Mailtoday
31AUG2012
BY SOURISH BHATTACHARYYA
WHIPLASH
The Gujarat CM’s
comments are a blatant attempt to paper over serious concerns that affect
most women in India
BEING a loner in his
personal life, Narendra Modi can be forgiven if his understanding of women is
somewhat limited, but being a chief minister with prime ministerial
ambitions, he has no business to be unconnected with the country’s complex
social reality.
His latest statement
berating young women for sacrificing their nutrition for the sake of their
figure is a shocker because it exposes a CM who lives in his own la- la land.
Gujarat’s so- called
success story has only recently been shown up by its sorry social indicators
and no matter what Modi likes to believe, his declaration is completely at
odds with the reality of women being denied their share of nutrition not
because they want hourglass figures, but because gender discrimination kicks
in even in the distribution of food in poor households.
And even in Modi’s
Gujarat, despite the hype, the majority of the households are poor.
Women who forgo food
for the sake of their figure are in a minuscule minority in a country where
hunger is the daily reality and beauty pageants are an aberration.
Such women, in fact,
may not be sacrificing nutrition — rather, they may be protecting themselves
against over- nutrition, which is the daily reality of the privileged
minority to which they belong. No matter what nationalist chestthumpers may
like to proclaim to the world, India’s food surplus — which caused a minister
to declare some time back that if all the bags of gains in the buffer stock
are piled up, they would reach the moon — is the result of the majority of
Indians going to bed without enough food.
It doesn’t behoove a
politician of Modi’s stature to pass the comment that he did. Even if he was
targeting middle- class women, it was out of sync with their reality.
As working women, as
single women, as mother, even they have to live in denial. That’s the Indian
Everywoman’s reality. She may not exist in Modi’s cuckooland, but she’s there
for all of us to see.
