India’s single chief ministers

All 5 of these leaders will be prominent in the campaign and in none of their cases will their being single come up.

India's strange, single chief ministers will come to prominence in this coming general election. Strange both, because of the eccentric behaviour they all share and for being a phenomenon. The never-married leader is almost unique to India among large democracies and we have many of them operating at the highest level of politics. Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal, Jayalalitha in Tamil Nadu, Narendra Modi in Gujarat, Naveen Patnaik in Orissa and Mayawati, the former chief minister in Uttar Pradesh. The fate of 200 Lok Sabha seats will be directly influenced by these leaders. They would not have been where they are in India, were they politicians in the US. In those parts, a close scrutiny of personal lives and a reassurance that they are 'normal' is important. Happily, this isn't so in India and so we can accept a candidate without knowing much or even anything about their really personal selves.

Mamata Banerjee is thought of as not even having an interest in a personal life because of the intensity with which she works at politics. It was said of Lata Mangeshkar that she had very little to share with her family after she returned from the studio every evening. The reason was that she was so spent of emotion, having expended all of it in singing, that she had nothing left to give when she was done. Whether or not this is a fact about the singer, we can speculate that it might be true for the leader.

Naveen Patnaik is interesting because he does have a personal life (and by many accounts, a most elegant one). However, it is shared only with a small circle, many of whom constitute the international elite, and some say, even that has waned in recent years as he has concentrated on his work. What a transformation it would have been for him — going overnight from someone who had interests in the finer arts to someone who had to look at district files and the caste of candidates. It would make for a fascinating biography or memoir and I hope that one day, it is written.

Jayalalitha has often been written about, but rarely understood. She mixes great charm with a ruthless manner. She is also a great eccentric and her single status is not surprising. The stories of her strange behaviour are many and they can come from something as simple as her manner of communication (a visiting George Fernandes was once denied her presence when he went to her bungalow and was apparently lectured over the intercom). Her control over her party is total and this is one reason she has no need to announce whom she is going to support in the election. With a minimum of a couple of dozen seats, she will be one of the six people who will crown the prime minister. But so mercurial is her nature that nobody can even predict whether it will be the Congress or the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for her. She says she has no problem with Modi but that doesn't mean she has ruled the Congress out. Both she and her rival, Karunanidhi, have been quite mercenary in the way they have supported governments in Delhi and that will not change after this election. It would not be incorrect to say that all these five people have been opportunists, and even Mamata, Mayawati and Patnaik have used the BJP and discarded it as they have seen fit.

Modi is the most famous single man in India. He was married in his youth but apparently against his will. His wife lives her own life and though he is insistent about her not revealing anything of this period in his life, discouraging people from meeting her, he has not made much effort to offer clarity himself. Little is known about Modi's personal life today but as a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) pracharak, he would have been a brahmachari (celibate) for most of his decades in that body. The RSS is admittedly not particularly insistent on this (much like the Catholic Church) and when one of its favourite sons, Sanjay Joshi was named in a sex scandal, he was not abandoned.

The person on this list who is no longer chief minister but inevitably will again be one day, is Mayawati. She has also, like Jayalalitha, been studied often and understood rarely. She is seen as crude and perhaps, she is. But that doesn't explain how she has managed to be chief minister so often and build from a small regional party, one of the most formidable political forces in north India. All five of these leaders will be prominent in the campaign of the next few months and in none of their cases will their being single come up. This is, of course, a good thing and something Indians can congratulate themselves over. Their personal lives are their own matter and other nations could learn from us in this regard.

Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the prime minister who never married, was asked about his being single once. His answer apparently was: "Main kunwara hoon, brahmachari nahin."

Published in The Express Tribune, October 6^th, 2013.

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