It’s the nation’s 70th birthday and as with every such occasion, the moment provides an opportunity to look back and map how far we have come, whether or not promises have been met, and what the road maps for the future look like.
Predictably, then, our media is full of stories of India@70. And equally predictably, there’s very little about women, there’s even less about other marginalised groups, caste is conspicuous by its absence, Adivasis come in for no attention at all.
There is, however, an abundance of politicians and mainstream political debate. And there’s analysis of all the different paths we’ve chosen — on the economic front, in terms of foreign policy, foreign relations and more.
Does the absence of women, minorities, the poor, the lower castes and tribals mean they don’t matter? That the republic doesn’t care for them? Difficult to escape that conclusion.
When India came into being, much was promised to its citizens. The promise of equality, and non-discrimination on the basis of religion, gender, caste, class and so on, has clearly not been borne out.
Indeed the two most important documents to come out in the ’70s — the first such documents that focused on women — have been all but forgotten. Towards Equality: The Report of the Committee on the Status of Women (1974-75) and the later (1989) publication, Shram Shakti , on women in the unorganised sector, provided the state with detailed information on the status of women, and recommended urgent action to improve this.
Equally, ever since the 1991 Census — which showed the results of enumerators asking gender-sensitive questions as suggested by women activists — we have had valuable information on women in the workplace, their political participation, in the agricultural sector, violence against them, and more.
And yet, change has been slow to come. Instead, indications are that things are not going as well as might have been expected. This is clear if one takes just a random look at things around us.
For years, for example, we’ve congratulated ourselves that the 73rd and 74th Amendments to the Constitution have, since 1992, brought more than 1.2 million women, many from the poorest strata of our society, into positions of power at village and municipal levels. No other country, we’ve said, has this kind of empowerment model. So successful was this experiment that in at least 15 states of India, the percentage of reserved posts was increased from 33 per cent to 50 per cent.
But the old adage of one step forward, two steps back, has come to haunt this experiment with states like Rajasthan and Haryana enacting legislation that disallows candidates below a certain educational level from contesting elections. With this move, in Haryana alone, 68 per cent of Scheduled Caste women candidates were disqualified and denied a voice in governance.
There’s a strange kind of way in which mapping the progress of women in this republic takes a somewhat zigzag path. Sometimes there seems to be a move forward and at others, the opposite happens. The tragedy is how little concern there is when that takes place.
For example, in recent years, globalisation is said to have created new jobs for women in urban areas — as salesgirls, security guards, taxi drivers and more. True enough, but while we’re congratulating ourselves on this, it would be well to remember that workforce participation rates for women have fallen from 37 per cent (2004-5) to 29 per cent (2009-10).
Statistics tell one kind of story. Attitudes and deeply held beliefs tell another. Let’s take two recent incidents. When Anna Hazare went on his hunger strike against corruption, flocks of political leaders thronged his bedside. Irom Sharmila’s fast, however, saw no such influx: perhaps the issue she was fighting for, and the fact of her being a woman, kept the politicians away.
A few weeks ago, the Rajya Sabha passed a new law on maternity benefits. Despite some important and positive new provisions, the Bill remained stuck in the old mode of seeing women only as mothers and men as providers. Surely in the 21st century we can do better than that.
I began this piece by noting how little there had been about women in all the media analyses of India@70. Why is it that it is so difficult, even for our most progressive thinkers, to see how the picture of India transforms when we look at it from a gender-inclusive perspective. There’s little doubt that we have, sporadically, made progress that has a positive impact on women. But surely it’s time we began to realise the importance of mapping their status too, and looking at what it tells us about the kind of people we are.
Urvashi Butaliais an editor, publisher and director of Zubaan; blink@thehindu.co.in