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ABSTRACT
The introduction to the Report of the Committee on Amendments to Criminal Law 23 January 2013, set up in the wake of the country-wide protest against the gang-rape of a young woman inside a Delhi bus in December 2012, recalls the pledge of the Constitution India adopted in 1949. The Report seized its moment to gesture at the point that the making of the state or the nation is inseparable from questions of gender. It is futile to try and seal off a political sphere from the civil society or from cultural practices. The notion of a nation always already in the making is reliant on the fugitive character of culture. The ideas of jati (nation), and rashtra (state) are, in the long run, dependent on what the desh (country) and samaja (society/community) make of the concept of lokatantra (republic/democracy). If the legal structure of the state enjoins a certain idea of nationhood there are bound to be contesting claims from intersecting fields, including those that involve seeing the nation as ‘gendered’. The current situation is more about the majoritarian understanding of what makes for the ‘modern feminine in India’ than idolatrous iconography or of the new patriarchy that had since the late nineteenth century sought a fragile truce with the project of ‘improving’ the lot of women along Western lines. Conversely, if the state – as sought to be reinvented by the current leaders of India – wishes to visibly display its secular credentials, the ruling majority will less than subtly alter the concept of Hindutva (or ‘Hindu-ness’) to identify with the nation and with ‘Indianness’. The Report of the Verma Committee attempts to recover the foundational tenets of the Indian Union which offered equal rights to citizens irrespective of gender. In the wake of popular protests against the ghastly incident that occasioned its appointment, it alluded to the fact that questions of gender justice and safety were inseparable from those of women’s equity, empowerment and capability. In the current situation it might be useful to recall Rabindranath Tagore’s suspicions about the imagined ‘nation’ held together more by chains of servitude than bonds of belonging. Tagore guessed – as his mature fiction clearly demonstrates – that there was no way of skirting issues of gender when speaking of the ‘modern’ idea of the nation. Tagore promises more than Reports of government Committees.
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Notes
1. Constituent Assembly of India, 11, 12 vols. Accessed April 11 2016.
2. Slote, Morals from Motives, 14; and Zagzebski, Divine Motivation Theory, 160.
3. See note 1 above.
4. Prasad, India Divided.
5. See note 1 above.
6. Ibid., 12.
7. See note 1 above.
8. Justice Verma et al., Report of the Committee on Amendments, 1–2.
9. Ibid., i.
10. Ibid., 3.
11. Biehl, “Ethical Theory and Moral Practice,” 353–69.
12. Justice Verma et al., Report of the Committee on Amendments, 5, 7.
13. Ibid., 8.
14. Ibid., 5.
15. Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation, 2.
16. Gyáni, “Gender, Nationalism and Individualisation,” 11.
17. Justice Verma et al, Report of the Committee on Amendments, 11. The Khap panchayat, of course, has no legal standing. It is a traditional community of village elders in some parts of northern India. Chautala, then in opposition, made the remarks in October 2012. Accessed April 11 2016. See http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/girls-being-raped-marry-them-asap-says-om-prakash-chautala-backing-khaps-501345.
18. The reference is to the address of the actor and Trinamool Congress Member of Parliament Tapas Pal delivered in Choumaha on 14 June 2014 in which he allegedly threatened political opponents with violence, including rape. Accessed 11 April 2016. See http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/kolkata/west-bengal-women-commission-slams-tapas/article6176900.ece.
19. Asaduddin Owaisi, leader of All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen and a three-term MP from Hyderabad, declared on 14 March 2016 that he would not chant ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ as demanded by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Shiv Sena since it was not a requirement of the Indian Constitution. On 16 March Waris Pathan, Member of the Legislative Assembly of Maharashtra and a member of AIMIM, was suspended from the Assembly for the rest of the Budget session for refusing to say ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’. Accessed 11 April 2016. See http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/i-wont-say-bharat-mata-ki-jai-owaisi-to-bhagwat-1287037. and http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/owaisis-legislator-waris-pathan-suspended-refused-to-say-bharat-mata-ki-jai-1287819.
20. On the history and interpretations of the issue, see Bagchi, “Representing Nationalism,” 42–3; Bagchi, Interrogating Motherhood; Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation; Gupta, Notions of Nationhood in Bengal, 132–7; and Ghosh, Different Nationalisms, 274–77. For a more indirect, though influential approach to the problem, see Chatterjee, “Nationalist Resolution of Women’s Question,” 233–53.
21. Ghar wapsi or home-coming is a campaign run by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Visva Hindu Parishad to convert (or, as the claim goes, re-convert) non-Hindus to Hinduism through certain public rituals. The campaign has been in the news since 2014. See Katju, “The Politics of Ghar Wapsi,” 21–24.
22. See Kosambi, “Multiple Contestations,” 193–208; and Burton, Heart of the Empire, 72–110.
23. See Thakur, “Rabindranather Rashtranoitik Mat,” 436–44.
24. Sen, The Idea of Justice.
25. See Thakur, “Swadesi samaja,” 526–52. In the 1930 essay, Tagore emphasized the distinct spheres of samaja and rashtra in India, harped on the need to serve the country and its people more than simply agitating for the control of the machinery of state, and denounced the idea of charka as a retrograde gesture of denial and rejection rather than genuine service of the nation.
26. Tagore, “Nationalism in the West”, 37. Spelling as in source-edition.
27. Ibid., 38.
28. Rathi, Tagore’s Ghare-baire and Char adhyaya, 185–200.