Bharat Mata-loving Narendra Modi makes a point about empowerment in his Ficci speech

NEW DELHI: NarendraModi looked around at his audience, mostly women, and broke into a speech devoted to wooing them. The bachelor chief minister, with a cultivated reputation for firmness and decisiveness, played messiah for women, in an apparent attempt to fortify the firewall that has helped him with successive election victories in Gujarat.


The burden of his address before the FICCI Ladies Organisation was a simple one: women constitute 50 per cent of India’s population and need to be empowered and treated with dignity for the country to be a developed nation. It wasn’t an unfamiliar line. Around three months ago too, after winning his third term as chief minister, Modi, who is known for his popularity among women in the state, had specially thanked them.

Women voters reportedly went up in the state to 68.9 per cent in 2012 from 57 per cent in 2007. Fully aware of the political gains of women power, Modi tried to strike the familiar chords, speaking of female foeticide, inequality and gender insensitivity. He said the statistics on female foeticide were alarming even in Gujarat.

“In our culture, mothers have the highest place. But a lot of bad things have crept into our society… There is female foeticide. We have regressed to even earlier than the 18th century,” he said, peppering his address frequently with the Bollywood metaphor “maa”. His focus on gender sensitisation did not, however, deter him from taking pot-shots at Congress and its vice-president Rahul Gandhi.

So whether he spoke of Jassuben’s pizza or Induben’s khakra and Lijjat papad as anecdotes of women’s entrepreneurship, the Gandhi scion’s Kalavati, the Vidarbha farm widow who became famous when he mentioned her plight in parliament in 2009, did sneak into Modi’s speech.

The media wasn’t spared either. “Now media will go looking for Jassuben to see if she is like Kalavati. Let me tell you she died five years ago,” he said. While recounting steps taken by Gujarat to empower women, he said the assembly had passed a bill ensuring 50 per cent quota for women in local bodies, but it was yet to be cleared by the governor.

“We could not implement it because our governor has withheld her signature…” Modi said women were still not part of the economic decision-making process. “We have to change this,” he said. His party, BJP, is hoping to cash in on the Congress-led UPA’s incumbent disadvantage.

Taking another pot shot at Congress, he said since assuming office in 2001, he was busy filling up the many “pits” left behind by decades of Congress rule. “So far I have only done the work of filling up the pits. You can imagine what massive pits Congress created,” he said, evoking laughter from the hall.

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