Close on the heels of a Twitter spat with Bihar Minister Ashok Choudhary, Union Human Resource Minister Smriti Irani wrote on Facebook that while women were taught not to question anyone or respond to provocations, she did not subscribe to such wisdom.
Signing off as “Aunty National”, a term used to describe her in a newspaper headline months ago, Ms. Irani listed the challenges she faced in her life and career as a middle class woman and took a dig at “intellectuals” for labelling her “illiterate”.
“Growing up in a middle class environment (Lutyens’ zone excluded), many girls who would walk to school/college and back home every day and go to the bazaar to get groceries and adequate sabzi in a given budget, would often be told that if accosted by a boy or a bunch of them, don’t look up and keep walking straight,” she wrote. “But there would be those rebellious kinds (yours truly included) who would question why? Why not respond? Why zip it? The standard answer such a question begets is that it is not worth it. Nuksaan tumhara hoga, ladke ka kuch nahi bigadega (loss will be yours, nothing will happen to the boy).” She added that the same advice was on offer in politics.
She said she entered politics not as a “fading star” but at the “peak of success”. “You are given the hard battles to fight, you accept (Chandini Chowk and Amethi were no cakewalk my friends). You work from the grassroots up. Yet some intellectual says anpad (illiterate) the minute you are given the opportunity to serve as the HRD Minister,” she said.
She also took a dig at the media, saying that when she joined politics she was given an advice that “till you don’t have your own coterie of journalists, don’t expect support to come pouring in through editorials...”
