Offering India’s Voters a Unique Perspective

Sanju Mausi offers voters a real choice. She could be the best man, woman, or cross between the two to represent them in India’s Parliament. It depends on their point of view.

The candidate dresses like a woman and campaigns under a woman’s name. The chief electoral officer insists the candidate is a man. Mausi hopes voters will support her for who she is: a eunuch.

Known as hijras in India, at least four eunuch candidates in the national election are offering an alternative to voters turned off by old-guard politicians stained by endless corruption.

“The people have checked out the gentleman politicians, they have tried out the lady politicians, but all of them have failed them,” said Mausi, 28. “Now, they want to try us.”

India’s election began April 20, and the balloting is staggered over several weeks so that security forces and polling officials can move around the country of more than 1 billion people.

The winners won’t be known until May 13. But exit polls, which don’t have a proven track record in India, suggest that Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s ruling alliance may be in trouble.

The exit polls indicate that Vajpayee’s alliance, led by his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, may fall short of an outright majority in the 545-seat lower house of Parliament. But after voting Wednesday, Vajpayee said he was still confident he would win.

The rival Congress Party and its allies also are struggling. Led by Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, the widow of assassinated former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, the once-dominant Congress Party’s best hope is for a deadlock. Then it might have a shot at forming a coalition government.

The hijras’ run for office, which began as a symbolic protest several years ago, has become a building revolt against the privilege, nepotism and corruption that beset mainstream political parties.

Tired of being treated like third-class citizens or, worse, being physically and sexually assaulted, the hijras are standing up as champions of India’s poor and exploited masses.

At least six hijras have won local or state elections in recent years. They include Shabnam Mausi, who was elected to the Madhya Pradesh state assembly with more votes than the BJP and Congress candidates combined in 2000.

The same year, voters in the city of Katni, also in Madhya Pradesh, elected eunuch Kamla Jaan mayor. But early last year, a tribunal ruled that Jaan was legally male and could not be mayor because the post is reserved for a woman under an affirmative action program.

The tribunal refused to allow a medical examination to verify Jaan’s assertion that she was not a man.

Jaan appealed to the state high court but lost.

Hijras have been part of the subcontinent’s society for centuries, yet they still suffer widespread discrimination. Some are born as hermaphrodites, but most are males who undergo castration. They live in groups that are rarely open to outsiders, so their world is little understood, and often distorted by rumor, myth and prejudice.

Many Indians believe that hijras kidnap boys, or buy them from impoverished families, and castrate them. Sanju Mausi’s assistant and fellow eunuch, Maya de Sungude, insists that she had the surgery by choice.

Even language can leave hijras feeling shortchanged. They refer to one another as “she” and “her.” Mausi’s followers call her Mausiji, or revered aunt. But hijras want to secure basic rights by being legally recognized as a third gender, neither male nor female.

Estimates of the number of hijras run to 500,000 or more, including Hindus and Muslims, in India and neighboring Pakistan and Bangladesh.

They normally live at the margins, suffering curious stares and ridicule. They often crash wedding parties or celebrations for newborn babies, banging drums and dancing until people pay them enough cash to leave. Some have turned to prostitution to make a living.

The eunuchs have formed their own political party, the Jiti Jitai Party. The literal translation is, “We Have Already Won” -- by which hijras mean the allure of body over mind that their sexual mystique wields over some people.

To many people, the combination of broad shoulders, well-toned biceps and 5 o’clock shadows in silk saris and makeup is hardly a charm or turn-on. It’s intimidating.

“Power, as you can see, is something which I already have,” Mausi said, flashing a gold tooth with her coquettish smile. She raised her hands, adorned with eight filigreed gold rings the size of teaspoons, to accentuate gold earrings that hung like tiny chandeliers.

“I don’t need anything more than what I already have,” Mausi said.

Except votes.

“Earlier, I used to beg from people for [bank] notes,” Mausi said. “Now I am seeking votes from the same people. Once they give me their precious votes, I can work for their progress and development, something which has not been achieved as yet.”

Then, she said, “Mausiji will achieve the progress that the ministers and politicians with beards and mustaches, wearing pants and shirts, have not been able to achieve.”

In politics, the hijras are trying to parlay their shock value into radical appeal.

“If I go and stand in the middle of the road and strip, the road gets blocked and traffic comes to a standstill,” Mausi said. “Then, the police and the government will be forced to come and plead to us to move away. They will say, ‘Mausiji, what are you doing?’

“We can get things done for ourselves in this manner. But the Indian people can’t strip like us. They will have to stand in line” to get what they need.

Mausi was born a boy to parents who named him Rajput Sanjay Kumar Shivram Singh. Surgery changed the sex, and a change of name, wardrobe and accessories completed the transformation.

She is now a spiritual guru to dozens of other hijras, and is running as a parliamentary candidate in Ahmedabad, the largest city in western India’s Gujarat state.

Mausi was here in Villupuram, in Tamil Nadu state, for a weekend conference of hijras, and a beauty contest.

Hundreds of eunuchs gather here each year to dance and sing at the nearby village of Koovagam, where hijras have their own temple to the Hindu deity Aravan.

According to legend, Lord Krishna took the form of a woman to marry Aravan before he went off to battle because no women were willing. The warrior god was beheaded the next day. Hijras mourn the moment as ritual widows by breaking their bangles and weeping.

In her campaign, Mausi is taking aim at the BJP incumbent, Harin Pathak. He was forced to resign as a junior defense minister for Vajpayee in 2000 after an Ahmedabad court indicted Pathak on charges of murder, attempted murder and other alleged offenses.

The charges stemmed from the 1985 death of a police constable, who was lynched by a mob of BJP supporters when he tried to rescue a fellow officer who had been stabbed. Pathak was accused of inciting the violence with fiery speeches.

Gujarat’s high court threw out the charges after ruling that prosecutors had not provided defense attorneys with the proper paperwork. Pathak and 11 others are appealing another judge’s ruling that there is still ample evidence to prosecute them on new charges. He has held a seat in Parliament since 1989.

If elected to replace him, Mausi promises to be corruption-free.

“I explain to the people that we have no family, no husbands, no wives and no children,” she said. “Whatever we earn, the people’s money, that is, will be spent on the people, for their interests.”