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G.S. 1, Personalities
Mahesh

15/05/22 04:20 AM IST

Vijay lakshmi Pandit

  • WHAT
  • WHY
  • WHEN
  • WHERE
  • WHO
  • HOW
What made Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit a diplomat?
  • On May 12, 1949, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit became the first female ambassador to the United States. 
  • Though a celebrated showcase event in the global pursuit of women empowerment, this was merely another feather in her illustrious diplomatic cap.
  • Pandit's political and diplomatic career spanned four decades. Her brother, India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, appointed her as Ambassador to Moscow when India became independent in 1947.
  • She then held a succession of high positions, including ambassadorships to the United States (1949-52) and Britain (1954-61) and, in 1953, presidency of the United Nations General Assembly. She was the first woman to hold that post.
  • She also led the Indian mission to the United Nations. She also had served as ambassador to Spain (1958-61).
  • She led India's first delegations to the United Nations and was president of the General Assembly in 1953 and 1954.
  • In India, she served as Governor of Maharashtra from 1962 to 1964, after which she was elected to the Indian parliament's lower house, the Lok Sabha, from Phulpur, her brother's former constituency from 1964 to 1968.
  • Vijaya Pandit was the head of the Indian delegation to the United Nations in 1946-48, and again in 1952-53.
  • She was appointed as ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1947, where she served till 1949, upholding India’s interests in the early years of the volatile Cold War era. From 1949 to 1951, she was India’s ambassador to the United States of America and Mexico.
  • In 1953, Pandit became the first woman to preside over the United Nations General Assembly. She headed the eighth session of the General Assembly.
  • Between 1954 and 1961, Pandit served as India’s high commissioner to the United Kingdom, as well as the ambassador to Ireland.
  • She played a major role in transforming India-Britain relations in the early decades of India’s independence, especially in the immediate aftermath of the nationalisation of the Suez Canal and the crisis that followed in 1956. She had also been India’s ambassador to Spain from 1958 to 1961.
  • After her return to India in the early 1960s, she became the governor of Maharashtra for a brief period from 1962 to 1964.
Why is she still famous?
  • Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit fought many battles and shattered many glass ceilings for the women of India and around the world.
  • She was a shining example of what women could achieve on the world stage if they set their minds to it. When she was president of the General Assembly, a reporter once inquired about the color of her sari, the traditional attire of Indian women. She shot back, "Did you ask my predecessor about the color of his tie?"
  • Being a woman in politics is difficult even today, but she began her career when it was virtually non-existent. While she acknowledged the privilege she enjoyed by belonging to the Nehru family, she also knew that there were plenty of obstacles that she had to overcome as a woman.
  • While people constantly tried to remind her that she was a woman, and an outsider, she didn’t let it affect her. When asked if she was conscious of being a woman in a position of power she says “I’ve never been conscious about being different from anybody else because I’ve never been allowed to think that.”
  • She went on to quip how people in the parliament were eager to bring needles and thread in case she wanted them. “This was not the kind of help I wanted,” she says “I wanted help from their minds.”
  • This attitude towards women in politics was seen across the world. During her first meeting with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill he said to Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit “Because I have accepted you, doesn’t mean that my ideas of women have changed. I don’t want you putting ideas into women’s heads.”
  • While she was “accepted” by the prime minister, she and other women of the time were not to assume that women now had an equal opportunity. She was an exception, an exception permitted to exist by the patriarchal bosses.
  • She wasn’t there because she had seen an opportunity and seized it but rather because she was “allowed” to by the men running the government.
  • Politics is still very much a man’s world. Even when there is a woman in it, she needs to claw her way through it, making a position for herself, facing more backlash than is necessary. So for Vijay Lakshmi Pandit to hold so many different positions, before and after independence, is an achievement for women through time.
  • Not only was she the first woman to hold a political position in pre-independent India, but she was also the first woman to be the President of the UN General Assembly.
  • She was the face of the newly independent India, representing the country in three different countries. She was a staunch believer in the freedom of India and openly condemned colonialism and imperialism.
  • She was also the first Indian woman to hold a cabinet post in pre-independent India. In 1937, she was elected to the provincial legislature of the United Provinces and was designated minister of local self-government and public health.
  • She held the latter post until 1939 and again from 1946 to 1947.
  • In 1946, she was elected to the Constituent Assembly from the United Provinces. Of the 299 members of the Constituent Assembly, only 15 were women.
When Vijay Lakshmi Pandit was born?
  • Born in 1900 to Motilal Nehru and Swarup Rani Nehru in Allahabad, Vijay Lakshmi Pandit married Ranjit Sitaram Pandit in 1921.
  • In 1937, she won the elections to the provincial legislature of the United Provinces. During this time, she was made the minister of local self-government and public health, making her the first woman in pre-independent India to hold a cabinet position.
  • She, however, resigned along with her colleagues in the Congress in 1939 to protest against the involuntary participation of British India in the Second World War.
  • She was arrested and imprisoned thrice during the freedom struggle — in 1932-1933, 1940, and 1942-1943.
  • Pandit was the president of the All-India Women’s Conference between 1941 and 1943 and mobilised opinion in favour of gender rights and women’s welfare. In 1942, when the Quit India movement was at its peak, both Pandit and her husband were arrested by the British. Her husband died in January 1944.
  • After her release from prison, Pandit led the Indian delegation to the Pacific Relations Conference in the United States in 1945, along with other leaders of the freedom struggle such H.N. Kunzru and B. Shiva Rao.
  • The conference was held in Virginia, to discuss and debate the possible shape of the post-Second World War world.
  • At the conference on the Charter of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945, Pandit made a case for colonies like India as an unofficial delegate.
  • She referred to the British Indian representatives as ‘British stooges’ who had no idea about the sufferings of the colonies. After her return to India, she became a member of the Constituent Assembly in 1946 from the United Provinces.
  • After the death of her brother and India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, in 1964, Pandit fought the Lok Sabha elections from his erstwhile constituency of Phulpur and became a Member of Parliament between 1964 and 1968.
  • Although she left politics in the late 1960s, her commitment to freedom pushed her back into the Indian polity in the 1970s. She protested fiercely against her niece and then prime minister, Indira Gandhi, when she imposed an emergency in 1975.
  • With the sudden demise of Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, the fifth President of India, Vijaya Pandit entered the electoral fray for the post.
  • Although Neelam Sanjiva Reddy was eventually elected, she travelled across the length and breadth of the country addressing rallies and interacting with people.
Where did she stand out as a diplomat?
  • Forced to reorient her life after her husband's death, Pandit traveled in the United States from late 1944 to early 1946, mainly on a lecture tour.
  • During her tour she talked about the problems of colonialism and the impact that imperialism had on colonised countries.
  • She pushed for countries to be held accountable for human dignity, equality and rights. She strongly believed in equality and condemned the inherent racism that came with colonialism.
  • During the San Francisco Conference, she called out the Indian representatives as being selected by the British to represent the colonised version of India, rather than the real India: “I desire to make it clear that the so called Indian representatives attending the Conference have not the slightest representative capacity, no sanction, no mandate from any of the responsible groups in India and are merely nominees of the British Government. Anything they say here or any vote they cast can have no binding effect or force on the Indian people.”
  • Returning to India in January 1946, she resumed her portfolio as minister of local self-government and public health in the United Provinces.
  • In the fall of 1946 she undertook her first official diplomatic mission as leader of the Indian delegation to the United Nations General Assembly. She also led India's delegations to the General Assembly in 1947, 1948, 1952, 1953, and 1963.
  • Pandit was elected to India's Constituent Assembly in 1946. Shortly after India's independence in 1947, she joined the Foreign Service and was appointed India's first ambassador to the Soviet Union. In early 1949 she became ambassador to the United States.
  • In November 1951 she returned to India to contest successfully for a seat in the Lok Sabha (India's parliament) in the first general elections.
  • In September 1953 she was given the honor of being the first woman and the first Asian to be elected president of the U.N. General Assembly.
  • For nearly seven years, beginning in December 1954, Pandit served as Indian high commissioner (ambassador) to the United Kingdom, including a tense period in British-Indian relations at the time of the Suez Crisis in 1956. From March 1963 until August 1963 she served as governor of the state of Maharashtra.
  • Jawaharlal Nehru's death on May 27, 1964 came as a great shock to her. In November, she was elected to the Lok Sabha in a by-election in the Phulpur constituency of Uttar Pradesh, which her brother had represented for 17 years.
  • She was re-elected in the fourth general elections in 1967, but resigned the following year for "personal reasons”.
Who did she share a complicated relationship ?
  • Pandit was a harsh critic of her niece Indira Gandhi's Prime Minister years - especially after Indira declared the emergency. In fact, she retired from active politics after relations between them soured.
  • On retiring, she moved to Dehradun in the Doon Valley in the Himalayan foothills. She came out of retirement in 1977 to campaign against Indira Gandhi and helped the Janata Dal win the 1977 election.
  • On Indira Gandhi she said, “I don't think she's aiming at anything except to get back into power. She believed in the personality cult, and that is the cause of all our troubles. I would have thought that six months or a year of complete peace and quiet would have foxed the public and the government much more than what she is doing now.
  • At present I don't think she has very many friends. She always had a definite streak of obstinacy. It would be wrong to say that Nehru trained her. He wasn't the type of person who could train anybody and she wasn't the kind who would be trained. He was an idealist. He was full of compassion. She is ruthless. She is hard hitting. She doesn't forgive - just like Durga.”
  • She was reported to have considered running for the presidency, but Neelam Sanjiva Reddy eventually ran and won the election unopposed.
  • In 1979, she was appointed the Indian representative to the UN Human Rights Commission, after which she retired from public life. She passed away in 1990.
How large is her bequest?
  • To the British, Pandit was dangerous because of who she was and what she represented.
  • Born in Allahabad, she was the eldest daughter of a wealthy nationalist family.  Impeccably connected, her family had brought her into close association with Mahatma Gandhi, and her brother, the eminent Indian National Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru, was already a well-known figure.
  • For her entire adult life she had been a Congress activist and politician – a career that included three periods of imprisonment and two years as India’s first woman Cabinet Minister in the United Provinces Provincial Government. 
  • A gilded upbringing, followed by years of activism and subsequent political office, had created a formidable communicator – a woman who was, as one official grudgingly described her, “educated, attractive, charming when she wishes”.
  • In the exclusively male space of the British bureaucracy, Pandit’s femininity was perceived as a mysterious, somewhat slippery asset. Her ‘undoubted feminine charm’ and ‘“sob-stuff” appeal’, it was implied, marked her out from the rational, reasoned world of male politics and gave her something of an unfair advantage.
  • As an anti-colonialist, what made Pandit’s personal attributes so dangerous was the powerful symbolic value she possessed. If India could produce such a woman – educated, liberated, and modern – the justification for colonial rule as a civilizing mission was easily defeated. 
  • Her very existence refuted the image, so favoured in imperialist propaganda, of the subjugated Indian woman – a victim of Indian culture that could only be saved by European civilization.  Rather, she provided evidence of India’s ability to self-govern.
  • Pandit’s appointment as the only woman leader of a national delegation at the UN in 1946 was the beginning of a pioneering international career. 
  • This exceptional career was rebellious, countering universally dominant assumptions about women’s place and abilities.
  • During her debut speech at the UN General Assembly in 1946, Pandit expressed the radical hope that “women of all countries will have the occasion to participate more fully with men in all departments of life, including the work of this Assembly, thus helping to create a better and more balanced world.” Neither the role of such rhetoric in normalizing the concept of gender equality, nor Pandit’s significance as a pioneer and role model, should be ignored.  However, her career as a dangerous woman is hardly a straightforward feminist narrative.
  • Pandit was a product of the struggle between imperialism and nationalism, in which both sides sought legitimacy through their claim to emancipate Indian women. Working amid the competing claims of gender and nation, Pandit regularly traded on her own personal achievements in order to favorably contrast the status of Indian women with the sexism she observed in Western society. 
  • This was a reply, in part, to the condescending attitude of Western feminists towards Indian women, but in her attempt to boost India’s international prestige she passed over both the genuine gender and class disparities of Indian society and the structural disadvantages shared by women globally.

 

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