The flaw was always there for us to see. We saw and turned away. We didn’t want to see.
How important is gender in the life of a politician? Certainly, in the hierarchy of things, caste plays a catalytic role, along with religion. Language, also, sometimes becomes central to identity, as we saw in the Bengali language movement that pushed for the creation of a new nation called Bangladesh in 1971. Class has always mattered, especially in Left-centred struggles.
But gender? Politicians across the political spectrum have always paid lip service to so-called ‘women’s issues.’ Whether it is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) or the Congress, the ‘par kati mahila’ has usually been a source of unease, neither evil nor goddess.
It took Sonia Gandhi, with her European upbringing that fully appreciated the work ethic of the working class, to understand that you needed women in politics to effect real change. So as she sat in the driver’s seat in Manmohan Singh’s first United Progressive Alliance government, Gandhi pushed for the passage of the Women’s Reservation Bill.
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She ensured that it was passed in the Rajya Sabha, so that the bill would never die.
That bill has proved to be the Congress party’s single most important investment in egalitarian gender politics – although, note that even today, the party hardly talks about it, leave alone flaunt it.
In fact, the Congress has never taunted Prime Minister Narendra Modi about not passing the bill in the Lok Sabha, where it has an absolute majority. It’s all very well for Rahul Gandhi to promote gender equality in politics, but it’s equally clear that in the Congress party’s laundry list of ‘Things It Must Do’ to win back power, gender is way down at the bottom.
A moment in gender politics
Perhaps that’s why, older women journalists (like me) are watching with a certain astonishment at the manner in which the current protest around allegations of sexual abuse and assault by Minister of State for External Affairs M.J. Akbar is taking place.
It’s been a week since the first accusations, but it’s not as if the protests are ‘snowballing’ or ‘ramping up.’ That jargon would imply a hearty, enthusiastic, largely linear movement in which things inexorably move towards a solution in which, in the end, the bad guy is properly buried in the woodwork.
The truth is, hashtag #MeToo is still too convenient, like a latch to hang something on. Perhaps it’s a moment in India’s gender politics, brewing since the Mathura rape, or Bhanwari Devi, or Jyoti Singh alias Nirbhaya, that reminded us of the Constitutional principles, such as the Right to Life, just in case ordinary human decency wouldn’t do.
In the case of Akbar, the story is so fraught and so loaded with the passage of guilt, humiliation and time that hope emerges, but only sometimes.
The other problem is that his fate fully rests on Modi’s one-word decision.
Go.
We know from ThePrint colleague Sanya Dhingra’s story that the Prime Minister hasn’t said one word about Akbar’s alleged impropriety so far. At a Cabinet meeting Wednesday, he is believed to have maintained a stony silence, while a few colleagues briefly discussed the matter.
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We have no idea if Modi is horror-struck just like the rest of us as he reads Ghazala Wahab’s piece in The Wire, or the Anonymous piece in FirstPost, on the considered brutality these women suffered at Akbar’s hands.
We have no clue if he’s mad as hell at the possibility that a supremely intelligent former editor, who come so late to the party, is endangering the last year of his government, in which he has so tenaciously focused on slogans ‘Beti Bachao’ aimed at improving his image among women.
The constituency
Modi recognised early on that ‘women’ could be a constituency. Swarms would sit right in front of every rally and he often addressed them through promises that would ease their hard lives – education, cooking gas and even a healthcare scheme. (The last one, especially, is expected to be a game-changer.)
Modi understood that happier homes in which the breeze lapped at the clothes-line that women have likely washed and the smokeless chulha on which women have likely cooked made for happier BJP voters.
But Modi has been careful about promising women the rose garden, thorns and all. He has never called for a revolution in sexual politics. Whether or not women are fair game is never the question. So-called ‘sex CD’ scandals in which BJP politicians have been allegedly linked quickly die a death. What happens inside the bedroom must remain inside the bedroom.
That’s why, despite such a handsome majority in the Lok Sabha, Modi will never take the Women’s Reservation Bill that Sonia Gandhi has kept alive for nearly a decade, and have it passed. It would be so easy for him to do. He will never do it.
So you can guess at the Prime Minister’s anger about the current, catalytic moment in which one of the smartest men in his government is in danger of being singed by a fire he started several years ago.
Modi’s problem is that he must now take a call on stopping the fire before it possibly engulfs his government.
That’s why he’s waiting for Akbar to return from his Africa yatra. The dice is loading against Akbar, as one senior Cabinet minister told me. Girl Number Eleven, @IndraniTalukdar, came out on Twitter Thursday to announce that she too had an ugly Akbar story.
The right thing
It would be so much easier of course if Akbar was a run-of-the-mill, pot-bellied, foul-mouthed politician with a yen for the young women. But he’s not.
As several journalists who worked with him over the years, including those he sexually assaulted, have vouched for, his golden pen, which slid over the page so easily and evoked the emotions the words were designed to evoke, was unique. Akbar was a rockstar editor who wrote the best columns, commissioned the best reportage and converted an upstart newspaper, The Telegraph, into an unputdownable product.
As fellow journalist S.N.M. Abdi says, “Akbar was a star, and we always hoped that some of that stardust would fall upon us.”
The flaw was always there for us to see. We saw and turned away. We didn’t want to see.
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The irony is we now want Modi to do the job for us. To do what we, the women, should have done a long time ago. Imagine if Akbar hadn’t joined politics and had continued to be an editor preying upon women young enough to be his daughter.
But he is a card-carrying member of the BJP today and a member of Modi’s government. The PM must do the right thing by all of us. Akbar must go.