An article by Madhu Kishwar, well known woman activist and editor of 'Manushi'
We know what Narendra Modi said about Sunanda Tharoor. But we weren’t
told about the rest of that speech
Now that the pious outrage over Narendra Modi’s tasteless remark
describing Sunanda Pushkar as a “50-crore rupee girlfriend” of Shashi
Tharoor has subsided, I hope we can examine the issue in perspective.
I write this after viewing Modi’s entire speech on YouTube, delivered
during the election campaign in Himachal Pradesh. It provides an
illustrative example of how our media steadfastly avoids discussion on
serious issues and picks up only sensational and
titillating tidbits,
especially with regard to women, even while pretending to be guardians
of women’s rights and honour.
The bulk of Modi’s speech dealt with burning issues such as price rise
and Centre-state relations. He focused in particular on the impact of
inflation on poor households and addressed specific issues concerning
women among the masses. For example, when talking about the effect of
the quantum leap in the price of gas cylinders, he expressed concern
that the unrealistic quota of six gas cylinders per household per year
would affect people in the hill regions more adversely since the cold
weather increases the consumption of gas. He pointed out that it would
force poorer households to revert to using firewood. That, in turn,
would increase women’s drudgery, since they would have to spend hours
cutting and gathering fuel wood from forests leading to further
deforestation.
He then
described how the Central government had torpedoed the piped
gas supply programme of the Gujarat government, claiming that the
state had already provided cooking gas pipelines in 300 villages
covering seven lakh households. His plan was to have covered 20 lakh
households by this year. Piped gas costs half as much as cylindered
gas. But the UPA government passed a law stipulating that only the
Central government can supply piped gas.
As per Modi’s claim, that project would have saved the Centre Rs
15,000 crore worth of cooking gas subsidy and spared three crore gas
cylinders for use elsewhere, but it was sabotaged because the Congress
felt threatened by the growing support for Modi among the women of
Gujarat. He then declared that he had filed a petition in the Supreme
Court to challenge this needless encroachment on the powers of the
state government.
Modi also talked of perennial power shortages and
blackouts in the
rest of the country while Gujarat had succeeded in providing
uninterrupted electricity to every single village and household.
Access to affordable and efficient forms of cooking is an issue of
utmost importance for virtually every woman in India. It is a life and
death issue for poor rural households where women have to spend hours
walking miles on rough terrains scrounging for fuel wood, cutting
thorny bushes and trees and carrying loads of firewood for cooking on
smoky chulhas that further endanger their health. Deforestation is
also a life and death issue for people who live in hilly regions,
especially women, because with disappearing forests, fuel, water and
fodder become scarce and landslides become a common occurrence.
Absence and/ or shortages of electricity have kept our villages
impoverished by crushing the emergence of small enterprises and
industries in villages.
Finally, Modi
critiqued Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi for bragging
in election rallies that the Congress party was the one facilitating
development by giving money grants to state governments while state
governments ignored or mismanaged development works. Modi echoed
Nitish Kumar, saying that the Congress talks as if the money coming
from the Centre is its personal wealth, which it is distributing as
charity.
Neither print nor electronic media chose to investigate and discuss
whether the claims made by Modi regarding the piped gas project and
universal rural electrification in Gujarat are accurate or
exaggerated. Similarly, the Congress party’s use of Central funds to
arm-twist chief ministers undermines federalism and vitiates
Centre-state relations, impairing the health of our democracy. The
Centre’s near-total monopoly over key sources of taxation leaves state
governments at the mercy of the Delhi durbar,
distorts state policies
and development programmes. For example, most state governments end up
pushing liquor sales because that is one of the few sources of revenue
they can impose directly. Villages that lack clean drinking water have
a plentiful supply of government-patronised liquor shops. This drains
out incomes of poor households, leads to greater domestic violence and
strengthens the hold of political goondas who own these liquor thekas
in villages.
But the media did not spend a fraction of the time discussing these
vital issues concerning women and democracy. Instead, for hours and
days on end, we heard militant feminists breathing fire and brimstone
and TV anchors emoting profusely only over the insult levelled by Modi
at Shashi Tharoor’s wife.
If Modi’s concern for reducing women’s drudgery is genuine, if he has
actually delivered piped gas to seven lakh rural households and
intends to
cover all the rest, if every household in rural Gujarat is
getting round the clock power supply, his frivolous remark against
Sunanda Tharoor is not enough to damn him for being anti-women. Mere
lip sympathy for women won’t do. I prefer politicians who care for
women’s well-being in concrete ways.
The purpose of writing this is neither to defend Modi, nor brush away
his uncouth remark. It is only to highlight the fact that when serious
issues are shoved under the carpet and a highly disproportionate
amount of time is spent on relatively frivolous issues by our national
media, is it not fair to complain that large sections of our
journalist biradari, especially our 24x7 news channels, are
trivialising politics in general and women’s concerns in particular in
their insatiable hunger for high-decibel cockfights over sensational
sound bytes? No politician dare marginalise the life concerns of the
mass of
our women as systematically as large sections of our media do,
with their disproportionate attention to glamour dolls, film stars and
the doings of the fashionable elite. It is easier to call monstrous
politicians to account than media monsters.
I know by writing this piece I will be damned forever by my “secular”
friends. To those who see Modi as evil incarnate and want to see him
defeated, I can only request: please have the courage to stay close to
facts and fight him on his home ground. Taking potshots at a straw man
or caricature will only weaken the case against him.
The writer is professor, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies,
Delhi, and founder editor ‘Manushi’
Visit
http://www.manushi.in/ll ॐ नमोः भगवते श्री परिज्ञानअश्रमाय
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