May Day, of course, has a history dating back to the last decade of the 19th century and has been commemorated in parts of India for several decades. Women's Day has been around since the second decade of the 20th century. But the latter appears to have floated into the Indian middle class-oriented media's ken in the last decade and a half, at roughly the same time as Hallmark and Archies made Valentine's Day trendy and educated women started entering the white-collar workforce.
For the media as well as marketing-savvy consumer companies and institutions, International Women's Day is a wonderful opportunity. The former gets to fill ad-starved newsprint and airtime with earnest articles and talk shows that can be divided into two types of discourses. One, the terrible lot of the majority of Indian women (with or without the familiar statistics). Two, heavy-handed self-congratulatory ones on how Indian women (mostly rich or upper middle-class ones) are now holding their own and/or "storming male bastions" (Chanda Kochhar, Shikha Sharma, Naina Lal Kidwai, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw and Vinita Bali can reliably be expected to be named). Both types of discussions will deplore the way women are objectified in our advertisements, TV serials or movies (Bollywood being a favoured whipping boy).
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These are all valid points and worth reiterating. But here's the problem. Gender inequality remains the key social problem in upwardly mobile India. It is an issue that needs to be at the forefront of the collective conscience on a regular basis and not just on a designated day or when a crime prompts headline-grabbing protests at India Gate. In that sense, the events and stories that are planned around this day in the routine daily and weekly news meetings may be well meant. But they suggest no less a tokenism than people who worship an abstract notion of "Shakti" in all its myriad forms.
Reinforcing this somewhat perfunctory approach are the consumer marketing companies and service providers. They are, of course, overtly cynical, leveraging the occasion to push their goods and services. The week before Women's Day can be guaranteed to see blizzards of price-offs, special offerings, from (seriously) "kiss-proof lipstick", to mobile phones, TVs, laptops and kitchenware, and freebies and bogofs at bars, restaurants and hotels (one Gurgaon-based hotel repackaged the Women's Day offer for Holi).
Meanwhile, the maids toil in middle-class homes, women continue to be harassed on public transport and there appears to be no diminution in crimes against women on or around Women's Day.
This is not to suggest that there are no serious groups fighting for women's rights. But the collective initiative is sorely missing, and the way Women's Day is celebrated reduces the issue of women's rights to one of mawkish sentimentality that hardly helps the cause. The same sentiment informed the actions after the December 16, 2012 rape. Politicians talked in the familiar, pointless idioms of populism: funds, banks, freebies, segregation in public services and so on. Acts and laws are passed but the practical, constructive focus on enhancing women's safety - sensitising our rampantly sexist police forces or revamping the transport system, to suggest two examples - is about as visible as the Dodo.
And so it is with labour. One of the more amusing annual rituals that the Left Front government followed in over three decades in power in West Bengal was the observance of the May 1 holiday (and the ultra-left Trinamool Congress continues to do). Every year, in the very best of Marxist tradition, the glories of The Worker were duly upheld with earnest pomp and circumstance even as most of the state's denizens revelled in a day's holiday, as they still do, at the start of the somnolent summer season.
The reason this was (and is) amusing is that the celebrations were in no way a reflection of the actual situation of the working class in this supposed Marxist paradise (that is, if you omit the minuscule minority of pampered organised sector labour). Did workers have access to toilets and drinking water? No, not even in the giant Hindustan Motors factory that gave one industrial group decades of profits as a monopoly. Good lighting and ventilation in factories? A brief visit to Kalyani or Howrah would disabuse anyone of that notion. A vibrant job market? Job mobility? The state's reputation as an investment destination to avoid was well established by the early eighties. But never mind all that. Maybe we should be grateful that for at least one day a year, the Worker and the Woman are remembered at all.