Walter Fernandes
One more Naga woman’s modesty was violated near Delhi on the night of July 27. Once again some fundamentalists are planning to repeat what they did in March after an attack on a woman from the Northeast. They circulated a leaflet and a statement on the internet that women from the Northeast are themselves to blame for the attacks because they are Christians and wear loose clothes which are not in consonance with the Indian culture. That provokes men to attack them. At first they claimed that Christian criminals had attacked women from the Northeast. When the man arrested for the crime turned out to be of another religion they changed tracks and circulated this leaflet
That reminded one of another incident in 1999. During his visit to Gujarat on 10th January 1999, right in the middle of attacks on Christians, the then Prime Minister Mr A. B. Vajpayee said that the country needed a debate on conversions. Reacting to this statement an editorial in The Times of India on 26th January, 1999 said that such a demand was equivalent to a rapist demanding a debate on the clothes worn by women. That is what the fundamentalist forces did in March and will probably repeat again.
It is not the first such incident in the national capital. Two years ago the Delhi police had prepared a dress code for women from the Northeast. It was withdrawn after protests from the students of the region because of its assumption that North Eastern women were to blame for the attacks. Police records show that around 40 percent of all women molested in the capital region are from the Northeast. Many of them are attacked while returning from work late at night. The attack in March was around midnight when the woman was going to the bus stand to receive her sister who was returning from work. The fact that many women have to travel late at night should have prompted the police to provide additional security. Instead, they shifted the blame to women.
These incidents and reaction show the attitude of our society towards women. If they are attacked it is their fault. If a family breaks up it is because the woman was not a good housewife. That attitude was visible in the Parliament during the discussion on the Women’s Reservation Bill on March 8. This bill has been hanging fire for over a decade because men from most parties oppose the idea of women getting real power and ruling the country. A few women here and there may be elected. They should be happy with such tokenism and should not demand real power.
That thinking is not confined to the Hindi belt. Women’s status in the Northeast particularly among the tribes may be better than in North India but they have very little political power. Even in Meghalaya where all three tribes are matrilineal, their higher status does not extend to the political sphere. The last Legislative Assembly of Meghalaya had three women members. At present there is one. Some like Nagaland have never elected a woman and their number is negligible in the remaining states.
Political power is only a symbol of women’s status in a society. For example, a study done in the first decade of the 21st century showed that 64 percent of women in Assam accepted wife beating as a husband’s right. One has seen boys from the Northeast studying in Delhi going around with girls of other communities. But the same boys used their power as officials of their students’ union to ask girls who were friendly with boys of other communities to go back home because it was against tribal culture.
This is the context of women’s demand to be treated as full citizens of the country and of their community. But those who have power refuse to share it with the powerless. The fundamentalists like those who circulated the scurrilous leaflet use religion to justify it. In their thinking only North Indian upper caste Hindus are fully Indian. The rest are linked to this “Mainstream” in different degrees depending on their caste, ethnic group and religion. The people of the Northeast, especially the Mongoloid stock are second class citizens. That turns women of the region into third class citizens. If they are Christians they belong to an even lower category. They have no rights, so if they are molested it is their fault and they should not become emotional and complain about it.
During the first International Women’s Decade in 1975, Tarzi Vitaci, a Sri Lankan thinker wrote in Newsweek that the view that women are emotional and not rational was only one facet of the overall attitude towards people whom the powerful treated as inferior. For example, the newspapers that speak of women as weak and emotional are also the ones that present the people of the Third World as inferior. They report “big crowds” joining demonstrations in the West But Asia and Africa only have “unruly mobs” that are not fully rational and do not have a right to demonstrate particularly against the rich countries.
The above leaflet betrays the same attitude towards women in general and those of the Northeast in particular. It exhorts the people of the Northeast to learn “Indian” culture and not provoke and tempt men. In the fundamentalist worldview, men have all the liberty they need but women should follow the “cultural norms” laid down by men. Every year on Valentine’s Day one sees young men wearing blue jeans asking women to give up western customs and wear only Indian dress. Many groups in the Northeast want girls and women to go back to their traditional dress but make no such demand from men. The leaflet belongs to the same school of thought.
It is time one recognised everyone’s right to equality. The women’s reservation bill is only one step towards it. It will not achieve equality by itself. Many more changes have to come for our society to live up to the constitutional mandate of gender, caste and religious equality. The solution lies in a movement towards such a just society and not in justifying attacks on women, on Dalits and on tribals in the name of religion or race. Is the Northeast ready for it?
The author is Director, North Eastern Social Research Centre, Guwahati.
