so much for empowering women
a woman named reshma used to do our dishes at home a few years ago. she would also sweep and dust the place for a sum of rs 1500 a month. i don’t know her last name, despite the fact that she was with us for over three years. what i do know is that she came from maharashtra’s smallest city, panhala, once capital of the maratha state and famous for its fort — the only one where, according to a few blogs, chhatrapati shivaji spent the most amount of time outside his childhood homes.
what i did know was that reshma was punctual, efficient, hard-working, and funny when she chose to speak, which was often. on the days she didn’t speak, i knew it was because she had been beaten by her husband.
as his second wife (and the younger one), she said it was her feisty nature that provoked him. he had two children with his first wife, who refused to work, and two with reshma, who was forced to work because there simply wasn’t enough money to go around. he couldn’t stand the fact that she helped provide for the family, apparently, and accused her of being ‘too proud’ for her own good. his anger would then compel him to attack her.
i tried, time and again, to convince reshma to report her husband to the police. i offered to invite them to my home, and have her speak to them there instead. i offered to call ngos that deal with domestic violence. reshma refused every offer. “my husband doesn’t care about the police,” she said. “he will get away within minutes. what will i do then?” my reassurances meant nothing to her.
her solution, at the time, was to bear the abuse until her children grew up and took her away. panhala offered no job opportunities, she added, so her mother couldn’t afford to keep her there. she didn’t want to disrupt her children’s education either.
i realized, after a point, that reshma simply had nothing to look forward to. stretching before her were years of dishwashing, the annual week-long trip to her mother’s home, and the dim hope that her children would study enough to land a job that could help them support her. if she chose not to work at someone’s home doing the dishes, she simply didn’t have the option of doing anything else. nothing that didn’t involve physical labour was open to her as a means of livelihood. she refused to accept charity, because she said she wanted to put her children through school without any help. i admired her enormously.
there are millions of reshmas across the country, doing hard labour on the streets or at homes like yours and mine, who have been completely ignored by governments that are supposedly there to take care of them too. these women have no job security, no medical insurance, and no access to public services that so many of us take for granted. the worst thing is how they have no help when it comes to domestic violence. how can they, when we live in a country where domestic violence is barely acknowledged? or, when we live in a country where the minister for women and child development says that marital rape — a very real issue in a country where millions of women simply don’t have a voice — cannot be applied to the ‘indian context’. what does that ‘indian context’ even mean? how do factors like poverty, illiteracy and religious beliefs (three specific excuses used by the minister herself) condone the fact that women have to suffer in silence?
there doesn’t seem to be any genuine attempt, by successive governments, to empower women either. politicians continue to debate the pros and cons of the women’s reservation bill, which proposes 33 per cent reservation for women in the lok sabha and assemblies. the central government says it is working towards evolving consensus and hopes it will succeed at the earliest. then again, the upa government tried to evolve consensus on the issue for 10 years. the bill was passed by the rajya sabha in 2010 but was stuck in the lok sabha on account of stiff resistance by a number of parties.
i remember asking reshma if more empowered women in politics would make any difference to her. she laughed for a few seconds, then asked, “will they manage to take decisions without asking their husbands for permission?” i haven’t thought of a reply yet.
what i did know was that reshma was punctual, efficient, hard-working, and funny when she chose to speak, which was often. on the days she didn’t speak, i knew it was because she had been beaten by her husband.
as his second wife (and the younger one), she said it was her feisty nature that provoked him. he had two children with his first wife, who refused to work, and two with reshma, who was forced to work because there simply wasn’t enough money to go around. he couldn’t stand the fact that she helped provide for the family, apparently, and accused her of being ‘too proud’ for her own good. his anger would then compel him to attack her.
i tried, time and again, to convince reshma to report her husband to the police. i offered to invite them to my home, and have her speak to them there instead. i offered to call ngos that deal with domestic violence. reshma refused every offer. “my husband doesn’t care about the police,” she said. “he will get away within minutes. what will i do then?” my reassurances meant nothing to her.
her solution, at the time, was to bear the abuse until her children grew up and took her away. panhala offered no job opportunities, she added, so her mother couldn’t afford to keep her there. she didn’t want to disrupt her children’s education either.
i realized, after a point, that reshma simply had nothing to look forward to. stretching before her were years of dishwashing, the annual week-long trip to her mother’s home, and the dim hope that her children would study enough to land a job that could help them support her. if she chose not to work at someone’s home doing the dishes, she simply didn’t have the option of doing anything else. nothing that didn’t involve physical labour was open to her as a means of livelihood. she refused to accept charity, because she said she wanted to put her children through school without any help. i admired her enormously.
there are millions of reshmas across the country, doing hard labour on the streets or at homes like yours and mine, who have been completely ignored by governments that are supposedly there to take care of them too. these women have no job security, no medical insurance, and no access to public services that so many of us take for granted. the worst thing is how they have no help when it comes to domestic violence. how can they, when we live in a country where domestic violence is barely acknowledged? or, when we live in a country where the minister for women and child development says that marital rape — a very real issue in a country where millions of women simply don’t have a voice — cannot be applied to the ‘indian context’. what does that ‘indian context’ even mean? how do factors like poverty, illiteracy and religious beliefs (three specific excuses used by the minister herself) condone the fact that women have to suffer in silence?
there doesn’t seem to be any genuine attempt, by successive governments, to empower women either. politicians continue to debate the pros and cons of the women’s reservation bill, which proposes 33 per cent reservation for women in the lok sabha and assemblies. the central government says it is working towards evolving consensus and hopes it will succeed at the earliest. then again, the upa government tried to evolve consensus on the issue for 10 years. the bill was passed by the rajya sabha in 2010 but was stuck in the lok sabha on account of stiff resistance by a number of parties.
i remember asking reshma if more empowered women in politics would make any difference to her. she laughed for a few seconds, then asked, “will they manage to take decisions without asking their husbands for permission?” i haven’t thought of a reply yet.
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