The polls are here – now is the time to fabricate politically correct statements. So the BJP prime minister-in-waiting Atal Bihari Vajpayee pledges to hasten in the Women’s Reservation Bill and goes on to add, “Rapists should be hanged.” Don’t ask why this man never came out with such radical assertions all these years. For pretty much the same reason, PR Kumarmangalam, when cornered on a TV show about his party creating an issue of Sonia Gandhi’s Italian roots, comes out with a patriarchal defence “...bahu akhir ghar ki hoti hai (the bride, after all belongs to the family).”
These were endeavours by two high-profile leaders of a right-wing ultra-jingoist party at making politically correct statements. Look closely at the two rights taken together and you will know both are wrong somewhere. Make no mistake – when a party strives to equate religious identity with nationalist fervour, you are sure to come across such isolated “politically correct statements” that are downright rubbish when seen in a proper backdrop. Especially, given the fact that public memory is so pathetically short.
Few would recollect that two years back Sushma Swaraj herself came up with prehistoric solecisms to the modern-day conundrums confronting women. The country was exhorted that in search of ideals and models it must recede into obscure mythology. After all, without an antediluvian milieu the party, which aspires to capture New Delhi come elections, cannot sell the notion that since “God has endowed woman with distinct physical attributes, her body being designed to fulfil specific functions, she cannot equate herself with man.”
The assertion of Swaraj, the BJP representative at the Beijing conference, reeked of the primordial ideology preached unabashedly by her party. Her views on feminism in a convolutedly titled article “Women should be an equal partner of development and not violently confront men” bore ominous portents since it was a de facto endorsement of what may be the ethos this March onwards. The ostensibly animalist overtones of her primer in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh mouthpece Panchjanya reduced women to a creature sans intellect, divinely ordained to perform a specific biological role, give birth to children and satiate man’s carnal desires.
Now, someone might argue, the BJP has shed its anti-Muslim garb. Others may suggest it has distanced itself from the RSS-Bajrang Dal-Vishwa Hindu Parishad combine. On the face of it, both contentions are certainly true. But, don’t forget these are times to be politically correct. This may be the time to bash the “pseudo-secularists,” but that does not mean the party is no longer steeped in obscurantist nihilism. Why else would one launch a homepage on the Internet on one hand, and yet believe that a “man” whose existence is a myth cannot have a birthplace (Ayodhya)? Then again, it is essentially the RSS-BD-VHP saffron cadres who are going to battle it out for the BJP at the grassroots level.
These purveyors of philistine bigotry are yet to comprehend and acknowledge that feminism is not a preposterous man versus woman fight but a struggle between women and the existing social order. This is precisely where the catch lies. For how can a ‘parivaar’ tomtomming its raison d’etre as religion admit that they themselves belong to the same social order.
It is vital one understands that religion originated from the primitive human’s helplessness in the struggle against nature, and later on, upon the emergence of antagonistic class societies, from the vulnerability in the face of social forces which dominated human life. Religion did become a stark manifestation of the masses’ servile attitude. Rulers and preachers manipulated it to glorify poverty and falsify reality. Humility, charity, patience, forgiveness, tolerance – not the worse of traits – were justified. The deprived were taught to toil lifelong so that they could enjoy happiness in heaven. The catechisms expounded by religion were to be accepted without investigation, to be gulped down like pills without mastication. Some Marxist axioms are true ideed.
In antagonistic class societies religion was rooted in class oppression, unfair social relations, poverty and deprivation from property. By ascribing solutions of day-to-day problems to being in the other world, religion strengthened and perpetuated man’s dependence on external forces. This pushed him to passiveness, arresting his creative potential. As man advanced further in terms of self-dependence, producing more than he could consume, there naturally rose a class that could reap the benefits of the majority’s labour. This system of exploitation of man by man virtually kept society divided ever since.
Once this system of exploitation became firmly entrenched, women as a whole like men were subjected to domination by those owning the means of production. But there was a difference, since to possess women was to possess unpaid workers whose entire labour could be appropriated without any resistance from their husbands or fathers.
Such a society based on the exploitation of man by man created and imposed the ideology and culture which upheled its values and ensured its survival. The economic exploitation of women, their transformation into mere producers with no rights required the creation of a corresponding ideology and culture, together with an educational system to pass them on.
The convenient tool at hand was always religion. The moot point was to keep women in ignorance. Since science was always man’s exclusive domain, to keep women away from science was to prevent them from realising that social mores were created as a function of certain specific interests and that it was possible to change society. As religion found its fertile soil among women, rites and cremonies became the main vehicles for the transmission of society’s concept of women’s inferiority, and their subservience to men. So countless myths were germinated with the express intention of destroying women’s sense of initiative and compelling them into passivity.
With men adopting secrarian views in all matters pertaining to religion right from ancient times, history has witnessed the devouring attitude of religion. All religions were founded by social rebels, but once established these very religions curbed subsequent generations of social rebels. Social orders built on the plinths of religion and obscurantism have always felt threatened by dynamic, flexible and rational ways of thinking.
Hence people like Vajpayee and others of his disposition today feel the imperative need to, at least, sound so politically correct. After all, we all know what they are from the inside. Isn’t the volte face on Vajpayee’s interview on the Net enough indication? Why was it withdrawn? Swaraj’s article, to the best of one’s knowledge, was not on the Internet, or else we know what might have happened to it as well. The point is not what the BJP wants us to assume it stands for, but what these rulers-to-be actually believe in expounding: religion.
It is not that other political parties are those of saints, much as they acclaim themselves to be when asked about their views on religion and women. Sharad Yadav and Mulayam Singh Yadav proved in Parliament what they would have been doing had they not been politicians – milching cows, what else? Our Leftists too have not made us believe that the emancipation of women is not an act of charity, the result of humanitarian or compassionate attitude, but that it is a fundamental necessity.
We have seen all kinds of votebanks: Hindu and minority voters, OBC and non-OBC voters, youth and not-so-young voters. Now, they are out to woo 50 per cent of the country’s population promising 33 per cent of the seats. And when two-thirds of women eligible to vote cannot even read and write, it makes them the right votebank to cash in. Keeping in mind the fact that this is a God-fearing electoral segment, it gives credence to the fact why Vajpayee’s party is wholeheartedly pursuing women.
To go back to women, it is equally imperative that they steer clear of a party whose gospel is religious and sexist chauvinism, and wipe themselves clean of the rust of obscurantist antiquity before it corrodes and wastes to nothing their struggle for a rightful place in society. What is required for the nation is undiluted statesmanship, uncompromising moral courage and aggressive leadership to take this obscurantist bull by its horns. This election can, in all likelihood, will not settle that.
