“This is what it is here. Women have lower status and men have higher status.” Roshan, a village elder in Peepli Khera in Uttar Pradesh quoted in The New York Times.
It sounded like just the kind of uplifting story of economic emancipation that India needs more of, occurring as it did in a village dominated by a caste that traditionally made its living by begging. Seven women in Peepli Khera, scarcely 64 km from New Delhi, started working in a meat factory in a neighbouring area. They earned Rs 5,000 a month, more than double what their husbands made as musicians in wedding bands. With their savings, they built brick houses and gave new vigour to a financial cooperative for women in the village.
These seven women, who chose to stand up for their right to work outside their homes, were ostracised, as first reported in The Hindu, and prohibited from using the local water pump and attending local weddings. India, it has often been said, lives in two centuries at the same time. And, as The New York Times story a fortnight ago about the good women of Peepli Khera underlined, women in India frequently find themselves in a society that is profoundly medieval. At the height of the controversy about whether these women could continue to work, Roshan, a village elder who in dress and demeanour looks like a patriarch in Saudi Arabia, goes to the village temple and emerges to pronounce that the goddess Kali has decreed that the women are prostitutes. One of the women, Premvati, loses a beloved daughter-in-law when the woman’s father storms into the house to take her away.
Ellen Barry’s NYT article on the utterly unequal tussle between these seven women and the men in their village was so vivid that it felt three-dimensional. On my first attempt, I had to stop reading it because it was akin to witnessing repeated acts of sadism. One of the saddest passages depicted the defiant heroine of the story, Geeta, being visited by her mother. Her mother could not enter Geeta’s house nor even accept a glass of water. Geeta, who had held her head high through months of intimidation and name-calling, goes inside her home and weeps. The article provides another explanation of why the number of women in the workforce in India — at just over a quarter of all women — is similar to the figures in Saudi Arabia or violence-torn Iraq. Men in many Indian villages regard their masculinity as being threatened by women working outside the home. In one especially surreal episode in Peepli Khera, a husband, earning a fraction of what his wife does, enthusiastically joins the men in imposing the social boycott because he deems the work of the women somehow immoral. The politician the women contact assures them that India is not ruled by the Taliban and then does not answer the phone (nor do the police) after an angry mob beats up Geeta’s husband and is on the verge of busting into their homes.
If the saga of Geeta and Premvati was not a depressing enough parable of life for women in India, there is the latest twist in the R K Pachauri docudrama at The Energy and Resources Institute (Teri). Pachauri has denied the charges by two women, who have complained that he engaged in mind games and repeatedly made sexual overtures to them — again in such distressing detail that many readers might well want to turn the page. I have heard grim variations ever since I returned to India in 2013 from three close friends, who had been harassed by men they reported to or did business with. A friend at a national newspaper gutsily stuck it out, despite being ostracised by her colleagues and victimised by her bureau chief, who had sent her loaded text messages and made inappropriate remarks. The men in charge eventually suggested that an apology be made over lunch, as if her manager was guilty of a breach of etiquette on the golf course. The bureau chief then shouted at his accuser, but kept his job anyway. My friend was told to “just enjoy her lunch”.
So, Pachauri has only done what all powerful men in India do when confronted with accusations of serial wrongdoing: he chose to brazen it out. Pachauri is anything but shy; he wrote a semi-pornographic novel a few years ago, enthusiastically launched by Naina Lal Kidwai and Mukesh Ambani. But, what accounts for the long silence and inaction until Friday on the part of members of the governing council and advisory board at Teri? The governing council includes HDFC Chairman Deepak Parekh and DSP Black Rock’s Hemendra Kothari and Kidwai, the advisory board people like former Nasscom president Kiran Karnik, executive search firm Amrop’s Preety Kumar and Pronab Sen and senior civil servants, past and present. Why did none of these people speak out in public, let alone resign, as Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw did last September? On Friday, the governing council at last appointed a new chairman, but it has been a year since the allegations were made. In future perhaps, organisations like Teri and members of their boards that condone such behaviour should be subjected to a social boycott. Desperate times call for medieval measures.
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
