By Rama Lakshmi
GANDHINAGAR, India — On the campaign trail, the renowned classical dancer Mallika Sarabhai walks past a foul-smelling trash heap and a gate adorned with coconuts to enter the maze-like slum where ragpickers in this western Indian city live.
Little girls welcome her with rice grains mixed in auspicious vermilion paste and garland her with hand-spun cotton threads. She squats on the floor and breaks into a folk song, and women in floral saris and colorful glass bangles clap and sing along.
“Other candidates wave at you and go away. Our democracy has room only for leaders, not for people like you and me,” said Sarabhai, 56, a slim, short-haired woman with kohl-rimmed eyes and a red-glitter bindi, the decorative dot worn on the forehead by many Hindu women. “But I have come here as one of you, as your sister.”
Sarabhai, a first-time independent candidate, is running for a lower house seat in Parliament in national elections this month from one of India’s most high-profile constituencies, a state capital that has been polarized along Hindu-Muslim lines since riots in 2002. As a dancer, she has used performing arts for years to challenge social taboos that limit women’s aspirations. In her new political role, she calls herself a “people’s candidate” who is fighting to reclaim the idea of an inclusive and secular India.
Sarabhai eschews grand speeches, microphones, banners and slogans. Instead, she takes notes as people talk about illegally brewed alcohol, bribe-taking policemen, the lack of bathing water and the shortage of women’s toilets in the slums.
Sarabhai, one of a handful of professional people running as independents in the upcoming elections, rejects the standard Indian political appeals to caste, religion and linguistic ethnicity, and speaks of empowering voters to unseat corrupt and ineffective politicians. Her campaign, she said, seeks to reclaim the shrinking space left for ordinary people’s voices in a democracy dominated by political parties that too often rely on mudslinging, muscle-flexing and money power.
Sarabhai’s constituency, Gandhinagar, in the western state of Gujarat, has suffered six bloody bouts of Hindu-Muslim rioting in four decades. The latest was in 2002, when Hindu mobs mounted reprisal attacks against Muslims that left more than 1,000 people dead in the state. Many groups have blamed the state’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government for abetting the violence. Later that year, Sarabhai filed a public interest lawsuit against the government in the country’s Supreme Court, earning the wrath of the BJP’s supporters, who have since lampooned her.
“The silence of the city’s middle class toward the violence has been stunning. She is trying to extrude that silence by providing a credible alternative,” said Shiv Viswanathan, a social scientist at the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology in Gandhinagar. “Her fight has a lot of symbolism in this city fractured by violence.”