s is
well known, the semantics of equality entered western intellectual
discourse only as a result of the writings of the French philosophes
whereas previously the acknowledged universal paradigm had been that all
human beings were created unequal. Thus there were those who were
“privileged” by birth and those who were not.
And it was only Buddhism in India that could indeed be
said to have genuinely offered a world view wherein equality made no
exceptions. Some reason why it became fatally important for Brahmanism to
eject it at all costs.
The new European classes whose material interests were
thus enunciated by the emancipatory writings of the Enlightenment claimed,
as Marx was to note, that they represented not just their own interests
but those of all “humanity”. A classic example of false consciousness,
since, as Marx theorised, every new class that challenges older social
formations needs such universalist claims to garner sufficient clout for
the overthrow.
The fact , of course, was that the notions of equality, or
rights (“unalienable” ones, you may recall), that came to be floated as
potent ideological ‘legitimisers’ of the aspirations of new dominant
interests effectively left out of the ambit of these notions slaves, all
labouring classes and, you guessed it, women. Indeed the men who were
inscribing the concepts of unalienable rights were untroubled slave-owners
themselves. Jefferson, for one.
Within the expressive world of what came to be called
“liberal humanism”, the reference to “all men”, etc in well-known redolent
phrases meant just that – all men. To a point where indeed not even the
world’s first industrial proletariat asked for women’s right to vote as
they submitted their charter to the Whig Parliament in 1832. Their demand
was “one man, one vote”.
Not until 1928 – only some two decades prior to India’s
political independence from colonial rule – did Englishwomen obtain their
right to franchise, as a result of their protracted struggles aided by
sections of truly liberated men.
And as has so often happened in the history of democracy
worldwide, those accreted gains elsewhere helped new post-colonial Indian
rulers to provide for universal adult franchise from day one.
**
Obtaining the right to vote, of course, did not translate
in equal measure to an equality of representation in Parliament and the
legislatures.
As in the case of Indian men, only some women who had the
pedigree, of birth or class, came to be given the occasional ticket to
stand for elections. Universal franchise has thus remained a grossly
anomalous adoption, having effectively left out half the population of
India from any stake in decision-making at state and national levels.
Over the last two decades, especially notable for the
expansions of consciousness among newly assertive and literate groups and
elites, men and women, the demand that a certain percentage of seats in
Parliament and the legislatures be set apart for women qua women has been
gaining force. A movement that may be conceived as the third rung of the
evolution of Indian democracy into a credible representative system of
consent and governance. The previous two having been the success of Indian
Dalits and ethnic tribals in securing the principle of reserved seats in
proportion to their population as a result indeed of the Ambedkarite
movement of the 1930s; and the success of India’s intermediate middle
castes (often referred to as other backward classes – OBCs) in the
northern states in capturing political power consistently since the
mid-1960s.
For some 15 years now the proposal to accord 33 per cent
reservation to Indian women has been the most consequential and contested
issue in India’s political discourse. Not surprisingly, the ruling party
apparatuses have found themselves caught in that classic pincer which the
idea of democracy has so often presented the world with; namely the
imperative to seem wedded to the notion of universal representation but to
be socially unwilling that the ideal see the light of day.
Capitalism, suffused and mediated by patriarchy, remains
unwilling to redistribute political power among the genders, just as it
remains unwilling to redistribute the right of ownership of economic
assets.
As any number of India’s TV soap operas will testify,
especially since the beginnings of India’s neo-liberal, market
fundamentalist shift (coterminous with the Washington Consensus of 1990),
middle-class Indian women (the only kind who are visible on TV) are sought
to be drafted for two conjoint purposes: one, as consumers of what the
cosmetics corporates have to offer and two, as vehicles simultaneously of
ideas of moral/ethical/religious traditions, all of which issue from
patriarchy and Brahmanism and seek to hedge and confine women within joint
families as the principal torch-bearers of culture.
Typically thus, the soap serials present lavish sets, even
obscenely lavish sets, upon which brocaded and bejewelled daughters,
mothers, daughters-in-law and mothers-in-law walk about in leisured and
gingerly cadences unspoilt by the least hint of labour even about the
household, unravelling fatal decisions with regard to the conduct of
various, and endless, pujas, engagement ceremonies, weddings (and their
consequences) – all interspersed without relief with rituals, ritual
fasts, ritual obligations bearing almost wholly on the women. And laced
with heavy doses of superstition.
In all these, money remains unmentioned as a given of
which we are never told how it is made or how much of it exists. What
defines these offerings is a relentless and relentlessly devious
ideological tie-up between seemingly unlimited resources and religious
iteration. And if ever a woman with a mind of her own surfaces, she
invariably does so as a threat or a menace and thus an object of rejection
secured by showing her up as out of line with the best traditions of
accumulated culture and received patriarchal wisdom.
Indeed a woman who chooses to dress plainly or
unselfconsciously is equally a no-no because such a stance is then seen to
rebuke the labours of the corporates that know best about what women with
money need and how they look best in various situations.
The movement for the reservation of seats for women thus
accompanies this matrix of decrepit social muck, all of which accompanied
India’s “modernity” through the movement for freedom and has now gotten
insidiously collaborative with corporate capitalism. Religious occasions –
dime a dozen in the Hindu calendar – help the corporate world and the
corporate state in two all-important ways: one, it is big business
(according to one UN study, religion is currently the world’s fourth
largest enterprise, after armaments, drugs and education) and two, it
helps to mute and neutralise class consolidation as individuals and
communities are projected primarily as religious entities and identities
rather than as secular/historical victims or agents, or economically
dominant or relegated communities.
Yet it is suggestive of the irresistibility of the
dynamics of democratic ideas that this press towards taking another
historic step in the equity agenda obliges India’s major and otherwise
antagonistic political formations (the Congress, the Bharatiya Janata
Party and the Left in particular) to collaborate in seeing to the
introduction of the Women’s Reservation Bill in the upper house of India’s
Parliament (the Rajya Sabha) tomorrow as the institution of March 8 as
International Women’s Day completes a centenary. And this despite the
bickering among various parties and considerable dissent within each party
on the issue.
And despite the often violent opposition of the OBC-controlled
parties which insist that the 33 per cent quota for women be further
broken down into reservation for OBC and minority women. That the male
leadership of these parties have thus far failed either to make such a
provision for OBC women within their own party office-bearers or to
apportion 33 per cent party/electoral tickets to OBC women is another
matter – but one that underscores the hypocrisy of the resistance they
offer.
Already one influential OBC chief minister (Nitish Kumar
of Bihar) has demarcated his own position from that of his party,
acknowledging that times have changed and that he now thinks it is
inadvisable to oppose the measure.
Such are the crevices through which the winds of rational
historical transformation often creep. The pity being that often those
rational winds have to battle barricades set up even by those who should
know better.
***
Here is what we say: should the bill, after all, be
successfully introduced in the Rajya Sabha on Monday, March 8, 2010, it
will be our view that Indian democracy will have made a great qualitative
leap forward. The polity across the nation state will experience a new
energy and conviction that cannot but invigorate its contributions in many
diverse ways and facilitate the opening of further doors to further areas
that remain dark and iniquitous.
In that context, I may enter a caveat.
There are those who still hold to the “nature” view of
gender. Many men and women honestly believe that women are by “nature”
less prone to violence, corruption, chicanery, more inclined to tenderness
and empathy and so on. Many take the view that women are best kept away
from such prosaic and hard things as finance, defence, industries and
allied areas of governance if they must be incorporated as bureaucrats or
as ministers. Many also believe that given their “natures”, women must
remain in charge of households to which their commitment brings cheer and
spiritual light, since women “naturally” take to the ways of piety and
tradition. And many honestly remain unaware that all these things that
they say reflect not what women think but what men of a certain kind think
about women.
Some support their greater presence in the legislatures
because they believe politics will then see a great ethical upliftment and
so on.
This writer remains of the view that be it in potential or
performance, discriminations based on gender are fallacious. Men and women
tend to be equally ambitious or not, canny or not canny, self-regarding or
not self-regarding, callous or not callous, competent or incompetent,
ethical or unethical, violent or not violent, even murderous or not
murderous.
Many men are often more tender as parents than many women
and many women are often more gamesome as parents than many men. Many
women are better drivers of cars and buses than many men and many men are
better cooks than many women, especially cooking of the kind that pays.
Sometimes women heads of institutions prove to be more inimical to gender
justice than male heads and perfectly of a feather with male corporate
counterparts and sometimes they are seen to be more sensitive to issues of
social discrimination among both men and women than their male
counterparts. It is the same in all spheres of prowess and activity.
Since we hold to that view, it is preposterous that some
98 per cent of the world’s wealth should remain in male hands while women
share the rest of the two per cent. And in large measure due to the fact
that gender discrimination based on assiduously constructed myths,
traditions and systems of knowledge and control has kept them out of the
institutions of law-making and of governance where such constructions can
be addressed and changed to the betterment, let it be said, not just of
women but of humankind.
We also recognise that women are as prone to social
prejudice, inherited bias and class antagonism as men are. But we believe
that these prejudices, biases, antagonisms, are best attacked jointly by
men and women both – in positions of responsibility and in social
movements outside the ambit of the state. And that, most crucially, such
an eventuality requires that women be first of all accorded all those
transformative, constitutional spaces over which the state presides and
which have been the fiefdom of men. Tragically, thus far in India this
necessary historical onus has been denied to women on one disingenuous
pretext or the other. And as a result, we are the nation we still are.
These fingers are therefore crossed as they type. Tomorrow
may be a day I shall truly celebrate, not as some teleological end of
democratic history in India but as the victory of a democratic idea and
imperative that has been delayed for far too long and out of which many
good things will come for those who are still at the receiving end at many
points of the social maze.
Thumbs up for the bill. And may sense dawn on those male
heads that are used to be habitually headstrong without much thought.