When the purdah lifts after Mandal
Winning and losing elections should be par for the course, a routine count of strokes at the end of the game, with predictable and stable shifts in policy orientation at the end. Alas, that’s hardly the way it pans out these days—in the crowded hyper-democracy that India is or elsewhere. In an age that seems to produce an assembly-line of demagogues, each wanting to deliver life-altering changes, every poll revolves around the promise of a mini-revolution, a drastic change in landscape. From Bush to Obama, Obama to Trump. Or closer home, from Manmohan Singh to Narendra Modi, or even the Congress to TRS or the post-Jayalalithaa era in Tamil Nadu.
The ongoing Uttar Pradesh elections are no exception. One more epoch-changing event is awaited, upon which the nation’s fate is hinged. Much, it seems, would come unhinged depending on who wins and who loses. Either way, it won’t be business as usual after March 11. Never mind the cynical aside from a retired Allahabad University professor: “Whoever wins, the potholes on our inner roads will never get filled!’’ (No metaphor intended, who has time for inner life when the outside is so dramatic.)
Such plaintive common man statements are passé—anyway, profs are no longer holy cows. Only yesterday a student called his grey-haired mentor a liar, on live television. The public scorn poured over a guru by a shisya was over contesting claims on campus violence, in front DU’s Ramjas college. With no sight of a Ram Rajya in the near or distant future, the tired cynicism of our retired UP professor is understandable. He after all has to decide whether or not to vote for one such student from his own alma mater. The Samajwadi Party candidate for Allahabad West, Richa Singh, is a product of a recent incident of campus violence. The 29-year-old’s claim to fame rests on her successful blocking of the entry of Yogi Adityanath into the Allahabad University campus. Richa, the first elected woman student union president of the University, is now trying her luck in the electoral fray and promising to fill up all the potholes in and around the hallowed city. The way civil society groups are rooting for her, she may well win the polls. Her professor’s dilemma notwithstanding.
Richa is no isolated case in this UP elections. If there’s one quiet revolution that does not need to wait for the declaration of the results, it is this: The emergence of woman politicians in one of the most patriarchal states of India. You may think Richa’s emergence from acrimonious campus politics on to a bigger stage is a qualitatively different thing from the public outing of the SP bahus, since that’s just an extension of patriarchal power. But there’s a connection. They have not just moved out of purdah into politics, but from being second fiddles to star campaigners and even decision-makers.
It’s in the fitness of things that Samajwadi patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav has gone into hibernation—been forced into semi-retirement from active politics. It seems the days of rustic Yadav warlordism with an Etawah-Mainpuri signature are truly over, and Mulayam’s political endgame is being written by the changing milieu. His kind of sectional power, woven around an OBC resurgence, is being nudged aside. The Yadav chieftain and his cohorts had, for 20 years, blocked the bill for 33 per cent women’s reservation in the Parliament. Ironically, he’s being outmanoeuvred by the women of his own family.
The self-assured Dimple Yadav—as the leading face of the Samajwadis on the road and on posters (with her open hair and cotton sari making for a more aspirationally salient figure compared to the dhoti-clad Mulayam)—is perhaps the single-most startling point of this elections, after the son eclipsed the father in a family feud. Another sign of the emerging women power: Even when Mulayam came out on a ‘limited edition’ campaign, it was for his chhoti bahu, Aparna Bisht Yadav (besides for brother Shivpal). That Aparna retains her premarital surname along with the Yadav suffix is in itself a telling fact. When his CM-son Akhilesh Yadav stamped his seal on UP politics, it seems to have meant more than a routine generational change of guard. That’s old as the hills. The arrival of confident women is a qualitative change. Mark that it’s not his gym-and-Lamborgini-loving son, Pratik, who’s come centrestage but his wife.
This scope of this silent revolution is no way restricted to the transformation within the Yadav clan, it speaks of a larger, perceptible change. The breakdown of gender stereotypes is possible only because of the social receptivity. Anyway, the tag of firm-handed administrator in UP belongs firmly to Mayawati, chief of the BSP, who is the one surging ahead of the rest. If she becomes the CM, UP politics would not be the same again. The Congress, which in recent times has a record of missing the pulse of the people, may have failed to sense the wind of change blowing over the Gangetic plains. Why else would it shy away from fielding Priyanka Gandhi in a more prominent role? Nevertheless, it was Priyanka who was the backroom strategist of the Grand Old Party this time, who stitched the SP-Congress alliance just in time.
In neighbouring Bihar too, the other bastion of retrogressive patriarchy, Mulayam’s Yadav brethren Lalu Prasad has been similarly done in by the logic of the day. His seat in Rajya Sabha is now represented by his daughter Misa Bharti.
Maybe time is now ripe for Prime Minister Modi to push through the Women’s Bill. The Yadav chieftains, its biggest opponents, are falling by the wayside and are longer in a position to shred the bill and defeat the majority intent.