This year’s International Women’s Day on March 8 coincides with Holi, celebrated extensively in North India. India is one of the few countries where women enjoy equal rights, as underscored by the fact that the head of state is a woman who came up the hard way from one of the least developed communities. Droupadi Murmu also happens to be the supreme commander of the Indian armed forces. One of the first women in the world to become head of government was Indira Gandhi. Long before women in even European countries, forget other Asian and African countries, obtained the right to vote, Indian women have been exercising this right since 1952 when the first elections were held on the basis of adult suffrage. The right to equality, irrespective of gender, caste and community, is one of the fundamental characteristics of the Indian Constitution that came into being in 1950. Incidentally, there were 15 women in the Constituent Assembly!
There are many enabling laws to protect the special interests of women and to rule out discrimination against them. The ban on sex-determination tests, stringent anti-rape laws and provisions against sexual harassment at the work places are some of them. Over the last 75 years of Independence, women have been breaking one glass ceiling after another, so much so that today a girl student can aspire to become the chief of Army, Navy and the Air Force in the foreseeable future. Very soon, a woman judge can be expected to become the Chief Justice of India. In fact, there is hardly any sector where women have not marched ahead. In sectors like education, public health and communication, women have been excelling so much that they can be said to have stolen a march over men. Every time a woman achieves something extraordinary, there is no national jealousy, only national pride.
All this should not deceive us into believing that everything is hunky-dory on the women front. Far from that, women as a group have been facing innumerable challenges because, all said and done, they still do not enjoy a level-playing field. What is often forgotten is that a successful woman, whatever be her chosen field, has to prove herself as a daughter, wife, mother and grandmother, sometimes all together, while charting her own career path outside of the home. When during his field studies, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen asked a woman whom he found working all the time, what she did during her spare time, she did not know what to say because the concept of spare time was alien to her. So she answered: “I wash clothes”! In fact, she represented a vast majority of the women in India for whom 24 hours are insufficient to complete their work.
If the development of a nation is measured by the status the women enjoy, India has a long way to go. Public roads and public transport even in a city like New Delhi are not safe for women, particularly after sunset. Female foetuses continue to be killed in the womb and girl children are not given the care and comfort their brothers are privileged to get. For every reported case of rape and molestation, there are many which go unreported because the villains of the piece are often not strangers but uncles, cousins and brothers-in-law. If most parents dread the possibility of the government increasing the marriage age of girls to 21, it is because they consider daughters as a liability. In the absence of schools and colleges, how will they keep them at home?
It is one thing to claim that women enjoy equality and quite another to recognise the reality that they continue to be underpaid and neglected. It required the arrest of two ministers to find a woman for inclusion in the Delhi cabinet! For the first time in Nagaland’s history, two women were elected to the Assembly in this month’s election. Most of the rights that women enjoy today were not granted to them as largesse. They often had to fight for these rights. International Women’s Day is an occasion to remind the world that women have “miles to go before they can sleep”.
