She's a Dalit and a woman, but is there more to the Lok Sabha's new Speaker?
Getting to know Meira Kumar, the new Speaker of the Lok Sabha, can be a reporter’s nightmare. She is pleasant, polite, but intensely reserved.
As a result, it took some persistent questioning for her to reveal her favourite book. It is Kalidasa’s immortal Sanskrit play Abhigyan Shakuntalam , the love story that was also a treatise on the dharma or duty of kings.
From which we can conclude that she is a romantic. She’s also clearly learnt the art of diplomacy from her brief stint as a diplomat. Kumar is charm and presence, from her high, little-girl voice to the graceful compliments she paid to her predecessor Somnath Chatterjee.
Certainly, compared to the weighty, lawyerly Chatterjee, Kumar wears her new role as India’s first woman Speaker lightly. She was appropriately modest about the fact that “most” parties had supported her on her appointment and added that she hoped there would be “healthy, meaningful debate” in the Lok Sabha with the realisation that “on national issues, the discussion should be above politics”.
Kumar also said two years after the appointment of a woman president, India was making a woman the first Speaker of the Lok Sabha. The controversial women’s reservation Bill — reserving a third of Lok Sabha seats for women — would, hopefully follow, she said. She conceded, though, that consensus would have to be created on the measure; one has evaded the Lok Sabha ever since the Bill was proposed.
Kumar is certainly deft in fending off pointed questions. Asked what she would do about all the time and money that is wasted by Parliament — 433 hours, amounting to more than Rs 54 crore in the last session, her answer was,“I’ll discuss it with all political parties.”
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But it is her training as a bureaucrat and politician on which she will have to rely most in the days ahead. She has grown up in Delhi in a highly political environment, physically far away from the grinding poverty of Sasaram, Bihar. This is where her roots really are. She is heir to the legacy of legendary Dalit leader, Babu Jagjivan Ram, who rose to be India’s defence minister and eventually deputy prime minister. Unlike her father, who developed a formidable reputation for administrative efficiency, Kumar hasn’t really made a mark in her one stint in the government.
Kumar unhesitatingly acknowledges that it is India’s version of affirmative action that enabled her to complete her education from Delhi University and join the Indian Foreign Service. She was posted in the Indian High Commission in London coincidentally from 1977 to 1979, the same time her father was a minister in the Janata Party government in Delhi.
Kumar served in just three countries (UK, Spain and Mauritius) during her tenure in the foreign service and she developed no lasting attachment either to the service or to friends made during that period. As a relatively junior officer she could not have been expected to come up with diplomatic coups — as indeed, she didn’t.
When she left the foreign service in 1985, it was to join Rajiv Gandhi. For some years, (1999 to 2004, essentially the Atal Bihari Vajpayee years) she was in the wilderness in Bihar, having lost the election to another former civil servant Muni Lal who joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
But in 2004, although Muni Lal used every means to win the Sasaram seat, including deploying Kumar’s estranged niece Medhavi Kirti (her late brother’s daughter) to campaign against Kumar, she won that election, one of the three seats that the Congress got.
There are two reasons Kumar has been a successful politician. One is her husband, a Supreme Court lawyer. Apart from the fact that Manjul Kumar is from the Koeri caste (a backward class), and there are a large number of Koeris in Sasaram, he is also supportive, happy to see his wife grow.
Kumar is a Dalit — and it helps that the Congress believes Mayawati and the Bahujan Samaj Party are going to become big political threats in the time to come. In the 2009 election, the combination of the Koeri and the Muslim vote in Sasaram and the fact that the Paswan vote was split between her and the BJP contributed to her victory.
As a Union Minister for social justice and empowerment from 2004 to 2009, she was tossed a hot potato in the form of job reservations in the private sector. Kumar’s approach to social justice is drawn from a human rights approach to caste. She did nothing to rock the boat when demands were voiced about reservations in the private sector during Manmohan Singh’s last tenure, only pointing out that constitutional amendments take time. Like other leaders before her, she is conscious that radicalism in social processes can lead to a backlash: And it is important to protect a vulnerable section of the Indian society from this.
Kumar’s interests can best be described as eclectic. She writes poetry and loves classical music. She confessed rather bashfully that in her younger days, she too had followed the adventures of Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple. She is a collector of tribal art and handicraft. She is also a pistol shooter and a horse rider. All her three children are married and have a grandchild each. Her son is a journalist. He describes her as soft-spoken but a disciplinarian. That last trait will be put fully to the test when the real work of the Lok Sabha begins with a debate on the President’s address on Friday.