The face of female leadership

Coconuts broken, idlis ritually devoured and pujas offered at the Sri Dharma Sastha temple in Thulasendrapuram worked their magic, it would seem. The ancestral village of the United States Vice President Kamala Harris in the Tiruvarur district of Tamil Nadu had taken it upon itself to propitiate the deities to ensure the success of their 'daughter' Kamala. Her victory was theirs, because politics, like marriages in Southasia, is a family affair. Daughters and wives of the grand political dynasties of the Subcontinent – the Bandaranaikes, Bhuttos, Nehru-Gandhis, Rahmans and Zias – have come to represent the face of 'female leadership' even though their regimes were never notable for advancing the rights of women in their respective countries.

Instead, their governments were often characterised by repression and autocratic rule, whether Indira Gandhi's Emergency from 1975-77, one of the periods in modern Indian history noteworthy for its stripping of civil liberties and fundamental rights, or the dubious record of Bangladesh's longest serving prime minister Sheikh Hasina's corruption, nepotism and high-handedness. Opportunism, imperiousness, political expediency and brinkmanship have exemplified the regimes of these leaders. Of course, these unseemly political legacies are not very different from the male leaders from these political dynasties. What, then, do women leaders have to offer, other than symbolising the basic equality principle – equal access to the corridors of power?