https://www.dhakatribune.com/opinion/op-ed/2021/05/21/op-ed-another-lesson-from-teacher-shailaja
In the same week that India set another horrific Covid-19 world record with 4529 deaths in 24 hours – experts say the unofficial total is much higher – the country also lost the architect of its most prominent pandemic successes. As part of his cabinet reshuffle, the newly re-elected Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan removed K. K. Shailaja (she is affectionally called “Teacher” after her previous long-term career in education), whose remarkable competence as health minister has drawn consistent global accolades. Earlier this month, she won her own election by the largest margin in state history. Teacher Shailaja’s demotion says something about the Communist Party of India (Marxist) she represents, which makes a show of rejecting “bourgeois notions” like personal popularity. Vijayan said, “in the party there is no room for individual decisions; it is a collective one. The party had taken a decision much earlier to induct new faces. It can’t give exemptions to some.” But the conspicuous irony that the chief minister himself stayed in charge is not lost on anyone. According to the senior journalist and author Sagarika Ghose, writing for the NDTV website, Teacher Shailaja is “a victim of her own popularity and competence. Her well-deserved fame went against her, and made party bosses insecure [and] the writing is on the beach: nobody shares the limelight with Vijayan, Kerala’s “Irattachankan" (double-chested leader).” Ghose makes the perceptive point that the ideological bent of Kerala’s chief minister couldn’t be more different from prime minister Narendra Modi, but the two strongmen nonetheless share essential political traits in the vein of what is called toxic masculinity. She writes, “the supremo cult of the Right is being mirrored by a supremo cult of the Left. In fact, in Kerala journalistic circles, Pinarayi Vijayan is often referred to as "Modi in a mundu," in a reference to the CM's imperious ways.” Beyond the individuals, this Teacher Shailaja episode underlines the drastic paucity of adequate women’s representation in Indian politics. In the recent elections where the Communists swept Kerala anew, an extraordinary 91% of candidates were men. Tamil Nadu and West Bengal were a hair better because women constituted around 11%, but Assam was even worse at less than 8%. The depth of this crisis is underlined by everything we have learned during the devastating Covid-19 pandemic, where states and countries led by women have fared significantly better than their counterparts. On this the data is incontrovertible. One recent study by UK-based scholars Supriya Garikipati and Uma Khambampati looked at 194 countries, to conclude “COVID-outcomes are systematically better in countries led by women [and] this may be explained by the proactive and coordinated policy responses adopted by them.” Even more interestingly – with direct implications for Teacher Shailaja’s achievements – a “quantitative and qualitative analysis” of American states by Kayla Sergent and Alexander D. Stajkovic found that “states with women governors had fewer COVID-19 deaths compared to states with men governors.” Their finding is “a potential mechanism for that effect may be that women governors were more empathetic and confident.” If women are provably better leaders in a crisis, and they also comprise 50% of the electorate, how and why does the political system in India deny them their due importance? To get an insider’s perspective, I wrote to the great writer Rajathi Salma (her books are signed only with her last name) who has risen from great adversity to become a major political leader and campaigner for women’s rights in Tamil Nadu. Salma told me, “The political arena is not at all as conducive or accommodative to women as it is to men. Women getting important and powerful roles in politics or government is still a rare thing. Even if they get these kinds of positions, they often do not get the adequate freedom to function on their own. On occasion, women with politically powerful family backgrounds do get some respect, but others have to struggle a lot even to get recognized in the first place. That is the reality we face till date.” The bio-note of her brilliant 2020 novel Women, Dreaming (superbly translated by Meena Kandasamy) says Salma’s courageous journey towards self-emancipation included “obscenity charges, and violent threats against her erotic poetry, and being locked away by her family.” It shouldn’t be that way. It’s a national disgrace that India keeps falling further into shameful ignominy in the Global Gender Gap Index of the World Economic Forum, which benchmarks progress towards gender parity and compares gender gaps across four dimensions: economic opportunities, education, health and political leadership. The 2021 report which came out in March shows that India plummeted another 28 places to 140th out of 160 (by contrast Bangladesh ranks impressively at 65). We don’t need Teacher Shailaja’s instruction to recognize it is among the worst countries for women in the world.