Soup kitchen beneficence

Nothing works better in politics than an appearance of harmlessness unless, of course, illusions of grandeur are supported by mass following. In the latter case, the leader’s hauteur is suffered, even overtly admired, by the followers for the natural purpose of advancing their own careers. But even when they follow the leader, it is hard for most politicians to camouflage their ambition; an unfortunate insufficiency that usually evokes the ever-present insecurity among their ilk.

There are, however, exceptions to this general rule. The newly elected Speaker of the Lok Sabha Sumitra Mahajan ‘Tai’ is that rare breed of politician whose elevation is celebrated by her peers in a profession where promotion, any promotion, is directly proportional to the number of enemies one makes.

She is the universal ‘Tai (elder aunt)’, a title she has chosen to officially adopt in her resume in the Lok Sabha. Her homely pudginess, mussed saris and henna-dyed mop is an instant invocation to universal empathy. With her soup kitchen beneficence, the Speaker has mastered the art of making everyone feel at home. She has understood the one truth that evades even the most brilliant of her peers — never threaten the multitude of mediocrity with a display of merit or ambition.

And so she sails through life with an appearance of harmless surrender. She threatens no one and does not mind being underestimated, a tendency that has been reciprocated with accolades from the highest, and really quite unusual, quarters.

The prime minister Narendra Modi, who has recently advised his newly elected MPs against routine exhibition of their magnificence — “zara zara si baat par desh ke naam sandesh dene ki zaroorat nahin hai” (“there is no need to start addressing the nation at the slightest opportunity”) — has publicly accepted Mahajan’s ‘greatness’.

At the time of her election, the prime minister quoted a Sanskrit saying: “Mahajano yena gatasya pantha (you should follow great people). We now have a ‘Mahajan’ (great person) presiding over the House and what could be more appropriate?”

This is high praise indeed, sort of proverbial icing on the cake — landing a job for which many more were vying and lobbying. While reports of the veteran LK Advani becoming Speaker appeared routinely in the media since the election results came out, Mahajan’s candidature floated almost inadvertently, and was accepted without any murmur of dissent.

And who can deny her credentials — the longest serving woman MP in Parliament, former minister of state and member of the Mahila Morcha, this 71-year-old lawyer- turned-politician has won the 2014 Lok Sabha election from her home ground in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, by a staggering 4.67 lakh votes. Although she lost the assembly elections thrice before Mahajan contested Lok Sabha for the first time in 1989, her victory run has been uninterrupted since then.

The second woman Speaker in the Lok Sabha is among the few women in Parliament who does not hail from a political family. Her father, Purushottam alias Appasaheb Sathe was an active RSS worker in their hometown Chiplun in Ratnagiri, Maharashtra. But Appasaheb died when Mahajan was just a teenager, and she had to shift to Mumbai to finish her graduation. She was married to a lawyer, Jayant Mahajan based in the city of Indore, and has two sons — Milind, who is a software professional, and Mandar, a commercial pilot. For the lone woman politician in a traditional middle-class family, Mahajan is impressive in the heights she has scaled.

But credentials alone do not amount to much, as Murli Manohar Joshi and LK Advani have gathered to their misfortune. It is the ability to soothe ruffled feathers and march ahead without getting noticed that really counts. Like the BJP president Rajnath Singh, another politician whose strength lies in the almost universal underestimation of his enormous talent for realpolitik, Mahajan manages to achieve ends without seeming to do much.

In November 2000, while she was serving as a junior minister under the then feared Human Resource Development minister Murali Manohar Joshi, the Tai invited her long-suffering colleagues for a meal of assorted Marathi delicacies. Over food, about 14 MPs, all of whom were junior ministers in Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government, shared their grievances about not getting enough work.

Tai heard everyone, commiserated and planned ahead. While everyone else embarked on a confrontationist path, she held her counsel. Shahnawaz Hussain, her colleague sulked, and before him, Uma Bharati openly rebelled against Joshi. MoS Petroleum E Ponnuswamy bluntly asked Vajpayee to be allotted more work.

But Mahajan is not one to complain and pick up fights. She, on her part, reached out to the former BJP president Kushabhau Thakre who worked on her behalf to carve out a whole department. Mahajan was allotted the charge of the Department of Women and Child Development under the HRD Ministry to which Joshi was apparently too busy to pay attention. She flourished in the ministry, instituting lasting schemes like Bharatiya Stree Shakti Puraskar, an award for women achievers in diverse fields that the successive UPA government furthered.

The quintessential homemaker has now stepped into the haloed precincts of the Speaker’s office in the Lok Sabha. MPs secretly expect her motherly admonitions to work better than her predecessor’s affected politeness.

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