March 8, International Women's Day - a date that rolls around every year to remind the world about and keep the women's movement alive, a homage of over a century of international struggle to secure suffrage, equality, the dismantling of patriarchal constraints.
This year the theme is #PledgeForParity and the International Women's Day website coaxes people to pledge to help women and girls achieve their ambitions, challenge conscious and unconscious bias, call for gender-balanced leadership, value women and men's contributions equally, and create inclusive, flexible cultures.
At the time of writing, the pledge has received an unimpressive 46,904 pledges and has been open for a fortnight.
Mere AcknowledgementMy mailbox however tells a different story-filled with hard to ignore cold emails from the public relations firms on corporate offers, pledges, advertorial text messages about sales, free doughnuts, spa vouchers, making it evident it's not just the Archies and Hallmarks of the world which are interested in capitalising the day to either push brand building agendas or to make buck.
However, among the mass, there are no commitments to improve wage gaps, improve diversity in leadership rungs or create egalitarian springboards to provide fair opportunity. The universally acknowledged male-tilted archaicness of businesses finds no promise of remedy.
Possibly, this is because there is no real threat or challenge. Society, as history, demonstrates time and again, is not comfortable with challenges to its hegemonic norms. So why isn't it making us Indians uncomfortable?
On Sunday, women protesting against the city governor's ban on the annual Women's Day march were pelted with rubber bullets in Istanbul. The only thing that comes close to this in India, unrelated to Women's Day, however, are the women who on Mahashivratri on Monday marched to enter the Nashik Shiva temple which only permits men on its premises.
Indian mainstream discourse has completely depoliticised Women's Day, reduced it to a celebratory event, a mere acknowledgment, focused instead on celebrating a handful of highly successful women, Yes, women are to be celebrated, and most importantly must learn to celebrate themselves, but the entire 'diamond in the rough' approach, the hailing of a few undoubtedly very successful and very worthy women, reeks of a refusal to remedy the real problem and ask the question- why aren't there more?
Selective Sight
Simone de Beauvoir said, "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." Experiences shape women-a nexus of class, caste and gender in India create conditions that make women themselves a heterogeneous lot, but what is common is the pervasive susceptibility, in variant degrees, of course, to rape, domestic abuse, sexual abuse, structural bias and discrimination, foeticide and infanticide, acid attacks, and dowry deaths, to name a few.
Yet, we only briefly talk about women like the Adivasi school teacher turned political leader from Bastar, Soni Sori, who was recently attacked with acid and has been an outspoken activist against sexual assault, police brutality and an advocate of the Adivasi voice, or the nameless multitude of women who face difficult conditions sole based on the genetic lottery for 365 days a year.
Instead, we choose to wish women, "Happy Women's Day", a statement seeped in the hypocrisy of our blindness or selective sight, look at a few women, largely uncontroversial public figures, who made it. Broke the glass ceiling. And pretend that this is so much better rather than looking at dismantling that very glass ceiling- shattering it for once and for all, and dismantling the very need to have a day dedicated to women.
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