?However much you strut about outside,/ Get home and the wife will take your hide./ In the home, Mian?s a zero,/ Bibi?s the real hero.?

[Baire jatoi karo na phutani,/ Ghare-te elei bibi-r dhantani./ Barite Mian zero,/ Bibi-i ashole hero.]

? MLA Phatakeshto

Everyone loves the funny politician, all bluster among his followers and henpecked in the house. But the bogey wife is funnier, reduced by the humorous male voice, and stuck firmly at home. Who are the women being ridiculed here, ever so gently?

It could not be Nayana Bandyopadhyay. Far from the nagging shrew, she is the perfect supportive helpmeet. Her position is unique: she is the sitting MLA (who won on a Trinamool ticket) of the same constituency from which her husband, Sudip Bandyopadhyay, is running as Congress candidate this time. As a campaigner for her husband, she asks her electorate to vote for him.

In our pick of the wives of candidates and campaign leaders, and of women workers, she is an MLA herself. So political shifts do not bother her. She has been inspired in her change by Sonia Gandhi?s sacrifices. In place of Didi (Mamata Banerjee), Pranabda and Somenda are now there to guide her.

But Nayana has to balance her acting with her own political career and that of her husband. Today she is the candidate?s ideal wife. Visiting party workers constantly need tea, and she orders out if there is a crowd. That?s a change from her mother-in-law?s days: Nayana remembers her making handis of tea. Now she gives Sudip tea, toast and fruits for breakfast; makes sure he is carrying water, towels and a change of clothes on the campaign trail, and has half a cup of rice and fish ready for lunch, soup and sandwiches for dinner. This is as pretty as a picture, ready to be filmed.

But voices can be different. That of the mother of Firhad Hakim, Trinamool councillor, Ward 82, is distinctly so. She was unenthusiastic at first about her son?s political activism, but supports him now. Yet, she voted left as long as Mani Sanyal was alive despite her son?s leanings. That choice was her own.

the way it runs

Choices are of different kinds, like households. Sati Chatterjee, wife of Salil Chatterjee, CPI(M) candidate from Cossipore, said: ?The way this house runs could be a little different from other houses. That is because my husband has been active in politics for over two decades. [He was the councillor of Ward 7 from 1985 to 2005 and has also been borough chairman.] So the house is always full of people, who drop in at all times. I have to address their queries besides running the house.? It is just a little more hectic during election time. Looking after her husband?s health, ensuring that he has his medicines and noon-jal, is one of her extra jobs then. Sati may not be an MLA, but she has been a member of the local CPI(M) Mahila Samiti for 20 years: ?I am not known simply as Salil Chatterjee?s wife, and I enjoy my role. A lot of people who come here actually come to meet me rather than my husband.?

Would she have acquired this identity had she married into a non-political family? Maybe the answer is to be found in the way she recalls her marriage: ?I was married [in 1971] into a household that was active politically. The situation was very new to me. For days I would not see my husband. He was living outside Calcutta, his life under threat. My father-in-law would smuggle me out of the house to meet him in the weekends.?

Sati has her daughter-in-law, Maulisri, looking up to her. For this young lecturer, too, marrying into a political family has been illuminating. She is more aware now of the problems of people in the slums, for example, and admires her mother-in-law?s efforts to help them.

Mutual admiration among these artists of identity circulates within the home. Hakim?s mother admires her daughter-in-law, Ruby, whose adaptability has made her son?s career possible.

Ruby Hakim, too, campaigns when her husband is a candidate. This time, when he campaigned for his party, she would have to stay awake late, discussing perhaps an error in a leaflet with her worried partner. He is always busy, but during campaigns he is out of the house by 6.30 in the morning and not back before midnight. She runs the house, looks after her children and in-laws, and helps in her husband?s business.

The councillor?s wife is a ?medium? between him and the people, taking phone calls, directing the ?boys? to get the occasional ambulance, ensuring that her husband signs the right papers when a widow?s allowance falls due. While talking, she runs upstairs several times, calls out instructions, answers her children, directs the driver, gives money to men going in and out, talks business with an employee, gets ready to take her 15-year-old for tuition and go to office because it is pay day. Hakim returns with a string of men before she leaves. Ruby arranges for their refreshments, jokes with her husband, instructs her baby to eat properly, scolds a maid mildly for breaking a tumbler, then picks up her bag to get going.

There is an intriguing sameness in the stories. Jhuma Ghosh, wife of Atin Ghosh, the Trinamool candidate from Baranagar, often hops over to the election office from her Nalin Sarkar Street home to see if the workers have eaten or if allotted money has been correctly utilized. She runs the house and looks after her teenage daughter and sometimes their business. These women may be the real heroes, but not quite Phatakeshto?s type.

The boudi is ?placed? by the address, her political role erased by her social one. Loora Sarkar, whose husband is Subhankar Sarkar, former state chief of the Chhatra Parishad and secretary of the state Congress committee, says that politicians? wives are their best friends, sometimes doing their most confidential jobs, and also their worst critics.

In this world of strangely wrought equalities, support is taken for granted. No one complains about extra work. And there is no point, Loora says, in cribbing about the lack of privacy. For unlike the gentleman, whose home is his castle, the politician?s home is his office. Even the most glamorous boudi of them all, Nayana, was shocked to find strangers in her bedroom soon after marriage.

Politicians, says Loora, cannot and do not spend time with their families. She, too, copes with child, home, and work, and with endless telephone calls meant for her husband. Family holidays, even honeymoons, just do not happen. Ranjini, the wife of Partha Pratim Biswas, CPI(M) candidate from Tollygunge, is happy with her little daughter and her music. She feels, as do Sati and Ruby and Loora, that her husband is just busier than usual at election time. She has to field more phone calls, and he can spend even less time at home.

If there are conditions to this support, they are not visible. Or audible. In this new game of Family Values, the realities of power and violence, the nuances of ideology have nothing to do with the achievements of the favourite boy. The recognition of realities is replaced by a faith in ?doing good?. Confusing social work with politics is a reassuring exercise. Ruby, for example, does not mind being ?sucked into? her husband?s passion for politics, because Firhad genuinely loves helping people. It is a belief ? in partners, sons, fathers ? echoed by the others. Jhuma?s mother-in-law accompanies her to election offices as does her sister-in-law. Ranjini?s mother is proud of her jamai, and her mother-in-law too has faith.

Family loyalty is easily the winner over freedom of choice.

Home and the world

Social good is the key to the commitment of women party workers as well. Women workers are displayed by all parties as a measure of their political correctness. They work devotedly, their partymen say, moving from door to door in between their household chores, mobilizing their ?friends? for processions and meetings, distributing voters? lists, without stipends or other benefits. Badal Bhattacharya, the chief election agent for Somen Mitra, Congress MLA from Sealdah, feels they are more committed than men. The women in the office of Khalid Ebadullah, the Congress candidate from Entally, were only too eager to talk about their commitment and the support they get from their families. The men all around watched them keenly. They seemed to exert a concerted will to end the chat as soon as possible.

To go by the men, the lives of candidates and their colleagues are models of harmony, both in and out of home. Badal Bhattacharya says his wife, Bani, knows the demands of a political household well, having married him in 1969, when he was the Chhatra Parishad general secretary. His home is forever open to party workers and that makes Bani ?happy?. Ebadullah, whose wife we could not meet because his family had to ?fly? somewhere on business, said, ?I am speaking for them.? They are very happy, he said, they have no problems.

Invisible hierarchies, like glass walls, divide the world of women workers. The headquarters of the Trinamool Congress, which is said to have 30 to 35 per cent of female worker participation, and the highest percentage of women candidates, was a male bastion at 10 in the morning a week before Calcutta went to the polls. Men wandered around either freshly bathed or in their nightclothes, talking on their mobiles and casting sidelong glances at the female intruder waiting to ask them questions. She sensed they were wondering how best to shoo her away. She was sent away to Kakali Ghosh Dastidar, West Bengal Trinamool Mahila Congress president, who would answer all her questions.

Not all walls can be seen.

A different class

It is gruelling work on the streets. Female foot-soldiers across parties are all from the lower or lower middle-classes. Chandrima Bhattacharya, West Bengal Mahila Congress president, who says that 7,000 to 8,000 women have worked for the assembly elections, claims that the ratio of participation of women to that of men is equal at the basic level. There is no difference in the work. Female participation is greater in villages, although literacy levels there are lower. Is that an argument for reservations?

But what about rising out of the ranks? Jayanti Banerjee of the Pashchim Banga Ganatantrik Mahila Samiti and member of the Calcutta district committee of the CPI(M) admits that the foot soldier can at most become a leader at the primary level. Poorer women are limited by their inexperience. Leadership and organization are given to middle-class women.

The hierarchy of values within the home matches the hierarchy of gender and class outside it. Harmony is kept in place by internal ? and internalized ? forms of control. In the office of Mita Mitra, Trinamool councillor of Ward 74 in Chetla, who campaigned for Tapas Pal, Swadesh, her husband, tells the women workers in a low voice, ?Speak carefully (Shabdhane katha bolbe).?

According to Kakali, the Trinamool Congress has 10 workers per polling booth. But not one party can show off a female chief election agent. Badal Bhattacharya says it is too hectic a job. Women are comparatively less educated, say the women leaders, and they lack skills to manage a booth. (Or is it violence?) Besides, household duties clash with the sleepless hours of an election agent?s job. Most often, male leaders decide what the women will do. But chauvinism alone is not at fault, says Chandrima. There is a social history to take into account: ?Women like to lag behind (Meyera pichhiye thakte bhalobashe).?

Even Sati Chatterjee, apparently: ?The responsibilities of a leader or an MLA are very different from that of an ordinary worker. I don?t think I have the time or the resources, or even the confidence, for such roles. I straddle two worlds, the private and the public, and I wouldn?t like to sacrifice either.?

Sushama Singh or Maya Dey, Trinamool workers under Mita Mitra, straddle two worlds too. Sushama, whose husband is an auto driver, wakes up at 3 am to collect water. She does the housework, gets her children ready for school, comes to the party office at 10. At 12.30, she goes home and cooks lunch, is back in the office by 5, and goes home four or five hours later. Neither she nor Maya thinks of contesting elections. They are proud to be close to Mamata and Mita, and happy to be of use. They look to their didis to address their problems.

Freedom is made of many colours. Of what are choices made?