Where are the women Gandhians? Unlike Gandhians like Sucheta Kripilani or Aruna Asif Ali, today's women politicians are megalomaniacs

By Sankar Ray/DNA-

Daily News & Analysis, 31/07/2011

Where are the women Gandhians?

Unlike Gandhians like Sucheta Kripilani or Aruna Asif Ali, today's women politicians are megalomaniacs

The governor of West Bengal MK Narayanan signed an order on February 3, 2011, appointing Dr Amit Banerjee, professor and head, department of cardiothoracic surgery, GB Pant Hospital, New Delhi, and the senior-most cardiac surgeon in India's academic institutions, as the vice chancellor, West Bengal University of Health Sciences. A national talent search scholar, Dr Banerjee is the winner of several prestigious awards and was editor, Indian Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, between 1991 and 1996.

Inexplicably, the then additional chief secretary, in charge of health and family welfare, M N Roy, disallowed Dr Banerjee to join when he submitted his joining report on July 1 although the incumbent was never given a deadline for joining in his new post. Grapevine has it chief minister Mamata Banerjee arbitrarily directed the top bureaucracy not to let the incumbent join after June 15. The executive committee of WBUHS has been asked to look out for another person and in the queue are a few newly-found sycophants of Ms Banerjee.

Ms Banerjee made her way upwards through a singular and protracted effort with an uncompromising adherence to personal values of austere and simple lifestyle. Nonetheless, her anathema towards a democratic milieu around her cannot be ignored. The ham-handed attitude towards Dr Banerjee is a reflex of one on a high horse with a revolver and whether it's a syndrome of megalomania is the concern of a social psychologist.

Megalomaniac feats among woman politicians and other sections of socialites are a feature, particularly in peasant societies that are distinctively different from industrially developed ones. In India, we found this propensity, essentially an outreach of extremely possessive traits, among top woman political leaders like Bahujan Samaj Party chief and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati and her counterpart in Tamil Nadu, J Jayalalithaa, dictator-leader of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagham.



They are very different from Sucheta Kripalani, India's first woman chief minister, who courted imprisonment repeatedly during the freedom struggle and whom Indira Gandhi described as "a person of rare courage and character who brought credit to Indian womanhood."

The likes of her were Aruna Asaf Ali, who hoisted the tricolour at the Azad Maidan during the Quit India movement, and Usha Mehta, a famous Gandhian who was instrumental in the operation of the Secret Congress Radio during the QIM. Unlike Indira Gandhi, they were democrat to the core, and believed that a democrat has to behave democratically among colleagues and juniors.

Maybe, the authoritarian trends reflect a sense of insecurity as the women are victims of discrimination and are challenged by male-dominated social hierarchy. Professor Everett Hagen, an economist having taught at MIT, scripted a theory -- known as Hagen's Theory -- on the direct relationship between societal change and personality change of people. He was of the view that a change from traditional to modern society happens when a change takes place in people's personalities. Traditional societies, Hagen holds, are dominated by authoritarian personalities while the modern societies are ruled by innovative personalities. The advent of Mamata Banerjee vouchsafes this in West Bengal, where peasants constitute over 70% of population.

Georgina Wayden in a paper, Women and Democratization: Conceptualizing Gender Relations in Transition Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1994), focused on the impact of gender relations on democratisation. Among the key questions she threw up were the role of women's movements in the transition to democratic rule and their impact on competitive electoral politics. Braving limitations of narrow definitions of democracy and the top-down focus Wayden studied the relationship between civil society and the state and the existence of 'political space' in different processes of transition in Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe and came out with a comparative gendered analysis.


Authoritarian aberrations affect the image of even very honest politicians. Coming back to the Mamata phenomenon that generated new aspirations for democratic movement with genuinely humanist tone, her quasi-dictatorial mindset would affect her most. But this deviation is not involuntary. When she was asked why democratic functioning is absent in the Trinamool Congress, she shot back, "Why don't you ask this question to Sonia Gandhi?"

Her followers may recite the Sahitya Academy laureate Bengali poet Joy Goswami:

Whatever you say, I shall do exactly that,
I'll eat exactly that, wear exactly that,
apply exactly that on my body.
And leave to go out.
I'll abandon my own land and go away without a word.

(The writer is a veteran journalist & commentator, specialising in left politics and environment)

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