‘heat, wave and women leaders

'HEAT' WAVE AND WOMEN LEADERS

By Prem Chandran

At the height of this election heat, where have all the women gone? Sushma Swaraj, who first played “hard to get”, then acted “coy” and waited for the right opportunity to cock a snook at Narendra Modi and failed, and of late is playing “hide and seek”, is by all means a class by herself. But, what of the more seasoned regional woman ‘supremo’s like Jayalalithaa, Mayawati and Mamata Banerjee?

These women leaders have not gone into hiding, and are in fact active on the campaign front in their respective states. But, they are crestfallen. The hotline set up between Kolkata and Chennai a month before the poll announcement remains snapped. Of what use, now! The suddenly crafted unity express has halted even before it gathered speed. Much water has flown down the Hooghly river in the past few weeks. The General Election campaign for the gaddi in Delhi is not progressing the way the two, or the rest of the women leaders, had hoped for. There is little to suggest any of these self-styled PM hopefuls will soon take a flight to Delhi.

As the heat “wave” erupted in the North, and amid crowd frenzy braving the heat in location after location, and Modi increasingly giving the impression that he will have the last laugh, a pall of gloom hangs over the hopes of several leaders of small-time parties, including the women supremo’s, who thought this here was the time for them to fish in troubled waters and get upfront. With these women, hopes have dashed – or rather, it appeared so for the time being –and also the hopes of the likes of Sharad Pawar and Nitish Kumar as well. Kumar has openly raised the question, finally, when he started increasingly having the feeling that no one is speaking up for him, as to what was wrong for a seasoned one like him to seek the PM post. After all, he has said, he is second to none other than Atal Behari Vajpayee in experience. Problem is, everyone does not see things in such simple ways.

In all fairness, it must be admitted that our women brigade have acquitted themselves very well as administrators. Mayawati did a good job when it came to terrorizing the bureaucrazy and bending it to her will. Some even got chappal treatment. And, she is also rumoured to have had a stock of chappals that matched the old Imelda Marcos shelves. On the positive side, when she was at the helm, the goon-brigade of Mulayam Singh Yadav, his party and the rest of the outlaws in the state, went into hiding – having surfaced only after she vacated the CM chair. People in UP had a taste of peace. They are back to square one now. Jayalalithaa has been doing a good job in Tamil Nadu if keeping things right under her thumb is one indication. She is giving the corrupt Karunanidhi clan a run for their money. So far, so good.

In West Bengal, the moment you land in Kolkata you know who is the boss and who is not. Red remained the classic colour of Kolkata for three decades; now, you will have to look around to see a red brick, leave alone a red flag. Blue and white, the shades of Mamata’s saree, you might say, is visible everywhere. Exit the reds for good. Sushma Swaraj was Delhi CM for a brief period, and was Union minister under Vajpayee, etc, and she was the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha this time. She is being hailed for the power of the tongue she wielded in Parliament. It was not just LK Advani who praised her gift of the gab, having gone to the extent of comparing it with that of legendary Vajpayee –yet again—but there are others too who subscribe to such a theory. She spoke well, but rightly or wrongly the nation apparently thinks there is more to a leader than a long speech. The RSS believes so too. And, the nation also thinks that adopting a conciliatory tone to the ruling party is not the way forward for an Opposition leader, though she found abundant merit in it.

On the other hand, while the nation bracketed Arvind Kejriwal with the PM hopefuls at the height of a media frenzy in his favour, it is quite unlikely that the AAP leader himself saw such an opportunity for himself. In fact, there is ground to suspect he even did not visualise becoming the Delhi CM. Unexpected situations threw up such an opportunity, and he grabbed it. Whether he acquitted himself well in the less than 50 days of his rule of the Rajdhani is a debatable point. Also debatable is whether he and his party did the right thing by spreading its net far and wide, expanding the scope of its operations even far down the south with practically no organizational network to its credit. All what it had was the goodwill from the media, at least to start with.

The unexpected success that came the AAP way emboldened Kejriwal and his team to experiment this time with India in its totality, with the exception perhaps of the North-East where politics is an altogether different ball game – a game of three Cs; of cash, clan and church. Adventurism has its flip side. With practically no organizational network to guide Kejriwal, state after state, and in such a short span of time before the elections came calling, candidate selections went haywire. For instance, an AAP candidate in Orissa has turned out to be the one candidate in the state who carried with him the maximum number of criminal cases, some of them of the worst nature. What is the message that this is sending out?

Or, what did the AAP try to gain by fielding the likes of a Rajmohan Gandhi in Delhi, or a writer like Sarah Joseph in Kerala’s Thrissur constituency? Both are good souls, but frankly, they are past their prime, perhaps relics of the past, and should have volunteered to opt out of the fray. AAP is a party that should essentially carry with it the power of the youth to change the society. AAP should rather have identified the right candidates, who could fetch votes by the strength of their personal appeal, sincerity to the cause, and energy to take things forward. The place for a Rajmohan Gandhi, at best, is Rajya Sabha.

Kejriwal or Prashant Bhushan is not super human. If their overzealousness or adventurism ends up in a fiasco, they should blame none else other than themselves for what went wrong. Rather, what might have been advisable for them was to concentrate on Delhi and its peripheries, where Kejriwal had nurtured his support for the past many years, and built their base for long term. Now, a dreadful prospect awaits them. They might lose Delhi, and won’t gain a foothold elsewhere too.

This is not to ignore the fact that the General Elections has provided the AAP with the right opportunity to reach out. What is doubtful is whether they can sustain the momentum, especially after several wrong steps have been taken like in the case of the Orissa candidate selection; or in the membership drive, wherein any Tom, Dick and Harry could simply give their telephone number and become a member of the party. If someone said this was just a joke, there is truth to it. And, when the Communists sought to dismiss AAP as a one-programme party (anti-corruption), with no other ideology or agenda with it, they raised a pertinent point as well. Communists, after all, are good at finding fault with others’ acts. This is not how AAP should be. In the process, unfortunately, the anti-corruption campaign has come to naught. It would look like, this now is no more an issue, not even for the likes of Arvind Kejriwal. He has grown beyond that; the cause has been orphaned. You might ask, what of Anna Hazare? The less said the better.

Back to the main theme of PM hopefuls. It is not time yet to pity the tailors who stitched coats for these men and women. We have to wait till the election results are out in May. Onto the people’s court.

premcee@gmail.com;indiahereandnow.com