This blog is written by a journalist based in Mumbai who writes about cities, the environment, developmental issues, the media, women and many other subjects.The title 'ulti khopdi' is a Hindi phrase referring to someone who likes to look at things from the other side.
Priyanka Chaturvedi has failed women in politics. Or perhaps she is showing them the only way to survive.
On April 17, Chaturvedi, then the Congress spokesperson and a familiar face on TV debates, expressed disappointment
with her party for having reinstated eight members she referred to as
“lumpen goons”. She had accused them last October of misbehaving with
her. Pending an inquiry, they were suspended. But earlier this week they
were taken back, apparently after they apologised.
The next day, Chaturvedi sent her resignation letter
to Congress chief Rahul Gandhi. “What saddens me is that despite the
safety, dignity and empowerment of women being promoted by the party…and
your call to action, the same is not reflected in the action of some of
members of the party,” she wrote. “A serious incident and misbehaviour
by certain party members while I was on official duty for the party has
been ignored under the guise of all hands needed for the elections.”
However,
in less than 24 hours, Chaturvedi did a virtual double backflip and on
Friday landed in the lap of the Shiv Sena, which is at the other end of
the ideological spectrum from her former party. By doing so, she not
only provided an escape hatch for the Congress, which was being
questioned about not treating her charges seriously, but also provoked
considerable scepticism about her own motives.
Coincidentally, the
same day, a veteran woman politician, Mayawati of the Bahujan Samaj
Party, demonstrated that pragmatism can trump old fissures by sharing a
stage with her former arch rival, Mulayam Singh Yadav of the Samajwadi
Party, for the first time since 1995.
Mayawati had sworn never to
forgive Yadav after his party’s workers attacked her at a Lucknow guest
house in June 1995, almost battering down the doors of the room in
which she had locked herself.
Just another day in Indian
politics, you might say, especially in an election season. But apart
from demonstrating the malleability and flexibility that seems to be the
hallmark of Indian politics and politicians, these events remind us of
the anomalies and contradictions of a woman’s role in this country’s
politics.
Take Chaturvedi. Though originally from Uttar Pradesh,
she is a typical Mumbai person. She is well-spoken and articulate and
appeared to be an asset for the Congress in its attempt to project
itself as a modern and progressive party in contrast to its main
opponent, the Bharatiya Janata Party.
At the April 19 press
conference where she announced her decision to join the Shiv Sena and
serve it in any capacity, Chaturvedi was asked whether she quit the
Congress because she was denied a ticket to contest the parliamentary
election.
Chaturvedi acknowledged she had hoped to get a ticket,
but insisted that was not the main reason for her resignation. She spoke
of her concern for women’s rights even as she sat on a dais with only
male leaders of the Shiv Sena, a party which is not exactly an exemplar
either of good behaviour or of upholding women’s rights. She appears to
have missed the irony entirely, or perhaps deliberately.
A misogynistic culture
For
a moment, though, if we set aside the pragmatism displayed by Mayawati
in putting aside her resentment and sharing the stage with her bitter
adversary, and Chaturvedi’s nifty ideological cartwheel, the two women
illustrate the challenges women in politics face in India.
Mayawati’s struggles are now well known. She has confronted the double
burden of being a Dalit and a woman, been called all kinds of names,
criticised and mocked for her dress sense, her taste, her looks. She has
received barely any appreciation for her ability to negotiate the snake
pit of politics. A man in her position would have been lauded as
clever, strategic, even brilliant. But Mayawati is called devious,
corrupt, unprincipled and much more because she is a woman. Mayawati
with Mulayam Singh Yadav and his on Akhilesh Yadav at a campaign rally
in Mainpuri, Uttar Pradesh, on April 19. Photo credit: Twitter/Samajwadi
Party Chaturvedi is fairly new to politics and
has had a relatively easy run. She was picked out to be a spokesperson
because she speaks well and knows how to handle the medium of TV. In the
last five years, with the BJP in power, she has been targeted as a
woman, viciously trolled and even threatened. Her apparent reason for
quitting the Congress was also misogyny. That men in the party felt they
could get away with the kind of behaviour that Chaturvedi alleges with a
prominent woman functionary speaks to male entitlement and a
misogynistic culture that is virtually a norm in Indian politics.
Mayawati and Chaturvedi are not the exceptions by a long shot. Go back in history and remember the kind of treatment J Jayalalithaa
received, especially shortly after MG Ramachandran’s death in 1989,
when she was assaulted and almost stripped in the Tamil Nadu Assembly.
Similarly, Mamata Banerjee has been physically assaulted and received the choicest sexist epithets from her male opponents.
Smriti Irani
may have laid herself open to criticism with her imaginative
descriptions of her educational qualification, but she too has had to
endure sexual and sexist comments by male politicians.
The most recent illustration of the special treatment reserved for women is what Jaya Prada,
until recently with the Samajwadi Party and now a BJP candidate, has
had to endure from former party colleague Azam Khan. Even when they were
in the same party, Khan did not spare her.
Par for the course
Sexism,
it seems, is par for the course if you are a woman stepping into the
male world of Indian politics. The women who have survived have all had
to face this in some form or another. If they have a male protector, in
the form of a relative or a mentor, they are sometimes spared. But that
too is no guarantee. Nor is the party to which they belong. So, the list
includes, among others, Sonia Gandhi, Renuka Chowdhury and Priyanka
Gandhi from the Congress; Sushma Swaraj, Smriti Irani and Hema Malini of
the BJP; and Mayawati and Jaya Prada.
As Scroll.in reported this month,
it is no different even in a state like Kerala, with high female
literacy and more women voters than men. There too women hesitate to
enter politics and political parties have historically been extremely
parsimonious about encouraging women to be a part of electoral politics.
Since 1957, the state has elected only 11 women to Parliament. And the
handful of women who are standing for the Lok Sabha this time have not
been spared sexist remarks from male politicians.
Chaturvedi
claims she quit the Congress because it failed to act against sexism.
Yet, by joining the Shiv Sena she has behaved like any male politician
looking out for the best chance would. She has also reinforced the
belief that for the moment, if women want to get ahead in the male world
of politics, they have to be a little like them. The misogynistic and
masculine culture that dominates Indian politics remains undented by the
presence of such women.
F or those of us who are diehard Mumbaikars, February is a month we will not forget for a while. Mumbai was spared a swine flu epidemic, unlike Pune. But this month it was laid low by a virus of acronyms — SS, BT, MNS, SRK, MNIK (for the uninitiated, that is Shiv Sena, Bal Thackeray, Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, Shah Rukh Khan and My Name is Khan). For days on end, Mumbai — and for that matter, the rest of India — heard nothing but whether a Bollywood film, which, by all accounts, is the typical concoction of reality and unreality, would be released or not or whether the will of the city's ‘super censor' would prevail.
At first it appeared that as BT and the SS had decreed that the film was unsuitable for popular viewing for no other reason than that SRK had said something they did not like, it would be pulled off the screens. That has been the norm for decades. But this time, thanks partly to SRK's star status, the people of the city said “Boo”, sort of, to the super censor, the state government pulled out most of its police force and stationed it, rather incongruously, in front of cinema theatres, and the film ran.
No victors
BT and SS claimed victory as did the state government and SRK fans. In fact, no one won. Mumbai's so called “spirit” prevailed only momentarily. It was better than in the past when the city's residents stayed at home each time there was the whiff of some trouble from these quarters. Also, rarely have Mumbaikars gone out in the streets to demonstrate for the rights of say, taxi drivers or street vendors, who are the soft targets that the SS and the MNS choose when they seek political mileage and media attention. Yet, it must be said, that even the act of going to see a film, albeit with full police protection, was an act of welcome defiance.
But the high drama, played out minute by minute on all news channels, revealed the emptiness of discussion and debate in this city of commerce. Posturing has replaced politics; violence and confrontation have replaced debate. Mumbaikars have now become accustomed to governments buckling under when these groups raise their voices. They are also used to Bollywood bowing down to the dictates of these political groups without protest. Commerce is more important than democratic sentiments such as freedom of expression.
The MNIK issue is one that every Indian should think about and discuss. What does this say about our democracy? At a recent interaction in Mumbai, Mohammed Hanif, Pakistani journalist and author of the hilarious fictional account of the death of Pakistani dictator Zia Ul-Haq, The Case of Exploding Mangoes, said that India should be glad that it is a democracy and has a judicial system that works, where someone like Ajmal Kasab can be tried. He said this in response to people in the audience who suggested that the only way to deal with terror was to seek summary justice. Hanif suggested that if Indians started talking in these terms, they would not be very different from the Taliban whose ideology they surely oppose. And he was right.
Our own Taliban
Yet, the MNIK brouhaha showed us that our own Taliban are well entrenched. They dictate what people should say, what language they can speak, what films they can see, what art they can appreciate, what books they can read and soon it could be what clothes they can wear. Is this India? Is this a democracy? Why are people sitting back and accepting this state of affairs? Why does a party, that has not managed to win a state election since 1994, dictate the city's cultural life? People of the city came out with banners saying, “Enough is enough” after the terror attack of November 2008. But should this not be the permanent slogan of a city that hurtles from one non-crisis to another?
Ignored issues
Of course, while the media's gaze remains fixed on these non-issues, the real problems that affect the lives of the millions who inhabit this city remain unaddressed. For instance, while the majority of people in the city are reeling under water cuts even before the summer has set in, and women in slums live in constant tension as they wait for water, private builders are advertising new luxury apartments with private swimming pools. Mill workers, who worked in the city's iconic textile mills — now mostly defunct — continue to wait for jobs and housing even as the real estate lobby builds deluxe towers on the vacant mill lands. And even as the city's poor, over half its population, struggle to get basic medical care from overcrowded government hospitals and dispensaries, the city is sprouting five-star hospitals offering three-room suites to its patients. The contrasts have failed to rouse our consciences, make us pause and think what direction the city is taking and who determines how it develops.
These issues should matter not just to Mumbai's residents but also to people in the rest of India. They reflect the absence of real engagement by civic society with urban development in many Indian cities that are becoming symbols of confused, iniquitous and environmentally unsustainable development. And above all, they expose the ease with which citizens and governments can get embroiled in non-issues while decisions that can make a difference to people's lives remain permanently on the back burner.
They did not ask for it. But Maharashtra Chief Minister Ashok Chavan has given Bal Thackeray and his nephew Raj an unexpected and generous New Year gift. For two political parties virtually joined at the hip, what could have been sweeter than the so-called “secular” state government giving them a perfect chance to revive the much-flogged Marathi Manoos issue? Indeed, if proof was ever needed of the bankruptcy of Maharashtra’s political culture, this action exemplifies it.
What, one wonders, was Chavan thinking when he told the waiting media after the weekly Cabinet meeting that from henceforth those holding permits to drive taxis in Mumbai would have to know how to “read, write and speak Marathi”? Did he really believe that by doing this, he would undercut the ground on which the Shiv Sena and the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) base their politics? In any case, the rule already exists as part of the Maharashtra Motor Vehicles Act 1989 but has rarely been enforced. So why now?
The Congress and the NCP, despite having won a clear majority in the state assembly elections last year, are worried at the growth of the MNS, which won 13 assembly seats principally in urban areas. With Mumbai municipal elections due in 2012, they are concerned about the expanding base of this party. Yet, could this be the only reason for such a gimmick?
For that is all it is. Mumbai has around 56,000 taxis — kali pili taxis, or the black and yellow taxis that have become such a symbol of this city. Of these, 24,000 permits are lying unused. In other words, drivers or owners with permission to run taxis are not running them for a variety of reasons, including lack of funds to convert these vehicles to CNG (now mandatory), replacing old vehicles with new ones etc.
The government has now decided to sell these unused permits to anyone willing to bring in new air-conditioned taxis with global positioning systems (GPS). This is ostensibly part of the plan to modernise Mumbai’s taxi system. The city already has such taxis run by private operators. But there are only a couple of thousand of these in a city of 17 million. Furthermore, not all the 24,000 permits will be sold at one go. Only 4,000 are up for sale this year. So the fuss being made is essentially about an additional 4,000 jobs as those who have been driving taxis for many years, irrespective of whether they speak Marathi or not, will not be affected.
Yet, by making this announcement, Mr Chavan has put the lives of the majority of ordinary taxi drivers who come from outside Maharashtra at risk. Given the standard tactics employed by the MNS and the Shiv Sena, these poor men will have to face harassment by their goons whenever these parties seek political mileage. Just as thousands of street vendors were once targeted by the MNS as “outsiders”, taxi drivers will now come under attack.
Yet what does the taxi-using public of Mumbai want? Compared to other cities, Mumbai’s taxis are a dream. Some of them might be broken down and dirty. Some of the drivers do drive rashly. Some of them do refuse to ply unless to a destination that suits them. But seven times out of ten you can easily hail a taxi on Mumbai’s streets and give your destination, and the driver simply puts down the meter and takes you there. The only test these drivers need is that of safe driving and learning their way around a city changing by the day. Passengers barely care whether such a test is given in Marathi or any other language, so long as they get the service they are paying for.
Instead of dreaming about making Mumbai into Shanghai or Singapore, Ashok Chavan and his colleagues need to deal with the more urgent needs that Mumbai faces — water, better roads, an efficient public transport system and above all, affordable housing and of course, better governance. If he concentrates on these, both the Marathi Manoos and the so-called “outsider” will thank him.
