India elects its first female president July 22, 2007 Jill Good on them. Sorry to anyone who commented on this earlier; I accidentally deleted it.
Yeah, but let’s not forget that they had Indira Ghandi as their Prime Minister way back in the 60s — and she served 4 terms in all.
Hmmm, hate to take the fizz out of what appears to be a great step forward for feminism. But Prathiba Patil, the new Indian president, got elected mostly for the wrong reasons. Mainly … the chief of one of the political parties (Sonia Gandhi) supported her.. she did not get elected by popular vote — most of you probably already know that (India elects its prime minister by popular vote). Amit Varma has an excellent article on why it’s scary she’s become president of India here: LINK.
What AG (and Amit, of course) said. Plus, I don’t think a lot of the people outside India celebrating this really understand how utterly unimportant the post of president is in India. It’s purely symbolic, and for me, Patil’s criminal activities (and the voices in her head) trump her being a woman. We’ve already had a female prime minister(though that didn’t work out too well)…I don’t see that Patil being female is going to change much.
Yeah, I’ve been reading the responses from a number of Indians, and Indian feminists, and nobody sounds particularly thrilled by this turn of events. I’m all for getting more women into visible positions of power (even if, as in this case, the power is pretty much symbolic), but I think we also have to consider what sort of an impact they’re going to have on the status quo-if any.