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Mamata Banerjee Must Apologise for Insulting Women

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Published on Friday, 03 February 2012 17:53

Written by Radical Socialist

Mamata Banerjee Must Apologise for Insulting Women

The silence of West Bengal’s intelligentsia, and that of rights activists, is eloquent.  It is after all still the long drawn out honeymoon affair with Mamata Banerjee as the Chief Minister of West Bengal. So minor flaws, as almost everything is being labelled, must not be blown up.

And therefore, whether it is suicide by peasants, ban on trade unionism, public insult to women as a collectivity, or the curbs on freedom of expression, one must remain silent or be branded as a CPI(M) supporter or an “ultra-left”. The Chief Minister said, on 25^th January, that one should not lend books, brain or housewives (gharer bou). She also said, reportedly, that if one lends out wives they are used before being returned. Whether she wants to lend books or brains are separate issues. But to use the term lending out wives is so unequivocally offensive to women, that any sensible person, anyone with even a little notion of democratic rights and gender rights, was bound to ask, how could a Chief Minister, and a woman at that, publicly make such a comment. This comment first of all reduces women, or at least all married women, to the status of a housewife. Secondly, it then proceeds to turn women from human beings into objects that can be possessed (by their husbands) and looks at the dangers of “lending them”. One would think that not only the feminist movement, but all previous efforts at improving women’s standing in society, their dignity, their rights as equal and full human beings, have simply not existed.

The politics of Ms. Banerjee are well known, if in recent times buried by her old backers as well as her new found admirers. She shot into fame after she led an attack on J. P. Narayan’s car when he had come to Calcutta. While it is often claimed that she is a woman who rose up without links with male politicians, this is only a half truth. She belongs to the ranks of the Chhatra Parishad- Yuva Congress cadres who had been patronised by S.S. Ray during a particularly black period of West Bengal’s history. That is the political culture she represents, under changed circumstances. S.S. Ray’s regime saw massive torture on political prisoners, hunt for political activists including murder of many of them, and torture of women activists, whether belonging to the Naxalite camp or the reformist left. That she has scant respect for gender rights is not something to be surprised at.

When a Chief Minister makes a pronouncement from a public place, however, it cannot be taken as an ill-mannered comment by some private person. It has to be taken up seriously, for it suggests the kind of values and attitudes surrounding women’s rights and women’s issues that the present government has/will promote. For her, it seems, wives are property, belonging to the husbands – property of a sort that can be lent out though that is fraught with the risk of being “used”. If one looks at the TMCs election manifesto, one would see clearly that it has no discourse of rights when talking about women, but only a rhetoric of izzat. How better to save izzat than to keep wives locked up in rooms. For to let them go out in the open air is to risk other males “use” them as ill-gotten property. This is a particularly extreme version of the total discursive shift she and her party members are trying to carry out in the political and social field in West Bengal.

What is also at stake is the credibility of West Bengal’s so-called democratic media and the civil social movement. When CPI(M) leader Anil Basu had made an obscene comment about Mamata Bandyopadhyay, we had protested. So had many of these civil social forces. This time, though, we saw neither Star Ananda, that unofficial Public Relations team for Mamata Bandyopadhyay, organising a debate on her propriety, with half a dozen critics present; nor did we see articles and statements pouring out from the “biddotjans” (the preferred term for intellectuals these days). The fundamental questions we need to ask are simple?

• Is gender right an issue that must be kept on the back-burner (again) in the name of “more important things”, namely having an anti-CPI(M) government in office and having stability?
• Is the politics of protest to be pursued only when the CPI(M) is in power? Is it going to be one standard (harsh) for a Social Democratic government, and another (very soft and loving) when it is a rightwing government?
• Is civil society only a myth, a fiction to enable people to fight for the TMC without overtly appearing to do so?

Demand that Mamata Banerjee must apologise and retract her words.

Radical Socialist 3 February 2012