Her Rampuri Edge

But there8217;s more to Noor Bano, aka Mahtab Zamani, than the image. She has worn the political mantle in the family ever since her husband, Rampur8217;s Congress MP Nawab Zulfiqar Ali Khan, quaintly nicknamed Micky Mian, died in a road accident in 1991. She has handsomely won two of the three parliamentary elections she contested from Rampur and shares, with party chief Sonia Gandhi, the distinction of trouncing her nearest rival then the BJP8217;s Muslim-in-Parliament Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi by more than a lakh votes in 1999. In the impoverished UP Congress today, she is the rare Muslim leader who can boast of an electoral base, as also the lone Muslim woman in the 13th Lok Sabha. The Begum wears those credentials with a marked lack of ostentation.

It wasn8217;t always so. There was a time when Noor Bano fought to stand out. In August 2000, she contested for the post of secretary of the Congress Party in Parliament. She was the candidate from the dissidents8217; camp led by the late Jitendra Prasada, who himself took on Sonia Gandhi for AICC presidentship later that year. Both lost, Noor Bano by a mere nine votes, but they had made their point.

She shrinks from any reminders of that brief rebellion. 8216;8216;Our fight was not against an individual. It was just that the workers were disgruntled because they were not being consulted on any issue8230; Since I was one of the people who had got a lot of support from my workers, I had to take the step for them,8217;8217; she says. Wasn8217;t it a challenge to Sonia Gandhi? 8216;8216;It was made out to be something it wasn8217;t. The Congress is my home. As for Prasada, he is no longer there. I can8217;t speak on his behalf.8217;8217;

Today the issue is secularism. And 8216;8216;Sonia Gandhi deserves all credit for taking such a strong stand8217;8217;.

Noor Bano has just returned from Gujarat. She is shaken by what she has seen in the relief camps. She speaks of the women who were raped, who continue to be denied justice. Yet she has found hope. 8216;8216;Wherever we went, the survivors of the violence never mentioned the word 8216;Hindu8217;. They blamed the RSS, the Bajrang Dal and the VHP, never the Hindu community.8217;8217;

But what about the Congress, particularly in Gujarat? There are reports of the state unit being paralysed by inertia and/or fear. And of the absence of local cadres in the relief and rehabilitation efforts. Isn8217;t Sonia Gandhi finding it tough going to enforce her 8216;secular8217; decree on the ground? 8216;8216;Everybody has been terrorised in Gujarat. What can the Congress do if the state agencies do not support its efforts?8217;8217;

It is on Rampur that Noor Bano is at her most unguarded. She was 8216;8216;brought out8217;8217; into politics, she says, to help her husband. It was also his idea that she should keep the 8216;Begum8217; in her name 8212; to make it easier for Rampur8217;s voters to locate her name in the alphabetical ballot paper. It was 1991, the mandir-masjid tangle was being forced on to national centrestage and Micky Mian was worried that Ayodhya would become an even bigger issue. 8216;8216;So he asked me to help him keep Rampur calm. I had already been working among the rural women, so the people knew me.8217;8217; After his death, they came to her simply because they had no one else to turn to. And the Begum has been in politics since.

Then the mosque came down at Ayodhya and 8216;8216;everything started going haywire8217;8217;. It was her responsibility to make sure there was no communal problem in Rampur and 8216;8216;thank God, we kept ourselves intact. Nothing happened8217;8217;.

It may well be that Rampur is an island of uncommon idyll over which the Begum presides more by accident of birth than political skill. And then, it may be more. It may also have to do with the practicing Muslim8217;s consistent rejection, even in these polarised times, of the tag 8216;Muslim politician8217; 8212; 8216;8216;Just as there is no 8216;Muslim fanatic8217;, there is no 8216;Muslim politician8217;. In India we don8217;t have a 8216;Muslim politics8217;, and that is the way it should it be.8217;8217; It may have to do with her undeterred belief in the innate secularism of the Indian people 8212; 8216;8216;I have never felt uncomfortable or insecure about being in a minority in this country.8217;8217; Noor Bano insists that communalism is a political contrivance. That everything will be all right again in Gujarat and elsewhere, if only the law is upheld, everybody8217;s fundamental rights are protected.

The Begum from Rampur makes no claim to a grander representativeness. But in the aftermath of Gujarat, it is terribly tempting to suspend caution. And to ascribe to her determined faith in the constitutional ideal of secularism, a wider resonance.