Sunday, December 30, 2001		Books

Women, Gender Equality and the State
by Sadhna Arya. Deep & Deep Publications, New Delhi.

FEMINIST scholarship has provided some of the most enduring and comprehensive frameworks for understanding the nature of the modern state. It is ironical that the power relationships which inform society, and in their aggregate form constitute the state, also get reflected in the courses which are taught in most of our universities. Courses on Indian politics, for example, can be offered in our universities with little or no analysis of its patriarchal character. Such "trivialities" are often accommodated in optional courses, where unsuspecting students see them as marginal to the standard referent, that they have been taught compulsorily.

In her book, "Women, Gender Equality and the State", Sadhna Arya, who teaches political science in Delhi University, and is a core member of Saheli, brings out the centrality of gender and patriarchy in understanding the political processes and state in India. Both these concepts — gender and patriarchy — provide a framework for the analysis of power, and the manner in which it unfolds in practices of rule, creating deeply entrenched hierarchies of social categories and relationships. Notions of equality, justice and development, get enmeshed in the intricate seams of these hierarchies, having wide ranging ramifications for what it means to be a woman.

It is these intricacies which Sadhna Arya sets out to unravel through the exploration of the manner in which the patriarchal character of the Indian state has unfolded over the past five decades. It is significant that the patriarchal character makes itself most apparent in precisely those areas where the Indian state has sought to lay claims to speaking for the people. The legal and developmental discourses in the period immediately before and following independence were replete with the notion of building a nation which could hold its own as a sovereign entity. This sovereignty was to be reflective of the cumulative capacities of the people for self-determination.

The legal framework and developmental policies, however, which enunciated these aspirations and capacities of the people, as voiced by the state, reflected and reinforced the hierarchies which it purportedly set out to efface. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of women, the terms of whose inclusion within the emergent political community, were laid down by the legal-constitutional and developmental discourses.

The premises of these discourses were perhaps laid down by the colonial encounter which saw the articulation of the emblematic "Indian woman" and the synchronous deepening to the structures of patriarchy. The incorporation of women as equal members of the political community and their simultaneous embedding within the national-community and cultural-religious community, as sources of cohesion and continuity, had important ramifications for the articulation of women’s subjectivities as citizens.

The approach of the post-independence Indian state to the "women’s question", demonstrates the "ambivalences" which informed women’s citizenship owing to the atavistic nature of women’s relationship with the nation-state. Nowhere is this brought out more starkly than in the provisions of the Indian Constitution which, following the principles of liberal equality, removed sex disqualifications and disabilities by providing various fundamental rights to equality and freedom, and offered special protection against exploitation. At the same time, through Articles 25 to 30 in the fundamental rights itself, the Constitution accepted the idea of the religious-cultural community as bearers of special rights, assuring religious communities "cultural and educational rights", enabling them to gosvern themselves by their own "personal laws". These articles in the fundamental rights have introduced a situation where the rights of women as individuals with equal rights under Articles 14 to 24, in the same chapter on fundamental rights, are compromised. The right to freedom of religion embodied in Articles 25 to 28, as interpreted and legislated in the form of personal laws, deny equality to women in personal, economic, sexual, social, educational and cultural matters. Thus, with the inclusion of the community as a relevant collective unit of social and political life of the nation, the extent to which gender equality could actually be realised has been circumscribed by the boundaries of the community.

A survey of development plans from independence shows that within the overarching framework of the state building the nation, the former claims to represent the diverse aspirations in the political community. The discourse on development subsumes these diverse aspirations within the overwhelming goal of serving the national interest, which in turn gets defined largely by an exclusionary dialogue. The manner in which women figure in the discourse on development, depends largely then, on what this exclusionary dialogue perceives as constituting women’s interests. Public policies and plan perspectives relating to women, reflect and reinforce an ideology which locates women’s agencies firmly within national-religious-cultural boundaries. This strengthens the grounds for a gendered citizenship, whereby women are received as members of the national-political on the basis of their socially useful roles as mothers, submerging them thereby in an inviolable biological determinism. These gendered inclusions and exclusions, have continued to inform the notion of female citizenship, determining the economic, social and political choices available to women. Furthermore, by looking at women as victims for upliftment or as "weak" sections of the population, public policies and development plans, reinforce the patriarchal ideology of the state. Such articulations of inadequacy either explained in terms of biological determinism, or as historically emergent, have had important ramifications for the manner in which women have experienced their membership within the political community.

Much of the legal-political framework of women’s "emancipation" and "upliftment" had started taking shape in the colonial period itself. The history of this upliftment was intertwined with the national struggle, and every significant event marking this upliftment manifested and was circumscribed by the specific concerns of the national movement at that moment of time, and the nature of resistance being offered to colonial rule. From 1937, when the Congress assumed responsibilities of government in the provinces, and the National Planning Committee was instituted with Jawaharlal Nehru as its chairman to make recommendations on various aspects of "national life and work", through the various five year plans, to the National Policy for the Empowerment of Women, 2001, the social, economic and legal status of Indian women has wavered precariously between the shifting paradigms of the women’s question from "upliftment" to "equality’"

It is significant that the 1937 perspective on the terms of women’s membership within the political community endorsed the 1931 fundamental rights resolution of the Congress and lay stress on the removal of gender disqualifications in the exercise of political rights and what it called "civic duties and obligations". While certain aspects of the report, including the unprecedented radical analysis of "women’s work", and the idea of economic liberty, trod new grounds, the fact that claims to gender equality were made on the basis of the "special" contribution women made to the nation and community as its "reproducers" and "sustainers", showed a reluctance to confront "traditions" This ambivalence in women’s membership in the political community was reflected over the years in the various welfare programmes. Even when there was a shift in various plans and programmes in response to women’s struggles from the perception of women as "targets" of change and passive recipients to women as active participants and agents of development, it took more than six decades for the government to realise that the notion of "empowerment" had been misconceived. The idea that women had to change and that this change would bring in its wake social transformation, worked with the notion of the state as a neutral arbiter and facilitator, and not as constitutive of structures which reinforced exclusion and marginalisation of women in society. It was not until the National Perspective Plan for Women 1988-2000 that the government’s admission of its failures, the reasons for it and the possible remedies were articulated.

Again, the plan perspective could not shake off its paternalism and declared its intentions of enabling women to "catch up with the mainstream by 2000 AD".. Its uncritical acceptance of the "mainstream" and the means of catching up with it with a more rigorous implementation of existing legislation, has been attacked by women’s groups.

A significant aspect of women’s membership within the political community is also her legal status as an individual. The anomalies in the legal status of women’s citizenship have been brought out remarkably well by the author. Roughly around the same time as the National Planning Committee was articulating women’s equal status within the emergent political community, women’s appeals to remove the "disabilities" of "Indian women" in law were also being voiced. In 1934, for example, the All India Women’s Conference (AIWC) urged the government to appoint an all-India commission to consider the promulgation of a new law which removed legal inequalities of women, especially in areas of inheritance, marriage and the guardianship of children. The question, however, as in the case of female franchise and reserved seats for women both before and after independence, lingered in the shadows of matters of "national" concern and attempts to resolve the legal status of Indian women proved desultory.

By January, 1941, when B.N.Rau was appointed chairman of a committee of eminent lawyers to study Hindu law and to look at the various bills on the Hindu woman’s property rights, male opinion on reforms manifested symptoms ranging from apprehension of an impending "havoc" in the (Hindu) household to recourse to religious sanctity and national pride to sustain the existing system. In the years after independence, the consensus over women’s legal status as citizens has no longer been a matter of complacent acceptance. Women’s movements have brought to public attention, the violence and indignity which has informed women’s dependent status within family and society. Arya focusses considerable attention on indicating the biases which inhere in laws pertaining to women’s status in the "family", her claims to inheritance of property and her children, as well as in the various laws which concern themselves with violence against women, including rape, marital rape, sati, dowry deaths, female foeticide, etc. She brings out in her discussions, the state’s perception of violence and women and, significantly, what exactly does the state perceive as violated when a woman is murdered as in sati. The state’s perception of women and the nature of their membership within the political community has been problematised extremely well.

In a remarkable revelation, the author brings out how certain laws like the law against adultery not only address themselves exclusively to the redressal of male (husband’s) grievance, they enforce the notion of women as a property of the husband and it is the latter which the law seeks to protect and preserve.

The book has a broad historical sweep, and a theoretical rigour sustained with empirical details. The notes and references at the end of each chapter as well as the detailed bibliography are useful, especially for those seeking to carve out areas of specialisation in women’s studies. Years of activism and teaching have given the arguments in the book a persuasive tenacity, and the ability to reach out and communicate with even those who are not familiar with issues and concepts associated with feminist studies.