India Elects First Woman President - A Trend To Impact On The US Elections ?
July 22nd, 2007 - by Chris Devonshire-EllisIndia elected its first woman President on Saturday, with a huge margin over her opposing candidates with a total level of support of some 65.82% of all votes cast. Mrs. Pratibha Patil had endured a rather nasty campaign against the opposition party, the National Democratic Alliance. The Chairwoman of the ruling United Progressive Alliance, Sonia Gandhi, and Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh both hailed the victory as “A vote against divisive forces”.
The role as President is largely a symbolic one, being democratically elected but with limited powers, akin to Britains Queen Elizabeth’s position within the UK Parliament. With the greater onus on national sovereignty, the President is supposed to be above the political whims of opposing parties, and instead to have three rights “the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, and the right to warn”, thus maintaining an element of stability should the democratic process be subverted.
The election is an effective massive endorsement for the continuation of the work by the ruling coalition government, and satisfies both business interests, liberal reformers and those concerned by the welfare of the rural population. Indeed, her background marks her out with achievements both political and personal in all three.
Mrs. Patil, who was born in 1934, is a lawyer by training. She was a member of the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly, representing Edlabad constituency in Jalgaon District from 1962 to 1985. Under the mentorship of senior Congress leader and ex-Chief Minister Yashwantrao Chavan, she became a deputy minister for education after re-election in 1967 (in the Vasantrao Naik ministry). In her next terms (1972-78) she was a full cabinet minister for the state. From 1986 to 1988, she held the post of deputy chairperson of the Rajya Sabha. As a member of parliament, she represented Amravati in the Lok Sabha from 1991 to 1996. She later became the 24th Governor of Rajasthan and, notably, was also the first female governor of this state. In successive congress governments, she handled the portfolios of tourism, social welfare and housing under several chief ministers, Vasantdada Patil, Babasaheb Bhosle, S. B. Chavan and Sharad Pawar. She was continually re-elected to the assembly, either from Jalgaon or the nearby Edlabad constituencies, until 1985, when she was elected to the Rajya Sabha as a Congress candidate. She has never lost an election that she has contested.
Together with her husband, she set up an educational institute, Vidya Bharati Shikshan Prasarak Mandal, which runs a chain of schools and colleges in Jalgaon and Mumbai. She has also set up Shram Sadhana Trust that runs hostels for working women in New Delhi, Mumbai and Pune and an engineering college in Jalgaon. She also founded and was the chairperson of a cooperative sugar factory known as Sant Muktabai Sahakari Sakhar Karkhana and a cooperative bank named after herself as Pratibha Mahila Sahakari Bank, specialising in providing micro-credit to impoverished women and their families. She was also involved in setting up an Industrial Training School for the visually challenged in Jalgaon and running a school for poor children of Vimukta Jamatis & Nomadic Tribes.
Wider Implications Based On Growing Acceptance of Female Powerbrokers
The softer implications may well be interesting in terms of continuing and growing acceptance of women in high powered and responsible roles regionally, and it may have a psychological voter impact in the forthcoming US Presidential elections in terms of growing gender acceptance irrespective of sex in business and politics.
With Madam Wu Yi, China’s Vice-Premier, being regarded by Forbes as the worlds 3rd most important woman, and Condoleezza Rice as the 2nd, with both generally being well-regarded in the US, Sonia Gandhi’s endorsement of Mrs. Patil provides a growing acceptance of women in regional and international positions of responsibility, and may passively assist Hillary Clintons attempts to run for President. The trend at the moment, US polls indicate, is that the US electorate seek to move away from a Conservative and war-like male figure. Images of Angela Merckel, Germanys Chancellor, cannot fail to have been noticed by the American electorate, who still by and large admire the figure of Britain’s Margeret Thatcher - a women who took her country into war in a far-off foreign land - and unlike Bush, managed to win. Other powerful regional women figures that spring to mind are Khaleda Zia, Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Wu Xiaoling, Deputy Governor of the Peoples Bank of China, Lalita Gupte & Kalpana Morparia, Joint Managing Directors of the ICICI Bank of India, Gloria Arroyo, President of the Phillipines, Helen Clark, Prime Minister of New Zealand, and Nahed Taher, Chairman of the Gulf One Investment Bank of Saudi Arabia. All are well known and powerful regional figures well known to the American political establishment and it’s senior business leaders.
Additionally, a whole raft of American businesswomen have held or still hold very senior roles in the United States, including within companies as diverse as CBS Paramount, The New York Times, PepsiCo, The Ford Foundation, Prudential, Dow Corning, Deloitte Touche, Ogilvy & Mather, Southwest Airlines, Time Inc, Royal Dutch Shell, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Kraft Foods, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, e-Bay, Procter & Gamble, Lucent, Johnson & Johnson, Goldman Sachs, Avon, Ernst & Young & MTV. And women as heroes, standing up to a miliary regime ? The regions own Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize Winner and still opposing the ruling Burmese junta.
Such a wardrobe full of enlightened women appearing on the world political stage and in America’s most respected boardrooms and institutions cannot fail to have impacted on the average American voters psyche, and Mrs. Clinton may well be able to take advantage of this. Reliable and strong woman ? Established political and business trends are being broken, and with Mrs. Patil being India’s first ever President in 60 years of democratic independence, who would bet against Mrs. Clinton achieving a similar feat in a now war-weary, tediously macho posturing America with Bill there as “World Ambassador” to assure the rest of the world that the last eight years were all a terrible mistake and that a womans touch pan-globally is now what is needed ?
