One year of Modi government: The gender equality report card

How do you assess a government’s performance of one year on solving a problem that is older than time? Really, one’s best answer is speculative. And when that problem is gender discrimination, one is in fact grasping at straws to find something that can be assessed honestly and meaningfully.
 
To make an optimistic start: It is possible to be impressed by the decisive manner in which the Prime Minister has pronounced his views and launched a major campaign to save the girl child. 
 
The Prime Minister’s Independence Day Speech last year touched the right chord when he asked: “As parents, have we ever asked our son as to what he is doing and where he is going? If every parent decides to impose as many restrictions on the sons as have been imposed on our daughters, try to do this with your sons, try to ask such questions of them.” In his style, he spoke then about sex-selective abortion and the declining sex ratio, and the need to end male child preference. He pointed to the number of medals won by women at the Commonwealth Games. To give credit where it is due, this may be the most attention gender equality has got from the Independence Day speech.
 
In January 2015, on National Girl Child Day, the Prime Minister launched the wordy ‘Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao’ scheme. The scheme will focus attention on 100 districts with low child sex ratio. The campaign is described as ‘multi-sectoral’ and includes elements that resemble Tamil Nadu’s Cradle Baby Scheme as well as a postal savings scheme for upto two daughters in a family. It is noteworthy that the scheme also lists “What can we all do as individuals” and this includes: celebrating the birth of the girl child, oppose the mentality of ‘bojh’ and ‘paraya dhan’ and “Mind his language and be sensitive to women and girls.” The Tamil Nadu government’s efforts to deal with the same problem have paid off but over a longer period, and sustaining the same level of commitment (as in resources) has been an issue. The intention is salutary, but that is all that is available to assess for now.
 
Another significant aspect of the Prime Minister’s backing of this scheme was his message to Haryana’s Khaps that they should back this campaign if they wanted their quest for reservation to be taken seriously. This makes sex determination and female foeticide political issues in a way they had not been, giving them greater weight. Whether this was an appropriate ‘deal’ to make is an entirely different debate.
 
But look at the things that the Prime Minister’s ministerial, party and coalition colleagues have been saying, starting with the Minister for Women and Child Development. She came under fire for suggesting the legalisation of sex determination tests. Others have made more outrageous statements. From victim-blaming to advocating that Hindu women bear five children there seems to be a contest to put misogyny on display—fastest, loudest, most outrageous. This should not come as a surprise to anyone, given the track record of these individuals.
 
However, it was a disappointment that the Modi Council of Ministers came nowhere near gender parity. Today, there are six women in a Cabinet of 26, one woman minister of state with independent charge and one woman minister of state. That makes just eight women members in a 64-member Council—not a stellar tally. It is true that the women Cabinet ministers hold significant portfolios, but still one-eighth does not signify a serious commitment to gender equality.
 
Other questions linger in my mind. Why do we see or hear so little from the Minister for External Affairs, one of the most senior women in the Cabinet, even though international relations have clearly been a Modi priority? I wonder about the Prime Minister’s paternalistic style—where like a parent, in a very familiar style, he states the problems, explicates it, offers a solution or judgment and moves on, not entertaining discussion—and what it means for his pronouncements on gender equality.
 
Then, what is the process by which the government has chosen this particular package of schemes for the ‘Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao’ campaign? The Cradle Baby Scheme saved baby girls but rather than undermine patriarchy, it reinforced it—almost saying, we know you don’t want the girls, it’s okay, we’ll take them. There are also questions about what happened to the girls. There is a history to policies and schemes ostensibly meant to promote gender equality and there is nothing to suggest the existence of a consultative process that takes lessons and critiques into account. Are we doomed to repeat local mistakes on a national scale?
 
Reports from Gujarat in 2002 and Kandhamal a few years later have copiously documented the use of sexual violence and gender-based violence to intimidate communities. Set aside the specifics of the Gujarat case for a single instant, is there any sign that this government understands that emergencies place women at special risk? We have not necessarily seen that built into conflict or disaster response, and with policies that increase the rate of climate change, we will only see more disasters.
 
History will offer us a better evaluation of which post-independence government did the most for gender equality—and chances are we will not have much to choose from. The women’s movement has consistently sought legislation and legal reform to further its twin agendas of a gender violence-free world and of gender equality in public and private spaces. For government, too, legislation—however ill-considered—is a way of staking its claim to being a champion of women’s rights. Government schemes abound, and so do their critiques. We have seen gender equality rhetoric take several incarnations, seen cutting edge ideas become development orthodoxy and adopted and adapted each other’s initiatives. But patriarchy remains, barely dented.
 
Perhaps one-year, five-year, even ten-year report cards are not the answer. Governments will only tackle the most superficial layer of the problem. We have yet to see a government that is willing to get on its hands and knees and talk gender equality at the grassroots. That would be truly destabilizing to any political system. It would take investment in capacity-building within political parties, engagement with people’s movements, short-term quotas for women at different levels (especially on party lists) and a willingness to nominate and appoint women, among other things. It would take conversations on every nukkad and thinnai. It would take more time than one year or one term. It would take more people than can sit in Parliament. 
 
But does this mean this government is off the hook? Perish the thought. In the coming year, I would like to see more women in the cabinet; to me, this would signify a genuine commitment. I would like to see more critical engagement with the states and civil society to improve existing schemes, both legacy schemes and the ones this government starts; this would tell me that government means to make a difference and not just a checklist of ‘stuff we’ve done.’ I would like to see an intellectual engagement with patriarchy deeper and broader than a father-figure’s occasional, unilateral pronouncements on the world as it is and should be. It would mean that all of us chose to go beyond demanding protection for “our” women (as if women are property) to attitudinal change in the way we approach gender-based violence, which is very hard work. This would take the pressure off the government to come up with one band-aid scheme after another, and it would be up to them to take that opportunity to work for lasting change. In five years, let this government become a serious contender to be the government having contributed the most to furthering gender equality. We would all benefit.
 
For now, here is my first year grade for the Modi government on the question of gender equality: Not sufficient data to suggest there is more to this right now than good rhetoric. And good rhetoric is commonplace enough in politics to count for nothing.

Swarna Rajagopalan is a political scientist and the founder of Prajnya