Samikhsya Bureau
Should International Women’s Day and the continuing debates over it with an emphasis on women’s empowerment or gender equality need not limit itself to a mere number game in political representation. Such discourses make any reading very tiring and trivial given the background that women have remained great achievers through out the phases of civilisation and history has it in record. Women is not a community that should be viewed as a quantity gasping for the sympathy from men.
Although the movement had its root in 1909 but it was not rooted in any myopic concept of politics merely. When today over forty countries commemorate this day and in majority of the countries the day is a national holiday, in India the situation is bit downbeat and we allow this great occasion to become a subject of politics, which is in fact does not behove to the high stature women enjoy globally.
Lets not reduce the concept where the politicians engage themselves in a kind of dog-eat-dog situation and reduce it be a subject that suffers from such a dangerous divide. It must be ridiculed.
Man and woman, as in normal life, it is a 50-50 reality and anyone trying to differ from it deserve pity. While enlisting it as an occasion of significance the United Nations lent its support to it in 1975 when it has stated that “International Women’s Day is a time to reflect on progress made, to call for change and to celebrate acts of courage and determination by ordinary women who have played an extraordinary role in the history of their countries and communities “.
History is replete with examples when several women had shown the courage and valour to brave social taboos and excel in their goals in many fields. Let alone politics but even in ancient era women proved their mettle braving centuries old mental inhibitions. Be it Vandana Shiva making a crusade on biodiversity conservation in India or UK’sRosalind Franklin’s stride in DNA or even in ancient Greece’s noted gynaecologist Agnodice who could dare the system that had sentenced some women to death who defied the diktat against such practice.
A book may be too small to document the achievements by women across the globe right from the pulpits of power to at the grass root level where civilisation had not made any inroad even. Few of the most firebrand political leaders the world had witnessed in Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandi who rose above many heights as women with iron guts to smother the chauvinism of that time.
It is time to give up tokenism as a mercy by commemorating the day and let the history-to-come record a 50-50 by a decade or so.
