Some commentators have classified India's women politicians into two groups – the "pallu brigade" (the pallu being the flowing end of the sari), or the ones with lineage on their side, and the "hysteria brigade", or the ones with no political antecedents, and therefore, desperate to be more macho than men.
There is some merit to the classification, particularly if you think of Mayawati, the champion of the lower castes, or the Bengali drama queen, Mamata Banerjee, the undisputed leaders of the "hysteria brigade". But the portrait of the politician as the dutiful beti (daughter) or bahu (daughter-in-law) may have gone in for a quiet change in the last few years. The sari and vermilion are no longer mandatory, but a working knowledge of one's constituency may just be.
In Indian politics, as in Indian society, son-preference comes naturally. Would Indira Gandhi have risen to the heights of political power if her father and India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, had a son? Would Nehru himself have achieved political greatness had his equally accomplished sister, Vijaylaxmi Pandit, not been confined to the safer world of diplomacy?
Going into the 15th parliamentary elections, one of the main talking points is that Indira Gandhi's granddaughter, Priyanka, has once again ignored her countrymen's unabashed desire to compare her and her grandmother as parliamentarians, and eventually as prime minister. She has thus left the field clear for her brother, Rahul, to carry the family mantle.
But when the influential southern leader M Karunanidhi brought out his near-anonymous daughter, Kanimozhi, and sent her to the upper house in 2007, he picked her ahead of his two politically active sons. Sharad Pawar, the Maratha strongman, too, initiated his homemaker daughter, Supriya Sule, into electoral politics, but people assumed that it was only because Pawar had no son. Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, the former chief minister of Kashmir, does have a son, and he still chose his daughter, Mehbooba. Hailing from a conservative Muslim society and a disputed, troubled land, Mehbooba has emerged as the most feisty member of the daughters' club.
There were strong rumours till a few days ago that Punam Mahajan Rao, the daughter of the late, rightwing Bharatiya Janata party leader Pramod Mahajan, would get the party's poll ticket this time. Her brother, Rahul, has a past tainted by allegations of drug abuse and domestic violence, though he redeemed himself somewhat by appearing in Big Brother's Indian clone, Bigg Boss. Not that past transgression is a problem in Indian politics. Recently Sanjay Dutt, the film star who once did drugs and has been convicted in a terror case, was asked to stand by the Samajwadi party. Dutt's father, Sunil, was a film star-turned-Congress politician, and his mother, Nargis, was a member of the upper house. However, when it came to choosing a candidate to contest Sunil Dutt's parliamentary seat after his death, the Congress chose his younger daughter, Priya.
Fielding a daughter is a safe bet in Indian politics. Often this is for no better a reason than stopping hopeful candidates from squabbling over poll tickets. Besides, a daughter is least likely to form a breakaway faction and put her father (almost never the mother) in trouble. Such favouritism is very welcome, but honestly, the sons of political India are under no serious threat at the moment. Female foeticide is alive and killing. The most recent statistics put the sex ratio in several states at less than 800 girls per 1,000 boys. A woman in Maharashtra felt happy to sacrifice her position as village head (sarpanch) because regulation demanded that she have no more than two children and she needed to try for a son after two daughters. After a group of women were assaulted by rightwing moral policemen in a pub in Mangalore recently, Sushma Swaraj, the only woman of any consequence in the BJP, rose to the defence of the women by saying that her own daughter visited pubs in London where she "only drinks orange juice though her friends have wine".
That's when I realised that the top rung of India's women politicians, with the exception of Sonia Gandhi (the others being Mayawati, Jayalalitha and Mamata Banerjee), is peopled with spinsters. Some of the second-rung women politicians, such as Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit, union minister Renuka Choudhury and Sushma Swaraj have daughters. But none of the daughters, whether they drink orange juice or wine, has come forward to fill her mother's sandals.
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