I remember a dinner party where one suave gentleman was particularly solicitous of us women — he pulled back chairs and insisted we precede him at the buffet counter and so on. But when the conversation veered to working women, he was the first to politely declare that women must not step outside the home.
Fast forward to the elections that are going on now. We have seen political party manifestos full of lofty concepts and ideologies, elaborate plans for committees, working groups, crisis centres, et al. And we have heard what the politicians actually said. The Congress party manifesto promises ‘one-stop crisis centres’ for rape survivors but the Gandhi mother-son duo famously refused to meet Nirbhaya protestors grieving and raging outside 10 Janpath. The BJP manifesto has some 23 bullet points in its section on women but I remember a debate here in Chennai where a party stalwart stridently defended the need to bar girls from wearing jeans to college. Parties on the lunatic right calmly launch attacks on women in pubs and even the AAP bizarrely jumps to the defence of Khap Panchayats.
There’s a reason why the philosophising in manifestos is just so much white noise. When our politicians talk of women’s rights, they haven’t the faintest clue of what it is they are meant to say or what it is they are meant to do. Gender equality is such an alien concept in our deeply patriarchal society that even our women often don’t know they have any rights, leave alone that they can fight for them. In the face of such appalling ignorance, policy makers can only dole out platitudes – task forces, all-women banks, women-only SMEs, blah and blah.
While granting that corrective measures have a role to play, let’s not for a minute imagine that these alone, with their sterile, tick-the-boxes approach, will change the ground reality for women in our country. In other words, an agenda to create a lakh more jobs for women will mean precious little if a woman cannot safely take a bus to work, whether in a burkha or a backless blouse. It is precisely at this point in real life that politicians lose the plot. They are happy as long as they have to dish out comforting acronyms, but pitch them into life and you’ll see how deeply uncomfortable this makes them.
In India today, it’s not in formal policy-making but in the informal attitudes that the gravest problems originate. For me, what is more frightening than Mulayam Singh Yadav’s “boys will be boys” comment on rape is the fact that this is what our mothers also say of their rapist sons. This is what our educated men said with a nudge and wink when they heard of the Tehelka assault. This is how we bring up boys in India. Growing up, I remember Monali telling me how at meal times her mother saved the choicest cuts of meat for her brother. In thousands of Tamil homes, it is still fathers and brothers who eat first, the women finishing what’s left over. Across India, daughters are told to “obey” their brothers at all times.
Honour killings and rapes are the most violent manifestations of this attitude. They make us angry and horrified. But our horror should start much earlier — when our mothers teach their daughters what to wear but forget to tell their sons how to behave. When this changes, policy making will begin to get real.
