Month: August 2021

When the State plans laws to punish parents who cross the two-child limit, let’s be clear about who pays the highest price. It’s women, the poorest and most marginalised

PREMIUMRepresentational image. (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

What’s not to love about a chota parivaar, that quintessential Indian family of parents and their two children? Fewer children mean better maternal health, more judicious use of family resources, improved nutrition, higher education outcomes, and a healthier planet, already groaning under the weight of 7.9 billion humans.

And, yet, when the State plans laws to punish parents who cross the two-child limit, let’s be clear about who pays the highest price. It’s women, the poorest and most marginalised.

As Uttar Pradesh (UP) fine-tunes its draft population bill listing out disincentives for those who have more than two children — and thank you for the clarification that having two daughters is not a “deficiency” that grants wiggle room for a son — as many as 12 states already have policies that impose a slew of restrictions, from participating in panchayat elections to disqualification from government schemes.

Also Read | A pathbreaking ruling on equality

Look at just one of these states: When Haryana placed restrictions on candidates for the 2015 panchayat elections, 68% of Dalit women and 50% of all women were instantly disenfranchised, according to advocate Indira Jaising who challenged the move in the Supreme Court. Any move to cut women out of public life, where their participation is already circumscribed, must be resisted.

Women in India lack the agency to decide the most intimate aspects of their lives: Who they marry, when they get married, when they have children, and how many children they have. Yet, even with this limited agency, more are opting to use contraception. The latest round of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) shows the highest use of contraception is among Muslim women (49%), compared to just 42.8% for Hindu women.

But NFHS also tells us of “unmet” needs in contraception — women who want to delay pregnancy (or not have one at all), but lack access to contraceptives. Nearly 13% of married women have this unmet need. And at 18%, UP has the second-highest unmet need for family planning, after Bihar at 21%.

The failure to provide family planning to women lies with the State. It cannot now seek to impose penalties on those who have more children than they planned because they could not access contraception. Women cannot pay the price for State failure.

But perhaps concerns over India’s burgeoning population — we will overtake China by 2027, says the United Nations — are misplaced. India’s growth trajectory is already slowing with decadal growth down from 21.5% in 1991-2001 to 17.7% during 2001-2011, according to the Census. Given our young demographic, the graph will keep climbing before it stabilises around 2050, says Poonam Muttreja of the Population Foundation of India.

Coercive policies haven’t worked in countries such as China, which saw a surge in sex-selective abortions. We have a lesson from India too. In 1977, following forced sterilisation in what was Sanjay Gandhi’s pet project during the Emergency, Indira Gandhi found herself voted out of power.

Namita Bhandare writes on gender

The views expressed are personal

Behind the glitter of the medals lies a story of personal grit. Poverty and marginalisation cut across gender, but women face special discrimination that ranges from fighting to be born to being allowed to play a sport

Weightlifter Mirabai Chanu arrives at the airport in New Delhi, on July 26. (File photo)

The first went to Saikhom Mirabai Chanu who set a new Olympic record with a successful 115 kg lift in clean and jerk. The second went to Lovlina Borgohain who, in her first Olympics, is now the third Indian boxer to ensure a podium finish, after Vijender Singh in 2008 and Mary Kom in 2012. PV Sindhu hauled in the third to become the first Indian woman to win two individual medals at an Olympics. At the time of writing, golfer Aditi Ashok could well bring home a silver.

And the Indian women’s hockey team made it to the semi-finals for the first time ever. Despite their 1-2 loss to Argentina, they fought hard against Great Britain in the match for the bronze, but unfortunately, lost 3-4.

Silver or bronze don’t matter as much as the distance. Chanu’s mother sold samosas on the street. Borgohain’s father worked at a tea garden. Women’s hockey team captain Rani Rampal’s mother was a domestic worker, her father, a cart-puller.

There’s another distance to consider. It’s the 21-year-long one from the 2000 Sydney Olympics when 25-year-old weightlifter Karnam Malleshwari first brought home a bronze. Of the five individual medals won so far this Olympics, women have won three.

Women’s hockey has come a long way from 2010, when charges of sexual harassment against then coach, MK Kaushik, led to the revelation that women players were expected to wash their coach’s clothes.

Now, states such as Odisha have set up the infrastructure to tap into India’s sporting culture for men and women, providing opportunities to scores of athletes and also reaping dividends for India.

Today’s women athletes also have the luxury of an earlier generation of role models: Kunjarani Devi, MC Mary Kom, Anju Bobby George and PT Usha.

Behind the glitter of the medals lies a story of personal grit. Poverty and marginalisation cut across gender, but women face special discrimination that ranges from fighting to be born to being allowed to play a sport. “Women face so many restrictions, from their mobility and the way that they dress to the social pressures that prevent girls from taking up sport, particularly contact sport,” says former national-level volleyball player Kanta Singh, now, country programme manager at United Nations Women.

There is change within families too, says Singh. Cash awards, government jobs and recognition have led more families to encourage their daughters to play.

Perhaps the biggest change can be seen among the women themselves. Sport, says Sharda Ugra who has spent most of her career writing on men’s sport, has given women freedom, power and confidence. It “makes us brave,” Rani Rampal told Ugra.

It also sends a message. “People in my village now think it’s okay to want their daughters admitted into a good college in another place,” goalkeeper Savita Punia told Ugra. “They tell my parents, Savita can go so far away, to other countries, other states, why can’t we send our daughters to another district?” Now, that’s a good distance to cover.

Namita Bhandare writes on gender

The views expressed are personal

Simone Biles might have just made it that much easier for young women everywhere. Her decision to pull out of the Olympics tells girls that they matter, their voices are important, and that it’s okay to put themselves first

Biles’s decision to pull out of the Olympics does more than shine a welcome spotlight on mental health (AP)

In Simone Biles’s decision to quit, lies a crucial lesson for young women everywhere. It comprises a single, two-letter word: No.

Biles’s decision to pull out of the Olympics does more than shine a welcome spotlight on mental health. By prioritising her own well-being over every tribal call for team and nation, she has reclaimed the power of saying “no”.

In a month when the Norwegian women’s handball team has been fined for refusing to play in bikini bottoms and choosing shorts, like male players, the word stands out like a flashing beacon particularly in cultures and societies like ours where good girls don’t say no; where they are brought up to never complain, never ask for anything for themselves; where they put family first and eat last and the least. From their birth, girls are indoctrinated into submitting to the unquestionable authority of patriarchs: Fathers, brothers, husbands, and fathers-in-law. Please “adjust” is what they are told when they are pulled out of school, made to do housework unlike their privileged brothers, or, find themselves in abusive marriages.

Even the slightest deviation cannot be tolerated. And, so, this past week, in Savreji Kharg, Uttar Pradesh, 17-year-old Neha Paswan was beaten to death and then strung from a bridge, allegedly, by her grandfather and uncles, for saying no to changing out of the pair of jeans that she had chosen to wear for a religious ritual.

Earlier in July, a 19-year-old woman in Alirajpur, Madhya Pradesh, was beaten up and hung from a tree for refusing to return to a violent marriage. The main accused are her father and two cousins.

In Dhahod, Gujarat, in June, two girls, 13 and 16, were thrashed by a group of 15 men in an incident that was videotaped. Their crime? Talking on a mobile phone.

These incidents are part of the every day normal for young girls who cannot be allowed to cross male-ordained Lakshman rekhas. This is a world where mobile phones are out of reach for women of a certain impressionable age, lest they do the unthinkable: Strike friendships with boys, break caste and gotra endogamy, fall in love, perhaps, run away and elope.

This view of the hapless young woman, incapable of making her own decisions, who must be protected by her father and brothers, her husband and father-in-law, her village elders, and even the laws of the land and the courts is pervasive. It’s what leads to a 23-year-old woman’s father convincing a judge of the Kerala High Court that his daughter could not have possibly converted and become Hadiya of her own free will.

It’s what has led to the enactment of so-called “love jihad” laws in four Bharatiya Janata Party-run states despite the National Investigation Agency telling the Supreme Court that there is zero evidence of a “conspiracy” to lure and entrap innocent Hindu girls into marriage, and conversion, by Muslim men.

In this normal world, a 19-year-old adult Hindu woman and a Muslim man arrive at the Ballia district magistrate’s office to marry under the Special Marriage Act, 1954. The marriage is thwarted on the basis of a complaint by the woman’s father. For good measure, members of the Karni Sena group are on standby to physically prevent the marriage. Like old Hindi movies, the police turn up in the last scene, find no evidence of love jihad, but arrest the man anyway, on charges of kidnapping. The woman is handed over to her father and, a day later, issues a statement saying she was being tricked by the man.

What kind of law subverts the agency of women who are guaranteed the status of equal citizens by the Constitution of India? Worse, perhaps, is the silence of Opposition parties and, even, the higher judiciary. It is a silence borne of the certainty of majoritarian public support in favour of “controlling” daughters. It’s a silence validated by the data that tells us that even in urban India, 93% of all marriages that take place continue to be arranged marriages.

But Simone Biles also tells us that saying no carries a price. For putting herself above her team, there has been applause for sure, most critically from her own team, but there has been no shortage of critics, including the odious Piers Morgan and a troll lynch mob that hides bravely behind anonymous handles.

Women should not have to pay such a high price for asserting themselves. But they do. It is absurd that a woman who speaks up about workplace sexual harassment should be dragged to court by a boss whose entitled predatory behaviour was an “open secret” for over two decades. It is shameful that a woman in a rape trial should have not just her identity revealed in the court judgment, but also details of her private life. Women who protest in public are shamed in public, as students at Banaras Hindu University were when they marched against a molestation incident on campus and were ticked off by their vice-chancellor Girish Chandra Tripathi that they had “sold a woman’s modesty and brought dishonour to the university”. Launched to protest against discriminatory curfew hours in college hostels, Pinjra Tod founders Natasha Narwal and Devangana Kalita were arrested in May 2020 under anti-terrorism laws and released 13 months later on court orders.

Simone Biles might have just made it that much easier for young women everywhere. Her decision tells girls that they matter, their voices are important, and that it’s okay to put themselves first. It reclaims the first word that every girl must learn because it is raw and powerful and has the capacity to bring about change.

Namita Bhandare writes on gender

The views expressed are personal