Women and the Future of Democracy
Alongside reworking on new social philosophy of solidarity and justice, and identifying new modes of discrimination, such as among the vulnerable among the dominant groups, the future of politics in India will also depend on locating and nurturing new agents of change who can contribute to reorganizing social life by identifying the hidden and not so visible hegemonic aspects of the everyday life. Women and the independence of their agency will be of great significance. There are already signposts of their emergence as a separate constituency, alongside religious and caste groups, for electoral mobilization. This will hold promise not only as the new element of democracy but also the capacity to democratize older actors and the modes of their mobilization. Indian democracy will also have to face up to new questions in the zone of emotions, intimacy, and the private, which have not generally remained at the core of what we understood by the imagination of democracy. Two such public debates that came to the core under the current regime was that of the demand for the prohibition of liquor and the problem of growing sexual harassment and violence against women.
Women as Free Spirits
With the successful implementation of prohibition of liquor in Bihar soon after Nitish Kumar was appointed as the chief minister, not only has there been a break on growing alcoholism and a liquor-propelled political economy but more importantly, what one is getting to witness in our democracy is the creation of women as a distinct constituency, with distinct demands of their own. Women have been active as voters all through post-independence history but rarely did they have distinct demands of their own, and more importantly, they were considered to be voting more around the preference of their families and male counterparts. It is perhaps for the first time that with a string of states, such as Kerala prohibiting liquor and Tamil Nadu considering the possibility that women are making their presence felt as a distinct constituency with demands and a viewpoint of their own. This would have a long-term impact on the way we understand the configurations of electoral politics alongside caste, religion, and region.
Electoral politics was dominated by caste and religious configurations, and women were a sub-set subsumed under these larger social grids. Women were known to raise and mobilize issues such as price rise or occasionally led social struggles against sexual violence, which did not necessarily turn into the electoral constituency to impact the voting patterns. Even if women’s issues were addressed as a tokenism, they did not assume the proportion that they seem to be taking in the current phase.
In Bihar, with the implementation of prohibition causing a revenue loss of up to `3,000 crore, women have put down a stamp of long-term impact on electoral politics by emerging as a relatively stable vote bank that would influence electoral outcomes in a decisive manner. This process began in Andhra Pradesh in 1992 with women leading the way and forcing the then government led by Telugu Desam Party under N.T.Rama Rao’s leadership to prohibit liquor. Women then had linked consumption of liquor with distress, debt, and domestic violence. They promised to vote for a party that would take this bold move. However, after a couple of years, prohibition was lifted, and the voice women had gathered frittered away.
This process, in a somewhat quiet manner, is underway in places like Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, which have been sites of various kinds of violence against women. In Haryana, if it’s the khap panchayats, in UP women were the worst affected during communal riots. Here, women began to speak across caste and religion and began to realize that either way, they were the worst affected. Khap’s order of rape as a punishment for inter-caste marriages or social boycott as legitimate punishments makes women belonging to both Hindu and Muslim communities the first victims of organized violence.35 If this ‘silent revolution’ fructifies, it would initiate a new kind of a dialogue on the religion and caste-based mobilizations and the way much of it is linked to the idea of community honour hinging on social and sexual control of women.
This process is also visible in the way when the Supreme Court order asked for women to be allowed into the Shani temple, and the way RSS and other social organizations have supported this demand demonstrates the importance of not only the presence of women in public spaces but their critical role in electoral calculations. The issue of the entry of women in Shani temple would have some impact on an impending demand for a Uniform Civil Code (UCC) in the days to come. It would be interesting to wait and watch if women, especially from Muslim communities, would play a larger and distinct role in the way the debate on UCC will play out this time around, different from the days of Shah Bano.36 If women from across religions are able to muster a voice of their own, distinct from their community leaders, this might impact not only the way religion will come to be perceived in public spaces but also begin to raise larger questions about the interface between religion and gender cutting across religious divides, which in turn would have important fallout for the possibility of communal polarisation and the way we understand caste in times to come.
Caste and Gender
In fact, as part of anti-caste mobilization, both Jyothiba Phule and Ambedkar always emphasized the inextricable link between caste and gender. As we had mentioned earlier too, both felt that much of caste is actually about gendered practices in order to gain control over the sexuality of the so-called lower caste women. Phule began school for both caste-Hindu women as well as Dalit and referred to both as shudraatishudra.37 Ambedkar too drew this link in arguing that it is only women and Dalits who experience untouchability—Dalits in being spatially and socially ostracised and women during their menstrual cycles—are physically segregated from the rest of the family members.38
It is this vision that can now be possibly recovered from women emerging as a distinct constituency in electoral dynamics. For women’s issues to be foregrounded, it is imperative that caste and religious control is undermined. This tussle that was partial and sporadic might now assume more substantive and long-term proportions. Women as voters now cannot be delimited to mere populist measures of offering sewing machines and colour television sets but raise more substantive political-economy demands as a distinct electoral constituency. Alongside this, the impending issue of 33% reservation for women in parliament might assume more serious proportions, which would only further add a fillip to this process of a distinct politics. This, however, cannot be construed as a revolutionary step that is going to set aside caste and religion but what it can do is raise new issues and bring forth new frames as to how and why women of all castes, religions, and regions become victims of physical and sexual violence in cases of conflicts (one of which in the context of Dera Sacha Sauda, we discussed in the previous section). There is a distinct structure that works across these social configurations. This perspective in itself is a step forward in Indian democracy.
Love and Sexual Harassment
The issue of sexual harassment is perhaps a constant under all political regimes. While there is no urban crime such as mugging that we often see in European cities, what remains unacceptably high in urban centres and public spaces in India is sexual violence against women. As a counter to the constant presence of sexual harassment in educational institutions, a few young women took the novel step of putting up the names of the alleged accused. They put up the names on the internet and in public domain for everyone to access. Those who put up the list referred to this as a method to ‘name and shame’ the accused in order to abate violence against women. Those who opposed such methods referred to it as ‘vigilante justice’.
The new discourse of ‘naming and shaming’ had taken the social media and institutions by surprise, but it also seems to have very soon met with a dead end.39 Those who took the initiative to muster a list of the accused refuse to answer the question ‘what if’ there are the names of those who were not involved in harassment, and therefore, the question of evidence remains unanswered. Those questioning the list, including a section of known feminists, questioned the veracity of such a method of ‘n
aming and shaming’, and equated it with public lynching. One could further say, it amounts to a justification of collateral damage like those who suffer without conviction in much of the ‘war on terror’.40 Those who brought out the list, fine-tuned it, and brought out not only just a list of the accused but planned to bring out the nature of complaints, expand the meaning of harassment, and call for a public debate on how fear gets instilled in institutional spaces. While those opposed to the list at best were interested in how else to fine tune the institutional response and protect the already existing mechanisms that have been devised, such as the Gender Sensitisation Committee Against Sexual Harassment (GSCASH) in JNU.
The stalemate, as it continued, sidestepped the question as to whether this debate can at all be settled without debating the larger context. Admittedly, there is an institutional crisis as much as there is a crisis of compassion and concern, in general, and not merely within the ambit of sexuality. One possible reason why this debate has raised the dust but not thrown any new light could be because the feminists who were raising the issue of harassment could have well worked within the very framework in which the accused seem to have defended themselves.
It’s not without coincidence that neither has paused to ask what type of relations we are searching for. What would be a deeper idea of love wherein claims and counterclaims—jostling for space—cut both ways without any easy resolution but continue to nurture deeper affections, attachments, and an idea of longing and belongingness! It includes an idea of sharing and looking out for each other mutually, and a sense of fondness beyond a mere sense of ownership, control, or self-glorification. The debate on harassment cannot be meaningfully continued without an accompanying debate on ideas of love, affection, and togetherness.
‘Fear of the Fall’
Are we collectively inhabiting in times best typified by what in another context Slavoj Zizek refers to as the ‘fear of falling in love’? What we instead have, according to him, is ‘precisely love without the fall, without falling in love, without this totally unpredictable dramatic encounter. And that’s what I find very sad. I think that today we are simply more and more afraid of this event or encounters. You encounter something which is totally contingent but the result of it if you accept it as an event is that your entire life changes.’41
The ‘fall’ requires losing one’s own self, it is an event of ‘pure contingency’. An event that refuses to remain contained but seamlessly spills over into a process that again as Alain Badiou in another context refers to as the ‘fidelity to the event’. Where the subjects, in this case, the lovers ‘interpret and explore an event without denying its eventual nature.’42 However, one needs to recognize that a deep relation ‘seems to hold together without guarantees or secure knowledge. It is unfolded or constructed through a series of interventions or inquiries. To take part in such a process is to believe, or guess, that there is something there to be unpacked or unfolded’.43 How do we counter power and fear with love and compassion?
In an age of ‘hyper-recognition, anxiety, and anomie’, the politics of opposition, including those of the feminist variant, can possibly spread by internalizing these very features. The marked absence of debate on love and attachment by those questioning, as much as those being questioned, is a point worth pondering over. The courage to question ourselves as to what sustains love is necessary to understand what propels harassment and fear.
There are no easy answers, but to suffer from a pervasive sense of the ‘fear of the fall’ is only to prevent oneself from even beginning to look for the answers. It is complex because the relationship between love and fear is not one of the straight lines but rather a crooked one. As Bertrand Russel in his celebrated book on the Conquest of Happiness notes that it is intriguing that those who feel loved find love and those who suffer the ‘lack’ only further distance themselves and continue to suffer abject neglect. The Lacanian idea of lack is the lack of very ‘being’, lacking the very ability to desire.44 Politics without desire is to inscribe death or passivity over life. We have collectively succeeded in interrogating the ability of power to subsume love but failed to trust the ability of love in overcoming power.
The new political spaces we inhabit have an immense symbolic potential to re-signify our practices and create their ‘uncanny double’. They implode from within and therein lays our failure to move beyond the stalemates we encounter. The crisis of gendered spaces is as much about our collective inability to love as it is about identifying power. Hundred years of the process of secularisation of social and personal relations, as Zygmunt Bauman observes, in his celebrated work titled In Search of Politics, has led to a situation of ending up only with contingent commitments and ad hoc bonds.
The best we could achieve is the contractualization of relations, as a template for free and equal relations. However, while it takes two to enter a contract, it takes, as Bauman points out, only one to break it. The pervasive sense of uncertainty and insecurity within which we strike intimate relations has made them ‘free’ and porous. This has to be the collective context to debate how best to carry the fight against fear and harassment and to evaluate if the method of ‘naming and shaming’ cumulatively aids or debilitatingly blocks our search for the alternatives.
Anxiety, Anger, Anomie: Mobilizing Generation Next
Something in modern life continues to exist without political articulation. While we try to subsume it under the known categories of caste, class, and gender, there is a pervasive excess that spills over and bleeds into everyday life. News and dailies routinely carry stories of child sex abuse, road rage, rape, murderous attacks, and suicides that are often reduced to individual psyche without an explanation in our collective existence. It could well be that the cause and effect of some of these phenomena seem to have become too circular to offer an explanation. Some of them that are relatively more visible include anxiety, boredom, alienation, anomie, stress, anger, and loneliness. These are related to issues of class, caste, and gender, as they are with urbanization, individuation, migration, and secularization but cannot be collapsed into them, and therefore need a novel political articulation to keep politics as an avocation relevant for the generation next.
Boredom has become so omnipresent that it stares at us from the billboards of advertisers, selling anything from chocolate to condoms. It is the sheer repetitiveness of the everyday life from your daily chores to work and art and literature that it seems time has come to a standstill.45 There is a shrinking of interests and manufacture of an unmistakable ‘one-dimensional man’ that makes most interactions a routine or a protocol that burdens you rather than offering a sense of refreshment or refinement. One way is to come to terms with the repetitiveness of the everyday, perhaps as Gandhi signified in his use of the ‘charkha’ that was not only to make us economically self-reliant but also socially self-sufficient. In order to be socially sustainable, we need to ask ourselves if we can escape the repetitive activities of the social order or in what ways we can refashion our social ecology in order to not feel repetitiveness as sheer boredom. Politics for the next generation has to involve what seem like deeply personal and bio-political issues, but in actuality, have a more intricate interface with other processes. For instance, boredom has a connection with the changing nature of work in the modern industry including information technology; it has links to shrinking interests and the gap between an emboldened imagination of intense relations and their elusive nature in the lived reality. Intensity and ideas of intimacy, in turn, are related to ‘liberation’ of women from the private, from tradition and the ritualistic socialization. Liberation of women in the earlier generation was problematized with its relation to sexuality, and we need to today link it to issues of intimacy, and love (as we discussed in the previous essay). Foregrounding issues of intimacy, emotions, and love will perhaps allow us to reframe the issue of gender as we understand it, and it will also provide us new issues that have escaped a more explicit political mobilization. W
hat would that mobilization look like?
Space and Technology
Closely linked is the deep sense of alienation in modern life that is a sense of organicity. Time seems to collapse into serialized moments each unto itself, refusing a sense of continuity and belongingness. Technology as visual and social media is intrusive and breaks down our relationship to the collective into a mediated experience and into titbits of information that we routinely feed on, only to move on to the next. While urban spaces inhabited with mediated interactions feel synthetic, there is no easy alternative in celebrating the local spaces and face-to-face interactions as being more authentic or more ethical; instead, they suffocate. Be it villages, suburbs, or small towns, life in the moffusil today seems burdened by imposed hierarchies of collective identities. The irreducible choice is between that ‘of hierarchical collectives of the local and facelessness of the global’. In what meaningful way can spatiality and space be politicized for a new kind of ‘spatial politics’? Can moffusils be a distinct space for political location, including the feelings of being left behind, the burden of socially intrusive locality, repetitiveness, and life without a spirit of exploring the new and the unknown, among many other such issues? These are linked to the way these mofussil-centric spatial imaginations have become structured after globalization. Moffusils at one point in time were centres of trade and culture; today they suffer from a pervasive sense of having been ‘left behind’. While this has been mobilized by capital for bulldozing urbanization, including claims by former Finance Minister Mr P.Chidambarm, that by 2050, 80% of Indian population will inhabit the cities, in what another way can we politicize this sense of moffusils being the backwaters of social life?
India After Modi Page 22