This article was first published in the print edition of Manushi Journal. (Issue-111, Mar-Apr 1999)
It is a truism that India is a land of mind boggling diversity. Yet stereotypes about India which reduce the Indian reality to a unidimensional monolith hold powerful sway.
One such powerful stereotype is that Indian women are brutally oppressed, denied a voice in their family and community, and marginalised in politics as in other power structures. Without doubt, there is much truth in this stereotype. But how do we then explain the current political scene? A few women are holding the entire political establishment of India to ransom. How else does one describe the machinations of Sonia Gandhi, Jayalalitha, Mayawati and Mamta Banerjee that have caused enormous upheavals in our polity and recently brought about the fall of the BJP government? Powerful politicians dance to the erratic tunes of these women, and are ignominiously subservient to them.