Politician or Goddess? Why are Indian Women Leaders Deified?

It is hard to be a woman in politics, considering how it remains a male-dominated field. It is even harder when the ones that we do have are constantly glorified as goddess figures.

Take a look at any female politician in India and you will notice that at some point in their political careers, the Indian media has compared each one of them to Goddesses.

For instance, after the success of the 1971 war, Indira Gandhi was hailed as an avatar of Goddess Durga. Much more recently, in 2019, a news channel portrayed Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman as Lakshmi, the Goddess of wealth during its Union Budget promo. Other leaders like Sonia Gandhi and Mamata Banerjee have literally been depicted as statues of goddesses.

Of course, Indian male politicians in many instances have also been represented as supreme deities, because — let’s face it, religion and politics in India are largely intertwined. However, parallels drawn between female politicians and goddesses is a bit more problematic.

During the national struggle, Mahatma Gandhi sought to mobilize women’s participation by citing Sita, the embodiment of the virtuous, chaste and dutiful wife as the ultimate role model. Moreover, the symbolic Bharat Mata also seems to exhibit similar virtues- the mother goddess who is willing to make sacrifices for her children.

Such gendered representation is problematic because it is deeply rooted in patriarchal stereotypes of the ideal woman.

Thus, the portrayal of women leaders as goddess does not display nari shakti, rather it seeks to legitimize their involvement in a male-dominated field in a way that is in keeping with patriarchal norms.

Additionally, it also reinforces the idea that women, as mortal beings are unfit leaders. This suggests that only men and/or divinity in the form of a woman are permitted to assume public roles.

So does this indicate India’s inability to accept women as competent leaders in their own right? I suppose, the answer is yes. Such representations amount to sheer tokenism at best and its time that we shift from such problematic portrayals and ask why do we even need to connect women to the divine?

Women are not goddesses.