India at 70: Where Indian women stand today
For the past two years I’ve been teaching a course on feminism and the history of the women’s movement in India at Ashoka University in Sonepat. An elective course, this one garners roughly a hundred plus students each year, between a third to about half of them are young men. Twenty, perhaps twenty five years ago, this would not have been possible. Courses or classes focusing on women would, by and large, have been devoid of men, as if the subject did not matter to anyone other than women.
At the start of the classes each year, I ask the students why they have opted for this particular course (they have a choice of many others) and what they hope to learn from it. I find the responses of the men particularly interesting. “I want to learn to talk to my mother,” one of them told me. Another said he and his male friends were concerned, they could see how their women friends were changing, they saw the battles they were fighting, and they wanted to be there to support them, but wanted to do the right thing by them. “We want to be supportive, to understand, and not to be patronising.”
A third added a different dimension to this. He came, he said, from a traditional and deeply patriarchal family. “Every woman in my family is highly educated, but all have chosen to stay at home, in the kitchen, to make nothing of their education.” He went on to add that he wanted to ensure that there was no pressure at all on his future partner. “I want to be the change,” he said, “but I want to do this without hurting my parents. They’re people I love and respect.”
To me, these are signals of a very important, very significant change in our society. True, it is not widespread, true that these students come from an elite background so in no way represent the wider reality of India, but nonetheless the fact that they have begun to think about “women’s issues”, and to do so with seriousness and curiosity, and a desire to understand, is to my mind profound.
It’s difficult to say when this change began, or even how wide it is. But there’s little doubt that following the brutal rape of Jyoti Singh Pande in Delhi in December of 2012, and her tragic death a few days later, something began to change, especially in the minds of the urban young, and across genders. Just as people became aware sexual violence was not an issue that concerned women alone, there was also a sense that if sexual violence was to be talked about and addressed, we had to speak about all forms of such violence – whether defined by caste, or perpetrated by the army or security forces, or encouraged by politicians to score points off their rivals and more.
Equally, there seemed to be an understanding, however limited, that we couldn't any longer remain silent about these issues, that it wasn’t only women who were affected, that a society in which violence against women was so deep-rooted and so systemic, was an unhealthy society, and that it was time we began to talk about these issues.
None of this happened on its own or in an instant of change – it’s important to remember this even as we talk of 2012 as a catalysing moment. Rather, behind the very slow, the infinitesimal change that moment marks, lies a long history of sustained activism in the women’s movement across the country.
Right from the moment when women, in their thousands, peopled the nationalist movement and worked hard in the campaigns for freedom, their contribution to changing the realities of India has been deep and wide-ranging, but sadly, largely ignored.
In the course that I teach, students are surprised to learn of the many women who participated in the making of modern India and whose name barely features in histories of the making of that moment. This, too, is worth remembering as we mark the 70th year of India’s Independence and all kinds of scorecards are pulled out to showcase the nation’s achievements.
Of course there are ways and ways of looking at the realities of women’s lives. If the State was to notch up a scorecard, I have no doubt the slew of legislation in the last few years – especially the 2014 changes in the law on sexual violence and the bringing in of the law on sexual harassment at the workplace, would find mention.
But these two, and many others that today signal some change for women, would never have happened had it not been for women’s groups. It was the action by women’s groups following the Bhanwri Devi rape case that led to the filing of the Vishakha petition and the resultant sexual harassment law.
Equally, it was the sustained inquiry into caste rape and the protests about it, by women’s groups and especially by Dalit feminists, that led to the law on the prevention of atrocities (POA). The list of improved legislation relating to women, that has come about as a result of the efforts of women’s groups is long and educative.
In any tally that may be made of where we are today in relation to women’s rights, such lists find prominent mention. No doubt the Indian State will claim the law on sexual violence or indeed on sexual harassment, among its achievements. But behind these achievements lie campaigns and activism that too need recognition.
And while it’s important to recognise the positives – of which there are some – it’s also important to remember that the battle is far from won. Conversations may have begun in some circles about violence against women; there may be some recognition that the question of women and women’s rights needs to be given serious attention. Political parties may all be aware that they need to include women in their manifestos. But there is so much that remains, and for each battle that has been won, there have been losses too, which come in often by the back door and are barely noticed.
If women’s groups have consistently fought for change, the Indian State has not covered itself in glory where women are concerned. Violence against women continues to escalate, women’s participation in the workforce is declining, the sex ratio is nothing to boast about, and the State continues to view women not as citizens deserving of rights, but as people on whom rests the burden of holding that sacred cow, the family, together.
It is because of this that the Indian State has refused to recognise marital rape – basically saying the woman is the man’s property once he marries her and he can violate her in whatever way he wishes. And it is the same outlook that has led our courts to make the recent judgment that waters down the provisions of 498A, which made domestic violence against women a criminal offence.
This unfortunate pullback is, according to the courts, because of the apparent “misuse” of this law by women. And yet, all statistics show that the "misuse" is minimal and certainly no more than any other law is misused in this country.
It’s a sad comment on the state of our nation and its attitudes towards its female citizens that the excuse of the presumed "misuse" of a law can be used to push women further into situations of violence, but the corporate world can misuse laws with impunity, as can crooks and criminals, and the State lets them get away with it.