Women need to be empowered!!

This thought has crippled every sane mind for a long time. The women who have participated in Indian freedom struggle along with men, the women who were worshipped by Hindus as the source of strength, as the mother and the source of inspiration and love, needed to be empowered. The women who carried the Father of the Nation in their arms or the women who were seen flirting with Nehru needed to be empowered. The nation was not able to sleep, politicians stopped thinking everything else to imagine how that could be achieved.

The nation didn’t realize the need for many years after the independence, but when we became imaginative enough, we felt the need. Women started dying while cooking using Kerosene stoves. Very often our newspapers carried those stories of ‘yet’ another woman’s death. Those stories were heart-wrenching. The nation started crying.

The budding story writers by then took up employment in Indian media. The leftist sentiment was strong and the need for women empowerment was felt by many. Soon intellectuals nodded their head and concluded it was the dowry system. Women were getting killed for dowry.

Politicians started debating, story-writers started finding new stories that media published and no one questioned and the woman Prime Minister has given the gift of 498a to India before dying.

Post 498a, the society was happy, everyone thought women were empowered and dowry deaths would stop. Ironically, the dowry death figures have increased since then – year after year until recently.

Everyone bought the Kerosene Stove Dowry death stories, but some historians did not. They did some hard work, studied each media report of dowry death and raised some uncomfortable questions. They found even men died of such stove accidents. They found silk saris worn by women in those days responsible for many of deaths, they found even the in-laws of the housewives dying of stove bursts. They also found that even the manufacturers of these Kerosene stoves agreed that the stoves were prone to bursting. They were patriarchal oppressors. They didn’t know that women needed to be empowered.

Their stories didn’t make to the newspapers. There were no social media, so no one knew about their findings –

Read – The Story of India’s dowry death

With the 498a passed, India thought the problem was probably addressed, women were probably empowered. But the United Nations was not ready to believe that. A sustained push to pass the Domestic Violence Act globally made Indians believe that there was a lot of domestic violence happening. The targeted programming through print media made us aware that it was only the women who could face domestic violence from men.

The nation started feeling again, yes, women needed to be empowered.

A hypnotized nation got sensitized to a new crime that was happening in their homes but they didn’t know ever. The western world, the UN found the crime for them. A hypnotized nation once again nodded their head in unison, oh …stop domestic violence (against women).

By ‘90s when empowering women of the world became a global concern. Nations suddenly became highly concerned about domestic violence against women. Their creative minds proposed the domestic violence Act. The global leadership joined hands to fight against domestic violence and to bring a law in every member country. We passed the DV Act in 2005.

People felt happy, they thought that’s it, Indian women were empowered and they felt happy that they were part of the process, only to find them in the Men’s Rights movement at a later point in time.

By then, Indian media and foreign-funded NGOs were at the top of their performance, brimming with funds and creative ideas to empower women. Many had sleepless nights thinking about new ways to empower women that others thought didn’t exist. The ideas like giving salary to the wife, demanding alimony as women’s rights and ideas like that kept flooding society.

By then, the media intellectuals and the foreign-funded reformers were in competition with one another to empower women. For some fictitious reason, empowerment of Indian women, by then, has become a global concern. As funds continued to pour in, after the Nirbhaya incident suddenly the need to empower women increased very much. All focus was shifted to institutional empowerment of women. Institutions like the NCW and WCD ministry for the first time were taken seriously. Women’s minister started giving statements in media.

Detractors, however, kept saying that the WCD ministry was dancing to the foreign-funded agendas. What else could be expected from those patriarchs? So naturally, other countries were seemed to be much worried about the empowerment of Indian women than Indian women themselves. So, the western world started funding India’s women empowerment even more. The UN started expressing concern over the safety and security of Indian women. Naturally western feminists needed to teach Indian women that they were oppressed. The patriarchs however said the western countries were running their feminist agenda in India.

New ideas of empowering Indian women kept pouring in from the western world through their funded NGOs and media houses. By then India started finding pleasure in liberalism and thus liberal articles and liberal social media posts to free up women started gaining ground. Liberals started fighting for women wearing any dress they liked in public.

Ancient India has witnessed the fierce battle of Kurukshetra because a man wanted to strip a woman in public. Lord Krsna appeared as the saviour and provided enough clothes to the woman so that she could cover up her body. Modern women are told by the liberals that they were not empowered with their clothes on. They needed to go out naked and semi-naked in order to be empowered. That was the new definition of empowerment.

Patriarchal oppressors continued to criticize the liberals saying, modern-day Duryodhana have successfully stripped women in public. Women are more than willing to shed clothes in order to get empowered.

‘Women can wear anything they like in public’ is a popular demand now and became a well-accepted ideology in modern time. Patriarchal oppressors however clarified, that statement says, ‘women may not wear anything in public’. So, empowered women engage in topless and nude protests world over. Going naked is considered as empowerment today and talking about public decency has become moral policing.

The modern-day Duryodhana have successfully stripped women in public.

A recent case of an aunty scolding some young girls for wearing short dresses has seen the violent women taking over social media against this what they called ‘sexism’. A skimpily dressed mother was seen in the video scolding the aunty about how her daughter could roam around in the streets in her swimming costume and no one had the right to tell her anything. The social media shouted in unison – ‘We want women in nude’ when they protested against this social bias of expecting women to be civil in their behaviour to cover themselves up in public.

‘Women can wear anything in public’ has become a buzzword. Women need to be empowered. The urge is so much that it doesn’t matter in what role or position they are, they need to be allowed to do whatever they wanted, otherwise they were not considered as empowered.

So, when we see actress turned politician women MPs of a political party doing a modelling photo shoot in the parliament. Some sexist people raise the question about the ‘expected behaviour’ of an MP. Those who bashed women MPs for using the parliament for modelling photoshoot were oppressors.

But what is acceptable behaviour in parliament? Anything told to women about their behaviour becomes a sexist comment until that fits with liberal agenda. When the empowerment gang says, ‘my daughter can wear anything in public’, they basically say that women can even wear a swimming costume in the parliament. What about giving flying kisses from parliament or giving seducing poses? Everything should be acceptable.

The moot point here is women are not empowered until they shed their clothes. A woman clad in asexual dressing is the drab woman oppressed by patriarchy. She is not empowered and needs to be told how to be empowered.

At this point when the concern for all is to see how women can be stripped in public in order to empower them, Smriti Irani who just defeated another male feminist who wanted to empower women for everything takes charge of the Textile Ministry in Modi 2.0 government. The real challenge to her will be whether she can provide enough clothes to Indian women while she empowers them. Because ironically Smriti is also the current minister for Women and Wife Development ministry which is also known as the Women and Child Development (WCD) Ministry.

Recently the Environment Minister in Modi 2.0 Shri Prakash Javadekar has said that we can conserve the nature and have technical advancement hand in hand. Now the challenge is to see what does the Textile Minister Smt. Smriti Irani do as the Women’s minister – provide enough clothes to women or empower them.

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Also Read – Why ‘Indian Values’ Prohibit Women From Wearing Short Dresses