Repeat offender

Mulayam Singh appears to have found an unlikely new ally. Talking at a convention of womens self-help groups,Goa Chief Minister Digambar Kamat randomly veered off course and advised women not to hanker after 33 per cent reservation,because politics makes you go crazy and instead,women had important roles to play transforming society and looking after the next generation. Rather than chasing after a political role,he counselled women to just work harder. While some in his party have interpreted his remarks as an expression of Kamats world-weariness with his profession,rather than any condescension or hostility towards women,it remains to be seen how his remarks will go down with his own party president,the strongest backer of the womens reservation bill.

Though he has claimed that his words were twisted out of context and that he,in fact,regularly exhorted women to join politics,Kamat has a long history of putting his foot in it,whether unwittingly or mischievously. When I am in Delhi for any conference,I have Sheila Dikshit on one side and Narendra Modi on the other. He is my best friend, he once confided to the media,to the discomfiture of his party. He placed the Congress in another bind last year when he implacably opposed special economic zone projects in Goa,claiming that he had to abide by the peoples wishes. He has a reputation for political jiggery-pokery,especially after he became deputy CM in the BJP government and then plotted its fall by creating dissension within BJP allies,and he tends his relationship with smaller parties in Goa. With a resume like his,it is unlikely that his remark about the womens bill was the slip of an unguarded moment.

How can the Congress credibly claim to champion this bill when its own big hitters openly express such attitudes? It must ensure remarks like Kamats come with a heavy political cost. The inanity of his words speaks for itself,but such routine sexist put-downs should have no place in our public culture.