Why Indian women need to be proud about how they rule politics

America may only just be waking up to a woman in the White House, but India is so been there done that we're wondering what took the supposed land of the free so very long. It's always Indira Gandhi that comes to mind, and we'd admittedly rather overlook the reign of Pratibha Patil, but apart from these two highest offices in the land, India has been filled with Iron Ladies galore. Never mind that the Women's Reservation Bill is still pending in Parliament, we Indian women have wheedled our way into positions of power quite well.

From their decisive shaping of our Constitution and freedom movement, Sarojini Naidu, first woman governor of UP in 1947, and Vijaylakshmi Pandit in Maharashtra in 1962, down to Margaret Alva and Sheila Dikshit in Rajasthan and Kerala respectively, with 24 women governors holding office at various points, hardly any state in the country has remained untouched by a woman's rule. Way before Mayawati, Sucheta Kriplani, a Haryana-born Bengali, and a professor of history at Banares Hindu University, wife of socialist Acharya Kriplani, was first woman CM of UP in 1963. Nandini Satpathy, the eldest daughter of poet and Marxist writer and dramatist KC Panigrahi, and while she jailed a number in Odisha as first woman CM of Odisha in 1972, she eventually broke away from Indira Gandhi and formed the Congress for Democracy party. Shashikala Kakodkar, the daughter of Goa's first ever CM Dayanand Bandodkar, who assumed CM of Goa in 1973 is credited with much reform in agriculture and education and social welfare. Syeda Taimur in Assam in 1980 is to date the only female and Muslim leader of the state.

So from Rajinder Kaur Bhattal in 1996 Punjab, or Uma Bharti in MP in 2003, India has been no stranger to women taking charge.

Beyond mere token representation, it is in tenure, in the last decade that the strongest women in power have been so for the longest possible time. You have Jayalalithaa, who shot to power in 1991 and is currently serving her fifth term as CM. Mayawati in MP has already been four times CM, Vasundhara Raje has been twice CM of Rajasthan post 2003 and Mamata Banerjee's golden rule in West Bengal is uninterrupted post 2011 while Anandiben Patel holds down the fort in Gujarat.

Whether via the dynasty of political inheritance or by the thrust of being married to or affiliated with men in various levels of power - indeed Clinton is no less an inheritor as a political careerist - or more by the Indian woman's personal sense of driving ambition, the efficacy of women in the hot seat has been exemplary in representation the world over.

True equality, of course, is when we begin to count whether women in power face as many corruption charges as the men. But that's a whole other story.