Can the State resolve the issue of gender?

ICFAI University Nagaland holds National Seminar on Gender & Politics

Government of Nagaland’s Parliamentary Secretary for Higher & Technical Education, Deo Nukhu, today expressed hope that the Women’s Reservation Bill be passed by the Indian parliament. He also expressed confusion as to why there were such few women contesting elections in Nagaland, particularly, and the North East, in general.

Nukhu could have found answers if he had attended the first session of the National Seminar on ‘Gender and Politics: Rhetoric and Accountability’ for which he proposed the inaugural address as Chief Guest at ICFAI University Nagaland, Sovima, on Thursday. The seminar is being held on February 11 and 12.

The Parliamentary Secretary wondered why there are more women in the teaching profession in Nagaland and they come out in larger numbers to vote, but are inadequately represented in political decision making? Even states he had assumed to be “backward,” like Madhya Pradesh, has 25 women elected to their Legislative Assembly, he informed. Nagaland has none.

Though some Village Councils and Village Development Boards in Nagaland are nominating women representatives, he figured that “customary practices” are preventing women from meeting higher political goals. Besides, the Nagaland State Government is in a legal tussle with women’s groups over providing a 33% reservation to women in town and municipal councils.  “I hope the court case will be resolved and women will come up in municipal bodies with or without reservation,” Nukhu said.

Gender and the system
However, at an interaction with Naga elders, Dr. V Sawmveli, a lecturer at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Guwahati, was told that a 33% reservation for women will not matter as elders (male) will never accept women in decision making anyway. In the scheme of customary laws, women have no such position. Indian law provides for both public and personal (or customary) laws to flourish in a mutually exclusive manner within its system.

Thus, Dr. Sawmveli wondered through her paper on ‘Gender, Law and State’ presented in the first session- Gender and State- of the seminar if legal routes are the best for feminists. Studying the codified Mizo customary laws in this context, Dr. Sawmveli’s paper examined the relation between social institutions and their responses to gender issues especially when the former perpetuates patriarchal ideology.

As in the case of Mizo women, “there is a tendency to think that the legal system can sort out issues of oppression,” she noted in her presentation. But customary laws are “rigid and consciously repressive of women” while public laws are caught in the dilemma between minority rights and women’s rights (or universal human rights and the particulars of cultural experience). The TISS lecturer, thus, called for an ‘intersectional analysis’ (towards a more radical approach) to sort out the dilemma for feminist thinkers among indigenous peoples—how do women transcend patriarchal roles without losing their identity/politics as, say, Mizo or Naga? Do women need to be stripped of their cultural identity to be treated as equals?

 Stripping of cultural identity, on the other hand, is what Evangelical Christianity has done in the Naga areas—narratives point to Naga people emerging from ‘savagery’, ‘tradition’ and ‘darkness’ to ‘civilisation’, ‘modernity’ and ‘light’: Good News for the new faith. Dr. John Thomas from the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, explored this in his paper ‘On Evangelical Christianity, History and the Making of Gender Relations among Nagas.’

He highlighted how patriarchy existed among the Nagas even before Christianity came, but there was little prejudice attached to the division of labour, and these lines remained more permeable than in caste societies elsewhere, leaving women with more dignity in their labour. But these traditional ways needed “cleansing and reform” as per Evangelist Christianity and man-woman conjugal relationships were re-structured by the Church into “suitable wives for Christian men” or “suitable mothers for Christian homes” models.

While the domestic space was evangelised through the mother, the father had to evoke the “real man” image of leaders and bread winners, albeit completely removed from his Naganess. From this newly “effeminate” man emerged a new sense of “masculinity” among Naga men, exercising greater control over women, particularly in the public sphere. Anyone who transgressed was either ridiculed or excluded from public sphere. With modernity exerted by Christianity came a patriarchy far more rigid and hierarchical, postulated Dr. Thomas.

In both Nagaland and Mizoram, the State remains tied to the Church.