For over a week now, India has been exercised over the issue of the (s)election of its First Citizen. Now it is fairly certain, barring cross-voting at a rather large scale, that the next Supreme Commander of the Indian armed forces is going to be a woman.
A woman called Pratibha Patil.
The Indian media has had a field day asking, "Pratibha Who?" After her recent not-the-most-politically-correct conmment about Hindu women in Rajasthan using the veil to protect their honour from Muslim rulers, questions have been asked about her suitability for a post that may be ceremonial but it is a job that, on occasions, calls upon its incumbent to display considerable political wisdom.
At the heart of the controversy over Pratibha Patil's choice lies the fact that she was not by a long shot the first choice of the ruling United Progressive Alliance goverment. A slew of names, from Shivraj Patil to Pranab Mukherjee to Arjun Singh to Sushil Kumar Shinde had been considered, debated over and then cast aside.
The current Home minister, Shivraj Patil had the blessings of Sonia Gandhi, but Comrade Carat, oops Karat, and his band of merry communists chose to play spoilsport. They argued Patil was not secular enough and too much of a political lightweight for the august post of the President of India.
It is a specious argument in itself because it implies the Left Front is okay with a non-secular home minister in a government that it supports but would not support the same man for the President of India's job. One would have thought given the nature of his job, a home minister would have to be more hands on with secular issues, and as the President his job would be more ceremonial, as enshrined in the Indian Constitution itself. But logic has not often been the Left's strongest suit.
After Madam Patil's history lesson on the veil, though, the Left might have similar worries about the secular credentials of the Patil they chose to back over the Patil they didn't. But now the Left Front would have to dwell on those thoughts in private, and Comrade Karat, in all likelihood would have five long years to mull over what they have brought upon themselves and the rest of the country, because the matter of election of the next President of India has already moved significantly forward.
Soon after Sonia Gandhi sprang the surprise candidature of the woman who was until recently the governor of Rajasthan, Congress spin doctors were quick to highlight the "progressive" decision to opt for a woman Presidential candidate. A happy picture was quickly painted of the largest democracy of the world with its First Citizen a woman and what such a move would do for woman's emancipation in this country and so on and so forth.
Now, we all know, THAT is such bullshit. Understandably, members of the media have reacted sharply to such a spin. Columnists like Shobha De have stridently protested against the sham symbolism of linking Pratibha Patil's candidature to women's emancipation. Others have rubbished the move as "blatant tokenism", the real purpose of which is to have a rubber stamp President, sympathetic to the interests of the ruling UPA government.
And so it is. Blatant tokenism it is, but all the same a shrewd move (albeit one she was forced to make) by Sonia Gandhi after the Left forced her hand. Honestly what were you and me and the rest were expecting other than blatant tokenism ?
We are, after all, a nation of, for the lack of a better word if I am allowed to coin one, "tokenists". We are most well versed in the intricacies of tokenism, better than anyone else I can think of. We can't stomach hard facts, whether in the political arena or on a sports field. We always prefer symbolism over more harder options.
We pay token tribute to secularism. In this non-violent land of Mahatma Gandhi, Hindus kill Muslims, Muslims kill Hindus, every now and then a Church gets burnt, and the odd nun gets raped -- a veritable plurality of killings in this plural society. And remarkably no one gets punished for these orgies of violence. No Hindu, no Sikh, or no Muslim has been sent to the gallows in this nation over communal violence. Perhaps that is our notion of secularism.
We pay token tribute to socialism. All the parties are committed to pro-poor policies, their election manifestos utopian. Yet, as the sensex is on a long bull run, Fortune 500 companies head India's way and we talk of a resurgent, new India with a double digit growth rate, in another India, farmer suicides continue unabated, and unemployment continues to rise alarmingly. As rich India waxes eloquent on socialism, poor India starves.
We pay token respect to our elders. We scorn the west for their old-age homes, and gloat over our ancient family values and then abandon our old parents. Younger men and women jostle past, push around their elders in public places, in buses and metros.
In our cities we build the world's finest hospitals, manned by worldclass doctors. Yet within a 250 km radius of all major cities in this country, you can find public health care centres which languish in abject neglect, the poor denied even basic health care. People from the US and western European countries fly down to India for top quality medical care. Yet even today women die in labour by thousands in this country not too far from these centres of medical excellence. And we talk of free health care for the poor. More tokenism.
And we pay token tribute to our women. We rape them in our cities, starve them in our villages, abort them in their foetuses, burn them for dowry and say "Nari hamari Ma hai (woman is our Mother)."
Why are we so surprised then about the latest tokenism, blatant or otherwise, of the selection of Pratibha Patil as a Presidential candidate? The list of tokenisms is very very long and makes for rather sorry, and unsavoury, reading. Poor Pratibha Tai is only the latest in a long line of tokenisms.
It will be a delicious irony of sorts if the fears of Madam Patil's detractors were to prove true and she indeed went on to become a token President of a token secular, a token socialist, and a token democratic republic.
Last, but by no means the least, I am not averse to the Tai's presence in Rashtrapati Bhavan for an entirely different reason. In case Hillary Clinton makes it to the White House, we can always tell the Americans that we put a woman in the President's office before they did!
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