The rice and roti routine

The last roti is for her
With which
She has to craft
The next day's sun.
– Premranjan Animesh in Pichhali Roti

Mao Zedong is believed to have said that the more chillies you ate, the more revolutionary you became. Judging from the fire in the press-statements of the Maobaadi commissars of Nepal, they must have bitten fistfuls of jyanmaras (killer chillies) in their childhood. But like most Nepalis, they too must have grown up eating loads of the staple rice as well. Despite tall claims of the Maobaadi leadership about the emancipation of women, indications are that the lot of the 'fairer' sex among insurgents is no fairer than their fate in the society at large. If we are what we eat, something is seriously wrong with the Southasian staple—rice and rotis.

Eating mountains of rice with streams of daal flowing over is bad enough in terms of gender sensitivity for we all know who does the cooking, but the roti-eating male of the species seems to be gastronomically programmed to be a male-chauvinistic-you-know-what. The female resigned to the fate of rolling rotis and boiling rice. Rabri Devi, the Chief Minister of Bihar, claims that she still loves to spend some time in the kitchen, specially rolling chapattis, for her husband-cum-party president Laloo Yadav. Women's rights is nowhere on the agenda of this housewife turned head-of-government in the blighted state of Bihar.

Not that this reluctant 'leader' is an exception in South Asian politics. Sheila Dixit has miserably failed to make New Delhi safer for women. She can claim that law and order is the responsibility of the central government. But then she failed to get her party even raise this issue in the Indian parliament in an effective manner. The time and effort the Congress (I) spent in fending off the onslaught on the foreign origin of its president Sonia Gandhi could have been better utilised to project her as the hope of half of the population of the biggest democracy in the world. But Sonia's (wo)man-Friday, Ambika Soni, seems to be too busy projecting her boss as the 'he-man' of her party. With women like these at the helms, why bemoan the attitude of the male of the species?

The status of women in Southasia is of course abysmal. More than 16,000 Afghan women die in childbirth every year, the world´s worst maternal mortality rate outside of sub-Saharan Africa. Despite the Beijing propaganda ("Statistics show that in recent years a Tibetan woman in urban areas spends on an average 800 Yuan or more each year on cosmetics, approximately half the monthly salary for a government worker in Lhasa."), Tibet women in and outside Tibet are no better off than their other Subcontinental sisters, even though they work a lot harder than their men.

According to recent Mahbub-ul-Haq Human Development Centre statistics, female economic activity in Pakistan is only 15.4 percent compared to 57.2 percent in Bangladesh, 85 percent in Nepal, 43.5 percent in India, 41.6 percent in Sri Lanka and 28.6 percent in Maldives. But it is the scale of desperation in India that is Bharat is most shocking. Devinder Sharma wrote recently in the Hindustan Times that a baby girl was sold by her parents in Orissa for INR 10, less than the price of a bottle of mineral water. Perhaps it was the poor woman's alternative to female foeticide, the procedure of choice of the comfortably off in the wheat belt of Western Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan, Punjab, parts of Madhya Pradesh, and Gujarat. Selling girls into the thriving sex market of the Southasian metropolis from the disadvantaged section of Nepali and Bangladeshi population is a curse that is giving nightmares to the health workers worried about the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS in the region.

However, all of this has not stopped us Southasians from electing some high profile presidents, prime ministers, chief ministers, parliamentarians, and legislators. Sultan Ahmed writes, of Pakistan: "It is easier to let more women sit in the assemblies and the Senate than enable them earn a living to feed their children and tend the ailing". Sadly, the situation elsewhere in Southasia isn't much different. Aung San Suu Kyi is the Nobel-prize winner and a symbol of democratic struggle all over the world, but that hasn't made the Burmese junta more respectful towards their women.

Traditionally, mountain and hill women of the Himalayan region work much harder—and hence command more power—but even they bow to the male authority almost unquestioningly. The monarchies of Bhutan and Nepal are yet to amend their succession laws in favour of the first-born irrespective of sex.
The model for women who seek power—and get it—is a male figure. The face in the chair may be that of a woman, but Southasian female leaders are more 'manly' in their minds than most of them would care to admit. Many women leaders have inherited political legacy from their fathers and husbands, and are groomed to behave like their mentors. Zulfi and Mujib's daughters (Benazir and Hasina) or Zia-ur Rahman and Rajiv's widows (Khaleda and Sonia) have inherited the male image and are trying to live up to it.

The political pedigree of Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratunga is a little more illustrious and complex. Her father was a prime minister. And her mother Sirimavo Bandaranaike had become the world´s first female prime minister back in 1960. Yet, she seems to draw her inspiration from her father, who was assassinated by a Buddhist monk when she was just in primary school.

Dynastic succession, even through democratic processes, seems to make women behave like men. But even those who have come up the social ladder on their own—like the glamorous sanyasin Uma Bharati from Bundelkhand or spinster Shailaja Acharya of Nepal—suffer from an acute masculinity syndrome. It is hard to see how they are any different from their male colleagues on the all-important question of empowerment of women.

Dowager Ammas
There is a very long tradition of dowager begums and maharanis ruling small fiefdoms, on behalf of their little ones, in Southasia. Surrounded by men in their courts, these women had to measure up to male expectations. They did so by becoming more like them. From Razia Sultan to Jhansi ki Rani in the battlefield and from Jayalalitha Jayaram to Mamata Banerji in the electoral arena, khoob ladi mardani (fought like men) has always been the ideal of women in statecraft and politics.

No wonder, Indira Gandhi aspired to be an Alfa male, and managed to become the only 'man' of all her cabinets after 1971—masculinity understood by her as the epitome of aggressiveness, imperiousness, intolerance, and the dispenser of patronage. The way things are, there is no reason why the women of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Delhi, Tamilnadu, and Bihar should rejoice that they now have Bhabhi (Vasundhara Raje Scindia), Behanji (Uma Bharati), Dadi (Sheila Dixit), Amma (Jayalalita), and Chachi (Rabri Devi) as their chief ministers.

Begum Khaleda 'entered' politics in 1981, when her husband, Zia-ur Rahman, a former general-turned-president, was assassinated by rebel military officers. Ever since, the sole purpose of her politics has been to prove her late husband right by running down Begum Hasina, daughter of assassinated prime minister Mujibur Rehman. Benazir has failed to grow out of the shadows of her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who had vowed to eat grass but build the nuclear bomb at any cost. President Chandrika of Sri Lanka prefers to walk the razors edge of communalism like her father, but times have changed since 1959. Shailaja Acharya—the most illustrious Nobody of Nepali politics—too likes to allude to the mid-seventies' conciliatory politics of her late uncle and mentor BP Koirala, without realising that there is no Cold War rivalry anymore to sustain the world's attention on any public figure in competition with the monarch.

There is little doubt that we need many more female Southasians in academia, media, business, diplomacy, and politics. But our common experience shows that matriarchal leaders are mirror images of their patriarchal predecessors. The women who succeed in life become as insensitive as men. The challenge then is how to get more feminine, if not feminist, women in public life in Southasia.

Several likely solutions are suggested by TV Talking Heads, print Big Foot pens, and radio Loud Mouths. Most of them end up stressing the supposed role of education in the emancipation of women. That is a suggestion that can never go wrong. But given the snail's pace of spread of female education in the region, it will be quite a while before we will get women-like-women in positions of power and authority. Meanwhile, why not tinker with a change of diet to free our Maa jis and Ammas from rolling endless number of rotis for the insatiable hunger of the ever increasing brood? Did you know that the three of the eight biggest countries of the world (in terms of population) are in Southasia, and that the rate of population increase in Pakistan is close to 2.7 percent?

We must eat less rotis, and go back to gruels like Dhindo (maize), Dalia (pulses), or Khichadi (rice and pulses) before we mature into eating sprouts that set the women free from the chulha-chowka (hearth and wash) routine. The earthen bowls must return to replace the grain-plates that we eat from.