No Modi govt for strong women: Why Smriti Irani finds her job on the line

Poor Smriti Irani.

She has apparently gone from Queen Bee to Queen-Been writes Saba Naqvi in Outlook .

The beaming woman was once hailed as the new woman face of the new BJP. Mangalsutra-ed and media-friendly, she successfully parlayed her Tulsi persona into political prominence. She was savvy, ambitious and never shied away from a fight. She was a politician who actually became successful by losing. She persuaded Pramod Mahajan to give her a high-powered ticket and ran against Kapil Sibal in Chandni Chowk much to the chagrin of Delhi’s own Vijay Goel. She lost but made a name for herself. In 2014, in a higher-profile re-enactment of that drama she ran against Rahul Gandhi in Amethi and lost again but was rewarded with the HRD ministry.

It has not been a stellar ten months as HRD minister as she has bounced from one controversy to another – Yale degree, Teacher’s Day, RSS appointments, Christmas, Sanskrit vs German, and now Fabindia.

In an earlier piece on Firstpost , we had written that Smriti Irani has proved her detractors right because she “failed to perform across all four basic parameters of leadership: qualifications, philosophy, competence, reputation.”

But it turns out her greatest sin, according to Outlook is her temper.

She’s accused of throwing a file at a bureaucrat. She does not play well with most of the other BJP women. When the Fabindia Peeping Tom camera controversy erupted in the middle of the BJP national executive meeting, she not only got no sympathy from her own party, Meenakshi Lekhi went out of her way to Twitter-snipe at her.

“Do I smell a rat to obfuscate the BJP national executive meeting? Attempts being made not to cover NE meeting, instead cover some inane issues.”

And a BJP NE member tells Outlook “Many people at the meeting wondered if Smriti had just had a tantrum and taken her temper out on Fabindia since she can’t shout at Amit Shah and throw files at him.”

She sounds like a woman who is committing the cardinal sin of behaving like an alpha male. That only works if you are already the head of your party ala Indira Gandhi or Mamata Banerjee.

While Modi has not said nothing about her in public, it’s clear that cutting Smriti Irani down to size could not be happening without his knowledge.

Now there are rumours that Irani might be dropped from the cabinet altogether. If that happens, and if it happens because Irani does not play nice with others, it would be proof that in politics there’s a clear lakshmanrekha for women – wear a big bindi and speak softly.

In fact, in a great ironic twist Irani is being advised to follow the example of the very woman she was supposed to replace as the female-face of the BJP – Sushma Swaraj. Swaraj, India’s putative Minister for External Affairs, has clearly been eclipsed by the globe-trotting Modi. Now she’s being touted as the “ better bindi diplomat ” who could teach Irani how to survive and succeed in politics– be polite, keep your head down, do your job without complaining and most of all, don’t make waves.

The double standard is that these rules don’t seem to apply to the men in the cabinet. Giriraj Singh is quite the motormouth but even causing a diplomatic row with Nigeria does not endanger his ministerial berth. Unlike Irani, he has a voter base that Modi needs in Bihar. Rajnath Singh survived rumours about his son’s “ misconduct ”. But it’s also clear that a female minister who makes waves in the media is frowned upon far more than her male counterpart.

Even an Uma Bharati has learned that and toned down the old fieriness in her ministerial avatar. Maneka Gandhi too seems far more mellow these days. According to Asian Age , Maneka did not get permission to attend a high-powered UNESCO meeting in New York last month. The Telegraph says Maneka Gandhi was miffed that her recommendation for a non-political person to head the National Commission for Women was rejected by the PMO and decided to not even bother shortlist candidates for the chair of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights. The Modi government also downsized her proposal for 660 Nirbhaya rape crisis centers to a mere 36 and slashed the budget for the project from Rs 244.48 crore to Rs 18 crore. After an initial controversy about whether Muslims were a real minority and Hindi versus Hindu, Najma Heptullah has pressed the mute button on herself. Now there are rumours that Mehbooba Mufti might replace her in the cabinet. Incidentally both Heptulla and Irani were dropped from the National Executive at the same time by Amit Shah.

Commerce minister Nirmala Sitharaman, whom Modi handpicked for the cabinet, rarely exceeds her brief and is careful to always stay on message. Harsimrat Kaur Badal, cabinet minister for Food Processing, usually sticks to comments about food parks and maize outputs. The only other woman in the cabinet who has shown real extra-curricular fire is Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti of haramzada infamy but while Modi rightly disapproved of the statement he pleaded with the cabinet to forgive and forget because she was a new minister and came from a rural background. Smriti Irani with her Yale “degree” does not have that excuse. While Irani battles Fabindia, Niranjan Jyoti still remains on the National Executive as does Yogi Adityanath, the ambassador for Ghar Wapsi with his penchant for inflammatory remarks.

Smriti Irani cannot be the only person in the Modi cabinet with a temper and half of the new ministers he inducted during the last cabinet expansion face criminal charges. But while her male counterparts make news every now and then for some ministerial overreach or speaking out of turn, it’s Smriti Irani who gets the tantrum diva treatment.

Sharad Yadav recently sneered at Irani saying “I know what you are.” Irani might not have a bob-cut but she very much fits the profile of the outspoken English-savvy “par-kati auratein” he once railed against. That media-savvy, that fiery outspokenness, that chutzpah all worked well for her as a star campaigner for the party. But it turns out that those very traits might hasten her downfall as a woman minister who does not know her place.