We know how difficult it is for women to be elected anywhere; this is still a challenging experience and there’s a double standard,” declared the political leader widely regarded as the most influential woman in the world today. I was in conversation with U.S Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton – appropriately enough in Kolkata where another woman, Mamata Banerjee, has created history by single-handedly ousting a 34-year-old Marxist regime – and we were talking about how institutionalised misogyny is in electoral politics today.

“You just are judged differently; you’re held to a different standard. We all know that,” said Clinton matter-of-factly, adding that it was this shared experience of societal hypocrisy that made her empathise even with ideological foes. “We share a common bond, if you will, of having gone through the fire of electoral politics in a very contentious political system, which both of our countries have.”

In India, there’s a befuddling paradox that defines the relationship between Women and political power. Unlike in many European countries – where women acquired the right to vote and run for political office in miserly instalments – in India, that right was a natural appendage to the birth of the nation. Hillary Clinton is still quizzed on whether her country is ready to be led by a Woman President, but as people we had no resistance to embracing Indira Gandhi, famously described by the late Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw as ‘the only man in her cabinet’.

Today, India’s political gallery may look like a dazzling illustration of empowerment. The President, the Speaker in Parliament, the Congress party chief, the Leader of the Opposition – and at least four of the most powerful regional leaders – are all women.

In fact the statistics tell a very contradictory story. Political representation is still dismal – 60 years after Independence less than 12 per cent of women in Parliament are women. Since the 1990s the controversial Women’s Reservation Bill has been successfully stalled and effectively aborted before birth. In any case the elevation of women to political office has done little to repair a skewed gender ratio, the cultural bias against the girl child and continued criminal malpractices like dowry deaths and domestic violence.

There have also been deeper questions raised about the nature of the interface between Women and political power. Cynics say that the Wife and Widow syndrome still plagues Indian politics. Yet, this may be an exact example of how women in the public space are measured by a different standard than their male counterparts. Patronage, mentoring and family circumstances may have provided an initial entry point for many of the successful women in politics today. But is that really so different from the sons who inherit a political legacy without having to fight half the odds that women do?

If you follow the trajectory of our female politicians you will find that their real struggles have begun well after their plunge into the deep end of the electoral waters. Sonia Gandhi may never have been a politician had her husband not been tragically assassinated. But it was she who was entrusted the task of holding a fractious party together and keeping it electorally relevant. Mayawati may have been the chosen protégé to take forward Kanshi Ram’s intellectual philosophy but in many ways it is she who translated his vision for Dalits into an electoral idiom. Sushma Swaraj may well have been influenced by the socialist leanings of her husband at the onset of her political career but carved her own path from the years in the Janata Party government of Haryana to the right of the spectrum as Leader of Opposition from the BJP. Now that Sheila Dixit has won three consecutive elections as Chief Minister of Delhi not many can connect her performance to the fact that she started out by helping her father-in-law. Jayalalithaa may have made the switch from celluloid to politics because of the benevolence of MGR (M. G Ramachandran) but as a formidable politician she is absolutely correct in asserting that “Now I am my own person.” And then, there are those like Mamata Banerjee who famously said to me during an interview – “I have no Papa in Politics” – entirely self-made and formed by years of grassroots activism.

The more relevant question may be how these different women dispense political power. And it is here that the debate turns more contentious. In office, many of them have been accused of being autocratic and volatile. Is that really the case or are the women being tagged by a gendered prism in the way that their male politicians rarely are? For instance, there are certainly women who are unpredictable and inconsistent as politicians – just like there are men who easily fly off the handle. Yet, the adjective ‘hysterical’ is reserved in media commentary solely for women.

One has to also ask if women who come into centre-stage from the margins of power have fought so hard to get there that they are more cynical and less likely to trust people around them. In other words, does the hardship of the journey explain the seeming harshness of style or opaqueness of emotion? On issues of gender equality they have healthy scepticism even for their own party colleagues! Right after the women’s reservation bill was passed by the Rajya Sabha, Sonia Gandhi told me in a rare interview that as many of her male colleagues congratulated her on the passage of the bill, she was aware of their possible heartburn and quipped back, “Sach much mein?”

There is of course no empirical evidence to suggest that women in politics necessarily raise the standards of either governance or political discourse. Like men, women politicians have been implicated in corruption scandals or governance crises.

Affirmative action – and whether women need it – is also a debate that has found no internal consensus. Certainly, the strongest women in Indian politics have won their own elections without the cushioning of any manner of quotas. But what I think women want – and don’t get – is the level playing field to be who they want, when they want and as they want. At the moment, women in politics – like women in every other field, but perhaps even more so – have to work twice as hard to get to the same point as men. And once they reach that pinnacle – they are scrutinised in ways that they may never have been prepared for. From obnoxiously personal sexist jokes to relentless commentary on their dress sense, it’s a narrative reserved for the female of the species. As Hillary Clinton told me what she wears will always form the parenthesis of any sentence written about her. Not so, for her boss – the (male) President of the United States.

In India, we are simultaneously more orthodox and more accepting of women in power. In many ways the women who have made it to the top are fiercely individualistic and often live deeply unconventional lives on their own terms. But their success is still rooted in a misogyny that is so subtle it can almost seem invisible – but so entrenched that you can be sure that a powerful woman fights an unspoken battle every single day of her life.

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