Ashley Tellis
As we come closer to Assembly elections in Goa, it is a good time to ask whether women mean anything to all the political parties in the contest. Are women and women’s issues a crucial part of any of their manifestos? Or are they worth just a token nod or to be shut up with money in their accounts as ‘home-makers’ as the BJP claims?
Beneath the placid surface, Goa is actually a hellish state for women. Apart from an exceedingly high number of rapes (with hundreds of cases in the last few years – and these are only the reported ones), domestic violence is endemic in Goan households, hundreds of women are kidnapped and abducted on a regular basis and murders of women are common. These phenomena cannot be averted by mere crime control but require systemic and structural change. One aspect of that change is more political representation. But are any of the political parties really invested in this?
The ruling BJP is without doubt the worst of the lot. At the national level, they have simply not tabled the Women’s Reservation Bill. At the State level, one might recall the CM’s offensive comments on how young women should not be sleeping on beaches at night as a response to the rape of two adolescent girls at Benaulim beach last year. The opposition parties while criticising the CM did not say more than security and safety should be the job of the government.
The CM’s response has been to talk the language of security and safety, to speak of a ‘pink’ (sic) police force for women, more women police officers, more patrolling. This criminological and policing based set of solutions does not address the problem at all. The DGP came up with the profound sociological insight that women prefer talk to women and so will come forth with more complaints but this is catching the bull by its tail in more ways than one. Not only is it reactive and intervenes after the offence, it leaves the sensitisation of men – both police officers and potential offenders – out of the picture when it is they who need to be addressed. While he spoke of training programmes for SPs on laws and guidelines, what they need is training in unlearning patriarchal ideology. The criminological approach does not address this structural need at all.
Making great claims about Goa’s high rate of ‘crime detection’ before the National Women’s Parliament (NWP) does not solve anything. The NWP is a private-public partnership and understands empowerment as ‘re-investment in the family’.
All of these are empty tokenistic words and gestures while the underlying patriarchal ideology from which they spring is left uninterrogated.
But nothing will change unless women are brought front into the political arena and questions of family, community and State are up for discussion with gender as a key variable. It is in the family where most crimes against women begin and it is that institution that needs change. Most gendered assaults on women, as it is well known, happen from family members, relatives and those known to the family. Political representation means nothing if family ideology does not change. Till then, women remain statistics in gendered crimes and foil for more policing, surveillance and control.