Politicians Like Smriti Irani Use Feminism When Convenient

When I was finishing my PhD and starting to look for a job, a senior academic chose to give me this unsolicited advice - 'You should seriously consider applying to the US. Look at how many boxes you will tick on an equal opportunities form.' It did not really matter what I worked on, or whether that was any good at all, or indeed why on earth the same boxes could not be ticked on that equal opportunities form in the UK itself, where I was doing my PhD. What I took him to mean was that by being a certain kind of person, I was primarily a series of tokenism opportunities.

One of the boxes I would have ticked, and still do on equal opportunities form, is that of gender. And for the existence of that box, mandatory on any such form, we have the early and second-wave feminists of the last century to thank. Many of their achievements - such as the right of women to work, to vote, and control their bodies have become commonsense and for many women, part of the reality they can take for granted. But too often we wake up to developments which reveal the precariousness of these hard-won achievements. 

A recent piece on this website raised a good and important point about pro-women credentials of our women politicians amidst rampant misogyny in our society. What Barkha Dutt notices about Smriti Irani's casual misogyny towards her and more concerted misogyny towards a political rival found resonance in current British politics. The Tory Brexiteer Andrea Leadsom claimed that being a mother made her a much more suitable Prime Minister than her rival in the Conservative Party leadership battle Theresa May, who has nephews and nieces, but no children of her own.
 Notwithstanding the political storm that has followed since that ultimately resulted in her withdrawal from the contest, Leadsom's pronouncements on the worthiness of her opponent would have only been ever more excoriating had May not been married, or then was not heterosexual, or indeed then had not been in a long-term relationship. That this is even a political claim, made by a woman of privilege, against another woman of privilege, in a leadership contest of a mainstream political party in a western democracy in 2016, beggars belief. (But then very little in the UK of the last two weeks has come with self-explanatory packaging.) What can possibly explain the politics of our women leaders and their clearly anti-women conduct?

Too many recent developments such as these seem to indicate that all that the first and second wave feminists fought for has now gone out of the window, or more accurately, become hostage to expedient and/or token feminisms. While a number of women today hold public office simply or primarily because of their gender - from all-women panchayats to Pratibha Patil's presidential tenure - others, who self-identify their position as meritocratic, from Smriti Irani to Andrea Leadsom, expediently use their status qua woman usually to fend off the opposition, and are seldom rooted in a feminist politics.
 Tokenist reckoning at least makes a nod to history and its wrongs, and has the advantage of (re)distributing some of the goodies of power, privilege, and opportunity to people who have in the past been neglected or actively kept away from the mainstream. At its substantive best, such kind of thinking results is driven towards social justice and in its fullness represents the ideal behind reservations, for example. At its worst, it is lip-service and empty of either intent or content, and mere box-ticking (think Pratibha Patil again). 

Expedient politics is different. Regardless of their individual trajectories, for women like Leadsom and Irani, it is sometimes useful being a woman. Neither Irani in India nor Leadsom in the UK would have quite had the career they have had in the absence of the foundational work of feminist politics, of which they are undoubtedly beneficiaries. The success (as well as the failure) of that foundational work lies in women like Leadsom and Irani being able to forget that history. While they are often quick to seek refuge in the space created by feminist politics and point out any hostile interlocution as misogyny (and on many occasions, it is indeed so), at the same time, the irony of scarcely thinking twice before running down the sisterhood themselves, accusing them of not being the right wholesome, pre-feminist throwbacks, is entirely lost on them. This is because theirs is an expedient feminist position, where the history, politics, and the values of feminism is incidental to their pursuit of power and privilege, and unlike even the tokenist kind, is not anchored in any ideal other than being self-serving.

(Kriti Kapila teaches anthropology at the India Institute, King's College London.)

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