Man enough to make it

But has that changed the overwhelmingly male-centric mindset of our people? Has Indian society become more gender equal as a result of some high-powered women “being out there”? Have ordinary Indian women become more self-confident?

The controversy about the Women’s Reservation Bill is only one indication that India is a long way from achieving substantive gender equality even in Parliament. (As reported in this newspaper on Monday, the Congress is starting political negotiations on scaling down the quota to 20-25 per cent for greater consensus.) To be taken seriously in Indian politics, women still have to be more-masculine-than-thou.

But male chauvinism is not limited to our political classes. A quick look at the top stories of the past few weeks is a telling narrative of our public culture. There is the Aarushi case where the Noida Police thought nothing of maligning the reputation of a murdered schoolgirl without adequate proof. The subtext to their slander is that if something bad happens to a girl, she must have done something to deserve it. In a single stroke, the Noida Police have not only shifted blame from the perpetrator of the crime to the victim but also absolved themselves and the larger community of any responsibility towards gender sensitivity.

That gender sensitivity training for the police and public is still not a high priority is an understatement when one considers the Sarita case in Haryana. A woman is raped by the very force that is supposed to protect her. If that is not shameful enough, her cries for justice are dismissed until she has to kill herself only to be heard. Had Sarita not taken this extreme step, like millions of ordinary women across India, she too would have remained invisible and inaudible; suffering in silence without ever being asked if she felt safe. However one looks at it, the situation is a lose-lose for the common Indian woman.So why has the feminist project not succeeded in India the way it should have? There are at least three reasons. First, internal rivalries amongst feminists and contesting definitions of what it means to be an Indian woman have stymied the progress of the women’s movement here. This has allowed anti-feminists (both male and female) to persist with gender stereotypes in the name of religion and culture. Second, feminists of all shades have exhorted women to change their inner and outer selves, whereas Indian men have been allowed to go scot-free. Men sympathetic to gender equality have not been engaged. Third, changing long-established patriarchal attitudes takes years of theorising and practising, with the support of a sound education system. India has failed to rise to that challenge too. Access to information about gender equality is a low priority when some women in India are still denied access to nutritious food, clean drinking water and other basic human rights. But in the absence of an academic system that instils self-confidence and self-love in women, or a healthy public culture, television programmes that present women in oversimplified good/bad, black/ white shades become dangerous surrogates that turns women against each other.Societies change when the mindsets of ordinary people change. In India, at least, it is not enough just to have a few powerful women “out there” to reverse inbuilt gender prejudices. What India will need, in order to change its patriarchal attitudes, are years of hard work from feminists, schools and universities, public sector outfits and also sympathetic Indian men.

The writer is a Mumbai-based academic patel1nandita@yahoo.ca