At the end of October, Bidhya Bandar was elected the first woman president of the small mountainous state of Nepal. The former minister of defence and vice-chair of the Maoist Communist Party of Nepal beat her rival from the Congress Party by a margin of nearly two to one. Bhandari was active in the student movement before being elected to parliament in 1994. She had gained public sympathy and national prominence in 1993 when her husband, the popular leftist Madan Bhandari, died in a mysterious car crash that many felt was a political assassination. The Communists came to power in 2008, following the abolition of the Hindu monarchy that had presided over a system of absolutist feudal inequality for 240 years.
Bhandari, who is from a poor farm family in eastern Nepal, struggled for years in the democratic underground against both feudal Hinduism and the rabid patriarchy that permeates Nepalese society. Nepalese women are frequently subjected to a regime of rape and domestic abuse, and young women risk being trafficked to the brothels of India. While the presidential post is largely symbolic, it provides Bhandari with a pulpit from which she is championing the cause of women in their fight for property, land rights and full political participation. But Bhandari herself has a mixed record as a feminist, drawing criticism for her support of the draft constitution that excludes Nepali single mothers and those married to foreigners from passing on citizenship to their children.*
