Keith Vaz, the Labour MP and chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, has demanded a change in British royal succession rules to remove a male child's precedence over older females.

He says a change now would allow for a smooth transition as there is no female heir to the throne. And if a baby girl were to be born to Prince William, she would become heir to throne. Which, he argues, Kate Middleton, betrothed to the second in line for the British Crown, would also appreciate.

The news took me to my college days when I and my friends, a bunch of confused idealists, were stumped by a forceful question: Why not United Queendom?

In the 1970s and 1980s campuses in India's southern state of Kerala were abuzz with activism, especially of the red and gender varieties. I remember walking miles after boycotting classes to protest CIA's killing of Chile's Salvador Allende. Even worse, I remember how sore my throat had been after raising slogans against the meddling hegemon.

One of those days on a lazy afternoon in the college canteen I and my friends were passionately discussing how to right the dismally wrong world order, when a firebrand feminist friend stunned us with the poser.

Clear logic

She had got seriously worked up about the gender inequalities perpetrated by the patriarchal way of life. Her point was simple. And the logic clear. She wanted United Kingdom renamed United Queendom.

My friend — who is now a homemaker with three grown up children, resigned to her top grade chauvinist husband — thought it is absurd that a nation with a woman presiding over its fortunes for decades should have such an MCP name as Kingdom.

We did try to argue with her that the British Queen is only a titular head and that the real power is vested by the Bill of Rights in Parliament.

But for my friend everything boiled down to a grand male conspiracy to perpetuate what she described as the Hegemony of the Patriarch. And she had enough lung power to shout us all down.

My interest in high school history had made me familiar with the history of British monarchy. In fact, Kerala's school curriculum still had not escaped the colonial over hang and British history was a major subject in schools.

Later on, the curriculums were revised to include more local history. Thus for those who grew up during the transition, Britain was still Great and the Kingdom still United.

We continued to believe as such until we reached the university and were swept off by communist ideals and began to believe in the great Red Dawn — yet another dogma. And we borrowed the Labour party's goggles to look at the British monarchy.

Recently, Italian showman premier Silvio Berlusconi said the name Great Britain is a misnomer as the country is no longer great. Long before Berlusconi, my feminist friend had established with the help of superior decibels the nature of the other misnomer — the United Kingdom.

Let us not go into the politics of whether Britain is still united. But going by my friend's logic, it should clearly be Queendom. Her argument was that Queen Elizabeth II had then been monarch for a quarter century since her accession to the throne at a young age in 1953.

As of now she has presided over the fortunes of the country for more than half a century. Still a kingdom?

Unfortunately, the gender equality movement that took Europe by storm did not have a leader like my feminist friend. Otherwise, we would now have been talking about the United Queendom.