Didi's coronation: Where's the girl power?

My mother and our cook both took a break from kitchen duty today to watch Mamata Banerjee become West Bengal’s new chief minister. Neither are great news junkies. “But we must watch today,” said my mother admiringly. “Imagine – a woman did it.” I am not sure how much West Bengal’s first woman chief minister reciprocates that feeling of sisterhood. As the parade of ministers walked up to the dais to take their oaths, we only saw a long line of white dhotis and kurtas. Didi has a jumbo cabinet, 44 ministers, the maximum allowed by law, but other than her there is only one woman. [caption id=“attachment_13135” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=““Imagine a woman did it”, but what about promoting women in Indian politics? PTI”] [/caption] She has accommodated the loyalists, the giant killers, the culturati, Muslims, Jungle Mahal, North Bengal. “If identity politics played a big role in Mamata’s ride to Writers’, the list reflects that,” reports The Telegraph . But identity as a woman as usual seems to have taken a back seat. It’s as if once a woman becomes the chief minister, she sucks all the oestrogen out of her cabinet. This is not new. It’s a scene that repeats itself over and over again in Indian politics. A few days ago Jayalalithaa took her oath of office, resplendent in her burgundy sari, presiding over a receiving line of men in white shirts and lungis. She managed to find room for two women in her cabinet of 33— Gokula Indra (Commercial Taxes and Registration) and Selvi Ramajayam (Social Welfare). Women in Indian politics do rise to the top but they seem to shirk from promoting other women. Perhaps they fear they’ll be taken less seriously in a system heavily skewed towards men. They tend to be single, as if any hint of family and domesticity would cling to them like a stubborn turmeric stain signaling that they’ll be too worried about their children’s lunches to perform their chief minister-ly duties. Perhaps that old misogynist quip about Indira Gandhi being the only man in her cabinet still stings.  They don’t want to be the woman who is chief minister, rather the chief minister who happens to be a woman. “The few women in positions of real political power behave like men, making their own kind suffer,” writes  Prabhu Chawla in the Sunday Standard.  The 20 Union Cabinets since Independence have collectively seen only 14 women as cabinet ministers. The current UPA cabinet has two, now that Mamata has moved to Kolkata. Ambika Soni, one of Congress’ senior-most leaders, is in charge of Information and Broadcasting. Kumari Selja is what Chawla dubs “the socially correct Union Minister of Tourism, Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation.” It might be a sign of progress that women don’t feel the need to appoint women, that we are beyond those gestures of tokenism. Surely policies speak louder than saris in the cabinet. Jayalalithaa is handing out gold to poor women for their mangalsutras. Mamata as Railway Minister proposed trains for women during peak times and more railway police for the ladies compartments. But perhaps it’s also true that if you want woman-friendly policies you shouldn’t look for a woman leader. Black leaders in the US came down hard on Barack Obama for appearing to go out of his way to not promulgate policies that would appear to favour African Americans. It’s all very well to say you are the President of all Americans, they said, but when one group is especially hard hit by the recession, they deserve extra attention. Bill Clinton would have given it to them. Obama cannot. Even rap star Sean ‘Diddy” Combs weighed in. “I feel there was a promise made to God to look after people that was less fortunate, and [many] of those people are African-American…” he told The Source . “I’d rather have a Black President that was man enough to say that he was doing something for black people have one term than a president who played the politics game have two terms.” The real bright spot for those who want to see Mamata’s victory as some kind of triumph for womanhood might be simply this — she pulled herself to power by her own bootstraps (or flip flop straps), not because she was someone’s daughter, widow, mistress or sister. Now we just need to see what portfolio Sabitri Mitra, the only other woman in her cabinet receives. I am hoping it won’t be Social Welfare.