By Jilawatan

“CARPET-bombing” is a typical media phrase used while planning a number of stories on a single subject; to be splashed, with pictures, charts and graphics, a cartoon or two in colour, page after page, to make impact.

Besides brooding over wins and losses in the just-concluded election and lofty ideas about good governance, the exercise these days, interestingly enough, is about women. And not without reason.

The first women’s rugby team preparing to represent India internationally isn’t the only news with a challenging headline: “Who says rugby has anything to do with gender?” One more men’s citadel is about to fall.

A piece of happy news that has caused many young heartbreaks is about tennis star Sania Mirza’s forthcoming marriage to her longtime friend. Since the lucky youth is Sohrab Mirza, one thing is certain: Sania will remain a Mirza and not change her surname, as most Indian women do on getting married.

Unusually, a newspaper editorial welcoming the wedding plans fervently hoped that Sania would continue to play tennis as aggressively as she has, and not surrender her passion for tennis, six-love-six-love-six-love, to matrimony.
Not all news is laudatory and feel-good — it cannot be. As politicos, journalists and feminists chew over the Lok Sabha, the powerful lower house of India’s Parliament, electing its first woman Speaker (who happens to be a Dalit, from the oppressed classes), there is a disturbing account, splashed on the same page, of gang-rape in a police station of another Dalit woman.

From poll-victor Sonia (Gandhi) to Sania and back to Sonia is inevitable. She gets the credit for breaking another male bastion.

After electing Pratibha Devisingh Patil as the country’s first woman president, Indian lawmakers have just elected Meira Kumar. Both are frail, gentle, soft-spoken, sari-clad women with long years in public life.

The difference, however, is that while Patil is an upper-caste Rajput, from the warrior class, Meira comes from the other end of the social spectrum.

Meira’s father Jagjivan Ram was an able administrator. Under him, from the 1950s through to the 1970s, the oppressed classes swore by the Congress, something the party lost in later years.

Sadly, Ram could not become the prime minister mainly because he was a Dalit. Meira, very much his daughter, now assumes high office almost three decades after the father’s political debacle.

This is a measure of political evolution, although cynics and statisticians may view Meira as a showpiece.

Meira’s elevation also indicates the Sonia-led Congress’ determination to recover this lost constituency. The present generation is unaware of the time when Dalit votes (nearly 15 per cent of the electorate in India) and religious minority votes (another 18 per cent or so) were the staple fare for comfortable Congress victories.

Meira debuted in politics in 1985 with a parliamentary by-election. Her victory was barely noticed then. But in the intervening years, the people she defeated — a young Ram Vilas Paswan and a younger Mayawati — have both established themselves as front-ranking Dalit leaders.

Paswan was a minister in many governments, and Mayawati is currently the chief minister of the most populous Uttar Pradesh state.

The Indian electorate has, for the time being, put paid to the prime ministerial ambitions of Paswan and Mayawati, and in a way, triggered Meira’s rise.

Whatever else Sonia Gandhi and the Manmohan Singh government have pursued with varying degrees of interest and success (and can be expected to continue in the second tenure), nursing the Dalit and women’s constituencies seems obvious.

The government’s women-centric welfare measures include 100 per cent literacy for women (as against the present 54 per cent) in the next five years through the National Literacy Mission, fixing the women’s quota in central government jobs, and setting up the National Mission on Empowerment of Women for the implementation of women’s welfare programmes.

All these items are listed as priorities in the government’s “100-Day Action Plan”, with the women’s reservation bill leading the list of 25 promises for action.

High on the agenda of the government is legislation to reserve a third of all elected posts for women. Defeated thrice, its passage will be a litmus test for the government.

Patil announced the move when she opened Parliament, and Kumar will preside over the House that shall debate and pass it.

But it is not going to be easy. There are surely going to be fireworks, as the process will be renewed. A major politician threatened to commit suicide in the house, but later retracted it. Another has called it a “conspiracy” to end the political careers of men.

Main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party and the communists have been fully supportive. Yet, past experience has shown, besides questions of political management, deep-seated prejudice against women. There is every chance of dilution of the provisions if and when they become law.

Even without this thorny legislation, Meira, it would seem, has been thrown to the wolves. Conducting noisy proceedings of 543 lawmakers, each one supremely confident of being an equal and anxious to be heard, is not easy — ask anyone who has witnessed the proceedings, let alone conducted them.

One of the 59 women MPs elected this year, Meira is now third in terms of protocol — next only to the president and the prime minister.

And she has qualifications to be there. She is fluent in Spanish, Bhojpuri (her mother tongue), Sanskrit and English. She is a graduate in Law, a postgraduate in English, and a member of the Indian Foreign Service who has served in Indian missions in Madrid and London.

With Vice-President Mohammed Hamid Ansari, who presides over the upper house, India’s Parliament is now run by two diplomats. This is rare.

Meira is also a poetess, fond of Sanskrit tomes and Indian classical music. Her hobbies include rifle shooting. She was party general secretary and a Congress working committee member for 11 years. She has the distinction of having been elected to Parliament from Bihar, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh. She was Minister for Social Justice and Empowerment.

Meira’s election as Speaker is symbolic and signals many different things. That she is a woman makes for a truly inclusive agenda that a diverse nation needs.