Last week I met five migrant women from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, presently residing in one of the unrecognized slums in Delhi. They were young women with a dream to live their life according to their own terms and conditions, as per their own choice, that they have as per the fundamental rights of the Constitution of India and the Declaration of Human Rights.
When I started the straight conversation with them, then I understood that they are all scared, and skeptical about achieving their dream. This is the situation of most of the women in this slum who are affected by domestic violence from their alcoholic husbands.
When Indian democracy is moving out from the old parliament house to the new HighTech parliament house and at G20 India is called as mother of democracy, then the condition of Indian women (resource-poor and marginalized) is so pathetic, raises a very fundamental question – Did Indian Democracy fail the Indian women?
My personal opinion, based on my interaction with thousands of rural and urban women during the last few years, is YES – Indian democracy has failed Indian women.
Most of the resource-poor and marginalized women in their life cycles are highly dependent on the male members of their families. During their childhood, they are dependent on their father and brothers, then on their husbands.
Most of the cases, they find that their husbands have no emotional connection with them, so then they start depending on their sons. When their sons fail them, then the last refuge is their grandsons.
These huge dependences of women on male members have made them highly vulnerable to violence of all kinds inflicted by these males. This is the reality.
Husbands of these five women and according to them, their women friends’ husbands are the model of cruelty and violence. Listening to these women, you will understand there is a need for a critical mass movement to ensure women’s liberty and freedom.
Women in India are oppressed by men. Men are their only oppressors. The solution is very tough. It needs monumental work because the women have internalized the image of men and adopted his guidelines so deeply that they are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility. And freedom is acquired by conquest and not by gift.
Women should understand that they have seen for decades now that men are doing just piecemeal efforts to give freedom to women. Indian women should understand that freedom is an indispensable condition for the quest for being fully human. Indian women have adapted to the structure of domination in which they are fully immersed and have become so comfortable that they are unable to act for their own freedom as they feel that they are incapable of running the risks it requires.
So, the backbone of women to take risks has been systematically broken by all existing systems starting from their families. Hence their struggle for freedom not only threatens men but also their fellow women who are fearful of still greater repression from men.
While talking to these five women, I understood (and that is the reality of every struggle) that their cry for freedom can be transformed into reality only when the same cry is aroused in their fellow women of slums.
This is well understood by men (their husbands) and so they never want their wives or daughters to step out of their house. One of the women, with whom I was talking, shared that her husband is a truck driver moving all over India with his truck and doesn’t want his wife to step out of the house in Delhi.
Since her husband is skeptical and suspicious of her wife having a high probability to move around Delhi in his absence, he is forcing his wife to return to his remote ancestral village in Bihar.
When I asked the woman why she doesn’t want to go back to the village, she shared that she would lose all her choices in life and that the caste issue will make her life hell. At least in the city, she has the freedom to dress, to talk, to move, to eat. Even though it comes with a fear of being caught by her husband and then she has to go through a series of domestic violence.
According to her, this is the story of every woman in her slum. What a life! Just imagining such a life for me makes me shiver till the end of my spinal. I would have died.
I am depressed. I don’t know how to change this situation. I don’t know how to say these women to revolt because that will risk their lives. I can only hear them quietly and shamelessly smile, looking at them. I don’t have any words of hope for them.
Every day they struggle for their life. They live in fear. Will human history ever forget men? Will human history ever write the brave story of our women? I am helpless. I am hopeless.