The statistics of gender bias
2012 report on “Gender Equality and Development,” the World Bank estimated that over the last two decades, around 2.5 lakh girls were killed in India each year because of their sex.
When infant and child mortality are driven by biology, fewer girls die than boys, but the third National Family Health Survey (NFHS-3) found that the postneonatal mortality rate for Indian girls is 21/1000, compared with 15 for boys. For the age group 1-4 years, “the child mortality rate for girls, at 23/1000, is 61 per cent higher than for boys, at 14.” The World Bank report estimated that, as a result, India lost another 2.5 lakh girls in 2008.
Sections 312 to 317 of the Indian Penal Code list the punishments for causing miscarriage, injuring unborn children, preventing a child from being born or causing it to die after birth, and abandoning a child under 12 years. Over the last 20 years, how many prosecutions have there been under these provisions of the law? There should have been 10 million.
Entrenched bias
2011 census shows that the sex ratio in the age-group 0-6 had fallen in 27 States and Union Territories from 2001.
Millions of girls who are allowed to live are fed and educated less than their brothers. The United Nation’s Human Development Report 2013 estimates that 42.5 per cent of our children suffer from malnutrition (as against 3.8 per cent in China). There is also great irony in this because NFHS-3 established that
- when mothers were undernourished, 54 per cent of their children were stunted and 25 per cent wasted.
- The more educated they were, the lower the chance of their children being either stunted or wasted.
The treatment of little girls moulds the psyche of their brothers, who internalise the view that their needs — as males — have preference over those of their sisters. What we have come to thereby is the socialisation of violence against women.
In 2007, the Ministry of Women and Child Development published a “National Study on Child Abuse,” which reported that 53 per cent of the children interviewed had suffered one or more forms of sexual abuse.
Data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) confirms that this pattern continues as the girl becomes a woman. Since the NCRB can only collate cases registered, its data represent just the tip of the crime iceberg. But it reports that in 2012 there were 24,923 cases of rape registered. In 98 per cent of the cases, the victims knew the offenders. This is a logical outcome of a nurturing process in which boys grow up believing, from what they see in their families, that women exist only to satisfy the needs of men.
Society still resists change. NFHS-3 found that the median age for marriage for girls is still just over 16, and commented that this “is an indicator of the low status of women...it is related to lower empowerment and increased risk of adverse reproductive and health consequences.” There is enough data to show how adverse these are.
Women, particularly poor women, are most insecure in childbirth when they fulfil the role society has set for them. According to the Millennium Development Goals, maternal mortality in India which was 301 per lakh of live births in 2001 should be down to 75 by 2015. This will not happen. We are perhaps down to a maternal mortality rate of 200 now. At 27 million live births in India each year, at least 54,000 women die in the process.
We also perhaps do not realise how other problems have a compounding effect. We are, for instance, the world leaders in open defecation. That is being perpetuated in most States where, despite a requirement that all houses built under the Indira Awas Yojana must have a toilet, very few do. Open defecation is also an open invitation to rape. In many States, teenage village girls either refuse to go to school or are taken out by their parents because the building has no toilet and their right to education suffers.
It is sad but to be expected that women have also been indoctrinated to believe that their security depends on good behaviour, as mandated by men. NHFS-3 found that 40 per cent of married women have been subjected to spousal violence. But it also found that 54 per cent of the women it surveyed agreed that wife-beating was acceptable if the wife went out without telling her husband, argued with him, refused sex, neglected the children, did not cook properly, was suspected of being unfaithful or showed disrespect toward her in-laws.
And then there are the more obvious acts of criminal violence against women
- enormous problem of trafficking; the special insecurities of women in conflict zones.
- Adivasi and Dalit women are branded as witches.
- There are the continuing tragedies of forced marriages, of girls being killed for marrying boys of their choice or for not bringing in enough dowry, the needless hysterectomies under the Rashtriya Swasth Bima Yojana.
For women to be secure, the country must change — there should be more women in Parliament and in positions of political and executive authority.
Most rural population engaged in non-farm work: NCAER survey
- Employment in agriculture has fallen sharply over the last seven years and a combination of farm-oriented and non-farm work is now the most common form of rural employment, according to the findings of a nationwide representative sample survey conducted by the National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER).
- 2004-05: half of all rural men and 83 per cent of rural women worked only on farms, making it the most common type of rural employment. However, exclusive farm-oriented work is still the most prevalent form of employment among rural women, engaging 66 per cent.
The IHDS findings contradict the latest data of the government’s National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), which shows purely farm-based work as the biggest employer in the country.
- The IHDS confirms an alarming trend — the NSSO found so too — of a fall in the participation of women in the workforce — from 47 per cent women aged 15-59 in 2004-05 to 43.7 per cent in 2011-12. The participation rate, which considers all those employed or looking for work, for men is 78.9 per cent and 77.2 per cent in 2004-05 and 2011-12 respectively.
- While the fall in male participation is primarily explained by rising higher education enrolment, the work participation rate for women have fallen even for those in their 20s and 30s.
- The IHDS also confirms that wages have grown exponentially over the last decade. The daily agricultural labour wage has nearly tripled for men in the last seven years, while the non-agricultural wage has more than doubled. The wages of women workers, though still much less that male workers, have grown similarly.
Call to spell out future of FATA in talks
While the government-appointed committee will meet with the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) shura soon, speakers at a seminar on Monday on the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) called for the future of the region to be spelt out as part of the ongoing peace dialogue. FATA, a group of seven tribal agencies with a population of over seven lakh, was described as once being a peaceful region, which underwent vast changes after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It comes under the direct authority of the President.
The Bharatiya Mahila Bank (BMB), an all-woman national financial institution, marked its journey in Tripura on Monday with the bank’s Chairman and Managing Director Usha Ananthasubramanian inaugurating the BMB’s 20th branch in Agartala.
The Agartala branch is the second branch of the bank in the northeast after the Guwahati branch which was opened soon after the BMB was established last year.
Centre reaches out to eminent PIOs to help electronics sector
The Government has reached out to eminent persons of Indian origin (PIOs) to put together a possible ‘board of global advisors’ that could help in developing the electronics sector in India, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.
The electronics manufacturing industry has not taken off in the country, primarily due to
1. a lack of a strong base and
2. the failure to build a strong ecosystem.
The country’s demand for electronics is expected to reach $400 billion by 2020, with imports accounting for nearly $300 billion of that amount.
The Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), therefore, is reaching out to Indian-origin persons who could help by contributing their knowledge, experience and expertise.
This new group of advisers is a logical culmination of the Centre’s intention to remove all barriers towards encouraging electronics manufacturing, according to sources.
The National Policy of Electronics in 2012 set out a vision to create a globally-competitive electronics design and manufacturing industry, and the first practical step in this direction was the recent ‘in-principle’ decision to support the setting up of two semi-conductor wafer fabs.
Withdraw notifications making Aadhaar mandatory, Supreme Court tells Centre
The Supreme Court on Monday directed the Centre to immediately withdraw all notifications making Aadhaar cards mandatory for availing benefits under social security schemes.
A Bench of Justices B.S. Chauhan and J. Chelameswar told Solicitor-General Mohan Parasaran that despite the earlier order directing the Centre not to insist on Aadhaar cards, there were several complaints that the authorities were insisting on Aadhaar cards for providing benefits.
The Bench also stayed a Bombay High Court order, which refused to interfere with an order passed by a lower court in Goa, directing the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) to share with the CBI biometrics and other relevant data of all residents enrolled with Aadhaar in the State to help solve the case of a gang-rape of a seven-year-old girl.
The Bench restrained the UIDAI from sharing biometric or any other data of the Aadhaar card holder with any agency without the express consent of the card holder.
A new window into an old world
On March 17, radio astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics found evidence of primordial gravitational waves imprinted on the cosmic microwave background (CMB), a field of energy pervading the universe.
A confirmation that these waves exist is the validation of a theory called cosmic inflation. It describes the universe’s behaviour less than one-billionth of a second after it was born in the Big Bang, about 14 billion years ago, when it witnessed a brief but tremendous growth spurt. The residual energy of the Bang is the CMB, and the effect of gravitational waves on it is like the sonorous clang of a bell (the CMB) that was struck powerfully by an effect of cosmic inflation. Thanks to the announcement, now we know the bell was struck.
The astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian used a telescope called BICEP2, situated at the South Pole, to make their observations of the CMB. In turn, BICEP2’s readings of the CMB imply that when cosmic inflation occurred about 14 billion years ago, it happened at a tremendous amount of energy of 10 GeV (GeV is a unit of energy used in particle physics). Astrophysicists didn’t think it would be so high.
This energy at which inflation has occurred has drawn the attention of physicists studying various issues because here, finally, is a window that allows humankind to naturally study high-energy physics by observing the cosmos.
For example, consider the four naturally occurring fundamental forces:
- gravitation,
- strong and weak-nuclear force, and
- electromagnetic force.
Normally, the strong-nuclear, weak-nuclear and electromagnetic forces act at very different energies and distances.
However, as we traverse higher and higher energies, these forces start to behave differently, as they might have in the early universe. This gives physicists probing the fundamental texture of nature an opportunity to explore the forces’ behaviours by studying astronomical data — such as from BICEP2 — instead of relying solely on particle accelerators like the LHC.
In fact, at energies around 10 GeV, some physicists think gravity might become unified with the non-gravitational forces. However, this isn’t a well-defined goal of science, and doesn’t command as much consensus as it submits to rich veins of speculation. Theories like quantum gravity operate at this level, finding support from frameworks like string theory and loop quantum gravity.
Another perspective on cosmic inflation opens another window. Even though we now know that gravitational waves were sent rippling through the universe by cosmic inflation, we don’t know what caused them. An answer to this question has to come from high-energy physics — a journey that has taken diverse paths over the years.
Consider this: cosmic inflation is an effect associated with quantum field theory, which accommodates the three non-gravitational forces. Gravitational waves are an effect of the theories of relativity, which explain gravity. Because we may now have proof that the two effects are related, we know that quantum mechanics and relativity are also capable of being combined at a fundamental level. This means a theory unifying all the four forces could exist, although that doesn’t mean we’re on the right track.
At present, the Standard Model of particle physics, a paradigm of quantum field theory, is proving to be a mostly valid theory of particle physics, explaining interactions between various fundamental particles. The questions it does not have answers for could be answered by even more comprehensive theories that can use the Standard Model as a springboard to reach for solutions.
Physicists refer to such springboarders as “new physics”— a set of laws and principles capable of answering questions for which “old physics” has no answers; a set of ideas that can make seamless our understanding of nature at different energies.
Supersymmetry
One leading candidate of new physics is a theory called supersymmetry. It is an extension of the Standard Model, especially at higher energies. Finding symptoms of supersymmetry is one of the goals of the LHC, but in over three years of experimentation it has failed. This isn’t the end of the road, however, because supersymmetry holds much promise to solve certain pressing issues in physics which the Standard Model can’t, such as what dark matter is.
Thus, by finding evidence of cosmic inflation at very high energy, radio-astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center have twanged at one strand of a complex web connecting multiple theories. The help physicists have received from such astronomers is significant and will only mount as we look deeper into our skies.
Post the Sachar Committee report, there is enough data to prove that Muslims are badly off in terms of education and economic opportunities. In some cases, this means being worse off than even Dalits. Therefore, to make special provisions for Muslims, including demanding reservations on religious grounds or including them in the Other Backward Classes (OBC) category is only a necessary corrective measure.
Even if the Constitution does not recognise affirmative action on religious grounds, there is enough sociological reasoning behind demanding special provisions for Muslims. Legal reasoning and pronouncements are not absolute. They need to be opened up to the emerging reality because many of the legal pronouncements themselves are based on no specific logic except in reinforcing popular perceptions about justice, including the cap on reservations not crossing 50 per cent that has no special logic except to maintain a perceived idea about merit, efficiency and equal opportunity in the system.
Similarly, this skewed logic that special provisions encourage vote-bank politics has been a long-standing complaint not only with Muslims but also with regard to policies for Dalits and the OBCs. While the former is seen as minority-appeasement, the latter is believed to be aiding the flaring up of casteism in society. Recognising specific disabilities is not reinforcing the divide but only providing a corrective to the divide that already exists and is not created by such protective policies.
A discourse in crisis
However, the problem with the secular-communal divide does not end here. The language and discourse of secularism itself has entered an irretrievable crisis across the world. In Europe, the secular separation of religion and politics was followed up by multiculturalism as a preservation of cultural differences, which has only resulted in an increasing ghettoisation of religious minorities and the creation of “parallel societies” and demands, mostly on Muslim populations, to demonstrate loyalty, and adopt the “our” values of the dominant community. This has given a fillip to not only a separation of communities but also, what Slavoj Žižek refers to as “racism at distance.” Now, Europe is exploring the possibility of shifting from multiculturalism to pluralism in order to open up intercultural dialogic spaces.
In India too, secularism has contributed to the entrenching of received ideas about religious minorities — mostly Muslims. It has rarely succeeded in opening up dialogue between religious communities. Similarly, in a democracy it is only proper to expect them to respond to forms of injustice that not merely hurt them but also other vulnerable social groups. As we do not expect women alone to speak up on women’s issues, or Muslims alone to speak on issues of communal violence, we cannot expect Muslims too to speak up only on issues related to religious minorities. It could in fact be argued that Muslim groups that protest against the exceptionalism of the state in Kashmir, and the witch-hunt in the name of terrorism and “suspect Muslims,” also speak up against these very methods against tribals in Chhattisgarh, and the citizens of the northeast. Unless the religious minorities do not come across as being “secular” themselves on some parameter, then the forces of the far-right will continue to exploit these silences for sectarian mobilisation. This is not to demand loyalty but to move beyond secular sectarianism in speaking for others. This is not a demand to prove the legitimacy of “their” belonging but a legitimate — dignifying — demand that ought to be made in any healthy democracy.
The search for the weak
The roots of communalism are fast shifting. They no longer exist “merely” in the memory of Partition or modern-day terrorism. They are in fact emerging from an entrenched caste psyche. Caste is a ladderlike structure with every group having a dual-positionality, with an oppressor above and the oppressed below. Keeping caste privileges and also undoing caste for every individual subgroup is as much about unsettling those above as keeping those below in their downgraded positioning. Anti-caste movements have exclusively addressed the atrocities of those above but never as much simultaneously articulated the caste hegemony towards those below by the very same sub group/sub caste. The momentum today is much in terms of maintaining this caste hegemony and subjugating those below. Subjugating those below is the most readily available strategy to undo the humiliation — as a quick psychological relief/empowerment — perpetuated by those above in the caste ladder. This reverse- osmosis of caste groups has led to a process of searching for and identifying groups that are relatively weak socially, politically and economically. This process goes down all the way to the smallest and most underprivileged caste groups. This is the psyche that allows for the dominant groups to self-represent themselves as victims, and the less-privileged as enjoying undue largesse and thereby as either opportunists with regard to Dalits or as aggressors with regard to Muslims. However, in this search for the weak, the buck seems to finally stop with identifying Muslims as the necessary “other.” They are weaker, perceived to be “outsiders”, and are perhaps the most vulnerable social group in India, combined with an imagination of the community as being aggressive.
The failure of the political project of building a “Bahujan Samaj” reveals the limits of the “secular upsurge” in India. The cynicism of the caste psyche that produces the Muslim as the “other” is ironically also the source to maintain and consolidate the Hindu fold against its internal fractures along caste lines for the Hindutva brand of mobilisation. Growing mobility for marginalised caste groups has resulted in increasing caste conflicts and, in turn, widespread communal violence. The entrenched sectarianism of the caste system cannot, however, be tackled with secular sectarianism that dithers from asking religious minorities to address issues of justice across religious and other social identities. Strangely, the Hindutva brand of politics seems to be a step ahead in articulating the idea of “justice for all,” which should have ideally come from those championing secularism and more so from the religious minorities themselves.
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