Meet AAP’s women power: The worker and the manager

They represent two extremes — Meera Sanyal, the former bank CEO from South Mumbai’s toniest area, and Medha Patkar, the social activist of many a people’s movement from a one-bedroom house in Chembur. Now both have entered the electoral fray on AAP tickets. SHALINI NAIR trails them and tracks their style of campaigning. (IE Photo)

Born to social worker Indu and trade unionist Vasant Khanolkar, Patkar did an MA in Social Work from Tata Institute of Social Sciences. She was doing her PhD at TISS when she left midway to spearhead the Narmada Bachao Andolan, which she founded in 1989 to protest against the construction of dams along the Narmada river. Today, she is the national convener of the National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM), a group of 250 mass-based movements. She married Praveen Patkar, a professor at TISS. They are separated. (IE Photo: Arul Horizon)

It’s a small, quiet campaign unlike the high-decibel politics of her party. Travelling in an open jeep and waving to passers-by in Mulund, with only one vehicle of Aam Aadmi Party workers trailing her, Medha Patkar does the routine campaign expected of any politician before the general elections. Except that she is not your regular politician. A fact that’s hard to miss, as 59-year-old Patkar, AAP’s candidate for Mumbai North East, which goes to the polls on April 24, makes it quite clear. At one of the gatherings in Mulund, she reads out an extract from a speech made by freedom fighter Bhagat Singh: “Revolution does not necessarily involve sanguinary strife, nor is there any place in it for individual vendetta. It is not the cult of the bomb and the pistol. By ‘revolution’, we mean that the present order of things, which is based on manifest injustice, must change.” (IE Photo: Narendra Vaskar)

Such speeches are meant to underline that Patkar, the national convener of the National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM), who has spent her life advocating the rights of the poor, is still more a revolutionary activist than a savvy politician. As the day gets sunnier and hotter, Patkar refuses to drink the packaged drinking water passed around at intervals, instead gulping down tap water from tumblers offered by hawkers or slum dwellers. She also prefers not to wear the AAP topi, unlike other party workers, offering only “I just feel awkward” as the reason. As she gets off her jeep to address voters in different parts of Mulund, she doesn’t appeal for votes for her or her party either. Instead, she tells people, “Iss baar soch kar vote dena (Please think before you vote this time)”. (IE Photo: Amit Chakravarty)

An ardent supporter of Anna Hazare’s India Against Corruption movement since its inception, Patkar joined AAP only after the Delhi polls. After months of deliberation, in measured words, she announced NAPM’s “support” for the party. This was followed by another round of listless waiting by her fellow activists before she finally decided to contest the polls. “There is no point holding on to one’s ideological position rigidly if it cannot get translated into action. I am not doing this for the sake of power but to establish a link between people’s politics and electoral politics,” says Patkar. (IE Photo: Amit Chakravarty)

Her manner may be that of a reluctant politician, but the party believes Patkar is their best bet in Mumbai as well as Maharashtra. In Mankhurd, a pocket teeming with unauthorised slums and resettlement colonies, Patkar is deified. Several women, who have never heard of AAP, pour out of their homes to listen to “Medha tai” talk about how, during the last elections, five lakh women of the constituency did not even care to cast their vote. “We have always voted for the Congress-NCP. They have given us nothing but false assurances,” says one Nasrin Bano, a resident of Mankhurd’s Mandala slum, where 3,200 families have been living since their shanties were levelled as part of a demolition drive by the Vilasrao Deshmukh government in 2003, that rendered three lakh families homeless. It was on Patkar’s intervention that Congress chief Sonia Gandhi forced the demolitions to a halt. (IE Photo: Arul Horizon)

Born to late Admiral G M Hiranandani, a Karachi-born Sindhi who went on to serve as the vice-chief of the Naval Staff, and Susheel Hiranandani, Sanyal did her MBA from INSEAD, France, and an Executive MBA from Harvard Business School. She has spent 30 years in banking — having worked with Grindlays Bank, Lazards and RBS India. Sanyal headed a microfinance programme for women in rural India. She is a member of FICCI’s National Executive and Inclusive Governance Councils. She is married to Ashish Sanyal, who runs a retail consultancy. (IE Photo: Amit Chakravarty)

Faces peer out of windows and balconies of the many dilapidated buildings in Dongri, a low-income Muslim-dominated neighbourhood, often the background for Bollywood biopics of underworld dons. Residents look down from their homes at a cotton sari-clad woman, with a sling bag and a topi on her head, followed by an all-male entourage, as she walks with folded hands through the narrow alleys, occasionally stopping to listen to residents complain about lack of water, toilets, schools and jobs, and promising to solve their problems. She makes no emotional speeches, and only asks residents to bless her and support her so that she could bring swaraj to them, help protect their public spaces, improve public transport, create affordable housing and promote women’s safety. (IE Photo: Pradip Das)

Meera Sanyal, the Aam Aadmi Party candidate from Mumbai South, is on her maiden visit to the Dongri area as part of her campaign and plans to come more often. The 52-year-old has made similar visits to the fishermen colony in Worli and the slum sprawls lining the Arabian Sea at the southernmost tip of Mumbai in Colaba. Like Dongri, both areas grapple with poor civic amenities. There’s another commonality among them — they are Congress strongholds, and largely contributed to sitting MP Milind Deora’s victory margin of over a lakh votes in the last general election. The Harvard Business School alumnus and former CEO and chairman of the Royal Bank of Scotland knows that she must make inroads into these pockets if she has to do well on polling day, April 24. (IE Photo: Pradip Das)

But this is also the constituency that houses the country’s costliest apartments. The tony areas of Cuffe Parade, Malabar Hill, Napean Sea Road, Breach Candy, Worli Sea Face and Colaba, where Sanyal herself lives, are home to the financial capital’s industrialists and businessmen. If Sanyal is focusing on the low-income parts — through road rallies and euphemistically named “safai yatras” in slums, old tenanted settlements and local trains — there is a reason. In the 2009 elections, only 40 per cent of Mumbai South voters turned out to vote — one of the lowest polling percentages in the country — thanks largely to the poor show in its upmarket areas. “We have been campaigning extensively in the slums as that is where the numbers are,” Sanyal says. (IE Photo: Amit Chakravarty)

Sanyal has learnt her lesson after the drubbing she got in the 2009 Lok Sabha polls — securing only 1 per cent of the total vote — as an Independent candidate from the same seat. Now she is mostly reaching out to these “familiar” areas through social media. She has held three Google Hangouts so far: one had her fielding questions on foreign policy, including issues such as terrorism, fuel imports and trade; another had her explaining AAP’s economic policy; and in the third, she talked of her own campaign. She regularly holds “question hour” on Twitter, where she has over 30,000 followers. (IE Photo: Amit Chakravarty)

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