A REPORT CARD

FOR MARCH 8TH, 2005

March 8th marks International Women’s Day, a day earmarked for raising consciousness about the absolute and relative women face the world over. Reflecting social and market realities, this very political day has been transformed into yet another marketing opportunity. We already see sales at stores marking the occasion, special TV programming that merely reinforces existing stereotypes about women and I am sure, soon, it will become what North America knows as a ‘Hallmark’ holiday!

I am dismayed to observe this transformation. MTV India for instance, celebrated women’s day by showcasing songs sung by female actors. It also does this on other days, and I wonder if the difference lies in the usual repertoire consisting of seamy, steamy remixes feature scantily clad girls and the March 8th-inspired playlist comprising clips where women are demure and domesticated? I caught one song as I surfed channels and although that is hardly evidence, that is what seemed to me to be the case. I don’t mean to single out this channel, because this is true across the board.

And then there are seminars organized on the occasion that are scarcely better. Nice, well-educated, professional ladies (like me) tell other nice professional ladies and a few gentlemen what we think of the status of women in one or another context. We are able to say at the end of the exercise that we were invited to speak. Maybe also that we met a few friends along the way. But what difference have we made? Arguably none.

So in this article, I want to travel around the region with you, highlighting for each of the seven countries (in alphabetical order), one persistent problem that women face and one significant improvement in our lives. Of course, this is intended to be indicative and not exhaustive or representative. And I am going to start with the good news in each case.

Bangladesh, which was famously described as ‘a basket case,’ is today known in development circles for its extremely successful micro-credit program, the Grameen Bank. 94% of Grameen Bank loans go to women as very small amounts of money that are repaid on a weekly basis. Women have been shown to be more scrupulous in their use of credit and in sticking to repayment schedules. The loan is conditional on the women promising to uphold 16 principles that include educating their children and forsaking dowry, and by insisting that they borrow in conjunction with four other women, it creates networks of self-supporting women. This model has been replicated in underprivileged communities worldwide, including some inner-city areas in the United States.

The bad news: acid attacks are a new form of violence against women that seem to have gained popularity first in Bangladesh. Punishment for rejection of their suits, jealousy or even for just leaving the house to earn a living, acid burns are a new weapon in the patriarchal arsenal.

The King of Bhutan is well-known for saying the development or progress lies in “Gross National Happiness.” On the face of it, the lot of Bhutanese women seems better than that of other South Asian women, within the limitations of a male-dominated and largely feudal society and a cautiously democratizing monarchy. The National Women’s Association of Bhutan which was founded in 1981 focuses on developmental activities like vocational training and access to credit. Curiously, this statement surfaces at many sites in an internet search for this organization’s website: “The association has organized annual beauty contests featuring traditional arts and culture, fostered training in health and hygiene, distributed yarn and vegetable seeds, and introduced smokeless stoves in villages.” I need say no more.

This very traditional model of women’s uplift is to be contrasted with the way in which traditional family structures are undermined by Bhutan’s Marriage Act (1981). In a region where women take on the identity and status of their husbands and where children take on the nationality and ethnicity of their father, this act deprived the foreign (read Nepali-origin) wives of Bhutanese men citizenship and evicted many of them along with their children.

Women’s activism in India is the good news for women in India, in my opinion. With a long history of political mobilization, the Indian women’s movement today comprises a plurality of politically diverse groups addressing a wide range of issues and engaging at several levels with each other, the state and society. From the more mainstream All-India Women’s Conference to the pioneering feminist journal Manushi to the militantly conservative Rashtriya Sevika Samiti, there is a women’s organization for every political perspective. Further, women’s grassroots activism is having a positive impact in many cases and the Mohalla Committees created in Mumbai/Bombay after the 1992-93 riots which helped prevent the outbreak of fresh communal violence after the many incidents of bomb blasts are an excellent example. Women’s leadership and engagement with policy also comes from their growing presence in industry, the services sector and research. Women activists in administration like Sheela Rani Chunkath whose name is synonymous with the drive to eradicate female infanticide in Tamil Nadu have also made a tremendous difference.

The good news about Indian women is easier to encapsulate than the bad. Having mentioned female infanticide, let me just stick to one issue: the declining sex ratio, that is, the decreasing number of women per thousand men. There are just 933 women for every 1000 men in India, according to the 2001 census. The rate is strikingly abysmal in Chandigarh (777) and Daman and Diu (710), and best in Kerala (1058) and Pondicherry (1001). Old chestnuts about correlating modernity and education with equitable chances of survival are proving wrong as improved communications reinforce age-old gender preferences and provide information about new technologies for sex determination and termination of pregnancies.

A long maritime history leaves the Maldives with a liberal outlook when it comes to marriage, divorce and remarriage and an average fifty-year old Maldivian woman is likely to have been married four times and borne seven children—without incurring social censure of the sort other South Asian societies reserve for women.

But here comes the bad news: what this means for the women is that they move from home to home with their children and no reliable means of support. In between marriages, they may actually be homeless. While literacy figures for Maldivian women are high by South Asian standards (96%), this does not translate into ability to earn an independent living as opportunities are few and may entail leaving the family behind and going to work on another atoll. Remarriage is no solution in itself, because the pressure to have another child is great and the result is poor reproductive health.

The traditional marginality of women in Nepali politics is now being undermined by the Maoist insurgency (and this is no endorsement of their methods). The Maoists claim that women make up one-third of their fighting force. Where women are combatants, it is likely that in addition to traditional roles (from cooking to sexual services), they are also entrusted with political and administrative tasks. They may or may not be privy to decision-making circles (usually not), but this is a step forward from complete exclusion and is likely to have long-term consequences for Nepalese society.

However, gains of any sort through the use of violence are ultimately unacceptable to many of us and in their overall impact, the negative outweighs the positive. Nepal’s response to the Maoist insurgency has increased the presence of its security forces throughout the country and women, as victims of sexual violence, become proxies for the ‘enemy’. This is not unique to Nepal. Similarly, as Bhutanese of Nepali origin have been expelled and have returned to refugee camps in Nepal, women in the camps have been vulnerable to sexual harassment, rape and other exploitation. Trafficking of women from Nepal to other parts of South Asia continues, with the efforts of NGOs to stop it being offset by the continuing collusion between some border agents and procurers.

Disruption of the democratic process, pressures from religious conservatives and a feudal social structure have not completely stymied either the Pakistani media’s willingness to speak its mind or the determination of its civil rights organizations to hold their own. In the last three decades, several organizations who make women’s problems their special interest, have been active at the grassroots in creating learning and employment opportunities for women. For example, Bedari in 1992 set up a crisis center for victims of gender-based violence and has since helped thousands of men and women. Another organization, Rozan, is focused on emotional health, gender and violence and among other programs, runs training programs for the police towards altering the way in which community issues get addressed.

As elsewhere in South Asia, the bad news is easier to find in Pakistan. Sometimes the situation is better on paper than in reality, but in Pakistan, the laws themselves seem to mitigate against equality for women. The Offence of Zina (Enforcement of Hudood) Ordinance, promulgated in 1979 and still in effect, severely curtails the rights of women. It criminalizes extra-marital sex, equating adultery, pre-marital sex and rape outside marriage (marital rape is not an offence anyway in most South Asian states). Raped women are unlikely to complain because they will be charged as guilty of having extra-marital sex and punished for it. Further, four adult Muslim males are needed to corroborate the word of one woman, so that the requirements of evidence are virtually impossible to meet.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Sri Lanka’s needs-oriented development strategy paid great dividends in the form of excellent social and physical quality of life indicators. Universal free education assures a high literacy rate and women in Sri Lanka enjoy good health facilities. Women have played prominent roles in politics and continue to be active in civil society, although they are not much better represented than their South Asian sisters.

More Sri Lankan women work abroad than men, and mostly as domestic help. Often they work in appalling, exploitative conditions but regardless, the remuneration makes this work desirable. Other countries have responded to the cases of sexual harassment and abuse by prohibiting women from seeking employment outside, but this curtails the freedom of adult women to choose their means of livelihood. Sri Lanka has sought to oversee and regulate the overseas employment process instead.

So, writing two days after International Women’s Day, 2005, what grade can we assign the states and societies of South Asia on the status of women? At best, an average ‘C’ where the ‘A’ efforts of individuals and groups in society offset the ‘F’ that the slow pace of structural change mandates. Will it change by publishing special issues of glossy magazines on the ten prominent women of a given year or by featuring only women-oriented films on a cinema channel? Unlikely. The glass may be seen as half-full or half-empty. What I fear with the more positive reading in this instance, is that it leads us to complacency. What I fear with the negative reading is that it sinks us into despair and apathy. Neither will help our daughters. Or our sons, who also have to live with the consequences of gender injustice.

Beyond complacency and apathy, then, I propose three small everyday steps whereby we can start making a difference right from where we are:
1. Consider people, not ideas or states: Where we would look at how a situation, an event or a policy affects a government, a country or even a set of ideas, we could practise asking, how will this affect real people living real lives?
2. Real people includes female people: Even as we consider how people are affected, we can make sure to ask about women who routinely get ignored because in the way we speak ‘men’ often includes ‘women’. Will women be safe? Will their workload increase disproportionately?
3. Am I a help or a hindrance?: If something is not right, if people are being hurt by it, each of us can either be part of the problem or the solution. Am I contributing money towards an organization that is making things worse (prolonging or precipitating a conflict, for instance)? Am I replicating the same values in my home? Am I able to offer a solution but postponing it till tomorrow?

International Women’s Day should not be the only day we think about women, any more than Human Rights Day is the only day we think about human rights. Buying flowers for women or giving awards to some women is not what this day is about: it is about renewing our commitment to a more just world for all of us.

Swarna Rajagopalan
Chennai, March 10, 2005