During one of my trips to India a few years ago, I stopped again in Delhi. I noticed the new slogan on billboard and transparencies “raaShtra kaa sammaan, strii kaa sammaan” or “Respect the nation, respect the woman”, followed by “Jai Hind!”. Being a woman and having daughters, I am always perturbed about such ambiguous signs, about such superficial and narrow-minded efforts for social change. These signs are placed in the streets where men go, hence reaffirming this status-quo. And the Jai-Hind part… does it mean that the message includes only Hindu men or Hindu women and what does it mean for the rest? Most importantly, such slogans place the woman at the level of a nation, which is in itself quite an abstract complex concept, so what does the analogy mean for the woman — that she is a concept as well? How do such signs help men to understand what equality means in reality? They perpetuate the idea that men are in a privileged and superior position and women are in a helpless inferior position, hence men are the protectors and women – the protected. Placing women on a pedestal, requiring respect as to a goddess only perpetuates the injustice of her objectification and limitation in terms of her involvement in social affairs outside of the domestic realm. Not only is she often liked to a goddess but more specifically to mata-devi, the mother-goddess, ergo, women who are not married and/or not mothers are non-women and non-goddesses? In every society with top-down approach to gender inequality, such as employment or government seat reservations, special cars for women in the urban metro, regulations for special car services for women with late shifts, etc., there needs to be a consistent effort to work with the social elements who generate and perpetuate discrimination, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, there needs to be a strong bottom-up approach as well, where both men and women are involved in education and in raising awareness of what equality means. Equality is about respect of every individual regardless of gender. It is about equal justice, equal rights, equal access and equal opportunity as well as full freedom of choice both in the social and the domestic domain despite the individual’s biological attributes, because they matter only for reproduction or in violence against women. And I am amazed at how much has been accomplished in just a few years in India by various NGOs and grass-root movement groups, but it is a slow and full of challenges process, no question about it. Every time I think about this topic, Warli paintings, tribal art tradition in Maharashtra, come to my mind for some reason. Maybe it is because of their blurred distinctions of male vs. female figures and of the domains, in which they are depicted to engage.
I used the same car during my week-long stay in Delhi. Mohan was the name of the driver, a young man from Madhya Pradesh who loved to chat. He was 28 and was engaged to a girl who was waiting for him back in his town. He came to the city a year ago and was working to make some money. He had two younger sisters for whom he needed to collect good dowries and he was also waiting for his brother to finish school so he could set him up to earn some money before getting married. One or two more years and he would go back. He would come in the morning to pick me up and he waited for me to finish my engagements and sometimes he accompanied me when I decided to visit a monument or a temple.
One day we were in the car on the way to drop off a colleague of mine at his house, a historian, with whom we had been working on a video project during the day. I mentioned how impressed I was by the changes in the city – clean sidewalks, well-maintained streets, green grass and sometimes flowers in the middle and on the side of the roads, and better regulated traffic. My colleague pointed out with excitement:
“Yes, yes, we have new laws, new regulations. Soliciting and begging on the streets is forbidden by law now. People who encourage this receive a ticket and no exceptions are made. The government has started to take care of the homeless and the poor in special shelters, as it is done in the developed world. India is gradually moving out of the group of the underdeveloped countries and into the world’s global community.”
The young man behind the wheel was nodding his head in disagreement. He wasn’t convinced that these were positive changes:
“This is not good for all, however. You read newspapers, right? So many cases of rape nowadays. Women go out alone, they wear western clothes, short skirts, tight shirts, they put on make up, lipstick, high heels…this is awful! Men are men, you know!”
My colleague, who had three grand-children, interjected:
“Yes, I agree, every change is risky and jeopardizes some traditions. But, in this case, these girls will understand eventually that no one respects them or will marry them and they will start wearing the traditional clothes again. We have had these traditions for thousands of years! Why change them?!”
I looked at both men in the car. One was wearing a grey shirt with black pants pleated in the front and the other one was in a green polo shirt and blue jeans.
“You know, I think that ultimately it’s the responsibility of their parents or older brothers. Why do they let them go out alone and like this? I would never let my sisters wear such clothes. They’d look so indecent that I’d be ashamed to look at them. And, after all, it’s not only about themselves, they should also think about their families! The honor of the family! They get raped and they ruin their family’s reputation forever! And then there is no way back!”
Mohan was speaking quite emotionally. My colleague added:
“By the way, I also read that there were a couple of rapes in Mumbai by policemen, to set an example, they said, to teach the girls a lesson. Well, who knows, hopefully they will learn their lesson. When they wear such clothes men cannot always keep their biological drives in check.”
At this point I couldn’t resist and jumped in the conversation:
“So according to both of you, any men who are attracted or don’t like the clothes women are wearing can rape them. The women deserve to be taught a lesson, right? Have you done it? Would you do it yourselves?”
They looked at me in disgust.
“No! No! Of course not!”
“Why do you look at me this way? So, if you can restrain yourselves or would never consider even doing it, how come it’s all right according to you when other men do it? Or they are unable to stop themselves and then this is OK! What, they don’t have any responsibility in this act? It’s the victim’s responsibility only? She should not be wearing western clothes or she deserves to get punished, right?!”
“No, no, you didn’t understand what we were saying”.
And my colleague the historian added:
“These issues are about tradition and identity if you think for a minute. Listen you cannot blame us for discriminating against our women. We have our Indira Gandhi and Pakistan has its Benazir Bhutto, and Indonesia and Sri Lanka have their own women heads of state. It means we do something right!”
I did not continue the conversation, although I did not completely agree. I did not question the enormous talent, exceptional education, outstanding skills and great accomplishments of those women. However, they did not always emerge as leaders on the national stage because of their struggle, persistence, hard work, willpower and original ideas, although some indeed did suffer and did show exceptional leadership qualities. But these women were also part of powerful political families. Nevertheless, I view their exceptional success as an example of the structure of societies where the family, its network and reputation is a critical factor in the individual’s path of progress, rather than as an example of a society exercising equal opportunities and equal citizens’ rights.
Inequality between men and women has existed here for centuries. The problem, however, is not triggered so much by prescriptive prejudice against women and girls, but by unbendable preference for a son in the family, carved in ancient beliefs and superstitions, social institutions and market forces. The daughter gets married and leaves the home to become a member of another family. She goes away with plenty of jewelry and ornaments collected over decades by her own family, but, ultimately, she takes them to another household and will never return them. As I have heard people use a proverb, “Raising a girl is like watering someone else’s garden.” She takes care of her husband’s house and field, and of her parents-in-law when they reach old age. The son, on the other hand, remains home to take care of the property or the business, to contribute to the family’s wealth through the dowry of his bride and to take care of his parents when they grow old. In the Hindu religion, he performs the final rituals at the cremation site and afterwards when the parents pass away. The father, in particular, needs a son, otherwise he will have to come back on earth again; he cannot move into the world of the ancestors and achieve moksha. According to the Laws of Manu a son can liberate even ancestors and descendants from sin (ch. 3.37). So consequently, sons are wished for, not daughters. Furthermore, a wife who bears only daughters and no son can be replaced after eleven years (ch. 9.81) and the laws explicitly state that a young man should not marry into a family with no male children or a girl without brothers (ch. 3.7 and 11)
According to data collected by UNESCO the ratio between female and male babies in India is growing alarmingly disproportionate. While the world sex-ratio is 1050 girls per 1000 boys, there are states like Punjab which had only 798 girls per 1000 boys under the age of five in the 2001 Census, along with other states with similarly abnormal ratios such as Hariyana, Gujarat, Maharashtra, etc.
The decline in the sex-ratio is attributable to two main phenomena – female infanticide and female feticide. In some poor rural areas little girls’ mortality rate before they turn five years is three times higher. They are three times more likely to suffer from undernourishment; they are often left unvaccinated and denied medical care. Controlling this problem is a challenge having in mind the fact that in poor rural areas children are born in the homes, where post-natal care is of low quality, child mortality in general is high and thus female child mortality in particular is not considered particularly disturbing. Thus thousands of cases of female neglect and infanticide are left unreported and unrecorded.
In addition, about half a million sex-selective abortions are made on a yearly basis. This is possible through the prenatal testing technology that was made available in 1970s to detect genetic disorders, but it was largely used in India for prenatal sex determination. This procedure used to be promoted publicly on billboards, flyers, brochures, etc. first for 500 rupees and then prices went down until it was affordable and desired by thousands and thousands of families. Gradually overtime, it grew into a flourishing business mostly in the North with some exceptions allowing parents after they were informed about the sex of the baby to make decisions about whether their baby should be born or aborted. After strong pressure from activists and feminist organizations certain measures were introduced to regulate this horrific trend, such as the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act 1971 and the Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act 1994, which, however are not enforced. Code words indicating the sex of the fetus have become public secret. The doctor would tell the mother that she can eat ‘laddu’, a sweet for a religious offering, for a male fetus or ‘karela’, bitter melon, for a female fetus.
Ultimately, the situation has further declined in the last decade according to the ActionAid and the International Development Research Centre’s Report Disappearing Daughters, based on research conducted in selected districts of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, and Punjab. There is some controversy about the accuracy of all the data reflecting female infanticide and female feticide, but there is no dispute about whether such a terrible phenomenon exists or not. In April 2008 the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare organized a national conference “Save the Girl Child”. The prime-minister Manmohan Singh during his inaugural speech acknowledged this problem referring to it as a “burning issue”43:
When I discussed this with Smriti, a woman activist in a women’s rights campaign in Delhi, she told me that many Indians who have admitted that they had done sex selective abortion shared with her that they believed that the soul could not die, but that the body did. Others told her that the fetus was soulless until the end of the second trimester and therefore it was morally unacceptable to kill a born baby, not a fetus. Smriti is a doctor, her mother is doctor, her sister is a doctor and they run a free in the suburbs of Delhi, at the border with Hariyana state. women’s clinic. The members of her organization believed that more pressure on the Indian government from society and organizations to enforce the laws, which were already in place, was the first important step:
“The next one will be to somehow change the tradition of dowry. And, I am talking about the Hindu rural communities mostly. You know the Muslim communities, they arrange their girls to marry relatives or close friends and neither daughters are considered a burden nor did dowry ever become an essential issue to settle. It’s not a problem in any other community but ours. You know, the less money a family has, the more strictly they follow the tradition. Lower castes view dowry as a sign of higher status and sometimes they themselves suggest or agree to pay a dowry that can exceed a couple of times their yearly income, can you believe it? They believe it’s good for their daughter. Because they found a boy from a good family! We will need to change this mentality and it will take a long long time, we all know it. It is not only men, but women, too, who don’t want daughters. We have a steep mountain to climb, women and men. It’s so absurd, when you think of it. We have our woman Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit and woman President Pratibha Patil, and at the same time we discriminate against our girls.”
Dr. Navin Goyal from Murthal, Hariyana state, has embraced the campaign “beTii bachaoo” or “Save our daughters”. I met him by chance during a break while working on a project. He organized several demonstrations in his semi-rural, semi-suburban area to raise public awareness on the issue. He made yellow T-shirts with a sign saying that killing the female embryo is a great sin, which he gave away to hundreds of rickshaw-drivers in the area.
“I also involved several munis in this campaign because no matter how much you explain the scientific side of any harmful practice popular among the rural community, they would not accept it, but if the rishi-muni people tell them that according to the scriptures it’s a sin, then they stop doing it. This is why I am building this temple complex, you know, at a sacred spot, but with a school in it. Parents would neither hesitate to send their kids here, nor would they question what they learn here. So if we teach the kids in here, the parents will have full trust and when the pandit says don’t ask for dowry or don’t offer dowry because it is not prescribed in the holy books, hopefully people will listen, because his authority is never challenged. If it’s just a teacher, who is he to tell us, right? As for health-related issues, like chewing the Tulsi leaf that is so harmful for the enamel of the teeth, it destroys it, but they don’t believe me although I am a doctor. I spoke to our temple pandit about this and when he told them that we used it only in the temple as an offering to Shiva ji or as medicine to swallow when prescribed by a doctor, and chewing it was a sin, you have no idea how many actually stopped. This is my hope with the campaign “Save our daughters”. They will not listen to what politicians or scientists say, but they will pay attention to what the pandits and the sadhus say. So we need to recruit them to work with us.”
Amartya Sen, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, elaborates:
“[…] women’s power – economic independence as well as social emancipation – can have far-reaching effects on forces and organizing principles that govern divisions within family, and can, in particular, influence what are the implicitly accepted as women’s ‘entitlements’. From the crude barbarity of physical violence to the complex instrumentality of health neglect, the deprivation of women is ultimately linked not only to the lower status of women, but also to the fact that women often lack the power to influence the behaviour of other members of society and the operation of social institutions.”44
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43 “Indian Prime Minister Denounces the Abortion of Female Fetuses” The New York Times, April 29, 2008
44 Sen, Amartya. The Argumentative Indian. Writings on Indian History, Culture and identity. New York: Picador, 2005. 239