VILLUPURAM, India — Sanju Mausi offers voters a real choice. She could be the best man, woman, or cross between the two to represent them in India's Parliament. It depends on their point of view.
The candidate dresses like a woman and campaigns under a woman's name. The chief electoral officer insists the candidate is a man. Mausi hopes voters will support her for who she is: a eunuch.
Known as hijras in India, at least four eunuch candidates in the national election are offering an alternative to voters turned off by old-guard politicians stained by endless corruption.
"The people have checked out the gentleman politicians, they have tried out the lady politicians, but all of them have failed them," said Mausi, 28. "Now, they want to try us."
India's election began April 20, and the balloting is staggered over several weeks so that security forces and polling officials can move around the country of more than 1 billion people.
The winners won't be known until May 13. But exit polls, which don't have a proven track record in India, suggest that Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's ruling alliance may be in trouble.
The exit polls indicate that Vajpayee's alliance, led by his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, may fall short of an outright majority in the 545-seat lower house of Parliament. But after voting Wednesday, Vajpayee said he was still confident he would win.
The rival Congress Party and its allies also are struggling. Led by Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, the widow of assassinated former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, the once-dominant Congress Party's best hope is for a deadlock. Then it might have a shot at forming a coalition government.
The hijras' run for office, which began as a symbolic protest several years ago, has become a building revolt against the privilege, nepotism and corruption that beset mainstream political parties.
Tired of being treated like third-class citizens or, worse, being physically and sexually assaulted, the hijras are standing up as champions of India's poor and exploited masses.
At least six hijras have won local or state elections in recent years. They include Shabnam Mausi, who was elected to the Madhya Pradesh state assembly with more votes than the BJP and Congress candidates combined in 2000.
The same year, voters in the city of Katni, also in Madhya Pradesh, elected eunuch Kamla Jaan mayor. But early last year, a tribunal ruled that Jaan was legally male and could not be mayor because the post is reserved for a woman under an affirmative action program.
