Women's rights as a power play

With elections approaching, women have become the focus of political contestations, but no amount of handouts can change the reality of gender disparity in India

International Women’s Day falls tomorrow, that time of the year when journalists’ inboxes are flooded with entreaties to cover some corporate initiative or the other to “empower” women. The impact of these disparate well-meaning efforts, some of them quite successful, become moot when you read about recent appalling events at Sandeshkhali, West Bengal and Dumka, Jharkhand. Both underline the “distance to horizon”, to use the terminology of surveys, towards gender equality and the deeply problematic nature of Indian society in which the political class across the ideological spectrum is complicit. Halfway through the third decade of the 21st century, women’s