I wish to congratulate your correspondent Deepa Bhookhun for the excellent letter published in your columns on Tuesday. There is no fault to be found with her main premise: men and women with a strong personal ideology should be the first elected to any parliament, as they make the best politicians.

Unfortunately, this is not how it works in practice. In Mauritius and elsewhere, this sort of politician is as difficult to find ? even with a torch and candle ? as potential women candidates, and I doubt that proficiency in the party?s programme will be a main prerequisite for potential candidates in the upcoming elections. Even where such programmes exist, they would need serious updating on most issues, and at the moment this task would not be a top priority for party leaders.

It is obvious that women should not go to Parliament merely to uphold women?s rights, it is also obvious that any sensible member of Parliament, once installed, will use his/her common sense to address the whole range of issues facing that august assembly: for the individual Parliamentarian cannot function practically on the basis of a single issue, however important. (By the way, women are not a minority group, that is the whole point).

The main idea behind the Majority Party is that to get the ball rolling we must get a critical mass of women into Parliament at the next General Election.

I have offered one simple means of doing this. Once there, their performance in every issue, will be as good or as bad as the qualities of mind and heart that each one brings to the task of democratic government. With time and experience, we will obviously get a better choice of women (and why not men?) candidates. Then hopefully as part of the movement of the new millennium, all the other outdated ridiculous qualifications, whether social, ethic or religious, will become subsumed into a higher ethic: that of service to the general good.

But women must get in there to start with and stop waiting for the male political establishment to do the job for us. In my opinion, a woman like Ms Bhookhun should usefully choose her party, based on her ideological preference, and then send us her name: we need people like her.

by Paula ATCHIA