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Peg: For Special Anniversary Issue of Newstime
HOW “EQUAL” IS EQUAL?
THE WOMAN QUESTION IN INDIA
By Shoma A. Chatterji
WORD-COUNT: 3267
Did it ever occur to you to find out why women across the world celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8 every year? If you do not know the story, there is no reason to feel embarrassed, because you are one among millions of Indians who do not have an inkling of why this date is so important in the lives of women. This true and historic story is something every woman should know because it has changed her destiny – in several different ways – for all time to come. On March 8, 1908, women textile workers in New York struck work and assembled in tens and thousands on the east side of the city for a demonstration. Their demands were – (a) higher living wages; (b) working hours shorter than the 16 hours they were putting in daily; (c) better working conditions; and (d) the right to vote. This democratic exuberance and militancy among these working women led to the Communist International that year to select the date – March 8 – to celebrate the cause of the working women in the world. Two decades earlier, May 1 was chosen to celebrate International Labour Day in more or less a similar manner. Since then, various women’s groups and associations have been observing March 8 as International Working Women’s Day. In 1975, the United Nations declared and adopted it as International Women’s Day.
Since 1975, many of the most repressive and barbaric nations across the world have been celebrating this day as International Women’s Day, completely oblivious to the contradiction that lies in this celebration and the real-life experiences and status of women in these countries. So pervasive – if not powerful – has been the impact of women’s participation in working people’s struggles for democracy across two centuries, that only a few self-styled progressives today would dare to assert that they do not support the liberation of women. However, it is the definition of the term ‘liberation’ that changes from society to society and from time to time. The perspective of looking at the liberation of women is not universal and this diversity of opinion, perspective and definition, creates conflicts and contradictions within women themselves, creating a society where a few women are considered to be representative of their respective nations, while millions of their fellow sisters lead oppressive, ignorant and humiliating lives.
India is a classic example of this jarring anomaly. For instance, the exploitative society we live and work in, offers a micro sample of a few affluent women who are free from the responsibilities of housework and child-rearing because they can afford domestic help at high costs. But does this individual, privileged freedom raise the status of these women to the level of being labeled ‘liberated?’ The Indian Constitution under Articles 15 and 16 clearly proclaim (a) prohibition of discrimination on grounds of sex, and (b) equal opportunity to women in matters of public employment. Equality between the sexes therefore, is presumed as a constitutional right. The question is – does this happen in real life? Or, is it violated in principle, covertly or overtly, directly or indirectly?
Two cases will prove whether our constitutional rights are actually granted to our women. One is the case of Mukti Dutta and the other is the now-infamous case of Roopan Deol Bajaj. Mukti Dutta, an activist, accused the then Union Government Minister of forests and environment, of having molested her when she met him to discuss a work-related issue. The news aroused a lot of excitement in the Press. Soon after, the Press came out with one more piece of news on the same story. Dutta had withdrawn all her charges of molestation against Ansari. Datta, who came from Madhya Pradesh, lodged the complaint against Ansari in October 1989. Suddenly, on February 24 the following year, she filed an application before the Metropolitan Magistrate in Delhi, Mr.Sukhdev Singh, withdrawing all her charges against Ansari. In her application, she explained her decision on grounds that Ansari was ill! “I therefore,” she wrote, “voluntarily withdraw my complaint against him under no compulsion or threat.” The Minister, now no more in a ministerial position, was acquitted of all charges in absentia. Why did Dutta withdraw her complaint? How can the physical ailment of an accused person at the present time absolve him of a crime he committed in the recent past? Was Dutta telling the truth? Had she been threatened to withdraw the charge? No one will know the truth. But everyone will go guessing at it. The guess is – she was threatened somehow which forced her to withdraw her complaint officially. And there ended her right to equality in the eyes of the law.
Roopan Deol Bajaj was an IAS officer who was slapped on her bottom by the then-IGP of Punjab, K.P.S. Gill. When she brought the whole episode out in public, she was accused of washing “dirty linen in public” thus “violating the dignity of the post she held.” High-ranked government officers, all male, including her male colleagues, made this comment. They added that “these things happen, and cannot always be helped. But taking sob stories to the Press would mark out the woman more than the man.” They refrained from questioning the indignity of Gill’s behaviour towards Bajaj. Was it becoming of the IG of Police to get sozzled at a high-powered party and slap the bottom of another high-ranking officer? Did he perhaps, take her sex for granted, knowing that being weak, she would never make the incident public?
Such illustrations merely labour the point. One could cite hundreds and thousands of incidents where the culprits go unpunished just because the victims are women. Who would charge the police of raping women in their custody? And where would such charges be filed? At a police station? Forget it. Because they are the rapists in the first place. Take the complaint to the local M.L.A.? Okay, but only if he is present in the vicinity and has not flown away abroad or to Delhi to kowtow to the minister at the centre which he is convinced, is a greater responsibility for him than to listen to complaints by wronged women in his constituency. Instances of landlords and employers raping and harassing poor women with the connivance of the police; police inaction in cases of murders by battering and induced suicides of women in marital homes; reactionary interpretations by the courts of seemingly progressive marriage and property laws; routine socio-economic helplessness of women to even approach the legal process on their own – are sufficient proof of the fact that civil liberty of sexual equality certainly does not exist here. Nor will it flow from organized institutions.
“Dowry murders” – deaths of married women caused by filial pressures – have been the focus of women’s groups for several years now. The Anti-Dowry Act (1961) was reinforced in 1982 to make room for (a) capital punishment for the offenders, (b) to place the onus of proof of innocence on the accused, and (c) to extend protection of the law to the complainants. To provide institutional support to this legislative rigour, a Special Cell was set up in Delhi in 1983. What happened? Of the 13,623 complaints registered between 1983 and 1988, just 700 could be framed as legal cases; of these, only four went up for trial and one brought in a conviction – only to be dropped subsequently and not followed up thereafter. Shashikala Ramaswamy, 25, died the agonizing death of a dowry victim. She was persistently harassed and tortured by her husband and in-laws with their ceaseless demands for more dowry and was finally killed for it. Neighbours and her parents were aware of the ill treatment. Yet, no one in the town of Tiptur in Karnataka came to Shashikala’s rescue.
Social activist Pramila Dandavate who headed the Mahila Dakshata Samiti opined that the Special Cells were not effective at all because the attitude of the police has not changed. “Under Section 498A for instance, both physical and mental cruelty are punishable crimes. But the police do not take action even when we send cases to police headquarters,” she says. If we find the police being nonchalant about dowry deaths, they are even more so in case of violence against women within the institution of marriage. Wife-battering is one of the most common crimes across the world and India is no exception. However, within patriarchy, many sections of the community, including women themselves, do not even believe that the battering of the wife by the husband is a crime! They argue that since through marriage, the wife becomes the husband’s ‘property’, then, by the same logic, the husband can do what he will with this wife who is his private property, including killing her. A doctor attached to an elite nursing home in Kolkata revealed that she treated many sophisticated women from elite society who came to her for bruises and abrasions on their bodies, ‘gifted’ to them by their violent husbands. This explodes the myth that wife-battering is confined to low-income and poor families.
According to US-based support organizations working for south-Asian women in distress, more and more Indian women in the US are reporting abuse at home. While earlier, the support groups would receive 120-150 calls a year, they now receive over 1000 calls a year. “We attended to over 1500 such calls last year,” says Mukta Sharangpani, programme-director of Maitri, a non-profit organization based in San Francisco, which helps south Asian women in distress. “Most women served by us had experienced emotional and psychological abuse. They were belittled, treated as servants by their husbands and simply abandoned often in the middle of the night,” noted K. Sujata, executive director of Apna Ghar, a domestic violence centre serving primarily, Asian women and children in Chicago. This shows that country and economic status know no bar where violence against women in concerned. It is a global problem and no effort to lighten the problem will bear fruit with women.
In a case that came to light in June 2001, an Indian was arrested in New Jersey, USA, for allegedly beating up his wife and biting her “to punish her for being bad.” Sai Maddi, who returned to US from India after his arranged marriage in February, allegedly hit his wife with a baseball bat that fractured ten of her vertebrae. She had some 30 bite marks all over her body. The case came to light when she rang up the emergency police number when Maddi was away at work. When Maddi went to the police, he demanded that his “property” (wife) be returned. It gave away his world view of women. The story illustrates the curious schizophrenic world inhabited by the NRI male. But it also shows him up to be as equal-minded as his Indian-Indian counterpart who has settled back home!
In such social conditions where civil liberties are paper tokens for most people, the struggle for ensuring democratic rights for all concerned becomes crucial. The same applies to women’s rights. This is not just a matter of fair treatment by father, brother, husband, policeman or judge. They must become a matter of routine exercise of equal status by women themselves. Towards attaining this goal, the first commitment of women is to begin a collective struggle because individual attainments do not count when one is accusing the nation and its entire machinery of discrimination and victimization of an entire section of its population – women.
For the majority of women in this country, equality of status with the men in the family makes sense only if it translates to their equal participation in the improvement in the material condition of the family to the level of human dignity. Equality should mean freedom from bonded labour from the landlord’s house. Equality should translate into freedom from having to walk long distances to fetch water and fuel; freedom from having to go hungry to feed the children and the labouring men; freedom from lack of medical care and rest before, during and after childbirth. For working class women in small towns and cities, it should mean freedom from hours of queuing up for rations and kerosene; freedom from endless vigils for filling water; freedom from crippling and long hours of work; freedom from the anxiety linked to their children’s welfare and illness; freedom from the constant worry over children’s education and jobs that are difficult to come by. Educated and urban women in a slightly higher position in the job market, also suffer from invisible inequalities with their men on all fronts. There is the constant pressure of working under duress to make both ends meet; they suffer from the insecurity of being the first ones to be thrown out in case of retrenchments; they must daily put up with the barbaric conditions of public transport while going to and coming back from their work place; they are constantly in fear of being sexually harassed by the male boss or colleague they can do little about despite legal provisions that are only on paper. The ability to share these crippling factors with their men might help lighten the emotional oppressiveness of their situation. But sharing alone will not offer them material and real equality with their men. This is precisely why many women’s organizations of the country linked to the women’s movement say that women’s struggle for equality is inextricably linked with the struggle of all people for a better life. When women actively step in to participate in democratic struggles, they create both the material as well as the social conditions for their fight for equal status with their men.
Several examples of such struggles at a micro level are offered in Women, War and Peace in South Asia edited by Rita Manchanda. The book offers umpteen illustrations of how women in their respective ethnic pockets, have organized themselves to alleviate their own conditions. In protracted conflict situations like Kashmir where women’s influence has been greatly restricted, their political mobilization has been manifested through their domestic activism. An incipient battle for women’s rights began in Jammu. The Nari Jagran Manch is agitating against the discriminatory attitude of the state government. According to a state law applicable in Jammu and Kashmir, if a woman who is a state subject marries a man who is not a state subject, she loses the right to vote, the right to a government job and the right to purchase land or property. She even loses her share of parental property. On the other hand, when a man marries a woman who is not a state subject, he continues to enjoy his rights along with his wife. Women of the region are now mobilizing themselves to fight this discriminatory law. Declares Sneh Bali, convenor of the Nari Jagran Manch, “We will not rest till we get this Draconian law abolished and restore democratic and fundamental rights to the women of the state.” A disturbing fallout of the turmoil in the Kashmir Valley spanning almost two decades has been the increase in destitution among women. This is manifest in the staggering rise in the number of orphans, widows and traumatized women. According to Dr. Dabla, head of sociology department, University of Kashmir, the number of young widows in the state today is between 16,000 and 20,000. The state also has more than 15,000 orphans in the 0-14-year age group. In 90 per cent of the cases, the widows have been thrown out of their marital homes. “This, despite the fact that the Islamic law provides for such women and children under “kutiba.” As per this law, if the widow’s father-in-law is alive, then she and her children are his dependents and it is his duty to provide for them. In actual practice however, this law is not implemented and widows are left to fend for themselves,” says Pamela Bhagat in a Women’s Feature Service report.
Women in Assam find themselves marginalized in the process of decision-making. To make interventions aimed at restoring peace in the area, they negotiate small spaces elsewhere, forming groups like the Anchalik Mahila Sajagata Samiti to protest against atrocities. In Nagaland, though women have certain advantages such as having property and education, they still find themselves marginalized where political parties and representational politics are still dominated by men. Major women’s associations like the Naga Mothers’ Association demonstrate that women are gradually asserting themselves in public roles. Women activists in Nagaland have also given peace a broader and more equitable definition. Along with protest marches and the like, they have taken up development issues like de-addiction among the youth, and community service.