Shuma Raha – SAWM Sisters

Will Rahul Be Able to Keep His Pro-Women Promise if Voted In?

Shuma Raha — Sun, 17 Mar 2019 07:57:19 +0000

India is in the thick of election season, and tall promises and pretty sops are raining down faster than you can say “Lok Sabha”. The latest offering came from Congress President Rahul Gandhi while he was having an informal interaction with the students of Stella Maris College for Women in Chennai.

Dressed in a blue t-shirt and faded blue jeans, Rahul dimpled charmingly at the huge assembly of young women — many of them first-time voters — and asked them to address him as “Rahul”, rather than a formal “Sir”.

It was not merely a guy-next-door charm offensive, though. Rahul sounded earnest and emphatic and used the occasion to make a big-bang poll promise. He said that if the Congress were voted to power, it would not only pass the Women’s Reservation Bill (which has been in limbo since 2008), but also reserve 33 percent of government jobs for women.

Rahul Gandhi’s Pro-Women Pitch Is Fine, But Is His 33% Govt Job Quota Pledge Feasible?

There was nothing new about Rahul reigniting that old pledge to pass the Women’s Reservation Bill, which guarantees 33 percent representation for women in Parliament and the state legislatures. Most political leaders do the same thing from time to time.

It’s their way of showing commitment to the cause of women, whenever there is need for such commitment to be shown. And then, they proceed to forget about it, which is why the Bill lapsed in 2014 and has been in coma ever since.

But what to make of Rahul’s promise to reserve 33 percent of government jobs for women? How does the Congress president propose to put that plan into action? Was it a well thought-out announcement with a feasible strategy, to wedge a quota for women into the minefield of an already existing 49.5 percent reservation in government jobs? Or, was it just another jumla — a high-blown promise of largesse, that will evaporate once the votes have been counted?

Election Promises that Evaporate

Regrettably, such grandiose announcements have become par for the course when Indian politicians get into campaigning mode. In January this year, the BJP-led NDA government at the Centre announced a 10 percent reservation in educational institutes and government jobs for the economically backward.

It rammed the legislation through in Parliament and no party dared to oppose the move, lest it be considered hostile to this particular vote-bank.

Everyone knew that the new quota was likely to be struck down by the Supreme Court because it goes against the tenets of social justice, which has been the constitutional rationale for reservations. But, of course, by then the elections would be over and the BJP would be seen to have been a benefactor to India’s poor.

Both Govt & Opposition Have ‘Announce First, Think Later’ Attitude

The Congress parried the ruling party’s thrust of 10 percent additional reservation, by announcing a minimum income programme for the poor. However, the details as to how this would work were left fuzzy. Not to be outdone, in the interim Budget, the government announced a direct cash transfer of Rs 6,000 per year to nearly 120 million small and marginal farmers.

It blithely ignored questions as to whether such a paltry sum of money would make any dent on rural distress. It was undoubtedly a sorry piece of tokenism, but in the government’s book, it bolstered its pro-poor narrative. And that’s all that mattered.

Campaign promises are an integral part of the electoral process in democracies all over the world. That’s how the system works.

But there seems to be a hint of ad hoc-ism, of an almost cavalier attitude on the part of both the ruling party as well as the principal Opposition, when it comes to announcing major policies.

The attitude seems to be — ‘announce first, think later’. Both seem intent on claiming the news cycle with a sensational policy decision — its details, pros and cons, viability or otherwise seem to be of peripheral concern.

Women — A Crucial Vote Bank

As for Rahul’s glib promise to reserve 33 percent of government jobs for women, he understands, as do all parties, that women are a crucial vote bank. They may be shamefully under-represented in politics — women constituted 12.6 percent of the Lok Sabha after the 2014 elections — but their participation in the electoral process has seen a phenomenal rise in recent times. In 1962, the gap between the turnout of male and female voters was 15 percent. In 2014, the gap had narrowed to just 1.5 percent — 65.63 percent turnout of women voters, compared to 67 percent for men.

Women could throng the polling booths in still larger numbers in 2019. Television journalist Prannoy Roy and election researcher Dorab Sopariwala’s book, The Verdict, states that in the assembly elections of 2017 and 2018, voter turnout for women was as high as 70 percent as compared to 43 percent among men.

Today, women can sway the outcome of an election. Hence measures for their upliftment and welfare are not just a social good — they could determine how a party fares at the hustings. And savvy politicians realise that. They realise that female voters may no longer equate empowerment with gifts of pressure cookers and LPG connections. They want more. They want economic and political power rather than deification in the kitchen.

Odisha and Bengal Govt’s Pro-Women Stance

Earlier this week, Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee took substantive steps to ramp up women’s representation in the upcoming general elections. While Patnaik declared that women would comprise 33 percent of the candidates fielded by his party, the BJD, for the 21 Lok Sabha seats in Odisha, Banerjee announced that 41 percent of Trinamool Congress’s candidates for the 42 seats in West Bengal would be women.

Will Rahul Gandhi make a similar push for women when his party declares its list of candidates?

If he cannot, then why talk about the far more difficult task of instituting a 33 percent jobs quota for women in government?

While good intent is good — actionable intent is better.

(The writer is a senior journalist based in Delhi. She can be reached@ShumaRaha. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own.The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)

source: The Quint

Lies, damn lies and books

Shuma Raha — Sun, 24 Feb 2019 08:38:15 +0000

At the Academy Awards on Sunday night no one will be surprised if Glenn Close walks away with the Oscar for best actress for her role in The Wife. The 71-year-old actress is outstanding as Joan Castleman, the wife of a celebrated author who has just won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Joan is the copybook helpmeet — devoted ally and personal assistant rolled into one. She is a loving wife, mindful of her husband’s health and his smallest needs, picking up after him and even signalling to him discreetly at parties when his beard gets festooned with crumbs. After they get the happy news, she submits to jumping up and down on the bed with her jubilant husband who chants, “I won the Nobel, I won the Nobel.”

But as the movie unspools, you realise that Joan is much more than an everywife (spoiler alert here!). Joseph Castleman’s literary works are not his own. She is the writer, he is not. She has the gift, he does not. And for decades, she has subsumed her literary identity into her husband’s fictive one and gilded him with the gold of her own talent. In short, Joseph is a fraud, and the Nobel Prize really belongs to his wife.

However, despite Close’s magnificently nuanced portrayal of a woman who is at last beginning to splinter under the strain of her exploitative marriage, The Wife, based on Meg Wolitzer’s 2003 novel of the same name, is an improbable story. A literary genius who lets her philandering husband appropriate the fruits of her talent? And she does it not with one book or for a few years, but over a lifetime? And with such cunning secrecy that not even her children get to know?

It simply isn’t credible. Besides, The Wife ups the volume on the same old dirge of the woman obliterating herself on the altar of her marriage and family. When a brilliant, gifted, 20th-century female character is shown to be so self-abnegating and slavish towards her egotistic, douchebag husband for the better part of her life, the cultural cues that go out are medieval, to say the least.

To me, the interesting part of The Wife (apart from Close’s performance) is Joseph’s dishonesty, whose entire writing career rests on a lie. It brings to mind a host of real life writers who have had a rather ardent relationship with lies. In a stunning exposé earlier this month, The New Yorker detailed how Dan Mallory, the book editor-turned-author of the bestselling novel The Woman in the Window, routinely treated his friends and colleagues to a fantastical web of falsehoods about himself. These included his claims of holding a doctorate from Oxford and being a cancer survivor who suffered debilitating relapses of the disease. (After the report came out, Mallory claimed he was bipolar, often with no recollection of what he may have said earlier.)

While Mallory’s fabrications are creepy, they aren’t exactly criminal. Others have threaded the dishonesty into their work — hoaxing, plagiarising, misrepresenting. There’s the famous case of Clifford Irving, who in the early 1970s, got a huge advance for a “ghost-written” autobiography of billionaire-recluse Howard Hughes before it was outed as a fraud; there’s James Frey’s 2003 memoir, the bestselling A Million Little Pieces, which was later trashed as a falsified account of his struggles with drug addiction; there’s Kaavya Vishwanathan, then a student at Harvard, who plagiarised her 2006 chick-lit novel from multiple books in that genre; and there are journalists who have dreamed up gritty human interest stories and done breathtaking “on-field” reportage without going anywhere near said field. In 1981, The Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke’s Pulitzer Prize-winning feature about an eight-year-old heroin addict was found to have been, well, cooked up. Cooke lost the Pulitzer.

Psychologists say that liars tend to be more creative, that their imagination is more supple and unfettered. Does that give creative people a sort of poetic licence to fib? Of course, there are fibbers and con artists in every profession, so the lies of writers can hardly be treated as pleasing bursts of their creativity. Most literary fraudsters do get taken down, they do come to grief.

But then, none of them had Joan for a wife.

source: Business Standard

In defence of divorce

Shuma Raha — Sat, 09 Feb 2019 14:19:38 +0000

Even today, a majority of Indian women cannot walk out of unhappy, incompatible or abusive marriages because they don’t have the social and economic capital to do so

An interesting statistic was bouncing around the Internet the other day. According to a 2017 report by Unified Lawyers, a Sydney-based law firm, India has the lowest incidence of divorce in the world — a mere 1 per cent. Luxembourg tops the chart with 87 per cent and Spain comes up second with 65 per cent.

While developing countries do exhibit lower divorce rates, Indians seem to have the toughest, the most iron-clad, bonds of matrimony in the world. It’s enough to make the sanskaari amongst us cut capers and rub their hands in glee. Of course, Twitter wits were soon …

source: Business Standard

Priyanka Gandhi Can Steal Airtime From Modi With ‘Good Wife’ Image

Shuma Raha — Fri, 08 Feb 2019 04:42:16 +0000

If politics is largely about optics, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra just scored a big hit in that department. On a day when she formally entered politics and took over as Congress’s general secretary in charge of eastern Uttar Pradesh, Priyanka managed to finesse her image, so she comes across not just as the comely daughter of the Nehru-Gandhi line, but also as a dutiful wife who knows how to stand by her man.

Political Message Behind Priyanka Dropping Husband Off to ED Office

Priyanka Gandhi Vadra achieved this by the simple — and highly visible — strategy of dropping off her businessman husband Robert Vadra at the office of the Enforcement Directorate (ED), where he was to be questioned for alleged money laundering in connection with several properties he allegedly owns in London.

Priyanka told the media when she came to the AICC headquarters afterwards:

I stand by my husband… I support my husband, I support my family. Priyanka Gandhi Vadra to media

It was, of course, a political message — one that signified that Priyanka and the Congress brass were backing Vadra to the hilt, no matter how hard the authorities came after the Gandhi family damaad in this election season.

But it shaded in another, more powerfully political, narrative. Priyanka’s declaration of support for her husband is an irresistible sentiment in a country as traditional and patriarchal as India.

People in the countryside may or may not be seduced by her dynastic cred, they may or may not be attracted to her sunny smile, but a woman who fights for her husband’s honour is bound to endear herself to male and female voters alike.

Priyanka Gandhi’s ‘Victim Card’ Might Do The Trick

Indeed, if the ED arrests Robert Vadra (and irrespective of whether or not he is truly tainted), Priyanka could well derive significant political mileage from it. “Look at me”, she might say, “they are victimising my family because I want to serve you and give you a better life”.

It could translate into a double bonanza for the Congress: the party not only gets a charismatic leader, but a charismatic leader who can play the victim card. And we know the victim card works. It has certainly worked well for the BJP’s chief vote-getter.

The BJP has greeted Priyanka’s entry into politics with the usual panoply of insults and slighting epithets. Apart from sneering at her lack of experience, BJP leaders have variously described her as “bipolar”, “bachchi” “homely” and “chocolatey”.

There’s no doubt that in the run-up to the polls, the ruling party will go all out to portray Priyanka as just another “pretty face”, an inconsequential airhead, who has been summoned into the field by her brother, Congress President Rahul Gandhi, in a desperate attempt to revive the party’s fortunes in Uttar Pradesh. Congress currently holds only two parliamentary seats in UP —the Gandhi family buroughs of Amethi and Raebareli.

Can’t Dismiss Priyanka Gandhi as a ‘Goongi Gudiya’

In addition, the BJP may choose to attack Priyanka on account of her husband’s alleged misdeeds. At a time when Rahul Gandhi tirelessly claims that astronomical corruption took place in securing the Rafale deal, the BJP might choose to make Vadra the centrepiece of its own narrative against a “corrupt” Congress-led UPA. With the 2G and Commonwealth Games ‘scams’ having all but faded from public memory, Vadra could be the focal point of the BJP’s ‘stop-the-corrupt-Congress’ campaign in the upcoming general elections.

But with Priyanka in the fray, the strategy could become complicated for the BJP. First, the party would be foolish to dismiss her as a ‘goongi gudiya’ redux (Priyanka’s grandmother Indira was famously described as one before she executed a ‘surgical strike’ on all those who challenged her).

Even while she was in the margins of politics, Priyanka revealed herself to be quick of wit and sharp of repartee. Moreover, she has reportedly been in on Congress’s political confabulations for some years now. She could well show considerable political acumen now that she has thrown her hat into the ring.

Watch Out Modi Ji! Priyanka Could Steal Your Airtime

Second, if the BJP tries to make political capital out of Robert Vadra’s alleged financial wrongdoing, it would at once have to deal with Priyanka’s adarsh bharatiya naari image of a wife who stands firmly by her embattled husband. She has made that clear already. In the West, the ‘stand-by-your-man’ narrative has been tinged with scorn. Hillary Clinton never quite lived down her support of Bill Clinton in the face of his multiple sexual peccadilloes.

But in India, the “ideal” wife who supports her husband through thick and thin, the woman who valiantly tries to shield her family from harm, is an object of admiration and reverence.

And you can be sure that Priyanka will play to that sentiment when she goes to woo the voters in eastern Uttar Pradesh.

Add to that, the gazillions of media attention and airtime that Priyanka will command — she could give the Prime Minister a run for his money here — and you get the feeling that the Gandhi daughter has it in her to be a thorn in BJP’s side.

Indians like to enter into familial relationships with their female politicians. A Didi, a Behen, an Amma — they are sisters or mothers to them. Priyanka is clearly following in that tradition. The coming weeks will show if she becomes the beti whom people adore for being the ideal wife.

(Shuma Raha is a journalist and author based in Delhi. She tweets at @ShumaRaha. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quintneither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)

source: The Quint