Patriarchy Politics

Rahul Gandhi’s latest clarion call to “smash patriarchy” is less a revolutionary manifesto than yet another of the Congress scion’s revealing exercises in political condescension. It presumes that Indian women need to be told what their liberation should look like and that the prescribed route leads straight to Rahul Gandhi’s politics.

India has spent decades moving from treating women as dependants to recognising them as citizens and political actors in their own right. Yet Gandhi’s formulation typically thrusts some 70 crore Indian women into a tired ideological straitjacket which essentially says that patriarchy is the cage whose doctrine is supplied by the Manusmriti  while its politics is supplied by the RSS-BJP supplies the politics.

The real question is why Rahul Gandhi’s crusade against patriarchy so often seems to begin with Hindu civilisation and end before it reaches the uncomfortable terrain of minority religious orthodoxy. If patriarchy is a universal evil, why is its vocabulary deployed so relentlessly against Hindu customs, texts and institutions, while political sensitivities are invoked whenever criticism might offend a minority constituency?

Furthermore, an Indian woman can reject patriarchy and remain deeply religious. She can be fiercely independent and politically conservative. She can reject the Manusmriti, admire it, ignore it or regard it as irrelevant to her life. She can disagree with Rahul Gandhi without being backward, oppressed or insufficiently liberated. The whole point of agency is that Indian women are entitled to reach their own conclusions.

Rahul Gandhi’s feminism becomes remarkably selective when it encounters politically inconvenient constituencies. The Congress opposed the government’s legislation against instant triple talaq instead of making Muslim women’s autonomy the overriding principle. The Shah Bano episode remains an indelible reminder of what happens when the politics of appeasement overwhelms the politics of women’s rights.

If patriarchy is truly the enemy, it cannot be condemned only when it can be conveniently attached to Hindu texts, Hindu traditions or political opponents. What about coercion justified in the name of religion? What about practices that deny women autonomy? A feminism that refuses to confront those questions is political selectivity dressed up as emancipation.

Gandhi lectures India about dismantling entrenched hierarchies while remaining the product and beneficiary of perhaps India’s most enduring political dynasty. Her sister, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, despite possessing an independent political identity, had spent years politically subordinate to her brother.

After repeated electoral failures, perhaps the Congress heir should pause before instructing Indian women about agency. They do not need a dynastic politician to explain freedom to them. They have been exercising it for decades in their homes, professions, communities, politics and ballot boxes.

The greatest insult to women is the assumption that they are incapable of thinking beyond somebody else’s ideological script. Indian women neither need Rahul Gandhi to define their liberation nor tell them whom liberation requires them to vote for.