On Being Mahua Moitra

 

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To write on Mahua Moitra is to miss a heartbeat or two! A feisty lady, exuberant in spirits, and exuding both charm and gutsy defiant air, she turns many a head as she bounds about in the corridors of power, or anywhere. She is a stormy petrel in our political landscape whose fiery eloquence with a tadka of desi phrase, a Shakespearean quote, a Mahabharata metaphor and a Bengali/Hindi simile to boot, serves a steamy, sizzling stew fortified further with a battery of facts. That’s what lends her speeches in the parliament so special and a must-see, must-hear, for everyone. Those whom her fiery stuff is aimed at squirm in their seats with her red mirchis burning hot on their palates, while the benches on her side applaud in stunned disbelief at her heroics.

Her academic and professional credentials are impressive: in a house where even ministers can’t tell Einstein from Newton, and a Baba’s herbal concoctions get a ministerial nod as standard cures for covid-19. She is a graduate in Economics and Mathematics from a Massachusetts college in the US, and quit her Vice-Presidential chair in ‘J P Morgan Chase’, before plunging into the choppy, toxic, male-dominated waters called Indian politics where zealotry, misogyny, patriarchal prejudices, obfuscation, chicanery, lies and abuse rule the roost.

 Mahua Moitra is well and truly a fine blend of our - this side’s - Orient, and their - that side’s - Occident. Groomed by liberal-minded Bengali parents and nurtured on rich Bengali culture, sari-clad, red bindi on the forehead, she is a Bhartiya Naari so picture perfect as a Raja Ravi Varma would fancy painting on his beautiful canvas. She visits temples and performs Durga/Kali puja with gusto like a devout, full-blooded Bengali. She mingles with ease with the common folk and even joins them to play football. On the other hand, like a highbred, fashionable French femme, she flaunts her Guccis, Ferragamos, Louis Vuittons, Hermes-es, and also enjoys an occasional sip of wine with equal felicity and an air of rebellious jauntiness: to send shudders down the saffronised spines of horrified Hindutva fanatics. In Indian politics she is our brave, legendary Lakshmi Bai, Joan of Arc and Cleopatra combined- one, who, like Helen of Troy, can launch a thousand ships with a mere quirk of her proud neck; who can slay with her angry frown; who can dare to cock a snook at the haughty-headed male bigots in the parliament and outside. In short, Mahua Moitra is a power-packed dynamo of a liberated, educated woman bathed and sunned in the best of East and the best of West.

What about her recent tiff vis-a’-vis the cash-for-query controversy? Enough has been said, shown and written both by the Godi media and the few surviving but gasping, free independent sources.

 As they say that justice should not only be done but should also appear to have been done. In Mahua’s case, alas, it seems neither. Instead, it smells fishy: like a rotten fish.

Well, while for the UK’s The Guardian, Mahua is a woman of “grit and glamour”, as goes the heading of its article, or “Dour and Dior” (The Indian Express); for me, Mahua Moitra is an iconoclast and a global citizen who challenges the established dogmas, the stubborn misogynist order and obscurantist, ‘khaapish’ mindsets that have only grown worse in the present times.  And, I, a conceited Indian male, would not just want to be a Mahua Moitra myself any day, but also wish every ‘Bharat ki Abla Naari’ to be one - the woman who dares and bewitches with equal ease and elan. 

Keep it up Mahua!