Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar offers tributes to Sumitra Devi in Bhagalpur on Wednesday. Picture by Amit Kumar

Bhagalpur, Sept. 26: Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar today invoked the name of her illustrious mother-in-law, Sumitra Devi, the first woman cabinet minister in Bihar, to drive her “dream” of women empowerment.

Without naming Nitish, who invariably claims the accolades for pioneering women empowerment by giving them 50 per cent reservation in local bodies, Meira said: “Sumitra was the first and real pioneer in the arena of empowering women.”

In a way, Meira was not off the mark. Sumitra went to school in far away Hathras, Uttar Pradesh, when she was just nine in an era when backward caste women were supposed to serve as housewife or farm hands. She plunged into freedom movement emerging a “favourite” of Rajendra Prasad, Jaiprakash Narayan and other first generation freedom fighters in Bihar.

Meira, to mark Sumitra Devi’s 88th birth anniversary at the Tilka Majhi Auditorium here, she said: “My mother-in-law inspired many other women and even me to join politics and serve the society, breaking away from the stereotype of staying within the four walls.” The former career diplomat recalled how her mother-in-law had shaped and guided her career in politics and treated her more as a “daughter instead of daughter-in-law”.

Sumitra won as an MLA from Tarapur in the first Assembly poll in 1952. She became the first woman cabinet minister in 1963.