Not long ago, I was in Pakistan where one noticeable difference from life on Indian streets is that there are not that many women around, going about their business, casually dressed in a range of attire of their choice. Pakistani friends who visit Indian cities also confirm this. For example, a young writer in Lahore said that it was becoming increasingly rare to see young women in jeans. “Those you will see will mostly be on campus and will wear long kurtas to hide as much of the denim as possible.” In an upscale coffee bar in Karachi, I observed a gaggle of chattering schoolgirls who, judging by their accent, attended a smart public school, but had their heads covered with scarves. A woman colleague said that it was virtually a no-no to see women in sleeveless tops; “and if you do,” she added, “it will be covered by some sort of scarf or dupatta”.
In the liberal democracies of the West — Britain, France and Germany among them — the headscarf debate rages on, signifying both a clash of cultures and the argument between personal choice and the stamp of homogenised authority. In Pakistan, a society as liberal as India a couple of decades ago, the swelling tide of Islamisation has changed fashions but not without the social cost of spiralling double standards. “We have become more hypocritical, that’s all,” said a leading feminist writer. “Women can wear what they like and do what they like so long as it’s behind closed doors. We have regressed to becoming a purdah society.”
Purdah has gone out of style in most parts of India; but for a liberal democracy where the main political parties are gung-ho about enforcing women’s reservation in the legislature, it is still a pretty retrograde place often held hostage to the conservative Right. Nothing else can explain why the south Indian movie star Khushboo was hauled through the lowest to the highest court in the land for saying that pre-marital sex between consenting adults was fine by her.
Khushboo was not delivering some prize piece of breaking news. As a well-known public figure, a mother of two and a responsible citizen, she was merely expressing an opinion in a magazine survey. But the harassment, threats, violence and political pillorying she has been subjected to for nearly five years show what a backward, parochial bunch of idlers can achieve.
More alarming is the case that the Indian legal system appears to have a lot of free time on its hands. A flurry of 23 criminal cases pile up against Khushboo in Tamil Nadu’s district courts, but after much hawing and humming, the Madras High Court announces last year that it cannot stay the proceedings against her. In a country where there are over three million cases pending in the 21 high courts (and a staggering 26 million pending in subordinate courts), why couldn’t the high court chuck out such frivolous, unnecessary litigation? Finally, when the case comes up before a Supreme Court bench — headed by no less than the Chief Justice of India — it quashes the case, saying what the thinking public knew all along. That it is Khushboo’s constitutional right to express the view that consensual sex before marriage is okay.
Think of the man hours and days lost by their lordships at taxpayers’ expense in coming to such a conclusion. That such precious time, money and judicial expertise should have been applied to attacking the far greater prevailing injustices of poverty, hunger, illiteracy, corruption and a hundred other miseries that afflict the public. Instead, the same was squandered on one citizen’s opinion of what should happen in a bedroom and when.
What Khushboo articulated was, in fact, borne out by the sex survey in which her view appeared: that pre-marital sex is far more prevalent, especially among the young, than generally assumed. Except that not many talk about it. But if they did, we would be spared the danger of becoming a purdah society like Pakistan.
