all, there have 2002-03 and for the fourth time, on her own their mentors or belonged to influential the democratic struggle in Myanmar is the the father or husband as the case may be, been 14 women chief ministers and some without any alliance from any other party, political families. It is no different in our daughter of the influential leader Aung the women leaders captured power or have had more than one term. Of them, from 2007 till date. Rajinder Kaur Bhattal neighbouring countries. Benazir Bhutto San. In Philippines, the assassination of became politically influential largely as a Mrs Dikshit has been the longest serving was chief minister of Punjab from 1996 to rose in the shadow of her father Zulfikar the Benigno Aquino made his widow result of a sympathy wave in their favour chief minister with three consecutive 1997. Rabri Devi was the chief minister of Ali Bhutto. In Sri Lanka, the first woman Corazano Aquino join politics and subse- and not because of their individual terms from 1998. Bihar from 1997 to 1999 and 1999 to 2000. President in the world, Sirimavao quently become President. In , achievement or struggle. The first woman chief minister was Mrs Sushma Swaraj was the chief minis- Bandranaike was the widow of Solomon Megawati Sukranoputro could become Miss Mamata Banerjee, after she lost Sucheta Kriplani in UP from 1963 to 1967. ter of Delhi for a brief period in 1998. Ms Bandranaike who was the country’s Prime President as she was Sukarno's daughter. the contest for the post of the Congress president in to Mr , left the Congress in 1998 and found- ed the All India Trinamul Congress. The Congress opposed her totally.She had to fight on two fronts all the time ~ the Congress on one hand and the entrenched machinery of the on the other hand. Her rise to power was not easy and there was even an attempt to kill her. Interestingly, Miss Banerjee has never por- trayed herself as a woman leader or sought sympathy or compassion from a patriarchal society.It is noteworthy that the Left Front, in its 34-year of rule in West Bengal, never produced a woman leader comparable to Miss Banerjee. Though the CPI-M and the CPI were among the first to espouse women's equali- ty as early as 1967, they did precious little to promote it. Their record in fielding women candidates has been less than 10 per cent. Ms Brida Karat mentioned the poor representation of women in the 1998 at the 16th congress of the CPI-M and opted out of the then newly-elected Central committee in protest. Even Ms Karat owes her position in the party and her Rajya Sabha membership to her mari- tal relationship with Mr Prakash Karat. She neither owes her provenance to the grassroots nor has to her credit any inde- pendent initiative or achievement. Despite its commitment to gender equality, the Left has perpetrated a patriarchal order and allowed only those women to rise who are either wives or well known friends of cur- rent leaders. This is because the CPI-M, a Leninist organisation, has reiterated the Soviet model and strongly promoted and support- ed the view of the woman as a mother and a worker within a traditional male-headed family with the woman playing the subor- dinate role. Nor did communism in theory attempt to revamp the sexual division of labour or tried to transform the patriar- chal culture as they subordinated woman's emancipation to proletarian liberation. In the former Soviet Union, both Lenin and Vera Zasulich, who together with Plekhanov and Axelrod formed the Liberation of Labour, the first Russian Marxist group in 1883, opposed many of the proposals put forward by Aleksandra Kollantai, Russian revolutionary, feminist and the first woman diplomat of the Soviet Union as divisive. Kollantai proposed in the 1890s equal pay for equal work, female enfranchisement, public financing of child bearing and rearing, abolition of all laws that subordinated women to men, the right of women to be elected to all institutions of self government on the basis of direct, equal and secret vote, protection to female workers, forbidding women from getting employed in hazardous conditions, provid- ing for female factory inspectors, materni- ty leave for eight weeks before and after child birth and free medical care during pregnancy.Many of these were subse- quently adopted in 1903 by the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.Under Stalin, women's issues were relegated to the background as he personally did not believe in equality for women and consid- ered their rightful place at home. Even during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev peri- ods, the party did not bother to alleviate the double burden that a woman had to endure ~ that of a mother and a worker. Another important point to note about Miss Banerjee’s splendid success was that even Subhas Chandra Bose could not build a massive party organisation after he was forced to leave the Congress. The Forward Bloc both before and after Independence, remains a fringe party.Equally significant is that Miss Banerjee defies the grand nar- rative of Indian politics, both in pre and post-Independence periods, where the lead- ership of mainstream political organisa- tions have been occupied by the elite ~ often western-educated and coming from affluent backgrounds. This is comparable to the change that was seen in Tamil Nadu when the power shifted from Rajaji to Kamaraj, at the Centre from Nehru to Shastri and a similar churning in UP and Bihar. Moreover, by giving a political voice to the powerless and the marginalised in and , she has warded off the criticism, levelled by Simone de Beauvoir, against women leadership world- wide as being confined to the middle class- es alone. In her long years of struggle, Miss Banerjee has demonstrated that to ensure lasting success, it is important to involve the larger and neglected segments of society and address their issues of livelihood. Furthermore, in crafting a political role without a mentor or help from a male family member, she has also demonstrated that a woman can make it to the top by her vision and grit. Therein lies the importance of Miss Mamata Banerjee. The author is Associate Professor in Political Science, Jesus and Mary College, New Delhi (The Statesman/ANN)