This is a blog post from
“ P oo mullil vizhundalum seri, mullu poovil vizhundalum seri, poovukku thaan padum”
Whether the flower falls on the thorn, or the thorn falls on the flower, it is the flower that gets hurt in the end…
These are the precious words that my grandmother, now no more, had once uttered when I had challenged her views on why women should not hang out with friends outside home until late in the evening. As a school-going teenager who had just begun to discover the joys of exploring the city in the company of friends in those days, my late arrival often used to be a source of anxiety at home. We lived in suburban Chennai and it often took me longer to return home than my friends who lived in the city.
My grandmother held the view that it is women who should exercise caution in order to safeguard themselves. Boys, however, need not be restricted in this way, she would say because they weren't as vulnerable to the sexual threat as women were. Listening to Karnataka Home Minister G. Parameshwara's response to the molestation incidents in Bengaluru on New Year’s Eve that it was the western attire of the women and their hanging out late at night that resulted in molestation attempts on them, brought back memories of what my grandma used to say.
Prudence over liberty
On January 1, I was at my professor’s place discussing gender and rights with a few alumni of Madras Christian College when women’s freedom entered the discussion. I was surprised to find how women participants themselves felt that self-regulation was necessary for women to remain safe in society.
“If I complained about getting robbed after walking in a dark alley at night wearing gold jewellery, I cannot blame the robber alone for the incident,” one of the alumni, a single woman with several years of work experience in the corporate sector, said, implying that women must be practical in the interest of their own safety. The lady’s comment was in response to the December 16, 2012, Delhi gang rape incident, in which the victim was blamed for hanging out with her male friend at night, sparking widespread outrage among other women in the capital. I brought the case up for discussion to draw attention to the rampant victim-blaming that exists in India whenever such incidents occur.
Should we not aim to create a society wherein women felt safe to step out no matter the hour of the day, and must not men be held responsible if they misbehaved, I asked. But I found myself marginalised. Other participants in the discussion too emphasised “prudence” over women exercising their liberty to walk the streets at night. It was remarkable how nobody thought substance abuse among men was the main reason why such incidents took place, and demanded strict measures to put a check on drunken men instead, as alcohol played a key role in the way men behaved both in Bengaluru a few days ago and in Delhi in 2012...
Development without freedom
Often when molestation and rape incidents take place and women protest in response to it, they are gently reminded that their lot is much better now than it was in the past. While there is no doubt that women in India are more educated and economically better off now than they were around 6 decades ago what remains lacking is women’s parity with men when it comes to key development indicators in society.
Female literacy, just after the Independence, stood at 8.86 per cent of the total female population. In the 2011 Census, this figure was 65.48 per cent of the total female population. However, the gap between male and female educational attainments has remained almost the same over the years. In 1951, 27.16 per cent of men were literate in society, while in 2011, male literacy was over 80 per cent of the male population.
Literacy rates as per Census
| YEAR | MALE | FEMALE | GAP |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1951 | 27.16 | 8.86 | 18.3 |
| 2011 | 82.1 | 65.48 | 16.6 |
Economic participation
More women are stepping out of the boundaries of their home to work, they are making more money and are better off, is the usual line of argument whenever women’s lack of freedom comes up for discussion. But the World Bank’s data on female labour force participation rates belies this assumption. It shows how women’s participation rate in the work force declined rapidly from 35.7 in 1994 to 27 in 2014.
Several reasons are attributed to this, first among them being women’s preference for household work or working from home. For all our purported progress, Indian women pretty much remain padi thaandaa patni s (wives who do not cross the boundaries of their homes). The absence of meaningful job opportunities is another reason being cited as to why more women aren't coming out to work, according to the International Labour Organization. Increasing educational opportunities for women is one of the positive reasons that are taking younger women away from work to institutes of higher education, ILO says. But a larger proportion of women of working age fail to avail of the opportunity due to the higher burden of household responsibilities placed on them. In India, a substantially high proportion of females report their activity status as attending to domestic duties, according to ILO. Such contribution to the economy often remains unrecognised.
Wage gap
Even if women do enter the formal workforce, they are not entitled to wages on a par with their male counterparts. A recent ILO report exposed the huge gap that exists between women’s wages and that of men in India, where women formed 60 per cent of the lowest paid wage labour.
If anything, incidents like the molestation of women in Bengaluru only go on to show that the progress women have enjoyed thus far in Indian society has hardly translated into freedom of mobility for them. Maya Krishna Rao’s solo dance performance in Jawaharlal Nehru University on the first anniversary of the Delhi gang rape incident poignantly captured the anguish of women at not being able to exercise their freedom to walk the streets. “Can I? Will I? Shall I? I want to walk…” Rao says, stressing upon each and every word, to drive home the point that it is this essential freedom that ultimately defines how fair society is to its women. And what fun is a New Year’s Eve without having some fun in the company of friends?
I am reminded of the 1990 Mani Ratnam movie ‘Anjali’, which featured the actress Shantipriya dancing with a bunch of small boys on the streets at night to ring in the New Year in the famous song Iravu Nilavu .
At the end of the song, the police arrives and shouts at the boys, “ Nadu -road la kooththaa adichikittu irukeenga [you are making merry in the middle of the road, are you?]? ” and drags them away in a van, leaving the lone woman behind, waving out to them. 27 years later, when a cosmopolitan Bengaluru saw women celebrating New Year’s Eve on MG Road, they were openly molested in the streets by drunken men, and the police stood watching silently and the Minister blamed the women for it the next day. Alas, women are entitled to such Happy New Years only in the movies it seems.
