Anindita Sengupta

Conservatives say that this sorting is voluntary—women don’t want to be carpenters and electricians, and prefer to cut back at work when they have children. But those choices are shaped by larger policy decisions. We don’t have paid parental leave or reliable affordable daycare; we have ridiculously high standards for motherhood and very relaxed ideas about what makes a good father. So women are really sandbagged when they have children—which most women do.

Without being hyperbolic, let me just say that this nearly made me upchuck my morning tea. The BJP government in Madhya Pradesh subjected 151 women to ‘virginity tests’. The women were to be part of a mass marriage scheme in Shadol near Bhopal. To avoid ‘complications’, the state government saw it fit to conduct physical examinations to make sure they were virgins. Most of the women were poor, tribal women.

From the BBC story:

Eyewitnesses said the women had to queue up before undergoing an extensive physical examination by a female doctor before they were given a special badge which allowed them to participate in the ceremony.

Several of the women were quoted as saying that they had at first refused to submit to the test – but were told by officials that they would receive their wedding gifts worth 6,500 rupees (about $132) only if they took the test.

Imagine the women. Perhaps a bit shy. Definitely a bit hopeful, anticipating relief if not joy. You see, they’d finally stop being a ‘burden’ on the collective chest of family and society. They turn up at the pandal or hall, dressed in their best. Then they’re lined up like cattle. Their privacy is violated (mentally and physically). Their bodies become the site of interrogation and censure. What should have been a happy day turns into a horrible humiliation, a nightmare–and they have to endure it so that they can get their gift of 6,500 from a benevolent government.

It’s a positive sign that the issue has been raised in the Rajya Sabha but I’m wondering what, if anything, will come of the protests. Will this end up being just the flavour of politics for the day–or will there be some real measures taken to see it doesn’t recur? Are there going to be strict rules built into mass marriage schemes? Of course, firstly, virginity cannot and should not be a criteria for a government-aided marriage. Mass marriages are often organized to counter dowry or lessen the financial burden of a wedding on the poor. To tie up the issue of economic deprivation with chastity, to allow people to benefit from schemes on condition that they are ‘pure’ enough, is just plain wrong.

I would also think that participants in any scheme should be informed of all details and conditions beforehand. If there are medical tests involved, they should be informed and their consent sought in advance–not at the last minute. These women were not prepared for this googly. Some of them probably felt confused or disoriented. Others might have felt an additional pressure because it was on the day, a sense of ‘how can I back out now, after all this?’

The other question is: How are these women going to be compensated for the shame and humiliation they have suffered? It’s all very well to use them as bullets in the spitfire but what happens to them now?

None of the news reports talk about any of this stuff. Amidst all the foam spewing from various mouths, nobody seems to have addressed any of this in concrete terms. Or the media wasn’t listening.

Cross-posted at Ultra Violet.

“We shall disallow travel and the mingling of songs”—this line from Jeet Thayil’s poem ‘Rules for Citizens’ makes me think about the Gay Pride Parade. Because travel is of so many kinds, much of it disallowed. At this year’s Bangalore Pride on Sunday, there was much mingling of songs as well.

Travel. There was a boy I’ve met a few times. He always struck me as attractive but on Sunday, he was wearing shimmery pants, an open jacket, long hair. His eyes were lined. His skin was cinnamon. He looked beautiful. Sexy and scared and triumphant all at once. What is the distance, I wonder, between that person and the person he is forced to be most of the time? For him, how far was the journey from home to Town Hall, really?

Mingling of songs. At the centre of the march, there were flags, drums, raucous songs. All kinds of identity bits spiralled around it: hijra, kothi, double decker, bisexual, lesbian, queer, straight. The frail, the firm, the defiant, the inured to injury.

Gay pride is really about the freedom to be — and love — who one chooses. Sexuality (and love), like gender, is a continuum. Where we fall on this continuum like feathers on a clothesline, nobody can know. How strange and sad it is  that there are those who insist on legislating, moralizing, straitjacketing and politicking around it.

Even stranger that some do not believe that this is an important freedom. In a world where the pursuit of money is slavish, where we’ve beaten the environment to death with our appetites for material things, what can be more important than privileging, for once, other things like identity and love?  It’s what (barely) saves us.

And it was fantastic to see evidence of this on the streets. The parade was noisy, large, full-of-itself, serious and fun all at the same time. Just as it should be. How wonderful it would be, how colourful and joyous, if such freedom existed every day. The city could span its different stories, instead of relegating them to niches and corners, muffled and trussed. It could become all of them.

*Cross-posted at Ultra Violet

An article in The Hindu about the women’s vote:

The importance of the women’s vote is not confined to the three States with prominent women leaders. The evidence gathered by National Election Study series at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies shows that this vote makes a difference all over the country. An overwhelming majority of women say that they take their own decisions when they vote. The evidence also shows that their voting pattern is different from men.

The women’s vote famously worked for NTR in Andhra Pradesh and Bansi Lal in Haryana, when prohibition was an issue. A reckless excise policy in Rajasthan may have led women to vote in a big way against Vasundhara Raje. If the Congress is the overall national beneficiary of this ‘gender gap,’ the picture is variegated at the State level: women voters favour the Left in West Bengal, the TDP in Andhra and the AIADMK in Tamil Nadu. More than the presence of a woman politician, what attracts women voters is the ability of a political party to address some of the issues that affect them. In an election where a small one per cent vote shift can lead to 15-20 Lok Sabha seats changing hands and upset all equations for government formation, small changes in the women’s vote can be decisive. If this vote does not feature much in discussion on counting day, it is not because it did not matter — it’s only because it remained invisible.

One of the challenges of writing for a foreign media product is that context-setting eats up a lot of words  and one has less space for actual opinion. So here are some related thoughts. Before writing this, I asked a whole bunch of urban, educated women whether they had taken gender issues into consideration while voting. Most said they hadn’t–either because they did not feel that any party really addressed gender issues or because they didn’t think the government could do anything / was  responsible for gender issues. The latter surprised me because I tend to look at safety, for example, as a governmental responsibility. Ensuring that streets and other public spaces are safer for women is certainly something the government can do. BUT some said that they had not voted for the BJP because of the party’s regressive gender stances. So there was gender motivation at play even if in a roundabout way.

This article reminded me of the defensiveness attached to writing from my location as a middle class, educated, privileged woman. Some usual reactions: ‘how dare you talk about Mangalore when there are so many worse things happening’ or ‘look at women in Saudi Arabia’. I often write about the urban, educated women because a) I know the most about it and b) I believe we need to be more involved in thinking, engaging and demanding more in terms of gender rights. To put it simply, we have more time and energy to do so. Nor are we unaffected by gender issues. After all, domestic violence, sexual assault or female foeticide are not restricted to the poor and rural. It’s amazing to me how many women are a bit blinkered when it comes to this, or don’t see the patterns of gender violence in their own lives because they are privileged in other ways. At the very basic level, female foeticide causes there to be many more men than women just about everywhere. This cannot be safe or healthy for anyone, at any level. Not all of us can work in the villages or at the grassroots level. Nor am I advocating that women in corporate jobs give up their perks or salaries and become activists. But all of us can think, write and vote. And we should.

In related news, something rather scary happened recently. I was returning from a friend’s place late at night when a man on a motorbike started driving alongside me, leering through my window and trying to get to me to stop. I was scared because I realised that if he stopped his bike in front of my car, I would be forced to stop as well. So we participated in some kind of bizarre road race with him trying to overtake me and me trying to stay ahead. When he turned into my lane after me, I was shaken. I stopped outside my gate and honked madly. The security guard came running out and the man whirled about and rode off. I wonder what he had in mind and why he bothered to follow me up to there at all. Perhaps, if I lived in an independent house or in a darker lane, he would have waylaid me once I got out of the car. I am grateful to Ganesh, who has a thick moustache and quick feet, for saving my day. The next day, I bought a pepper spray can. Now, I’m primed for the people who will say ‘but, think about how much worse it could be’ or ‘be thankful you have the money to buy pepper spray’ or ‘you have a car? you have forfeited your right to complain about anything ever again’ — because that’s exactly the sort of argument some do offer. Which is bs of the highest order. I have every right to go out and not get followed. And no I don’t have to be okay with it because women in Saudi Arabia are so much worse off. And no, I don’t have to wait until after I get raped to protest.