Women's role not at the end of one's tether

Chennai: Five years have rolled by rather swiftly, and Tamil Nadu is yet again facing a general election to its 234-member State Assembly, along with neighbouring Puducherry, on May 16, with 71 days to go to be precise from Sunday.

As various political parties, both national and regional, still do their back channel talking to sew up the best possible alliances amid the best possible electoral terms, the spectrum of women’s leadership role in its broadest sense has only got more colourful.

For the erstwhile Madras Presidency, which with pride saw India’s first woman medical graduate, the indomitable Dr Muthulakshmi Reddy, who rose from very humble beginnings in erstwhile princely state of Pudukkottai, to be also the first woman member of any Legislative Council in the country in 1927, to several brave women who were in the thick of the freedom struggle like an Ammu Swaminathan, Rukmini Lakshmipathy, to even the distant shores of South Africa where Thillaiyadi Valliyammai joined Mahatma Gandhi’s anti-apartheid struggle, that over century-long legacy is still glowing.

The intensity of purpose that fired those feminine icons may have altered over the decades as the country grew into a modern economy. But almost every party in Tamil Nadu politics now, in the run-up to the Assembly polls, is bristling with women power.

When the AIADMK supremo J. Jayalalithaa was asked few years back about writing her biography, her reported retort was an unmistakable, why- I-have-more-years-to-go refrain.

And with her political confidante Sassikala Natarajan, who still visits various temples across the State praying for ‘Amma’s good health, the party founded by M.G. Ramachandran, popularly known as MGR, has been a window to more space to women in public life.

This is notwithstanding the fact that the number of elected women MLAs’ in Tamil Nadu has been in the decline post-1991 polls, when the House had an all-time high of 32 MLAs’, including 25 AIADMK MLAs’ led by Ms. Jayalalithaa herself.

In the other major Dravidian party, the DMK, which has historically been more conservative in giving tickets to women members, post-1989 era saw big changes, when M. Karunanidhi came back to power in the State after a 13-year ‘Vanvaas’.

Since then women’s intra-party roles have been influential, from the DMK patriarch’s wives, Mrs Dayalu Ammal and Rajathi Ammal, to his daughter, Ms Kanimozhi, a Rajya Sabha MP, not to leave aside people from outside the DMK’s first family like Dr Kanchana Kamalanathan, Subbulakshmi Jegadeesan, Dr Poongothai Aladi Aruna, poet Salma and Tamizhachi Thangapandian.

Interestingly, Mr Karunanidhi has not yet officially and wholeheartedly declared his political successor in the DMK notwithstanding his younger son M.K. Stalin working hard for long, but years back had openly described Kanimozhi as “his literary heir”. It was when Kanimozhi had conceptualised and organised the ‘Chennai Sangamam’ festival, an effort to revive the Tamil cosmopolitan spirit during previous DMK tenure.

Actor Khushbu, who was not so successful a campaigner for the DMK in the last Assembly elections, is now among the most effervescent spokespersons in the Tamil Nadu Congress Committee, despite its obduracy to remain faction-ridden.  

Along with a host of other women Congress functionaries including the savvy advocate-turned-MLA,  Vijayadharani, who was recently elevated as the National Mahila Congress general secretary, it only underscores how women politicians continue to play a key mobilizing role in reaching out to the people. For the Congress president Ms Sonia Gandhi, Tamil Nadu “continues to have a special place”, for it was at Sriperumbudur, the holy birth place of Sri Ramanuja, her husband Rajiv Gandhi was killed by the LTTE.  

The BJP is not to be left behind, with Dr Tamilisai Soundararajan, daughter of the veteran Congress leader Kumari Ananthan, having been given a second chance to head the saffron party’s Tamil Nadu unit for another three year term by no less a person than Mr Amit shah himself.

Backed by equally vocal women functionaries like the State vice-president Vanathi Srinivasan, the BJP knows its electoral constituency well — the growing urban middle class in Tamil Nadu.

Even actor Vijayakanth, the DMDK’s founder-leader, who continues to play truant like the Indian monsoon, is driven by womanpower, his wife Mrs Premalatha. “We don’t know yet whether our Captain will become King or not, but our long-term hope is on Anni (Mrs Premalatha),” said a DMDK functionary who did not wish to be named.

In such an evolving political milieu, it seems somewhat like an odd ball that both an aspiring party like the PMK, which has projected Dr Anbumani Ramadoss as its Chief Ministerial Candidate, and the combination of parties that now form the ‘People’s Welfare Alliance’ — comprising the MDMK, Left parties and the Dalit outfit Viduthalai Chiruthaikal Katchi, — have so far held campaigns sans a woman campaigner.