Gender equality has never been a significant campaign issue for any party. The conspicuous silence on a problem that has earned India global notoriety, even though it concerns half the country's population, is a telling comment by itself. None of the major party manifestos says much, if anything, about narrowing the gender gap - barring a stray mention of special provisions for the education of girls by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).
As for the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP's) prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, his attitude borders on the creepy. For one, there is his statement that women in Gujarat were underweight because they liked to diet. Then there's the enduring mystery of Snoopgate, on which he has chosen to be as opaque as he has been on his 2002 record. The third is his decision to acknowledge the existence of a wife, despite being in politics for decades.
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Little is known about this good lady, since she apparently departed for a long pilgrimage after Mr Modi's nomination form revealed her name. We are given to understand that she is simple, hard-working and pious, the standard image for Indian women as prescribed by conservative society. It is hard not to feel sorry for her, given the extreme and sometimes prurient media attention to which she will be subject (when she returns from her religious rigours) as a result of her estranged husband's curious decision.
Now, Mr Modi may not be a chauvinist of course but, taken together, these three incidents certainly induce a degree of discomfort. At the very least, they suggest that a progressive agenda of gender equality is unlikely to figure in his vaunted "Development" agenda in a major way.
But why blame Mr Modi. All parties have fielded women candidates, but none of them has a noticeable agenda for women. As worrying is that not one officer of that ever-vigilant watchdog, the Election Commission, thought fit to pull up the Samajwadi Party's Mulayam Singh Yadav for his infamous endorsement of rape. "Boys make mistakes," he is reported to have said. Rape is a "mistake"? His loyal lieutenant Abu Azmi added his mite by saying even a woman is guilty in a rape.
Do these statements not qualify as hate speeches "promoting enmity" on a par with a communal remark? If Sharad Pawar can be hauled up for what was patently a joke when he told voters to vote several times, on grounds that he was encouraging crime, how were Mulayam Singh Yadav's and Abu Azmi's comments any different? If such remarks do not figure in the Election Commission's rules governing campaign conduct, they should be incorporated immediately.
Now, to FDI. This is the first election campaign since the mid-nineties to demonstrate ambivalence about foreign investment within the political class. To be sure, this uncertainty is not new, if the complex sectoral limits on FDI - that too, mostly represented in policy statements, not the statute books - are an index. The BJP had advocated a muscular "swadeshi" policy at the time, then quietly retreated from that position when it saw the transformational aspect of foreign investment on the Indian business landscape.
This time the uncertainty focuses on FDI in retail. The AAP doesn't want it on ideological grounds, period. On FDI in general, Mr Modi has been progressive and sensible, even telling a dismayed traders' body in Delhi that its members should be ready to face competition. Yet the BJP's manifesto singles out multi-brand retail as a no-go area for FDI, though the party says it is open to global corporations in other sectors provided they create employment.
This selective approach is understandable given that traders and middlemen (and they're almost entirely men), who have most to fear from the rise of organised Big Retail, whether Indian or foreign, form a powerful core support base for the BJP for both votes and funds.
Should this exceptionalism matter? It does in terms of the signals it sends out to an already confused international investing community. As importantly, organised retail, like outsourcing and almost any activity in the service sector, has also been a force multiplier for women's employment - as a brief visit to any mall can confirm - and, eventually, empowerment. Big-ticket multi-brand retailing models as followed by global corporations can deliver more critical mass in this respect than wholesale retail. Keeping it outside the purview of FDI policy indirectly suggests that India's great socio-economic leap forward may take a while yet.