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In her trousers and red top, her long, quilted jacket, lace-fringed scarf and swinging earrings, Shazia Ilmi attracts curious glances as she walks into the office of the Delhi unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Apart from a couple of young women among the waiting journalists from Hindi news channels, everybody else in sight is a man. The portraits on the walls, too, are mostly of men, among them life-size ones of Sangh Parivar grandees Deendayal Upadhyaya and Syama Prasad Mookerjee.
After a jaunty 'Hello' for the journalists, along with the breathy announcement that she has been "with senior leaders since 7 am", and a respectful "pranam" for middle-aged partymen sitting in a huddle, Ilmi gets to work. Settling herself on a sofa in a small room, wall-papered with the BJP's lotuses, the one-time STAR TV anchor rearranges her hair and begins to tear apart her former colleagues at the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) for the cameras.
A portly media cell functionary from her new party watches approvingly as vivid phrases fall from her lips, unfailingly curved in a smile: "a cult," "a secret society", "denounced by their own Bhishma Pitamah, Shanti Bhushan", "my election internally sabotaged, though I was a founding member".
As Ilmi holds forth on women's rights, a reporter asks pointedly, "Should women politicians keep changing parties, just like men do?" "Power is gender-neutral," says Ilmi cordially. Between interviews, she frequently addresses reporters by their first names, and banters, "Have you noticed the way Arvind Kejriwal starts coughing as soon as he sees a camera?"
Some might dismiss Ilmi, who has lost both the elections she contested - one narrowly, in 2013, and the other comprehensively, in 2014 - as a political lightweight, lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time.
AAP spokesman Ashutosh would clearly like to. Accusing Ilmi of not being a team player ("she changed her campaign manager thrice when she contested the RK Puram seat in Delhi in 2013"), he says, "She joined the anti-corruption movement when there were very few women, and she rose because she is articulate in Hindi and English on TV. But she made the mistake of thinking she was a celebrity, not realising it was the platform that enabled her to rise."
Whether you condemn Ilmi, who has viscerally attacked the BJP in the past, as an opportunist, or admire her for her bounce-back after being marginalised in AAP, there is no denying she is part of an interesting trend. Namely, the growing appeal, for parties, of the feisty, telegenic, Twitter-happy politician. A good example in her own party is Smriti Irani, who rose, with no political base, on the back of formidable TV skills. Ilmi's diatribes against the dissension-ridden AAP, in the run-up to the February 7 Delhi election, are not aimless. An estimated 78 per cent of the capital's electorate watches TV news everyday.
Without undue modesty, Ilmi calls herself a "straight communicator, with piercing logic and an analytical mind". However, the newbie BJP member, who drove to the party's sprawling central office for her joining ceremony on January 16, only to be redirected to the more modest Delhi unit, ducks the question of whether she sees herself as a national or state leader. "I don't plan, I believe in the moment," she says.
Married to a wealthy businessman of Hindu-Muslim parentage, Ilmi went to school in Kanpur (in the 1980), where her family owns an Urdu newspaper, and to college in Shimla and Delhi. She did film courses in Britain and the US.
While working at STAR, she caused a mild frisson when she wrote a scathing piece in The Indian Express attacking Omar Abdullah for "political posturing".
Showing her eclecticism, she also wrote on women's rights, polo in Argentina, which she visited after leaving STAR, and the Anna movement, which she joined, somewhat to the surprise of her friends, shortly after it began in 2011.
Ilmi contests the notion that she embodies metropolitan chic. "I did not grow up in Sainik Farms (an upmarket neighbourhood of South Delhi)," she says a little sarcastically. "My mother wore a burkha for most of her life. It has been a tough personal journey."
Tougher perhaps because of acrimonious family feuds. She is today in the same party as her brother, Aijaz, whom she had volubly accused of sabotaging her 2013 election. Does it matter? "I barely speak to him," says Ilmi dismissively.
As a modern Muslim woman, Ilmi would stand out in any political party. In the BJP, with its narrow slate of male Muslim politicians, she is unique. "She will be useful for spreading the message among Muslims and liberal Hindus that 'we are not so bad as you think'," says Ashutosh sardonically.
Political writer Ajaz Ashraf, who had lauded Ilmi for rising above identity politics by contesting from R K Puram, where Muslim votes are only 4.5 per cent, wrote recently in an article on scroll.in: "It is her Muslim name she is now consciously milking to trumpet her courage in joining the BJP, which is unabashedly anti-Muslim."
To a TV reporter who makes a similar point, Ilmi says: "You are hurting me, I am a citizen first." But she certainly is a more decorous citizen than before.
The old Ilmi would have lit into BJP MP Sakshi Maharaj for saying Hindu women should bear four children each. The new one says sedately: "There are fringe elements in every political party."
