Constitution and the gender question

By Suresh Babu

While addressing to the nation on August 14, 1947 midnight, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India proclaimed that "Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny and now time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measures, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake life and freedom". But not less than three year after, Dr. B.R Ambedkar, the Drafting committee Chairman of the constitution warned to the nation on January 26, 1950 that "We are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we shall have equality and in social and economic life we ill have inequality….We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blowup the structure of political democracy which we have laboriously built up". The kind of contradiction the later wanted to address was very much in the everyday struggles of the oppressed groups in India in general and women in particular. As we know that, the post-independent India set out a different approach in dealing with the problems of inequality based on the universal principles enshrined in our constitution.

It is a fact that modern societies function based on certain ideological underpinnings, to overcome all sorts of social problems through social intervention, which are rather more philosophical in nature. In fact, to facilitate a vibrant civil society through participation; democratization of social system has been proved a pivotal force in this earth. Imprinting democratic value like liberty, equality and fraternity upon the state formation made Indian society, in all sense a modern one. Knowing the fact that, at the experiential level, these values were non-operational in the traditional societies because of the varieties of contradictions, perhaps the framers of our constitution wanted to make these values to be institutionalized for everyday practices thereby building up an egalitarian society. Therefore, every citizen of the nation supposed to negotiate these basic values critically and reflect upon it. If liberty is treated individuals as free agents and allowed to develop their own critical faculties, equality appeals for treating unequal as equals. Equality, for instance, at the formal level seems to be merely a temporal one. However, the substantive aspect of equality is very critical as it allows for questioning the historic and systematic contradictions of the system. In other words, a systematic improvement through reforms, equality can be realized. Finally, fraternity seems to be a risky concept and very difficult to get into be practiced because of two reason. Firstly, liberty and equality is meaningless unless one experience what is fraternity all about. This led to the second aspect that, it demands an enduring form of greater inter-subjective communicative action between citizens and thereby sharing great common good of the nation equally. Perhaps, it sounds the constitution is like social document instead of treating it merely a legal and political document.

Contradictory to this, the ground reality of the socio-cultural and political system in India shows a clumsy picture. There are reasons behind it as one looks at the very functions of democratic institutions and social systems over the last five decades or so. In addition to that, there are theories available to prove this fact that, the very notion of nation-state is itself an alien to us and could not grounded through our own culture and traditions. Protagonist of this movement would suggest that it is the failure of the very modernity of the western model, which could not succeed in building up an egalitarian society. The idea of democracy had to travel a long journey from the west to the other part of the world and then from past to the present, and again possibly to be rolled on to the future aspect of human life. It is in this context, democratization is not an end in itself, instead, a pray for traveling unusual trajectories of human life through contextualizing its specificities and thereby exploring new possibilities for greater participation of people in the process of governance.

Despite the fact that the women folk constitute nearly half of the population in our nation, they are more mostly dependent on men, are educationally backward and exploited a lot on many grounds. Many of them were pushed into the dark side of tradition as they seem to be carriers of culture and tradition for socializing the generation to come. This stereotype inward looking aspect of women perhaps has been sanctified by the tradition itself. Tradition was not the sight on which the question of gender revolved around instead; women should become the site in which traditions to be debated. The gender question, which the women's movement is trying to articulate, has been touching upon different shades of the world view of human society on this kind than merely narrowing down its space to gendered one. In this debate certainly certain structural factors like the issues of patriarchy, sexuality, and property are represented as the main yardstick to women empowerment.

Yet, there is an optimism, that may not be evolved from the languages of the mainstream academics or political parties; instead, it was basically from the toiled masses of our rural and tribal regions and their everyday protest against all kind of exploitation had underlined descriptions of the theories of reflexivity and criticality to challenge the male dominated social institutions and practices. As the protest is the only weapon before the weaker to be assertive, women's movement in India brought about a new paradigm shift geared upon gender questions under the theoretical rubric of new social movements by the academia in our times. In fact, these struggles did not yield any feminist articulation; but, the every struggle of the toiled masses itself invent new lessons for theorization and practices. This is what precisely the role of academia gets blurred or the new academic activism comes in.

There are certain possibilities unfolded before us that give a ray of hope for our future while looking at certain structural changes on the question of women empowerment. Certainly it deserves special attention made through the 73rd and 74th amendment of the constitution. Admittedly, almost one million women were elected in to the local self government bodies through this legislation. But sadly to be noticed that, it has not been taken into the dominant discourses of gender issues on the question of whether it really made any impact upon women's life conditions resulted into societal transformation. However, it is sure that, this had challenged the fixed ontologies of patriarchal mindset deep-rooted in Indian intelligentsia and political parties equally.

Yes, constitutional amendments are good and well, but a point here wanted to make however is that, one has to move ahead of it in order to change the structural locations of patriarchy. It can be possible through pursuing an enduring form of treating other gender as equal, somewhere the pioneer of sociology of the 19th century Emile Durkheim would always remind us for having a minimum level of resemblance.