The rise of Asia's women leaders
IN the summer of 1960, while women in the West were paddling in the shallows of a decade which would bring them the Women's Liberation movement, the Pill and bra-burning, an unexpected blow for feminism was struck in an Asian country. That July, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, resident of what was then Ceylon and is now Sri Lanka, became the world's first female prime minister.
In doing so, she established a trend which has remained peculiarly Asian to this day. Asia, in fact, has produced more female prime ministers than the rest of the world put together. Mrs Bandaranaike's victory proved that Asian women could hold high political office, strutting with apparent ease upon the world stage, even though they had been brought up within an essentially patriarchal society. At the same time, she arrived at the polls with a simple manifesto: her political existence was exclusively defined by her relationship to a male.
In Mrs Bandaranaike's case, that man was her husband, Solomon, who was assassinated by a Buddhist monk in 1959. As a campaigner wearing widow's weeds, she was to be the forerunner of Corazon Aquino, who became president of the Philippines in 1986 after her husband Benigno was shot dead at Manila airport in 1983 and, more recently, of Sonia Gandhi, whose husband Rajiv was annihilated by a suicide bomber while campaigning in southern India in 1991.
Sonia Gandhi, of course, is Italian by birth, and this - not her sex, nor even her political inexperience - was the objection most often raised against her during this year's Indian election. She was still viewed as an outsider within a great dynasty. Those who claim to be in the political know in Delhi say that it is Priyanka, Rajiv's daughter, who will be the true inheritor of the family mantle. Daughters, tied by blood to dead fathers, are usually a good bet as far as potent political symbols go in Asia.
The second half of the 20th century is filled with examples. Indira Gandhi, Rajiv's mother, was the daughter, not of the Mahatma (although this mistaken belief often proved convenient to her) but of his friend, India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru died in May 1964, while still in office. By January 1966, his self-effacing only child was prime minister. Her demure qualities did not last long, and her authoritarian rule, which included conflict with Pakistan, the testing of India's first nuclear weapons and the storming of the Sikh Golden Temple at Amritsar, came to a violent end in 1984 when she was assassinated by two of her own Sikh guards.
By a historical quirk, the two countries which painfully devolved from post-Raj India - that is, Pakistan and Bangladesh - have spawned identical father/daughter political relationships. Benazir Bhutto, Harvard- and Oxford-educated, is by far the better known. When her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was overthrown as Pakistan's prime minister in 1977, and hanged two years later, she assumed his mantle as her tragic political right.
As a way of garnering public favour, becoming a symbol of sorrow is highly effective: in 1988, at the age of 35, Benazir Bhutto became the first woman to rule an Islamic state since Raziyya Sultana, Queen of Delhi, in the 13th century. She served two terms - 1988-1990 and 1993-1996 - before being deposed on charges of massive fraud.
Recent political jostling in Bangladesh has been solely confined to bereaved women. Sheikh Hasina Wajed, the current prime minister, is the daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman who is usually referred to as the 'Father of the Nation'. He became Bangladesh's first president in 1972, but was assassinated three years later. Sheikh Hasina's immediate predecessor was Khaleda Zia, who became Bangladesh's first woman prime minister in 1991, and is the widow of president Ziaur Rahman who was also assassinated, exactly 10 years earlier. (The two Rahmans were not related, and the women are bitter political rivals.) The morbid nature of such Asian political patterns - the male dies and, without much apparent ado, the daughter or mother steps into his bloodied footprint - appears likely to continue. Asia's most famous political lady-in-waiting, Burma's Aung Sang Suu Kyi, may have no official title but she, too, is a dead leader's daughter. Her father, Aung Sang, is usually referred to as the founder of post-colonial Burma. He was assassinated in 1947 when Suu Kyi was two.
In Indonesia, newly elected Vice-President Megawati Sukarnoputri is the daughter of founding president Sukarno.
Wan Azizah Ismail, the wife of Malaysia's most famous prisoner, Anwar Ibrahim, is proof that a husband need not be deceased before his spouse steps into the limelight.
Other variations are creeping into the Asian political landscape, but how truly encouraging these are to the millions of women treated as second-class citizens on this continent is open to question.
