Banking on the 'purdah' principle

It took a brutal rape in the capital three and a half months ago for women's rights (or lack thereof) to come rather violently into focus. But the response from the political and civic authorities has been decidedly unsatisfactory, as any woman using public transport in north India in the days running up to Holi can testify. Instead of the engaging Festival of Colour that Incredible India-type ads hard-sell to foreigners, Holi has degenerated into an excuse for inebriated men to grope and misbehave with women in north and east India.

So even as the media stepped up its coverage of crimes against women, the rest of the polity has lapsed into its customary indifference. The sad fact is that women's rights are on nobody's political agenda, which is why the issue has never been given a constructive response from our elected representatives, men or women. Sheila Dikshit, for instance, is making a bid for a fourth term as chief minister but shows no signs of a specific plan to alter Delhi's reputation as the world's rape capital. Her constant complaint that the police do not come entirely under her jurisdiction but the central government's is weak. She is a Congress chief minister and a Congress-led coalition has been in power at the Centre for nine years. Could Ms Dikshit not leverage that relation (and she likes to parade her closeness to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty) to push for police reform?

As with all those social ills that no one really wants to spend time solving unless it comes with some venal gain attached, the approach to gender equality over the years has been so patronising as to be insulting. In the nineties, when Human Development Reports revealed, for all the world to see, the appalling oppression of half of India's population, the reaction was almost comic. Reserve a third of seats in Parliament for women, a response so inane and non-constructive that it is no surprise it has been pending in the Lok Sabha for 17 years.

Then, in 2003, P Chidambaram, surely India's most innovative finance minister to date, introduced the concept of "gender budgeting". This sounded great, since the exercise was meant to ensure that public resources were actually spent more equitably between the genders. In practice, it turned out to be little more than an exercise that lumped all spending on "women and child development" in one place.

Last month, Parliament passed a law protecting women against sexual harassment in the workplace, 16 years after the Supreme Court put out guidelines on the issue. This certainly marks a small step for womankind, but only educated, professional women. It provides little to safeguard the majority of working women - the millions of women who work as domestic helps or in small unorganised factories or construction sites.

After the December tragedy in Delhi came another response that has been greeted with so much derision that it is worth wondering why the proposal has not been withdrawn. This is the woman-only bank, as proposed by Mr Chidambaram in the 2013-14 Budget. Together with women-only buses prescribed by the willfully hapless Gurgaon civic authorities, such "reservation" policies have attracted the opprobrium they deserve. Why not a street only for women, joked some young women professionals.

That's the point: the more we segregate the genders, the worse things will get for women. It is a bit like the legal doctrine of "equal but separate" that was applied to coloured people in the US after the civil war. That did nothing to improve their plight. The doctrine was eventually overturned by the Supreme Court in the mid-fifties. It is no coincidence that the worst states for crimes against women are those in which females tend to be killed before or immediately after they're born, so that men outnumber women. The purdah we deplore in other countries is no less an issue in the world's most populous democracy: most of our public transport services have separate compartments and seats for women, or separate queues for accessing public services only because it's mostly unsafe for men and women to mingle in public places.

Gender equality has a better chance of winning on the back of sheer practicality. Nowhere is this more evident than in Southeast Asia, where growing textiles, garments and electronics industries have created a huge demand for nimble-fingered women workers who, in turn, have a strong sense of their rights. That has not only gradually altered the social dynamics in these countries, but also prompted administrators to create safer conditions in general, as anyone who has visited these countries can confirm. India's BPO industry showed that potential before losing its sheen to Asian competitors. As for textiles, India managed to destroy this thriving industry quite efficiently from the eighties on. And the broader manufacturing industry is in such bad shape that it is unlikely to create jobs for men, let alone women. But solving these issues is the hard part; in India's chaotic politics, it is so much easier to build political capital through tokenism.