Atishi-Gambhir row: Politicians use misogynistic slurs to slight women leaders, but bias won't swerve women from their political destiny

My friends and I like to retell one story about a well-known Bangalore feminist who passed away a few years ago. Two stories actually. One that when her husband brought home, over her objections, a friend with a reputation for being abusive to his wife, she left the house and sat on the footpath and told everyone who asked her why she was sitting there. The second one was when she got into a protracted argument with an auto driver who wouldn’t return her change. The auto-driver eventually snapped ‘soole’ at her, which means ‘whore’ in Kannada. She is supposed to have said, “naan soole irrbohdu aadre chilre vaapis kodu (I may be a whore but give me my change)." It is a line that I have had many occasions to remember during this election season. Long before a comically villainous pamphlet against AAP’s East Delhi candidate Atishi started making the rounds this week. When I attended a non-partisan meeting in December 2018 to promote the number of women candidates, politicians across the board agreed on the deep misogyny and violence that is wreaked upon them as candidates and as working politicians. Back in December, there was some hope that the parties would field more women than the pathetic handful they usually do. Months later, we saw that only the Biju Janata Dal, Trinamool Congress and Naam Tamilar Katchi have made a true, admirable commitment to correcting the imbalance. [caption id=“attachment_3175586” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] File image of Atishi. Twitter @atishimarlena[/caption] For example: of the 8048 candidates running for elections, 711 are women. Women candidates are 8.8 percent this time marking a teeny 1.2 percent increase compared with 2014. And what fun it is to run for elections if you are a woman. Political parties in India almost never give women the chance to rise through the ranks. The few women who do end up getting tickets are either well-connected or celebrities. The latter group of women politicians face a mandatory set of childish remarks about their clothing and what it implies. One dude said this about Smriti Irani: “She sits beside Gadkari and talks about changing the Constitution. Let me tell you a thing about her. She wears a big bindi on her forehead and someone told me that when a woman changes her husbands frequently, the size of her bindi keeps growing.” What does it even mean? Jayakaran Gupta of BJP called  Priyanka Gandhi a skirt-wearing bai. “Congress ke ek neta to badi jor-jor bolte hain, acche din aaye? Unhe acche din dikhayi nahi dete. Are skirt waali bai saari pehenkar mandir mein shish lagane lagi, gangajal se parhej karne waale log gangajal ka acchman karne lage.” What does this mean? Or read any line from the pamphlet about Atishi and ask yourself, does it really mean anything? The words, in the end, do not mean anything. From Urmila Matondkar’s rival calling her a bholi bhali ladki to a Samajwadi Party leader saying Jaya Prada would make nights rangeen in Rampur, all that these sentences convey is a blinding smirk and a cloud of befuddling contempt.

The male politicians would like this cloud to make their women rivals and their voters feel small and useless. Most of all they would like women to believe that the idea of a woman running for elections, a woman winning, a woman proposing policy and change are all figments of our juvenile imagination, like wanting endless ice-cream.

To impose their preferred reality on women, male politicians have to ask the pointless time-wasting questions they specialise in. And when a candidate does not fit the type like Atishi or Mayawati or Mamata, then their questions and allegations become even stranger. It would have been a simple matter for Gautam Gambhir, the BJP candidate, and his party to simply deny and renounce the pamphlet on Thursday for its ridiculous contents. Instead, Gambhir has sent Atishi a defamation notice while his fellow party members went on television to say that they have seen Atishi eat beef and they would like to know where her husband is. Instead Gambhir tweeted to AAP’s Arvind Kejriwal and Atishi last evening:

I abhor your act of outraging a woman’s modesty @ArvindKejriwal and that too your own colleague. And all this for winning elections? U r filth Mr CM and someone needs ur very own झाड़ू to clean ur dirty mind.

— Gautam Gambhir (@GautamGambhir) May 9, 2019

My Challenge no.2 @ArvindKejriwal @AtishiAAP
I declare that if its proven that I did it, I will withdraw my candidature right now. If not, will u quit politics?

— Gautam Gambhir (@GautamGambhir) May 9, 2019

Challenger Number 3 to @ArvindKejriwal and @aap. If he can prove that I have anything to do with this pamphlet filth, then I will hang myself in public. Otherwise @ArvindKejriwal should quit politics. Accepted?

— Gautam Gambhir (@GautamGambhir) May 10, 2019

Calm down, this is not in a 90s Tamil campus movie to be issuing challenges with your forefinger sticking out. The AAP, whose Delhi school reforms is their one justly celebrated success, a success they credit to Atishi, have played their part in trying to make her fit only one kind of reality. Her surname Marlena has ‘disappeared’ in case people think she is Christian. She appears with a teeka in case people think she isn’t an upper caste Hindu. Why not provide her with a janeudhari husband and a bowl of kachumber while they are it, to fully erase who she is and the brilliant things she can do. All our male politicians defend themselves by saying they are pandering to the voters when all they are doing is pandering to themselves. The majority of our politicians like to pretend that the voters do not include Muslims, do not include Christians, do not include Dalits and do not include women. And some of us who belong to one or more these categories are supposed to feel the sting of their contempt and quietly go home. Imagine a beef-eating, ‘lower’ caste woman daring to stand for elections or daring to want anything at all. Hence, the establishment, aka upper caste Hindu gents would like a reality in which it is comical for Hema Malini or Urmila Matondkar or Smriti Irani to enter politics and fully play along in the dumb charades of election campaigning but serious for Kamal Haasan or Rajinikanth to endlessly stroke their chins about politics. Modi, therefore, is serious but Mayawati is “haha, so funny.” This is a version of ‘reality’ we must reject all day long and every day until these men go home. Otherwise, we will continue to have a life in which ‘Atishi taught in a primary school in a small village in Andhra Pradesh’ is part of a smear campaign. See then the power of a Mayawati asserting her reality by saying at a rally, “Chamari hoon, kunwari hoon, tumhari hoon (I’m a cobbler’s daughter; I’m unmarried; I’m yours)." Did Gautam Gambhir and the BJP circulate that pamphlet? Who knows. It really is a very silly document that looks like it was stitched together with all the fever dreams of Whatsapp. Do the assertions of the document closely skew to the misogyny of our political parties? Oh, for sure. Should we be feeling sorry for Atishi or Divya Spandana if a pamphlet about them includes magnificent sentences such as, ‘she is a prostitute. Think for once that if she wins you will have to go to a prostitute for help or some work.’ Are we supposed to cry and feel bad and wonder how she will ‘ever get over this’? Please. If you step back from the heaving male bosoms of our politicians this ‘accusation’ really cannot be treated as something that will swerve women from their work or their political destiny. Our voters include skirt-wearing bais, women married to Christians from Andhra Pradesh, bholi bhali ladkis, saas and bahus, beef-eaters, sex workers, unmarried women, women who are thankful that their husbands are far away in Delhi with political ambitions and women who can make nights rangeen in Rampur. We all vote. We all might stand for elections. And until then let us say aloud: I may be a whore but give me my political change. The Ladies Finger is India’s leading digital feminist magazine.