• Valson Thampu

Two women politicians are currently in Kerala limelight; though for contrary reasons. Unsurprisingly, Kannur’s Divya is hogging the limelight. Her exploits presumably by way of moral-policing the administrative culture of Kerala, has deflected attention from Priyanka’s débuting in electoral politics from Wynand.

Contradictions in political cultures apart between them, they highlight the limits of the myth that we are still reluctant to outgrow: the presumed inferiority of women to men in political acumen. Women, as feminists have been complaining for long, are judged by men on the basis of ‘what they have made us to be’.

Divya represents women’s empowerment in an ironic mode. In this mode, women are deemed empowered if they are free and able to act like men.  This is ironic because such pseudo-male empowerment distorts and deforms the feminine. The macho-status that women attain in this mode is secured, in many instances, at a huge cost. It involves, as Shakespeare would have put it, the souring of the milk of humankind-ness; that all-important, though intangible, quality of femineity, which tends to be, in our times, derided as an imposition on women by men in their stratagem to limit and use women as means of convenience and sensual pleasure. It is the distortion that Shakespeare intuited more clearly than anyone else I know of. Regarding the fierce manliness rippling in his wife’s ambition, Macbeth cries out, “Bring forth men-children only; for thine undaunted mettle should comprise nothing but males” (Act 1, scene 7). The implication is obvious. The worst degradation of the feminine is that it cannot mother, or express, the truly feminine.

It is empowerment of a different order that Priyanka denotes. She proves that political acumen is not only compatible with, but that it really needs to be humanized by, womanly grace and genius. When two decades ago the time was ripe for the ‘Gandhi siblings’ to enter politics, there was a clamour for Priyanka to be favoured over Rahul; catalysed, no doubt, by the nostalgia for the Indira-era of the Congress. (She was famously described as ‘the only man in the Congress’.)  But Priyanka would have none of it. She was content to play a supportive and complementary role to Rahul. What strikes me as particularly relevant is her intuitive perception of Rahul’s political potential at a time when many thought of him as a handsome political misfit, of which V.S. Achudanandan’s ‘Amul baby’ jibe is the household variant among Keralites.

On the average, women are superior to men in intuitive perception, which makes them practically effective. (Most men are, for example, hopeless in multi-tasking.) Women, thanks to their clearer sense of fact, understand situations better and faster. Perhaps that is a function of love. Love is the light of knowing. Power lends itself to control and flamboyance. Love makes one quietly efficient in the practicalities of life. This is the strength native to women; unless they renounce it, as Lady Macbeth did, to become men’s copycats. It is not for nothing that even today Indira Gandhi is regarded the ‘best Prime Minister India ever had’, rated higher even than her legendary father, Jawaharlal.

There is a context to my hailing Priyanka’s electoral debut from Kerala. Years ago, I used to serve as a volunteer with Mother Teresa’s home for the destitute and dying in North Delhi called Nirmal Hriday. Advised by the sisters there, I made a visit to the children’s home in South Delhi maintained by the Sisters of Charity. My visit over, as I was leaving, the sister in charge confided in me that Priyanka was serving as a volunteer, twice a week, in that orphanage. Caring for the children there was instinctive to her. To me it mattered not only that she was soulful enough to care for the orphan children, but also that she did so in utmost privacy, shunning publicity. That, I believe, is typical of the feminine grace that we can never have enough of. For men, even spiritual meditations are incomplete without the hype of publicity! Men crave to be seen; whereas women care to see. The former’s hands remain withered, unless they are assured of being noticed and acclaimed for the good they do as something out of the ordinary.

The political culture of Kerala urgently needs a shot of this feminine grace. This is not a politically partisan advocacy, but a citizenship dream. The ascendancy of ‘macho-politics’ of the ‘fifty-six-inch-chest’ brand has undermined the foundation even of citizenship. Historically, the masculine has been nurtured on the paradigm of power. As John Stuart Mill argued, equality unsettles the masculine mindset. Men become unable to live peaceably with their equals. They tend to see equals as enemies. (Was that why Jesus taught his disciples to ‘love your enemies’?) Men feel secure, Mill says, only when they subjugate those in their vicinity. Hierarchy -the institutionalization of inequality- is quintessentially masculine. But equality is a precondition for justice. So, a power-and-inequality-driven political culture revels in inflicting injustice on the vulnerable, of which lynch-mobs are sporadic reminders.

Kerala may be free of this malignancy. But murder-politics is endemic in the state. Violence denotes a renunciation of fellow-feeling and a corruption of social imagination. We must kill our own humanity before we can kill a fellow human being. Historically, men have monopolized means of violence, and the legitimacy to use them. They are disempowered by this power-orientation. Buddha preached compassion, and Jesus incarnated Love; both, as antidotes to the malignancy of power. Kerala remembers, by fits and starts, its Navodhana legacy. But that legacy is excluded from the dynamics of the politics we practise.

The essence of Navodhana is love. No man, wrote G.K. Chesterton, can be a reformer unless he is a lover! When politicians who believe in violence don mantles of Navodhana opportunistically, the best they can do is to imagine it as a ‘wall’! They remain unaware that in doing so they are thinking in the anti-Navodhana mode. Wall, Robert Frost would say, is manly. It divides neighbours, communities, societies and nations into ‘us-against-them’. The Sangh Parivar is an instance of ideology-as-wall. So, it envisages unity via fragmentation. ‘They’ must be stigmatized and disenfranchised, if ‘we’ are to be virile, united, and safe!

Its counterpart in Kerala is murder-politics, the lumpen glorification of violence in the practice of party politics. Our public life stands in urgent need of an injection of the authentically feminine -the caring, life-nurturing, difference-respecting outlook that leaves you free to love others as they are, and to treat them as you would be treated. I have every reason to believe that Priyanka symbolizes such a spirit in politics, and I look forward to her having her full impact on the politics of Kerala. Group skirmishes within the Congress is a milder variant of the murder-politics outside of it; an intra-party toy-gun, if you like, as compared to the inter-party AK 47.