Gendercide

An Islamic high court in northern Nigeria rejected an appeal yesterday by a single mother sentenced to be stoned to death for having sex out of wedlock.

Clutching her baby daughter, Amina Lawal burst into tears as the judge delivered the ruling.

– The Independent, 20 August 2002

In the 19th century, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe: sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings and mass rape.

70 percent of the world’s poor are women. In a large slice of the world, girls are uneducated and women marginalized, and it’s not an accident that those same countries are disproportionately mired in poverty and driven by fundamentalism and chaos. Many of them can neither read nor write. Deeply-rooted cultural and social traditions are largely to blame for the grim condition of women across the world. Education, income generation and healthcare for women are some of the central concerns of the United Nations Millennium Goals. There’s a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism. But many complain these issues have not been sufficiently addressed.

Traditionally, the status of women was seen as a “soft” issue — worthy but marginal. The international press roared when the students were murdered at Tiananmen Square, however, no mention was found of the report published the next year stating that 39000 Chinese baby girls died annually as parents did not give them proper medical care and attention as boys received. Those Chinese girls never received any mention in the press, which makes us wonder if the journalistic endeavor of the media is skewed towards patriarchy?

In India, a bride is burnt every two hours to punish her due to inadequate dowry or to eliminate her so that her husband can remarry. When a terrorist is captured, media finds “Breaking News”, but when 100, 000 girls are deported to a brothel, it is not considered as news. 

Noble laureate Amartya Sen has calculated that 100 million women are missing from world today.  He argues that overall there are more women than men as women live longer than men. But in areas where there exist deep rooted gender inequality, the sex ratio is absolutely skewed.

More women are missing from world today. The reason is because they are women. one reason for this is that girls do not get adequate healthcare and food as boys. In India, girls within the age group of 1 to 5 years are 50% more likely to die than boys, and the reason is that girls are only taken for medical care when the illness is “serious”.

Statistics shows that in 20th century more girls and women have gone missing than men who died in all the battles of the century. Interestingly, the routine gendercide has killed more women than the number of people killed in the genocide of 20th century.

Gender  discrimination is one of the least important problem that women face today. Women are the modern slaves who are caught in brothels, and regularly beaten and sedated and fed just enough to live. ILO figures show, 12.3 million women are engaged in forced labor and usually in sexual servitude. India is one such country which has more modern slaves than any other country.

The question is what is more important – free trade, global warming, or the safety of women? What can be done to make the girls and women in our society safe? Discrimination, equality, wage differential etc. are utopian words for women who struggle for their basic physiological and safety needs. Its time that hollow words should be replaced by concrete action.

Just be a Woman

Paul Samuelson once quipped that “women are just men with less money”. This aphorism is an an apt one-sentence summary of classical feminism.

The first generations of successful women insisted on being judged by the same standards as men. They had nothing but contempt for the notion of special treatment for “the sisters”, and instead insisted on getting ahead by dint of working harder and thinking smarter. Margaret Thatcher made no secret of her contempt for the impish men around her. But I believe that women will never fulfill their potential if they play by men’s rules. It is not enough to smash the glass ceiling. You need to audit the entire building for “gender asbestos” – in other words, root out the inherent sexism built into corporate structures and processes.

It is undeniable that women are wired differently from men, and not just in trivial ways. They are less aggressive and more consensus-seeking, less competitive and more collaborative, less power-obsessed and more group-oriented. Women excel at transformational and interactive management. Peninah Thomson and Jacey Graham, the authors of A Woman’s Place is in the Boardroom, assert that women are “better lateral thinkers than men” and “more idealistic” into the bargain. Feminist texts are suddenly full of references to tribes of monkeys, with their aggressive males and nurturing females.

Women being women is important for both feminism and business. I believe these “womanly” qualities are becoming ever more valuable in business. The recent financial crisis proved that the sort of qualities that men pride themselves on, such as risk-taking and bare-knuckle competition, can lead to disaster. Lehman Brothers would never have happened if it had been Lehman Sisters. Even before the financial disaster struck the best companies had been abandoning “patriarchal” hierarchies in favor of collaboration and networking, skills in which women have an inherent advantage.

Discourse of Sexual Harassment

Recent events entailing the Ruchika and Bajaj-Gill case has become an eye opener for the popular discourse sexual harassment in India. The discourse is not only related to the feminist ideology and upholding honor of women, but also to the responsibilities that come with position of power. Both the cases – Ruchika as well as KPS Gill – were related to women being harassed sexually by men with power. Though no two sexual harassment cases can differ in degree of severity but the former required more support due because the age of the victim. Rupan Bajaj was a senior IAS officer and more capable of defending herself than a 13 year old minor. This is so because the former case power as a resource is unequally distributed between men and women (in this case between Ruchika and Rathore, but not so much in case of Rupan Bajaj and KPS Gill).

Sexuality has been continuously hushed up through the ages irrespective of geographic boundary. What is the root cause of harassment as observed in both the cases? Surely power is used as a tool for domination. But is it always true? Not entirely. As pointed out by Foucault, modern power subjects individuals, in both senses of the term; it simultaneously creates them as subjects by subjecting them to power. Though Foucault denies that power is essentially negative, in these cases power has been used as a negative force. It is the case when power is used to delineate the sexual desires of the patriarch on women and then suffocating them through the system and institution, and eventually killing her.

The recent events related to Ruchika is no surprise to me for the very reason of deprivation of women in the society. Power and position corrupts people and the more you have it, more shamelessly you flout the rules of society and the society lamely turns a blind eye and a deaf ear to it. The case of Ruchika is not a case related to female right, but to justice in society. It is not only the girl who has become the victim, it is her whole family and people who were close to her. It is not a female issue, it is an issue of human rights and child abuse for the girl was a minor when she was sexually abused. Voice must rise for hundreds of Ruchikas who are strangled by the wheel of (in)justice and thousands of Rathores must be punished for the hideous (mis)use of power.

Purdah Among Hindu Women

Married in a conservative family, I have always wondered at the numerous rules that a woman has to follow in my husband’s family. Here I must confess, though to my taste, his family is more conservative than the society that I come from, but they are one of the most radical families in their society. Please do not misunderstand me, I am not criticizing anyone. You see, first time I saw my mother-in-law, otherwise an independent woman who brought up three children singlehandedly, to do purdah in from of someone, I felt aghast. My head spun and said, "This is twenty-first century man!” Well I had no right to react that way, even if it was confined in my head. I must have realized that my mother-in-law was bound by custom she was brought up with, something she has been discoursed to do.

Yes, purdah is still followed in Hindu families in northern parts of India. Though it was not originally a Hindu rule, but was adopted by the Hindu middle and upper class during the Mughal and British rule, in order to upgrade their position in the social hierarchy. The purdah (veil) system amongst Hindu women in some parts of Northern India originated during Mughal rule, to protect local women from Mughal invaders and now that India is a free country women should abandon the veil and get educated. So many classes amongst the Hindus adopted an Islamic tradition of purdah and Victorian tradition of chastity of women, to elevate their social position.

The origin of the purdah is not actually relevant. The point is that the purdah system exists only in parts of north India today, not in the west, south or the east. Even if some ‘medieval’ practices such as these did exist in these parts, it is clear that time diluted them … except in north India. Why? Obviously it is north India which bore the brunt of the attacks of various invaders throughout history and it is an indisputable fact that during war and foreign rule, women are often raped and kidnapped. That is why the system did not vanish in parts of north India, in fact it has become ingrained in some communities. Women are kept cloistered and denied an education.

Certainly, in the north-eastern parts of India and say Kerala, which were areas far far away from the invading armies, the status of women continued to improve. So really, it is a historical fact that the invading armies of the Turks, Arabs, the Mughals and the Victorian values the British brought in had something to do with the purdah system in north India.

But the question that is relevant today is why do women today still follow such custom? Evidently this is a very demeaning custom for women where their movement and expression are restricted due to the very use of a veil. From what I saw in my husband’s village and society, it is more of a custom that women want other women to follow. You see I was actually asked to do purdah in front of older men of the household as a sign of respect, whereas I do not have to follow the custom while I’m in front of my father-in-law. My sister-in-law must have a scarf or dupatta over her head when in front of her in-laws. My mother-in-law does purdah from elders from her village. this is so because they have been brought up to do it and have been constructed to do it. I, on the other hand, though not constructed to do it, was asked to do it, and did it out of respect for my mother-in-law. This is a custom perpetrated on women by other women and the cycle continues.

Though the severity of the tradition has reduced greatly, still there are instances where incidents like honor killing, female infanticide,  and sati still catch media attention. Women are subjugated and still they want to climb up. But social change works at a snail’s pace, and therefore, the observers must be patient.

All things said and done, one must not forget that this custom is a foreign custom that had crept into the Indian or rather Hindu society and the concept of Victorian chastity has been imbibed from the British themselves. Though we gained independence six decades ago, we are still chained to the ideologies the firangis brought to the country.