International Womens Day Democracy is subversive, wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in his popular Democracy In America. It tends to uproot the existing structure. Because, in democracy there is something called rights. Rights are an entitlement, they are a legitimacy entitled to you by the State, and ensured and protected by the legal machinery. Rights challenge the status quo. Rights challenge unequal powers. And we are not comfortable with being challenged. That is why we dont like to give rights to the other. We dont like the idea of equality because it challenges our advantageous position. As a matter of fact, we are authoritarian by nature. For example, the father who smokes, telling his children not to smoke. In the US, when the womens movement began, they demanded the right to vote first. It was seen by the males as opening the Pandoras Box, because it would challenge patriarchy and male chauvinism. Ours is a society which still believes in the code of Manu, who said, Women and dolls are like flour. They are best kept in shape when beaten. The Manipuri society is no different in spirit in that it also believes in the idea that a woman of the rank of an IAS officer is an ornamental doll to be presented -by society- to whoever thinks he is entitled to her heart, mind and soul on the basis of a few cups of coffee or photographs together. It all presupposes an assumption -that women are brainless, incapable of decision and choices, are fickle, and all that. Empowering women is not about making them hold a torch in the cold night. It is about making them conscious of their rights and choices. And our comfortability with it. How comfortable we are with dissent and opposition is an index to our understanding of rights. You may say, we have a different value system -the attitudes, roles, norms and mores, power structures and strictures. True, we have. But society-culture is not a static. Society-culture is evolving. Society-culture is dynamic. With the passage of time, consciousness becomes refined. As well as, we all succumb to the influences of the external stimuli -especially the hegemonic stimuli of the materially advanced West. Soon, its inevitable that women become conscious. They will become conscious of their rights and choices. And when that happens, we shall be presented with the society of the America of 1940s, 50s or 60s.
Posted on: Sat, 08 Mar 2014 05:15:08 +0000
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