15 April 2014, 10:05 PM IST
Indian democracy is a 'male-ocracy' in which men call the shots
While Indian democracy was patting itself on the back for the record voter turnout that the ongoing polls have witnessed, an inconvenient fact seems to have got overlooked: that hundreds of thousands of citizens have been disfranchised in a patriarchal society in which men tell women whom to vote for, if at all they are allowed to vote.
India's democracy is really a 'male-ocracy', a polity dominated by men in which women are second-class citizens. A recent Haryana study has revealed that in many rural areas of the state it was the menfolk who decided for whom the community as a whole would vote. In many cases, unmarried women were not allowed to vote at all.
What's true for Haryana is true for many rural regions of India. Sixty seven years after Independence, the Indian ballot box remains largely a masculine preserve.
Nor does it seem likely that the situation will change in the foreseeable future. One of the key legislations which could have proved to be a real game-changer has been pending in Parliament for years having systematically been blocked by its opponents such as the Samajwadi Party, whose leader, Mulayam Singh Yadav, has said that "boys" who make "mistakes" like rape should be spared capital punishment.
Barring the Aam Admi Party, no other major party manifesto has included the issue of reserving 33% of parliamentary and assembly seats for women. There is specific mention of reservations for OBCs, Muslims, and other 'weaker sections'. But, barring AAP, no party has included in its manifesto a provision which would give what many believe to be the most vulnerable and exploited minority community in the country — the community of women, particularly rural women — to have a greater say in how our polity should function.
Symbolic of this marginalisation is the disclosure of prime ministerial hopeful Narendra Modi's marital status. According to family sources, Modi reportedly left his wife, Jashodaben, some 45 years ago to fulfill his ambition to 'serve his nation', a laudable objective which would perhaps have been more commendable if the budding politician's concept of a nation deserving of his service had included a life partner whose welfare and maintenance he was legally and morally obliged to ensure.
The problem is that, despite the existence of organisations and institutions like the National Commission for Women (NCW), unlike other groups, women do not constitute a mobilised and collective vocal vote bank, a necessary instrument of negotiation in Indian politics which even the nascent gay, lesbian and transgender community is beginning to devise.
Perhaps one of the reasons is that, at least in traditional India, urban or rural, there is little or no consciousness of a collective feminine identity and the need to politically affirm it. After millennia of subjugation, only too many Indian women subscribe to the entrenched patriarchy that typecasts them as the second, and inferior, sex.
Let alone voting rights, in traditional India a woman has no identity of her own other than that defined by a man: she is someone's wife, or her father's daughter, or the mother of a son. Without reference to a male, she is a non-person. Untrue? Perhaps Jashodaben would know. Or would she?
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