The Indian Constitution in 1947, declared equality as a Fundamental Right. It also guaranteed equal protection under the law, provided equal opportunities in public employment, and prohibited discrimination in public places. Equality was constructed as being accessible to all and did not take into account that each individual, being located within different social realities, was not similarly positioned to enact this concept. This rhetoric, which existed at the discursive level, did not affect women materially. The Indian Government’s commitment to equality was seriously challenged and critiqued in 1974 when Towards Equality: Report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India, a report on the status of women, was published. In 1971, the Ministry of Education and Social Welfare had appointed a committee “to examine the constitutional, legal and administrative provisions that have a bearing on the social status of women, their education and employment” and to assess the impact of these provisions. The research and it’s publication was also, partly, in response to a United Nations request to all countries to prepare reports on the status of women for International Women’s Year, scheduled for 1975.11 The report concluded by stating that women’s status had not improved since Independence, and is worth quoting at length:
Social structures, cultural norms, and value systems influence social expectations regarding the behavior of both men and women, and determine a woman’s role and her position in society to a great extent. The most important of these institutions are the systems of descent, family and kinship, marriage, and religious traditions: … The normative standards do not change at the same pace as changes in other forms of social organization brought about by such factors as technological and educational advance, urbanization, increasing populations.. .This gap explains the frequent failure of law and educational policy to produce the desired effect on social attitudes.
Social structures, cultural norms, and value systems influence social expectations regarding the behavior of both men and women, and determine a woman’s role and her position in society to a great extent. The most important of these institutions are the systems of descent, family and kinship, marriage, and religious traditions: … The normative standards do not change at the same pace as changes in other forms of social organization brought about by such factors as technological and educational advance, urbanization, increasing populations.. .This gap explains the frequent failure of law and educational policy to produce the desired effect on social attitudes.
In this report to the government of India, the members of the committee, concluded by recommending (amongst other things) “establishment of women’s panchayats at the village level with autonomy and resources of their own for the management and administration of welfare and development programs.” This issue was also problematised by numerous female legislators and feminist activists.
Even if women are given parity in the realm of the polity and the state, would the value systems and the cultural standards change? The system of “religious tradition” was mentioned as being a root cause that contributed to maintaining the cultural values, but no means were mentioned in the report that would systematically address ways to undo these value systems. If, as the report Towards Equality stated, a “woman’s role and her position in society” in India is determined by cultural values which in turn are defined by “religious traditions,” then we have to examine the nature of these religious institutions; interrogating the Hindu shastras will allow us to conclude that they are incredibly sex-ist and caste-ist in nature and unconstitutional.
Even if women are given parity in the realm of the polity and the state, would the value systems and the cultural standards change? The system of “religious tradition” was mentioned as being a root cause that contributed to maintaining the cultural values, but no means were mentioned in the report that would systematically address ways to undo these value systems. If, as the report Towards Equality stated, a “woman’s role and her position in society” in India is determined by cultural values which in turn are defined by “religious traditions,” then we have to examine the nature of these religious institutions; interrogating the Hindu shastras will allow us to conclude that they are incredibly sex-ist and caste-ist in nature and unconstitutional.
How we, that is, women – eat, breathe, dress and conduct ourselves and the kinds of labor that we are allowed to perform – are codified and seen as intrinsic to the Hindu shastras. The realm of religion, indeed, is the privilege of men. And indeed, it would not be salacious to argue that self-identifying Brahmin men and those who function in the religious institutions and are the so-called custodians of Hindu dharma are mostly myopic; they are unable to distinguish between what constitutes “revealed knowledge” about Existence and Brahman and Creation, and temporal gender-caste based social modes of being. What prevents the government of India (which is also a signatory to CEDAW) from slapping legal cases against these religious institutions as they propound unconstitutional rhetoric that, in all respects, violates our Fundamental Rights that are embedded within the Indian Constitution?
(Towards Equality: Report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India. New Delhi: Govt. of India, Ministry of Education & Social Welfare, Dept. of Social Welfare, 1974.)
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