Kanika Datta: Wait until dark

There is even less hope for women when leaders such as Mamata Banerjee & Sheila Dixit agree to the view that women should not work after dark

Here’s a suggestion for India Inc: to ensure the safety of women employees in the workplace, make it compulsory for them to leave office premises before the sun sets. Sounds ridiculous, right? But if the Gurgaon Police, Mamata Banerjee and Sheila Dixit are to be believed, the predatory nature of men is stoked at night or just before the dawn. By their logic, therefore, women who are sexually harassed in the workplace are subject to such treatment only after dark.

Now, we know that the darkness provides a handy cover for all manner of crimes, not just sexual or gender-related ones. But public authorities and politicians are kidding themselves big time if they think closing nightclubs early or dissuading women from being out on their own at night and working late will lower the crime statistics against women. In 21st-century India, crimes against women continue to be a 24X7 activity and little of it is related to nightclub-frequenting or working women. The fault, to paraphrase the bard somewhat clumsily, lies not in the stars and moon but in our attitudes.

It is depressing enough, for instance, when thugs and loafers belonging to a party that rejoices in the name of Ram Sena can even think of physically attacking women in a bar in Mangalore as they did in 2009 or a cab driver should plot to rape and murder a call centre employee in Bangalore. But there is even less hope for women when women leaders echo these antediluvian male attitudes.

Last month West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee initially suggested that the woman who was raped in a moving car on Park Street should not have gone to a nightclub given that she is a mother of two. The multiple inferences here of expected standards of behaviour from women would have been worthy of a representative of a khap panchayat in Haryana rather than of a politician who broke many gender barriers to become West Bengal’s first woman chief minister. Presumably, someone should have asked Ms Banerjee if it was okay for a father of two children to frequent a nightclub.

Her subsequent statement that the random rape incidents over January and February were engineered to discredit her government was more in keeping with her worldview (which explains why she was noticeably less-than-enthusiastic when some perpetrators were caught). But it is no less worthy of condemnation. A crime is a crime irrespective of who commits it. Ms Banerjee has the power and the moral force to impose a no-tolerance policy on crimes against women in her state. It would be a solid legacy to acquire but probably less politically savvy. In male-dominated India, women’s issues are not vote winners.

By turning the latest incidents into political fodder, the unspoken message she has sent out is that the occurrence of rape doesn’t matter as long as it doesn’t make her government look bad. Her diktat that bars and clubs close early is of a piece with this general thoughtlessness; most of the crimes against and harassment of women don’t take place here but in homes, offices and on the streets, every day.

Ms Banerjee, however, isn’t alone in her outlook; an infinitely more experienced woman chief minister like Ms Dixit appears to harbour similar views on how women should behave. Four years ago, when a young TV reporter was murdered on her way home late at night after duty, the motherly Ms Dixit deplored the fact that young women should be so “adventurous”. This is a strange adjective to apply to a professional woman, that too someone who worked in the media.

Since Ms Dixit has a faultless command of the English language, she could not have chosen the word mistakenly. According to the dictionary, the word “adventurous” means “being prepared to take risks or try new experiences”. Thus, we must assume from Ms Dixit’s statement, women who work at a career that may entail working late at night are risk takers, not achievers. This is a sad commentary on a country that set global standards in the outsourcing industry, where almost half the employees are women. Imagine where India’s banking, finance and IT industries would be if educated women chose not to be “risk takers”.

It is hardly surprising that the burly men from the Gurgaon police should come to roughly similar conclusions as two prominent women leaders. They are willfully ignoring the evidence of a growing complement of working women in this emerging city, of course (corporate India clearly does not have the same reservations about hiring women). After all, it’s so much easier for law enforcers to demand that women should stay at home and express helplessness when they choose not to — and so much easier to imply that the victims are ladies of easy virtue. Much simpler than working to create a safe environment, so that half India’s population can contribute more meaningfully to economic growth.