Cliches Come Free

Is Sushil Sharma,the remorseless author of the tandoor case, just an abberation?

In short, wherever you are, serious attacks on women, it seems, are always being carried out by someone else, somewhere else, and 'educated', 'liberal-minded' men walk around with an absurd smugness which says: "It was him and not me. Some of my best friends are women."

In a sense this is not too different from the anti-Muslim and anti-Dalit 'sentiments' that are so tricky to pin down as they slither around the country.In his book Secular Common Sense, Mukul Kesavan puts forward a thesis that is simple but like all brilliant insights sinks the unshakeable hook of truth into one's head: the urban middle class in India was never really 'secular', it only embraced 'secularism' because that was the fashionable and useful thing to do in freshly independent India. The idea of secularism and subcontinental multi-ethnicity were the garments in which the new Indian state could strut down the international ramp.

Piggy-backing on this analysis, let me throw up the idea that perhaps, as a society, we have never been for women's emancipation, women's rights, gender equality, or any of this stuff. There are some people who have made no secret of this—the Mahants, the Mullahs and their ilk, feudal patriarchs of all ages, hues and masks, and even that hazy person called the 'common' man—but perhaps a certain Feminism Version 3.01 or 4.12 became vaguely fashionable and useful to certain groups of urban middle-class men and when that moment of usefulness passes, as it perhaps now has, most of us will revert to type and join all the other male chauvinists.

In any case, this disappearance of the small number of so-called 'feminist' men would be inconsequential in a larger reality that is getting more and more grim for either gender. In England, all through this last summer, along with detailed projections of how the earth will end and the universe collapse, there was also pretty serious discussion on the wearing away of the Y chromosome—the detailed, and apparently not so fanciful imagining of a world in the future in which the male of the human species will actually disappear.

Here, in the meantime, the opposite is not so difficult to imagine. In certain districts of Haryana and Punjab, the girl child is being ruthlessly eradicated by the joint weapons of sonography and abortion. And just in case anyone wants to snort about "backwardness in rural areas" and such like, they should consider the fact that posh Defence Colony in south Delhi leads the urban statistics in aborting female foetuses.

Turning the horrific into the absurd, another friend recently recounted how people in a lower middle-class colony in Delhi ran into logistical problems during Kanya Puja. The puja requires that young girls be fed on the day. There being a severe shortage of young girls in the locality, the same five or six girls were roped in to eating at different houses and, by the end of the day, the girls were reeling under over-full stomachs. "So what happens?" asked my friend. "What happens is that in some houses they end up feeding boys. On the one day that girls are supposed to be privileged above them!"

Take the logic to the end and the question that looms then is not, where have we come from, but, indeed, where will we come from? Think about a world without either one gender and the mind wobbles a bit. But then, we already have a detailed imaginary of a planet without greenery, or cities without water, or sky without birds, so why not add this as well? Especially if it helps sharpen present thought?

Trying to actually picture this, all I can come up with is a vicious image of a womenless Delhi-Punjab-Haryana zone walled off from the rest of the country. Almost as if she can read my mind, my pal with the mobile phone joke calls me.

"Are you still banging your head on the wall about that Women's Issue?"

"Yes. And I don't want to hear any of your stale jokes."

"No, no, listen, here's a profit-making idea: how about if we print a few hundred T-shirts? With a slogan which says: We Are ALL Women's Issues."