Women outside the comfort zone SWOT
So Ramveer Bhatti, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) state vice-president, wants to know what Varnika Kundu was doing driving around on her own at midnight. Okay, but, as Ms Kundu legitimately asked, what was his party colleague’s son, Vikas Barala, and his pal doing out on a midnight jaunt?
Implicit in Mr Bhatti’s comment is the assumption that Ms Kundu was up to some hanky-panky, or had irresponsible parents, as he suggested in a disastrous attempt to clarify thereafter. But he was strangely incurious about Barala Junior & Co. We know they didn’t chase Ms Kundu 7 km to tie a rakhi, though she miraculously became his “sister” when confronted with the police. But we also know that Mr Bhatti’s query would have been considered pertinent by many Indians across the gender and political divide. Within the accepted paradigms of behaviour in a country that aspires to be modern, women aren’t supposed to be out alone at night. That’s not just for the good reason that there are predatory men out there; such conduct falls outside a designated comfort zone of chauvinism.
No one would question men for the following: Enjoying a drink in a bar, out on a date, driving home after a late night shift, taking a cab home after some heavy drinking. Did you miss the sottovoce disapproval — from men and women — when women victims were discovered to be indulging in similar activities?
No matter how much BJP’s Chandigarh MP (Member of Parliament) Kirron Kher asserts a woman’s right to be out on her own at night, Indians of both genders suffer the ingrained paternalism that prescribes behaviour exclusively for women. College administrations offer dress advisories for women (focusing on “modesty”) but never recommend moderating behaviour for men. Delhi’s woman chief minister asks why girls should be “adventurous” when a young TV reporter is found shot dead in her car after driving home in the small hours. In Pune, a female Shiv Sena corporator sparks a campaign against — no kidding—provocative shop mannequins (the male ones with artificial six-packs don’t provoke improper thoughts, apparently).
The implicit message in this double standard is that it’s somehow understandable if women who behave in a nonprescribed manner are harassed. She’s asking for it, the cliché goes, though you wonder which woman would ask to be harassed or raped, or, for that matter, why so many minor girls, who do not indulge in any of the above, should become victims too.
Now, Ms Kundu is decidedly out of the box. She is a DJ, a rare profession for women in the big cities, let alone in a conservative town like Chandigarh (so we can guess why she was out late; Barala fils, however, is yet to explain his late-night roving). Importantly, she also represents a growing cohort of women who define themselves on their own terms. She has chosen to dispense with the veil of anonymity — a standard legal protection for victims of sexual crime in India. She wasn’t the criminal, she pointed out, Barala Jr enjoys that distinction though Daddy’s contacts helped him avoid a night in the slammer.
Ms Kundu says she wants to name and shame in solidarity with all victims of sexual harassment, a visible, vocal ambassador of an inconvenient truth about Indian society. Her recent forebear in this is the late Suzette Jordan, gang-raped in Kolkata in 2013 and excoriated by the state’s female chief minister for visiting a bar. Ms Jordan not only declined to mask her identity, she became a crusader for women’s rights in the short time left to her (she died in 2015).
Their sisters were visible on several cold days and nights on Raj Path after December 2012, expressing collective outrage at the rape and murder of a paramedic student out on a date with a male friend and the innate bigotry that makes India one of the most unsafe places for women. Poignantly, the victim’s father declared his daughter’s name, asserting that she, too, was not the criminal.
Those protests attracted global headlines and forced through tougher rape and sexual harassment laws. Still, you understand the depth of the problem when a President’s son, whose owes his rise in politics entirely to Baba (who emphatically does not share his views), sneeringly dismissed the protestors as the “dented, painted” brigade. In his narrow, Neanderthal world, women wearing makeup (the “denting, painting” allusion) are disqualified from being taken seriously.
Welcome, all, to the new India, just about to turn 70, where women head companies, pilot aircraft, win international tournaments, join the police force, will soon participate in combat and form a visibly growing proportion of the white-collar world. As they earn their own incomes, they will also learn to draw their powers from their own capabilities, not from fathers, husbands or sons. The Pink Chaddi campaign that enveloped Pramod Muthalik of the Ram Sene whose goons attacked women in Mangalore pubs and the #aintnoCinderella handle that’s mocking Mr Bhatti now are part of that new-found confident defiance.
We are but a tiny proportion of women who can enjoy these rights — and we highlight more than ever the urgent need for faster, deeper economic reform.