Dear reader,
American Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said that “women belong in all places where decisions are being made. It shouldn’t be that women are the exception.” But it has always been a tough call for political parties in India to take.
Women Chief Ministers in politics are often like birds of the season. They flit in and flit out and never quite have enough time to build a durable nest.
When Atishi, after her 11-year stint with the AAP, became the Delhi Chief Minister designate following Arvind Kejriwal’s resignation, the first thing she said was about the collective resolve to make Kejriwal Chief Minister again. The next Delhi Assembly election has to be scheduled within six months. So Atishi at best has a tenure of half a year to leave her mark on the governance in Delhi.
But women being made Chief Ministers as a stopgap arrangement has been there for quite a while. While a number of female politicians have risen through the ranks to become Union Ministers, the top posts of Chief Minister or Prime Minister have somehow eluded them. This is perhaps because these posts are considered the real power centres or, as the saying goes in the Hindi belt, the three most powerful positions in the country are “DM (District Magistrate), CM (Chief Minister), and PM (Prime Minister)“, the ones who can directly intervene in people’s problems and make a difference.
The idea of gender representation is perhaps not as politically polarising as that of caste reservation. Hence there is no high-pitched debate for representation for women according to their 50 per cent share in the population unlike the argument for caste identity.
There have been times when reservation for women in Parliament was dismissed with remarks like parkati mahilayen (women without bobbed hair) in 1997, when politicians opposed the Women Reservation Bill saying they would not allow reservation benefits to go to urban, upper-class women.
Arguments apart, the facts are clear. Of the 15 Presidents, the country has had only two women Presidents, with Pratibha Patil becoming the first in July 2007 almost 60 years after Independence.
The Congress went to town citing this as an example of its commitment to women’s empowerment. Then came the time for Droupadi Murmu to become the second woman President in July 2022. This time her identity as a tribal President was talked about more than her identity as a woman. The reason was that the BJP wanted to reach out to the tribal population in a big way in the 2023 Assembly elections in central India and in the 2024 general election.
The same goes for the list of 14 Prime Ministers the country has had. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is the only woman to have bagged the top post twice over, and many give the credit for this to her being the daughter of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
India has seen 17 women Chief Ministers and the number is at best minuscule given the number of States (28 States and 8 Union Territories) in India and the number of Chief Ministers it has had since 1947. Of this, only 12 States and one UT have had a woman as Chief Minister. Gender justice at the level of chief ministership still eludes women in most States.
Even in West Bengal, where women are educated and assertive; Kerala, where the female literacy ratio is more than 92 per cent; and north-eastern India, where society is matriarchal to a great extent, women find it tough to make it to the top seat in the political hierarchy.
Syeda Anwara Taimur, a graduate of Aligarh Muslim University, became Chief Minister of Assam but her stint was sandwiched between spells of President’s Rule and lasted just a little over six months from December 6, 1980, to June 30, 1981. She is thus far the only Muslim woman Chief Minister in India and the only woman Chief Minister from the entire north-eastern region. She stayed in the job for 206 days.
Similarly, West Bengal, Bihar, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Goa, Punjab, and Jammu and Kashmir have seen only one woman Chief Minister so far but some of them have been prominent and come into their own, such as Mamata Banerjee, Uma Bharti, Nandini Satpathy, and Anandiben Patel.
Vasundhara Raje, Shashikala Kakodkar, Rajinder Kaur Bhattal, and Mehbooba Mufti are other names with lineage and family connections but also strong personalities of their own. Of these, Bhattal’s tenure in Punjab was just 83 days. The shortest tenure for any woman Chief Minister was that of V.N. Janaki Ramachandran in Tamil Nadu at just 23 days, who took over after the death of her husband and then Chief Minister M.G. Ramachandran. The AIADMK’s second Chief Minister Jayalalithaa, in contrast, served as Chief Minister for over 14 years.
Like Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh also saw two women Chief Ministers. Before Mayawati, who was also the first Dalit woman Chief Minister, Sucheta Kripalani from the Congress became Chief Minister for three and a half years in the 1960s. Kripalani was the first woman Chief Minister in India.
The National Capital Territory of Delhi is the only State to have had three women Chief Ministers, but only Sheila Dikshit served three terms for a period of over 15 years. Dikshit’s father Uma Shankar Dikshit was a veteran Congress leader from Uttar Pradesh but the daughter surpassed him in many ways.
Sushma Swaraj’s term was just 52 days in 1998. She was given the reins of the party only after things went out of hand, but she could not bring the party back to power.
In Goa, Shashikala Kakodkar as Chief Minister owed the job a great deal to her father and the first Chief Minister of Goa, Bhausaheb Bandodkar. She succeeded her father as Chief Minister, very much like Indira Gandhi did Jawaharlal Nehru as Prime Minister.
When Lalu Prasad foisted his wife Rabri Devi into his chair after he was implicated in the fodder scam case, nobody foresaw that the planned short-term arrangement would go awry and she would serve three terms.
Atishi is much better educated than Rabri, having a degree from Oxford and a Chevening scholarship, but that is for academic circles. In the corridors of political power, she is a lightweight. And that is probably the reason why she was chosen, as both Manish Sisodia and Gopal Rai could have, in the future, projected a challenge to Kejriwal.
Atishi will play out her time for a couple of months and be happy to go back to the background and let Kejriwal hog the limelight again.
In the celluloid world, Richa Chadha starred in the 2021 Hindi movie titled Madam Chief Minister which told the story of the rise of a Dalit leader to the top post in Uttar Pradesh. Some sought to link the film with Mayawati, but the story did not have too many similarities with the Bahujan Samaj Party leader’s life. It, however, did project the challenges that a woman politician faces in the Indian political system when she rises through the ranks.
The web series Maharani on the streaming platform Sony LIV, which cast popular Hindi movie star Huma Qureshi in the lead role of Rani Bharti drew applause and ran for three seasons with multiple episodes. It was partly inspired by Rabri Devi becoming Chief Minister in Bihar, but the show took creative liberties while mirroring some events that had taken place during Lalu Prasad’s regime.
The 2021 Tamil movie Thalaivii on the life of Jayalalithaa had the lead role played by Bollywood star (and now Lok Sabha MP) Kangana Ranaut and was released both in Hindi and Tamil, but it bombed at the box office.
Howard Roark, the protagonist in The Fountainhead, the first bestseller of the acclaimed Russian-born American author-philosopher Ayan Rand, when asked “My dear fellow, who will let you?” says: “That’s not the point. The point is, who will stop me?” Possibly it is time for women politicians in India to take a cue from him.
Let me end on that note of optimism. Write back to us about which woman politician you think will make a great Chief Minister. Until then,
Anand Mishra | Political Editor, Frontline
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