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?
Mentors, mothers and sisters
The family factor giving a leg up to women politicians is vastly overstated in a political ecosystem where dynastic politics is firmly entrenched. Sons, sons-in-law, nephews and brothers of prominent politicians take off on a smooth runway to power, as the Nehru-Gandhi, Bhutto or Rajapaksa regimes have demonstrated. Yet, it is women's family networks, or even close connections with powerful males in the party, that are far more under the microscope. Some, like Sonia Gandhi, have had their 'foreign' origins repeatedly flogged in the absence of other criticism. The metamorphosis of the quiet Italian daughter-in-law of the first family of Indian politics, to an astute politician who revived and led a comatose Congress party to a resounding victory in 2004, is the stuff of legend.