Aryaman Jalota
When I flip open the newspaper every morning, the plethora of negative media stories fails to astonish me.
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An opportunity for Mutual Emancipation |
Before we delve into the roots, we must orient and
understand the problem. In modern Indian society, neither are women treated as
equals nor are they treated unequally. They are treated sub-equally, a
situation wherein the mechanisms for women to succeed or liberate do exist, but
the opportunities to pursue or access those mechanisms are controlled by men. A
fine example lies hidden in the recent buzz about the Indian political opposition’s
Prime Ministerial candidate. While the feud for the spot was between a senior
member of the party and a successful state-level politician, the leader of the
opposition, a woman, was completely ignored. She became the country’s youngest
Cabinet Minister at the age of 25, served six terms as an MP and three as an
MLA. In 1999, the party’s patriarchs nominated her to contest against Sonia
Gandhi in a constituency that the ruling party had controlled since
Independence; in a record breaking 12 day campaign, she managed to secure more
than 3.5 lakh votes, and lost by only a 7% margin. Would the opposition’s
patriarchs have let her pursue the road to her Prime Ministerial candidacy?
Perhaps they were still shocked by the radical political guts that India’s only
female Prime Minister manifested from 1975 to 1977.
The impression that Indian society has historically restricted women is specious. The liberty of female self-expression dates back to pre-Mughal India, of which the erotic carvings on the walls of Khujaraho are fine examples. The Mughal Raj undoubtedly brought about a change, swinging liberty away from women's favour. The British Raj then enslaved a disparate society, which was to taste freedom only in the mid-20th century. Switching from liberty to restriction to liberty again has undoubtedly projected a perplexing societal influence on gender issues, thus rendering "Indian society" not culpable. Moreover, not many will deny that this perplexity was further exacerbated by Western influence on modern Indian society.
There is no easy way to ameliorate this perplexity. The notion of pro-women solutions to gender disparity is on one extreme end of the spectrum. If we truly desire harmony between (or among) the sexes, we cannot take measures that ignore the role men must play in the resolution of gender discrimination. What men need to be made aware of is that they are tricked into thinking in a certain way by a patriarchal society, which has spawned from the political perplexity that the last ten centuries blessed us with. Once they recognise this, and are emancipated from this perplexity, the emancipation of women is an imminent and inevitable consequence. Feminist movements must therefore seize the opportunity for mutual emancipation through this initial liberation of men to implicate a subsequent liberation of women. When these milestones are achieved, the utopian goal of transforming sub-equality into actual equality will only be moments away.
Aryaman Jalota is
pursuing his IB Diploma at in Mumbai. He has an academic inclination towards
both Economics and Mathematics, and hopes to influence Indian public policy
through economic research. When he isn’t buried in his books, he occupies his
time with Model UN, advocating organ donation and poetry.