All the celebratory statements about the possibility of the ‘first woman president’ — they are unfair to Pratibha Patil, the UPA’s presidential candidate and unfair to all those who work for gender sensitivity in this still largely reflexively male chauvinist society. Unfair because politicians have discovered the virtue of having a woman president post facto. Unfair because such tokenism in public statements from political leaders imply they take genuine gender issues far less seriously than they should. And not just unfair but indicative of a larger malaise — the use of the concept of group disadvantage as a camouflage for any number of political manoeuvres.
Which is why we find terribly unwholesome the hypocrisy that has marked the UPA’s exercise in choosing its presidential candidate. It was quite apparent from the start that the Congress party, and particularly its president, was keen to project Shivraj Patil, the Union home minister, as its presidential nominee. Patil either lacked the required charisma, or the Congress the necessary clout; but that proposal was soon rendered dead in the water, with the Left parties making no bones about their unwillingness to ease him into Rashtrapati Bhavan. It was only at that point that the other names got tossed around, and Pratibha Patil’s finally made the cut.
Call this search for the ‘common minimum’ an expression of pragmatic politics, and we will have no problem. The Congress wanted its candidate in, most of its allies within the UPA were willing to go along, and the Left wanted to influence that choice. Fine. But the claim that the choice was designed as a tribute to Indian women was sheer spin, symbolism at its most hollow, the worst sort of tokenism that does little for the cause of its so-called beneficiaries. High-sounding post-facto justifications for a choice that was driven by cold political calculations will invariably ring false. And this instance is no exception.
