Retrograde & Regressive

20 February 2020

#WomenEmpowerment

One aspect of Government that has not changed is the bureaucratic buck transfer using the phrase ‘subjudice’. It must have weighed in if at all one wishes to translate Mr Modi’s grandstanding about ‘Nari Shakti’ by offering permanent posts to women officers in India’s Army, for our wonderment is otherwise not sufficiently explained away. For here was India’s chief executive announcing in public, a rethink, for a policy decision, to grant permanent commission to women and these days when our Central Government loves executive fiat more than Parliamentary legislation, Mr Modi’s instructive delivery could well have become an overnight Government order. Any way a year and few months later, in compliance with a Supreme Court judgement, finally such a Government order will come about. But not before, the government made written submissions cleared at the highest level before the SC bench deciding the matter declaring women as eminently misplaced for command. The declaration was dripping in misogyny, in unscientific male prejudice, adhering to patriarchal morality and we can be glad that ten years after the Delhi HC first judged women fit for permanent commissions in the Indian Army, the SC was able to affirm the same. Of course, you could see how even otherwise ‘balanced’ and ‘neutral’ advocates like Major Navdeep counter Mr Rahul Gandhi’s tweet, which was later targeted by ministerial level trolling by Ms Smriti Irani, and her claim was proven this time swiftly as falsehood by several ‘fact checking’ websites and agencies.

Mr Rahul Gandhi has now demonstrated how he is actually an outsider in his own party, since he is actually the only person talking back to this powerful ruling dispensation, and the only real ‘opposing’ force, though his effectiveness is very poor since his own party apparatchiks don’t back his positions on ground. Now that Mr Montek S Ahluwalia has revealed how his own brood had savaged Dr MM Singh’s ‘ordinance’ that would have given Lalu Yadav a free pass, which the good doctor read to his private grief, we realise that his response to Mr Rahul tearing in to the ordinance, ( he merely uttered those words, did not actually tear any piece of paper in the company of Mr Ajay Maken back then) was specious, since already Dr Singh knew how the die was cast with respect to that crappy piece cocking a snook at the judicial effort to reform our polity! ( In a recent judgement on the subject SC has mandated that all candidates with criminal background fielded by political parties must be with reasoning offered by the party in a transparent manner with equal publicity to the nature of offences!) So today, when Mr Rahul says that Mr Modi or the BJP government was paying lip service to women in context of this case, he is not wrong at all. And when folks point whataboutery to him, about the appeal filed by the government then led by his party in SC, they forget that Mr Rahul had and has little salience with the party or with Dr MM Singh’s government, only he plays the unwitting scape goat, even today blamed by analysts for the INC’s disastrous performances electorally.

I am using Mr Rahul as a reference, not because I espouse his strident liberal views wholeheartedly, or that I find in them a messianic path in the maze that beguiles India now. But because, I am very sure that India’s posturing of liberal values going forward would have few victories and large doses of tokenism only. What ever male patriarchal privilege held earlier behind close doors in now out in the open, mouthed by Mr Mohan Bhagwat the head of the RSS repeatedly, about where the Sangh finds the woman most ideally situated- behind the ‘choola’ or stove, making rotis, and minding her business. The woman of Hindutva is like a slave of her sex, a distant second to another ‘gender’ that is called children, and even more distant to a third ‘gender’ called old people! So we have an espousal of what is called ‘grahani dharam’, where the domesticated beast of a woman is meant to be a beast of burden, one that minds and toils at domestic chores, which by the way include outdoor menial tasks like shovelling, deweeding, tilling and sowing, as part of farm labour, which is increasingly taken up by our society in a manner inimical to the basic design of femininity.
That is why you hear stories that shake your moral conscience; of women getting hysterectomies done before labouring in cash crops like cotton or sugarcane, because the contractor is a male misogynist who doesn’t want to waste his labour even for a second. That is why you hear ghastly stories of how a residential school of Swaminarayan Sect in Gujarat recently rounded up its girl students and made them remove their underwear to check if they were menstruating. That is why, in this 21st century, we have Godmen talking about how energies that are harmful to women are generated in sanctums of worship, that beyond science, the occult itself is inimical to women. One went so far as to promise those menstruating women who cook food a rebirth as a bitch! Then you have this ‘laughing stock’ situation, where the Supreme Court of this land has tied itself in knots, by admitting issues in a settled case that were not raised by any petitioning party, enlarger it by seeking to examine it under a universal ambit, while not having the overt dare to rescind its previous order- Yes Sabarimala!

What ever may have been the situation then, when menstruating women had to be offered ritual prohibition to prevent the contamination of living areas, places of worship and public places, in today’s age of vaginal cups, tampons and sanitary napkins, there should be no logic in their continuance. As a temple visitor, I have seen so many temples of hoary traditions change their guidance, now allowing babies and toddlers to now accompany parents in their precincts, that acknowledges how nappies have changed the way we handle our children! Still, I find that it is possibly only that hygiene and sanitation was simply a ruse for menstruating women. The need to ‘other’ this gender, to hit it where it hurts, deeply and psychologically, takes away from that distant past when in our traditions women were equally priests, adorned themselves with the Yagnopaveeth, were contributing Rishikas, and warriors, rulers and counsel women! I can easily identify the rise of rigid birth decreed casteism with this extreme patriarchy of menstrual taboo and ritual purity in Dharma, and link it to the decline of Indian genius, the slow death of Sanskrit and many of our ancient arts and crafts.
The reason the Modi government did not withdraw the SC appeal, the reason the Sabarimala verdict is on paper only, and the reason why Indic society that is now overrun by Hindutva is revealing its regressive and reductionist fangs is because at a fundamental level, the Indian patriarchy fears losing its comfort zone. The crib about Hijab, or the portrayal of Islamic society as equally ridden with caste, is simply to produce parallels for those downtrodden, a kind of shadow boxing, to ensure that they do not look for greener pastures, acknowledging the Ghoogat/pallu/purdah system which is pure patriarchy in form and context, and suppression of castes and outcastes by comparing organisation of churches along caste lines, ( which unfortunately is endemic in India) and now probing into social injustice within Islam. So Hindutva justifies patriarchy because it is universal, it justices the suvarna predominance by showcasing the operation of caste in non-Dharmic faiths as well!

A very intelligent and experienced person contrives an argument that there are mystic reasons why women must not seek ‘equality’ with men in an outwardly worldly visible fashion, while seeking limited autonomy for themselves in the larger social context. The argument was ‘Nature’ intended it that way, otherwise, women would be truant to their maternal instinct. So as warriors wielding weapons, waging war, commanding men into battle, they would lost their feminine grace, their motherly feelings, their nurturing deportment! So I counter by asking if Nature intended us to be like Hominids then why did we tool and invent ourselves to become what we have become? For man, who once fiercely defended his brood, who brought home the meat and fruit, who offered it raw, then smoked and cooked it over fire, who took the women out with him on hunts and foraging parties, his modernity has made him need the woman less? That he now wants to confine the woman into the hospitality and child rearing business alone? A sex slave with a short list of other duties? Better still, I just tossed the names of women whom we now venerate as ‘Shakti Rupa’ ( forms of Shakti-feminine Supreme Personality from whom the trinity of Shiva, Brahma and Vishnu have been derived), and added for good measure about warriors Sita and Keikeyi from the Ramayana. So in a world of precarious populations, it was alright for weaponising women and marshalling them to battle order, but today when human population is outstripping Planet Earth of resources, we cannot spare women from child bearing and nurturing duties?
So stripped of all the excuses, this gender misogyny is entrapment of one gender, enslavement of one gender, done in the name of protecting it from getting corrupted and insulating it from the advances of modern society, to retain its purity and essence as Nature intended, isn’t it? What can Mr Modi, our Supreme Court or our society can do to empower women, if using logic, persuasion and play off of one against another set of pros and cons, men continue to have the last laugh in India? Remember this, in USA right now, under Trump, the Roe V Wade Judgement which gave women autonomy over their reproductive function is under existential threat. So now will we offer that as an offset to hapless women in India?