Why can't Indian rupee have a woman's face?

On April 20, the US treasury secretary Jacob J Lew announced that Harriet Tubman - women and civil rights activist and American spy during the American civil war - would replace former president Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill.

The new design, to be introduced in 2020 commemorating 100 years of female voting participation, puts a woman on the face of currency for the first time in over a century in the US, and an African-American woman for the first time on the planet, relegating the slave-owning and pro ethnic-cleansing former president out.

The department of treasury also made changes to the design of the $5 and $10 bills. Although it retained first treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton on the $10 (who Tubman was supposed to replace according to Lew's initial announcement last year) owing to his connection to currency and a Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway musical boosting his popularity, the back of the bill will now feature a 1913 march which lead to women getting the right to vote and the $5 will now showcase Martin Luther King Jr on the back along with Lincoln on the front in Lew's attempts to "bring to life" the monuments the bills formerly had.

The change was welcomed by President Obama, and the NYT described the broader remaking of the country's currency as having "captured a historical moment for a multicultural, multi-ethnic and multiracial nation".

More than just symbology.

In doing so America joins a host of other countries. For example, Britain replaced Charles Darwin's image to make way for Jane Austen's image on its 10 pound bill in 2013. Other countries that have women appearing on their currency include Syria, Israel, Turkey and Australia to name a few. Besides the obvious equalitarian symbology associated with these iconic female images on currency, such an inclusion serves many other purposes.

For example, after this change was announced NYT ran a feature explaining the history of the personalities and their contribution to the US political, ethical and ethnic space. There are over 8.5 billion $20 bills in circulation in the world in 2015, and a particular face on each of them is bound to impart some education about the contribution and importance of women and coloured in America's history where - if their presidential campaign is anything to go by - such an education is in dire need of being had.

Even if that were not the case, a change in currency is implemented by central banks regularly to guard against counterfeiting. According to The New Generation Currency Program of the Philippines (another country to have recently put a woman's image on its currency), "by making it very difficult and costly for counterfeiters to produce exact copies of our money, we protect the integrity of our currency from criminals".

To put that into context, a Hindustan Times report on August 3, 2015 reported Rs 400 crore-worth of fake currency in circulation in India, amounting to four in every 1,000 notes being fake. Justifiably, therefore, most central banks redesign their notes every 10 years on average, and India also introduced new design features into its 500 and 1,000 rupee notes on the January 7, 2016.

The Indian scene

However, the changes to our notes included finesses like "ascending size of numerals in the number panels, bleed lines and enlarged identification mark" an article in the Financial Express reported. On the subject of new personalities on our country, though, a 2010 RBI panel report declared that "no other personality could better represent the ethos of India better than Mahatma Gandhi" revealed finance minister Arun Jaitley in a letter to the Lok Sabha according to an article dated December 5, 2014 in Times of India.

Incidentally, the government had requested the RBI to look into other personalities for our currency after reports of circulation of counterfeited currency through ATMs installed by various public and private banks.

"Design of currency notes needs stability to retain public confidence. Hence it is a generally accepted principle that changes thereon are brought only in medium to long term and that too after deliberate considerations by expert group", said the RBI's principal communications adviser, Alpana Killawala, when asked if the RBI was considering any other national personalities for Indian currency in the future.

An inconsistent argument

Even if the RBI panel's comment about Gandhi be taken at face-value (even though that in itself is debatable), it doesn't hold up to consistency. Various national leaders have historically always appeared on coins in India; even Indira Gandhi's image has been produced on a coin in India before - so much for the "females on money" and equality pioneering. Besides, diversity in postal stamps - also issued by the government - has been a representative aspect of our history and culture that has been at the forefront of attention for all political parties in India, even PM Modi and his predecessors in office like Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

In the light of these parallel arguments, it is difficult to see how the arguments of historical and cultural representation do not extend themselves to paper currency.

The NYT quote of America's decision being a landmark in a country as diverse as America applies just as much to India and its culture, if not more, and given the current undercurrent of dissatisfaction amongst the minorities, such a move could go a long way into highlight and bring their histories and contributions into common circulation all across the country.

No public awareness initiative can ever have more penetration than paper money; integrate the two, and we could have an upshot in discussion and curiosity similar to Sofia's - an eight-year-old who wrote a letter to President Obama asking why more women were not on money, impressing the president with her precocious insight.

War of appropriation

Perhaps one of the more sensible roadblocks to such a change, however, can also be gauged from an extrapolation of Sofia's argument. Indian politics has often boiled down to party-wise appropriations and petty renamings (think Gurugram), and in such a situation any personality's inclusion is bound to illicit questions of why not someone else.

An inkling of this can be seen in the reactions of right-wing conservative leaders like Donald Trump or channels like Fox News. Trump called the treasury department's move "pure political correctness" while Fox's Greta Van Susteren called the move "needlessly divisive", arguing, essentially that the move undercuts the position of whites in American society.

It is easy to imagine a counterpart argument in the context of Indian politics, except with many more parties than the bipartisan politics of the states. It is true such arguments crowding already a progressively more inane political centrestage can be avoided by keeping Gandhi as the sole representative (nobody, perhaps with the exception of the RSS, would argue with that!) of all of India.

Perhaps that was one of the considerations of the RBI panel, perhaps with some cause as well, but it must be deliberated at what cost (pun intended) we are keeping this silence, and what it is exactly that is being muted with it.