So Now Congress made Meira Kumar as the first woman Speaker of the Lok Sabha in History of India......................But read following to decide how good it is ??
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Somebody says take care of Sukka Pagadaalu(??) and the Meira Kumars will be automatically taken care of. Meira Kumar is the first woman Speaker of the Lok Sabha, scream the headlines. But a little later we are told in an aside that she has been appointed Speaker because she is a Dalit woman. And the idea behind the appointment is to contain Dalit queen Mayawati, whose ambition to climb the Raisina Hills is an open secret.
But how is Meira Kumar’s appointment going to check the rising ambition of Mayawati? We are told that this will happen because the message will be sent from the Congress is: "Hum kisi se kam nahin." For every Mayawati we have a Meira Kumar. This, we are told, is the reason why a record number of Dalit women have been appointed to the Manmohan Singh government, which includes Kumari Selja, Panabaka Lakshmi and Krishna Tirath. The Congress’s fashion statement is that "we care for Dalit women and thus we have Dalit women in the forefront". By implication, "we are doing the most for the women of this depressed group".
Maybe I am uninitiated so I don’t understand. How’s Meira Kumar’s appointment going to help ameliorate the fate of millions of Dalit women across the country? Meira Kumar may be a highly competent woman but does she symbolize in any way the typical Dalit woman? An ex-Indian Foreign Service (IFS) officer, daughter of Babu Jagjivan Ram who straddled the country's political scene for 50 years, and endowed with a wonderful voice, Meira is really from a very privileged background. Moreover did she want this job? Okay, forget Meira Kumar, did the bosses of the Congress think of the lady for the job even a few days ago? Obviously not and this is the reason why Meira Kumar was sworn in as a cabinet minister only to be made Speaker as an afterthought.
If the ruling party is so keen to uplift downtrodden women, it should first think of the likes of Sukka Pagadaalu (picture below), who at 64 is the same age as Meira Kumar. For those of you who came in late, she’s a tribal woman and was an MLA of the ruling party in Andhra Pradesh in the late 1970s. But now she is a daily wage labourer earning Rs 60 per day. Her husband is employed along with her as a construction labourer in the remote Srikakulam district. She gets an MLA’s pension but to make both ends meet she has to do a labourer’s job in her village, far away from what is called "civilization". Her plight had been highlighted in TOI in the run-up to the just-concluded elections.
Pagadaalu was attracted to politics by the call of Mrs Indira Gandhi and was one of the 33 women elected to the 294-strong Andhra Pradesh assembly in 1972. Even today she is a fan of the late Mrs Gandhi and laments how politics and politicians were different in her time.
Humble submission to the descendants of Mrs Indira Gandhi: If you really want to make a difference, uplift the likes of Pagadaalu. If you do that, the likes of Meira Kumar would be automatically be taken care of. And Mayawati won’t loom so large on your horizon. And then possibly UP could be yours – in the course of time!
