Missing discourse in 2019 polls: fem policy perspective

We’re in the midst of general elections. Political parties, citizen groups and the common public are participating in a grand democratic exercise. This exercise brings together the largest electorate in the world, with about 900 million voters, and more than half of the electorate is likely to be comprised of women voters this time. This election should have, therefore, been a turning point in bringing feminist policy perspectives to the fore. But some of these important issues are missing from the discourse.

Women and work

The terrain of work and employment is highly gendered and patriarchal in the Indian context. On the one hand, most of the work that women do in their families and households is not considered work and not accounted for in the GDP; on the other hand, most of the work done by women is either in agriculture or home-based. Household work is done mostly by women and is not just undervalued, but goes unrewarded.

The latest OECD data shows that an Indian woman spends an average of 5.8 hours every day on unpaid work, while a man spends less than an hour doing the same. Even as there are a great number of social barriers to women’s entry into the workforce, the workforce ecosystem is highly unorganised, discriminatory and unsafe for women. Consequently, in recent years, despite increasing levels of education, the female labour force participation is stagnating. This is a consequence of a vast number of literate rural women working in their households rather than the work market.

The recent #MeToo movement saw a number of public figures being accused of sexual harassment, increasing sexual harassment cases reported at the workplace by 54%. The ever-pervasive gendered and insensitive policy-making is also evident in the mid-day meal scheme policy documentation where the women cooks are officially considered ‘volunteers’, and not ‘workers’, who are paid an honorarium, not wages. Considered to be working part-time even when they are putting in 7-8 hours a day, they get no security of wages, pension or medical benefits.

Women farmers

While the public discourse has witnessed greater emphasis on rural distress and farm suicides, the condition of women in this context is hardly highlighted. The situation is particularly grim because as the male population migrates to the cities to earn a livelihood, the responsibilities of household production and cultivation fall upon women. This is particularly daunting for women as they lack the title to the land.

Due to lack of land rights, women farmers are further marginalised in terms of access to State support in the form of easy credit, subsidies, insurance or income support. This is even more distressing because of the fact that suicides by women farmers are not even recorded because they are not recognised as farmers. For women, thus, in death as in life.

Women’s health

The lack of basic healthcare facilities remains one of the biggest challenges for India and yet, according to NHP report 2018, India spends only slightly over 1% of GDP on health. India is ranked at a miserable 147 out of 149 countries in women’s “health and survival” indicator released by the Global Gender Report 2018. This is stark in the context of sexual and reproductive health and rights of women in India. While maternal health remains a challenge, the risk of adolescent women to anaemic and other undernutrition-related ailments is very high.

The scourge of forced sterilisations in the target-oriented policy framework for birth-control continues despite India’s international commitments to a gender-just and rights-based population policy. The national budgets prioritise female sterilisation over male sterilisation and do not adequately provide for affordable, healthy and safe contraceptive options.

The debate over choice-based abortions has moved ahead to prioritise women’s legal rights to safeguard their health and well-being but multiple social and institutional barriers remain in our broken gynaecological healthcare system. Even in this context, abortions and foeticides of female foetuses continue due to lackadaisical enforcement of laws like Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, 1994 (PCPNDT Act).

Justice in the family

Even as sexual, physical and emotional violence against women has been a subject of raging public debate, various essential layers of this patriarchal violence remain unchallenged. One grim example is the state of mental health of housewives in India. One out of every three women in this country is reported to have faced some form of domestic violence during their lifetime.

The quiet epidemic of housewife suicides is increasing even as patriarchal violence within the family for multiple reasons like dowry-related exploitation has been prevalent. The sad reality is that not only has the legal and policy framework failed to address the issue of domestic violence but also that deep-rooted patriarchy has become so ingrained that a lot of women do not even consider domestic violence as a problem.

India is currently one of only 36 countries where marital rape is still not considered a criminal offence, where 83% of the victims of sexual violence between 15 and 49 years of age reported violence by their current husband.

To ameliorate the horrifying state of a litany of abuses that affect the status of women in India, it is necessary to raise and resolve gender issues in the mainstream political discourse. The election manifestos of the political parties in India offer little more than grandiose lip service to various pertinent issues.

It is about time that women staked their claim to political power and held their elected representatives accountable to the lofty promises of gender justice. In this process, it is equally important to not lose sight of the most dispossessed among women, who face the barriers of class, caste, region and status in our highly patriarchal country.

(Dhawan is a student of NLSIU, Bengaluru, and a volunteer with the Shakti Project for Enhancing Women’s Political Power; Bansal is a student of Ashoka University, Sonepat)