Some months ago I was asked by a large firm of chartered accountants to come and speak to their staff, mostly young CAs-in-the-making, about gender issues. “One of the things we’re often asked to do,” the Senior Partner told me, “is to make wills and we find, in most cases, that parents unjustly want to rule daughters out of their wills.” He wanted, he said, that his young colleagues understand the hows and whys of this. “It’s not our job to persuade people otherwise,” he said, “but if my colleagues are sensitised to gender issues, perhaps they can make a small change in this injustice.”

I was pleasantly surprised. Not many CAs would even think of gender equality, let alone try to do something about it. In the ensuing conversations with his colleagues, many questions came up. One young man posed this problem: often, he said, they were asked to go to relatively ‘unsafe’ localities to meet clients. If he found a woman colleague had been given such an assignment, he would offer to go along, and to take over the work, in order to minimise the risk to her. But he found that she never understood this and was always angry at him for offering to help.

I was reminded of this incident a few weeks ago, when I read about undergraduate women students of Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) being denied access to the library because, as the authorities put it, they were concerned for the women’s safety and security — and worried that if women students were given access, hordes of men would turn up (presumably to harass the women) and the women would then be at risk (the latter has been taken from a statement made by the Vice Chancellor).

There’s something skewed, and terribly familiar, about this line of thinking. Even though the Vice Chancellor protested that the issue was not about gender but about overcrowding, his fear that ‘four times more men’ would turn up if the women were to be allowed to use the library, is telling.

It’s also very much in line with similar comments made by a number of politicians, such as the Rajasthan BJP MLA who suggested, in December 2012, that a ban be placed on girls wearing skirts, or the Puducherry government in 2013 when they suggested that girls wear overcoats to schools to prevent sexual harassment, or earlier this year, when members of the Karnataka government suggested that girls be banned from carrying mobiles. All this to ensure their own safety.

These statements and actions are no different really, from the sentiment expressed by the young accountancy intern, or indeed from Smriti Irani’s protest statement that called the AMU Vice Chancellor’s statement about the library ban, ‘an insult to our daughters’.

This is precisely the point: if men are the ones who are endangering women, why should women be the ones who have to put curbs on their lives and stay out of men’s way? I recall once having a prolonged argument with a neighbour as we traversed our local walking track. Commenting on a young woman who walked past in somewhat fitting sports gear, she said, “You see, it’s because women dress like this that men lose control and they rape.” No matter how much I tried to argue with her that between ‘losing control’ and taking off his clothes, and finding a place to assault a woman, there are a number of well thought out and deliberate actions that are very much in his control, she was not convinced.

There’s no doubt that sometimes, the concern that lies behind protectionism is genuine. But it’s the form that it takes that needs to be questioned: the young accountancy intern’s concern for his female colleagues was genuine, but he had never thought to ask them if they wanted his ‘protection’. He simply assumed he was doing the right thing. Equally, one might ask the AMU Vice Chancellor: if overcrowding is the problem you are worried about, then why stop only undergraduate students? Why not find other ways of limiting the numbers — like allowing access to specific numbers for limited hours on a first come first served basis? And there are other questions too. If, as the VC and other staff members have suggested, there is always online access, what does that say for the class of students that is being addressed? Not everyone has online access — so what happens to those who don’t?

And of course there’s a question for the Minister too: why does she only feel that the denial of access is an ‘insult to our daughters’? Why is it not a clear violation of the rights of women, why is it not a denial of the most basic rights to access, to knowledge, the right to education, the right to learn?

The insult to women lies not only in the facilities that are denied to them, but in the non-recognition of their rights, and indeed in the language we use to think about them.

( Urvashi Butaliais an editor, publisher and director of Zubaan ).

>blink@thehindu.co.in

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