I don’t notice feminists exactly jumping for joy at Patil’s selection. No doubt, they recognise that she was chosen as a cynical ploy to get around the impasse created by the Left. After the Congress’s first preferences for the post were turned down, by sheer chance a CPI member suggested appointing a woman candidate. The Communists now take credit for this ‘path breaking’ decision. It is, of course, another matter that till two years ago no woman had even been appointed to the CPM Politburo and even the half a dozen females in the Central Committee are wives or siblings of party leaders. So thrilled was the UPA selection committee with the symbolic gesture that it took barely six minutes to clear Patil’s name, even though most UPA allies were unaware just who Patil was and even some in the Congress were only vaguely familiar with her name.

Interestingly, as the UPA government bats for Patil, another woman, Veena Sikri, has gone to court accusing the government of unfairly depriving her of the foreign secretary’s post because of a gender bias. Sikri points out that she was senior to the man who superceded her and was equally qualified. The foreign office is not ruffled by charges of gender bias. It feels it has proved its credentials by appointing a woman as foreign secretary a few years back. The woman selected as India’s first foreign secretary was, like Patil, completely taken aback at having hit the jack pot. She was, after all, no high flier; she had never worked in any position of consequence in South Block. As with Patil, she was lifted out of obscurity in a Machiavellian move to deprive a deserving male. The senior-most official in the then PMO wanted a free reign in the MEA and he thought the woman candidate would fit in ideally.

Such tokenism is common in our polity. Symbolic representatives are selected because they belong to one or another disadvantaged minority whom the establishment would like to mollify. The Congress has developed a special knack for inducting token representatives who have no power base of their own even within their respective communities. Ahmed Patel and Ghulam Nabi Azad are taken as the representatives of the Muslim community in the party, although the community looks more to Arjun Singh to speak on its behalf. The Congress’s representatives from the dalits such as Sushil Kumar Shinde, Meira Kumar and Kumari Selja, lack an all-India standing and popularity within their own community. And Mayawati has managed to wean away the dalit vote from the Congress because the Congress only paid lip service to their cause.

The malady of tokenism afflicts all our national parties. Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi and Shahnawaz Husain are conspicuous Muslim faces in a party basically formed to advance the Hindu cause. Much was made of Bangaru Laxman’s dalit background when he was made BJP party president. But he was kicked out unceremoniously for accepting a bribe and has not been heard of since. The bulk of the BJP’s OBC representatives are token leaders with the upper castes still calling the shots. Uma Bharati’s stormy exit from the BJP was because she refused to be either a token OBC or a token woman — she wanted to be her own person, wielding power in her own right.

In the politics of empty symbolism, the deserving candidate generally gets shafted for someone subservient and pliable. Patil’s record suggests she fits the mould. In her career there has always been a male to push her career forward, whether a party or caste leader, father, brother or husband. She even disclaims all responsibility for the fraud committed by the woman’s bank founded in her name, Pratibha Mahila Sahakari bank, and of which she was founding chairperson. The males in the Patil household are the real guilty ones, according to her own party.

The curious part is that the Congress hardly needed to make a token gesture towards women’s empowerment. After all, it threw up the first woman prime minister. Today the power behind Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is a woman and I am not referring to Gursharan Kaur. When you have the real thing, why go for a mere token?