The undeclared War against #MeToo

The storm in the social media tea cup over Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey holding a placard saying “Smash Brahmanical Patriarchy”, amid a group of well-known supporters of feminism and the #MeToo movement, proves how the politics of despair is usually the politics of backlash in India. Especially, when the subject is women. Chitra Subramaniam, the high priestess of the Right, and Mohandas Pai, another vocal supporter, say they are “shocked”. Subramaniam goes on to ask what datasets Jack has based his (anti-Brahmanical patriarchy) position on? “Indeed Jack Dorsey”, she writes, “…You haven’t covered yourself with glory Sir...”

Their usual ideological opponent, Barkha Dutt, too is very cross with the Twitter boss and feels the apology, that has come from his side, does not cover him with glory. Poor Twitter India is getting it both ways. It has tweeted what it calls not a denial but a, “tangible reflection” about how the company’s efforts were only “to see hear and understand all sides of important public conversations”. And it was in this series, that their CEO had attended a meeting with his legal head, and participated in a round table with women journalists, activists, writers and change makers. It was at some point during the course of this meeting that a Dalit activist had handed him the said placard.

Oh dear! The alarms against liberal feminists today are just not going off in the media. The political arena is also all heated up. It began with the demand for fast-paced judicial enquiries into all charges of sexual abuse brought in by women workers from all spheres. But as the Supreme Court ruled that all women be allowed into the sanctum sanctorum of a males-only shrine, a hitherto undreamt-of confusion is let loose upon all parties, most of all on the BJP, which is nursing its image as a great saviour of Muslim ‘sisters’ and lauding their success in entering the Haji Ali Dargah! The barricades have been removed by us, the BJP leaders, wooing women voters, assured Indians. Women have made it, the media, fed with generous dollops of shudh desi ghee of DAVP advertising, cheers obligingly.

Women can now have it all! Many of them go on to “honour” iconic women on TV. It turns out those being handed trophies on the dais by a high-profile minister are, more often than not, high-profile corporate wives greatly into ‘social causes’ or highly-placed officials in some branch of the company sponsoring the event.

Behind such glamorous celebration of women’s victory, behind the positive news about Indian woman being the gem in India’s crown, cheerfully and unendingly underscored and repeated by the government posters, behind the PM’s bearded benevolence flanked by women and girls receiving subsidised books, laptops, gas cylinders or free-to-use toilets, is another nasty message blinking in the media. You may feel free and equal now, but the fact is you are far worse off than before.

Women workers are sick both physically and mentally due to the stress brought on by various work-related factors. Divorce rates are rising, so are numbers of women abusing alcoholic beverages.

Then, there are those right-wing goons, dressed in saffron with moustaches to match. They come on camera and threaten to thrash Hindu women who dare break traditions and marry in defiance of our glorious caste/gotra-based traditions for love for aliens. Even some women, who have arrived like Subramaniam herself, or Madhu Kishwar, who launched a sharp and feminist Manushi in the 70’s, have taken to warning women that they should not turn into ‘sickulars’ and look down on India’s first truly Hindu government and its noble leader who has given us the catch phrase: Beti Padhao Beti Bachao!

How can we, the women of India, be in so much trouble at the same time that the government and the Godi media say that we are blessed to have been born in a land where traditional belief decrees that gods dwell where women are worshipped? If their social status is indeed so high, why are rapes registering a steady growth? Why do gender-based income and general health-related disparities repeatedly generate data, saying women are losing out on employment, on maternal healthcare and nutritional benefits? Why is feminism being blamed for all sorts of ills from increasing juvenile delinquency to rapes and marital breakdowns?

Other outlets of popular entertainment and culture like Bollywood have been underscoring the connection in their own way. From Padmavat that glorified Sati and Jauhar to feudal definitions of what a good wife should be, to Naagin, a TV soap opera where female snakes seek revenge upon men who killed their male mates through black magic and mythical mumbo jumbo, the message is the same. Single, professional and assertive women are harpies that wreck marriages and culture, the wiser among them recant before the closing sequence.

Some academics and so called ‘cultural experts” have also joined the bandwagon. Among them, several like the redoubtable Rajiv Malhotra or one Father Frawley, are living and/or teaching in universities in the west. In the media, they have unceasingly made fun of the liberals, of emancipated women and the minorities, condemning them as anti-Hindu and foolishly ignorant of their own culture. Then, there are sitting chief ministers who say that women today are striking friendships with men, only to lodge complaints against them of having raped them if the relationship breaks down.

The Chief Minister of another northern state repeatedly raises the bogey of Love Jihad whereby Muslim boys, he alleges, are luring Hindu girls and converting them. Another prominent minister, a woman herself, allowed herself to be duped by a fake news item and tweeted that women pushing and jostling to get into a holy male-only temple in Kerala were carrying blood-soaked sanitary napkins to defile the deity! “Would you dare to visit a friend when you carry a bloody sanitary napkin on yourself,” she asked.

Truth is behind all the untruths and fake news, planted repeatedly in the media and the cyberspace against the small group of talented, educated and liberated women, is an attempt to retract the small victories that they have won after a hectic and long struggle. The counter-assault is insidious and is greatly helped by the Dark Net and trolls unleashed by the Right to subvert the truth. It uses both fake data and the sentimental moralising of the Saas-Bahu type soaps. Just as the present-day rulers have shifted the political discourse far to the right and demonised liberalism and secularism, so this backlash is trying to convince the Indians that liberated ‘sickular’ women, especially those in the media, especially those asking for the scalp of their sexual predator bosses, the ‘presstitutes’, are the true contemporary scourge. Wait, even journalists’ bodies, routinely led by men, tell the complainants the same: “The charges against a senior and celebrated member of the fraternity may well turn out to be just an unending laundry list of planned vendettas that may be proven ‘later’ to have emerged from personal and/or official jealousy and frustrations. Don’t you realize how massive is the professional contribution of your alleged assaulter?” They are told off as though being an eminent person is proof against all charges of sexual misdemeanour!

In the 90’s, the mainstream media had painted its own glossy picture of a happy woman and said “She is happy because she has dared and broken free of a tradition that tied her to a gender and/or a caste!” Now, under the reverse logic of a backlash created by the politically empowered Right, it has just become grossly susceptible to the political currents and loaves available for bringing dissenters’ scalps and demolishing them socially, politically and financially.

The anti-feminist backlash has been set off actually not by women’s achievements, which are considerable, but by the increased possibility that their numbers in well paying but fast shrinking urban jobs may soon become a critical mass and catapult them to hitherto forbidden heights as a group while majority of men are being steadily pushed into the unorganised sector and/or the dark hell of MSMEs. It is thus a sort of pre-emptive strike that, it is hoped, will stop women in their tracks before they clear the winning tape.

There are no easy answers to questions women’s increasing self assertion is throwing up for democracies the world over. Futurology is in crisis. The human imagination shaped for a small, simple and static world as defined by men today fails to grasp the new reality as forces of integration and disintegration collide. Frankly at such a juncture, like Tolstoy’s puzzled Nicholas in War and Peace, checking his horses over the vast wintry fields of Russia, we wonder, “…Heaven only knows where we are going, and heaven only knows what is happening to us…”