Comment

I guess I’ve always harboured a secret desire to one day work for The New York Times. I guess that’s why whenever I see a byline with an Indian sounding name in the Times, it pleases me to bits.

Especially if it’s a woman writer. So across continents, across multiple time zones that make totally different deadlines, I cheered as I heard the news of Jill Abramson becoming the paper’s first woman editor. I read with interest all the analysis surrounding her appointment and marvelled at the fact that in India, it wouldn’t really have been that much of a big deal because women have always been at the frontlines of journalism and, for some time now, have occupied top positions in news organisations including my own.

When I was reading The New Yorker profile of Abramson, the phrase ‘mercurial’ struck me, because I had spent an entire day talking to people about Mamata Banerjee and the same word was repeatedly used — from Congress leaders who were bearing the brunt of her latest tantrum after the petrol price hike to her own Bongo paparazzi. They said even though good sense and logic dictated that the Trinamool Congress would neither withdraw its support or their ministers from the UPA government, no one could vouch for what ‘mercurial’ Mamata would do.

They recounted what happened during a recent meeting that Mamata attended. One of her party leaders anticipated trouble as soon as he saw that as union minister, his seating was at a better real estate than his leader’s. “Sunetraji, I have usually seen people lobbying for a better seat, but here the minister was begging to be downgraded,’’ said a Congressman.

Now this may be an exaggerated version but the minister was later seen sitting rows behind Mamata. It was obviously not enough because one member of Bongo paparazzi says Didi emerged from the meeting to announce in front of journalists, “Where is he? I’m getting a lot of complaints about him.”

I’ve been on the Mamata beat and have seen some of her eccentric, unpredictable ways. Sometimes, she’s all loving — feeding you puffed rice and pakoras, indulging you by allowing you to take pictures while she is painting, and answering all your questions. Sometimes, she can snub you with a flash of anger, call you a CPI(M) agent for no apparent reason, complain that your camera lights hurt her eyes and refuse to entertain your queries.

So maybe that’s why journalists have allowed Mamata and several other woman politicians to be described as ‘mercurial’.Just a thousand kilometres to the west is the other claimant to the title — Mayawati. Every week, instead of focussing on the work she does, or on how many Uttar Pradesh villages still need electricity, we are distracted by stories of her reactions to real or imagined snubs. About how she hates Rahul Gandhi so much, she doesn’t allow his posters to be displayed, how she won’t allow Manmohan Singh’s letter to school children on November 14 to be read in UP, how she was so angry at a police officer for criticising her, she committed him to a mental asylum.

And if it’s Mamata in the east and Mayawati in the north, then Jayalalithaa from the south completes the trio. They call her ‘mercurial’ for several reasons, from her sudden change of heart about alliances to her idiosyncratic ways. And if we dig, there are many more instances like former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Uma Bharti whose ‘mercurial’ nature was so out in the open that when she threw a tantrum and was miffed with LK Advani, it was done on TV. So, are all successful, female politicians being undermined as ‘mercurial’? What about Delhi Chief Minister Shiela Dikshit and Congress president Sonia Gandhi? Why is it that we never hear about their mercurial ways?

Here’s my theory, even though it is a bit simplistic. The reason why Gandhi and Dikshit haven’t developed this ‘mercurial’ mentality, why they don’t appear almost tyrannical is because they both married into political families and their claim to power was inherited and so on a road of much less resistance. Of course, when they entered the political arena, they too faced as many adversaries, they too had to take on patriarchal systems but that came at a much later stage. How could they compare with Mayawati’s struggles as a child resenting her father for sending her brothers to better private schools just because they were boys? Yes, she got back at them by not just getting a shelf full of degrees but also by supporting the whole lot of them now. Can you blame her if she got a terrible attitude along the way?

Or can you blame Jayalalithaa for being a tough nut when that’s what she had to be to survive without a father, with a mother who pushed her into films just so that she could support the two of them? And, of course, Mamata is a drama queen. That’s what a woman perhaps had to be to be noticed in the Congress party if you weren’t somebody’s son or daughter. If dancing on the hood of a car is what it takes to make it in politics, Mamata decided that’s just what she’s going to do.

So instead of judging and ridiculing these women for their unorthodox ways, I’m going to try something different. I’m going to remember how difficult it can be for all women, including professionals like me, to survive male-dominated ways. I’m going to remember that each time I’ve had a bitter experience, it has changed me in some way and these women in the particularly poisonous world of politics have had to evolve their ‘mercurial’ ways. Having got her top job, Jill Abramson is reported to have promised to change, to listen a lot more — but I don’t think our desi divas will do the same.

Sunetra Choudhury is an anchor/reporter for NDTV and is the author of the election travelogue Braking News On Twitter: @sunetrac