HVK Archives: Women's worth - Parivar's brand of liberation
Women's worth - Parivar's brand of liberation - The Times of India
Lalita Panicker
()
5 July 1997
Title: Women's worth - Parivar's brand of liberation
Author: Lalita Panicker
Publication: The Times of India
Date: July 5, 1997
The disturbing turmoil in national politics has ensured that the United
Front government will not have to address issue like the controversial
Women's Reservation Bill days, virtually no political formation, barring
the Left, looked upon this empowering measure with sympathy. While the
Left has been consistent, the BJP's recent pro-reservation position
somewhat surprising since its record has been less than encouraging in
the past. While it may be politically convenient now to knock the UF for
its lack of commitment to the cause, there is nothing to suggest that the
antiquated mindsets in the top echelons of the BJP or indeed the RSS have
really changed.
Peculiar Notions
Four years ago, doing story on women and their status within the BJP, I
had to meet the party's senior leader, Mr Murli Manohar Joshi. The learned
professor of physics from Allahabad university has some peculiar notions
of what women's role in society was. They should be given reservations
in nursery school jobs, he felt, as they are tender and, therefore, best
suited to this job. The same story entailed a meeting with members of
Delhi's Ram Rashtra Sevikas Samiti, the women's wig of the RSS. Their
views were most enlightening. Women are the backbone of society and the
pivot of the home. Men are only formless creatures who go out to work in
the daytime and do little else - an insult to numerous men who take the
task of parenting very seriously, The woman produces children,
inculcates in them the right cultural values, looks after the home, keeps
the husband on the right track, indeed moulds the nation. Those who
fail to meet these superwoman standards are helped out as
unobtrusively as possible by the friendly neighbourhood sevikas.
If the RSS has changed its position with changing times, it has kept
remarkably quiet about it. While it is very long on rhetoric about the
exalted position of woman during the Vedic times - there is some truth
in this - it is silent on the deteriorating standards of treatment
meted out to women since then, RSS leader H V Seshadri seeks to cover up
this uncomfortable fact by saying that "we have been able to preserve our
cultural traditions in spite of continuous aggression on our country over
last 1,000 years only because we were vigilant about protecting our
women." This is far from the truth, women were very much oppressed
well before the Muslim invasions.
This doublespeak finds echo within the BJP as well. The suave Mr L.K.
Advani blasted the vacillating UF on the Women's Bill saying, "They are
subverting one of the most progressive pieces of legislation proposed to be
enacted to promote genuine social change." Yet the same Mr Advani said
nothing at all when the BJP government in UP revised social textbooks to
say that the laws which favour women like the Widow Remarriage Act 1956,
the Hindu Women's Property Act 1937, the Special Marriage Act 1954
and Hindu Marriage and Divorce Act 1955 are causing tension and strife
within families. The family is considered of paramount importance to the
women, she must adjust to it rather than try and make a difference. A
woman can pursue a career but only with the sanction of the family and
without disrupting it in any way.
Mr Seshadri goes one step further. In his book Hindus Abroad: Dilemma,
Dollars or Dharma? he recounts how inconceivable it is in the West
for an educated and talented woman to stay at home for the sake of
her children. This is not so for Hindu women, he says with pride. He
gives the instances of a woman VHP worker abroad who gave up her career
to take care of her family just as she was about to get a promotion.
Bringing up children is the greatest contribution a woman can make to
society.
The Hindu woman is the ideal of womanhood, according to the Rashtra
Sevika Samiti, and she does not need any liberation of the kind seen in
the West. In fact, in its souvenir issue commemorating its 50th
anniversary some years ago, the Samiti chief, Ms Saraswati Apte, answers a
question on what her advice to her activists was in the light of the
fact that the whole world, India included, has seen women's liberation.
Loosely translated, she says, "The Indian woman has always been
liberated. She is one of the heavenly creators of a proud, brave nation.
This freedom of women in India has nothing to do with licentious and
libertarian notions on which the women's liberation movement is founded."
Limited Identity
Ms Mridula Sinha of the BJP's women's wing concurs: "For Indian women,
liberation means liberation from atrocities. It does not mean that women
should be relieved of their duties as wives and mothers."
The concept of family is so overwhelming - the RSS calls itself a
family and not a social or political organisation - that whatever
limited identity the modern Hindu woman is able to evolve is conditional
on some or the other form of patriarcy. Ms Tanika Sarkar in an essay in
Women and the Hindu Right quotes a Samiti workers as saying, "We do not
believe that in marital disputes the husband is necessarily to blame. When
we arbitrate, we do not take the woman's side, we are neutral. We will
tell the woman that she must do everything to preserve her home life.
We are not wreckers of homes." Therefore, women facing marital troubles
cannot look to the Samiti for anything like legal counselling since
divorce is frowned upon. Dowry is considered an evil, but it is not
banned either in the RSS or the Samiti. In fact, the poorer members
are helped out financially in order to enable them to pay dowry for their
daughters.
The limited equality that women enjoy within the Hindutva fold has not
grown in any substantial manner despite the BJP's espousal of women's
causes in recent times. The RSS continues to be male-dominated and the
Samiti is just an adjunct, the existence of which creates an illusion of
gender equality. The importance of women like Ms Vijaye Raje Scindia,
Ms Uma Bharati and to a lesser extend Sadhvi Rithambara in the sangh
parivar cannot be taken ass a sign that it has abandoned its outdated
concepts about women's liberation. Note that none of these women have
taken up any cause aimed at bringing about women's empowerment in any
substantial measure. Rather, their energies have been channelled into
propagating fundamentalism of the worst sort, indeed even justifying some
of the uglier aspects of the sangh's attitudes towards women. Ms
Scindia, for example, has publicly defended the obnoxious practice of sati.
Jettison Orthodoxy
Giving women a false sense of importance a homemakers on whose shoulders
rests the honour of the greater Hindu community has effectively ensured
that they do not enlarged their political space. Aggressive and active
women like Ms Uma Bharati are sidelined the minute their political
utility is over. The sangh parivar excels in telling us what is wrong
with everybody else as far as women's rights go. The western women
neglects her family so has lost her moorings, the Muslim women lives in
fear of her tyrannical polygamous husband, the upwardly mobile Hindu
woman commands no respect in society. The inadequacies of others,
thus, becomes a justification for the sangh's inaction. The BJP is the
party in waiting for power at the Centre. It claims it is the party which
will make the difference. Building on the encouraging remarks made by Mr
Advani and other luminaries in the party on the need to empower woman both
socially and politically, it should now jettison past orthodoxies and
smooth and path for the emergence of greater equality for women
within its fold. This would give greater credibility to its new-found
claims to being the foremost proponent of women's empowerment.
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