Uma Bharti emerged from her helicopter in the saffron robes that mark her as a Hindu holy woman, pushing through a crowd that bent to touch her feet. She berated a party worker for poor directions -- "How can you be so irresponsible?" -- then drove to town and ascended a small stage.
There, as usual, she was almost the only woman in a crowd of men. Oblivious to her singularity, she delivered a gripping speech in a raspy voice, invoking the Hindu scriptures whose recitation first defined her public persona. But her goal here was not to edify the spirit, but to win the vote.
PHOTO:REUTERS
Bharti, 44, one of the most well known women in the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which leads India's coalition government, is her party's candidate for chief minister in assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh whose results were scheduled to be announced yesterday.
nominated
She is one of three women selected to contest for chief minister in four states that went to the polls this week. The elections, which pit the Janata Party against the Congress Party in four major states in India's Hindi heartland, are seen as a bellwether of both parties' prospects for general elections next year.
Bharti, and this year's elections, thus represent the latest chapter in the evolving, often contradictory story of women in Indian politics.
This country has produced strong female leaders, notably the late prime minister Indira Gandhi, and this year's vivid characters are among them. But despite the women currently at the top of their party's tickets, the feminine cast to these elections does not extend very deep. And the message about the role of women tends to hue closely to tradition, even in cases where the messenger does not.
Bharti, for example, who exit polls suggest will win, became a preacher at age six, defying the traditional role of mother and homemaker allotted to Indian women, not least by the Hindu nationalist movement she represents.
filling roles
The women selected to lead their parties' campaigns this year "are filling roles neatly carved out for them in an establishment that continues to be male dominated," said Yogendra Yadav, a political analyst with the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi.
He said that in this state, there are only 52 women among 407 candidates for the two major parties. The proportions are roughly the same in the other three states.
In the current parliament, only 8 percent of the Janata Party's members are women, and 11 percent of Congress members. A bill to reserve a third of the seats for women has long stalled -- held up, its advocates say, by the men who hold the votes to pass it but also want to hold onto their seats.
The problem is not that women do not win elections, Yadav said. It is that the parties do not let them contest.
That was the experience of Bindu Raj Modi, who left the Congress Party this year because she felt she was being denied the opportunities she deserved. She is an ambitious, gregarious and self-made politician, who was married off just shy of 16 but, more than two decades later, has found her public self.
good ticket
She is now running on the ticket of the Rashtriya Janata Dal, a Bihar-based party with almost no base here, but one that welcomed her.
"Even in my second life I would not have gotten a ticket in Congress," she said.
The problem was not the voters, she argued, who in fact seemed to think women were less corrupt. But big parties simply did not want to give tickets to women, she said. When a woman entered politics on her own, party leaders started questioning her character for moving about outside the home.
Wendy Singer, a history professor at Kenyon College who specializes in women in Indian politics, said that many women frustrated by the "ticket ceiling" simply went into other kinds of political, or even social, work.
The question, she said, was whether a decade-old law that reserved one-third of the seats on village councils for women would change the status quo, creating a larger pool of women with the right connections to run for state assemblies and parliament.
Unlike many women in Indian politics who entered on the names of their fathers or husbands -- Gandhi, who was Jawaharlal Nehru's daughter, among them -- Bharti, the Bharatiya Janata Party candidate, rose on her own.
A village-born child prodigy, she is more intelligent than educated, a populist who says she feels more comfortable with the common people than the political class.
"In my opinion, I am a very ordinary person, having very ordinary desires," she said.
She credits "God's grace and the people's support" for her rise. Others credit a tide of anti-Muslim rhetoric she unleashed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in a flamboyant mix of piety and hatred. Hindu nationalist leaders relied on her powerful, often rabid speeches to rally crowds. She helped lead the destruction of a 16th century mosque at Ayodhya, which many Hindus believe is the birthplace of Lord Ram, and is still facing charges in the case.
Her charisma partly accounts for her party's selection of her as a prospective chief minister. She also is a member of a lower caste, an important voting bloc in the state.
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