How bad can a bad Indian girl get?

Kanika GahlautFeb 21, 2015 | 13:30

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A rather unremarkable "A Bad Girl" chart, by going viral, has become a telling comment on feminism and women's rights in India today. That so many folks took a rather innocuous and satirical set of "rules" - bad girls ride a bike, bad girls can't make round rotis, bad girls go to Goa - literally, and some even outraged mistakenly over it as a judgment of women as taught allegedly in school books, (@BBCTrending reported later that it was indeed not meant to be taken seriously, and only created as a college assignment at an art, design and technology school in Bangalore by students as a feminist parody of school posters that appeared in classrooms across India in the 1980s and 1990s) is by itself indicative enough about the state of feminism and what women are up against.

But the chart, while being well intended and having definitely got the attention of the Indian online space, is revealing as much for what it includes - the right to have breasts (surprised outraging folks couldn't see this could only be a parody) and the right to fall in love in a park (ouch, so scandalous), the right to booze, "lech" at men, and other just obvious issues of biology and personal freedom and choice - as feminist notions as it leaves out.

India's popular feminist movement seems to still be widely battling with patriarchy for a sexual freedom revolution, while the rest of the modern world has moved on to the feminist revolution. The second could not have happened without the first, but India's struggles with patriarchy only show how behind the times the movement is, and how urgently it needs to catch up.

While feminism worldwide is taking on issues of equal pay at work and the ownership of reproductive rights, men - and women - instead, from Haryana to New Delhi, are stuck on the "right to wear jeans" and "right to have a love marriage" narrative.

Even the issues of women's rights that are highlighted seem to suggest the state of things. Feminist Rita Banerji, founder of the "50 Million Missing" project, observes that "rape seems to touch a public nerve in India in a way that no other form of lethal violence on women or girls does, and goes on to discuss why this is because it’s still seen through a prism that views women as sexual resources owned by men".

"There are millions of women and girls murdered in India each year," writes Banerji. "About 17 million girls were killed between the ages of one to 15 years in India in one year (not foeticides!), and about 106,000 women were burnt alive, mostly for dowry in one year. Hundreds more are killed in so-called "honour killings" and witch lynching, or in lethal rape cases. That is, at least, 35 to 40 girls and women are killed in India every minute. EVERY MINUTE!"

She asks: "Then why do these brutal, lethal violent crimes against women and girls not evoke the same public outrage?"

The theme of sexual ownership (as seen by men) and sexual honour (as seen by women) reflects as much in our politics and society - "love jihad", raised by the new ruling party at the Centre the BJP, became an election issue in Uttar Pradesh in 2014 and has reverberated through public discourse since, and in 2015, when the AAP seen as "fresh, young, new", swept the Assembly polls in Delhi, it did so with an election manifesto that promised to establish a million CCTV cameras for "women's security", but did not feel the need to have a single woman representative in its Delhi cabinet.

Women in so-called emancipated pockets of urban India too - the corporate boardrooms and media houses which should have led the feminist movement - are woefully lacking in female representation. Only five per cent of working women in India make it to senior leadership positions in the corporate sector, compared to the global average of 20 percent, according to a 2014 study by Delhi-based Lal Bahadur Shastri Institute of Management.

The World Economic Forum's 2014 gender gap index shows India continuing to reflect the country's dismal performance in removing gender-based disparities, ranking 114 out of 142 countries, scoring below average on parameters like economic participation, educational attainment and health.

In popular cinema and culture, the narrative is a recurring one - consider the big hit and Oscar winning Frozen (2013) and Bollywood's award-winning Queen (2014) - while both are feminist narratives, the difference in treatment cannot be more pronounced - the former while delightfully breaking down the "knight in shining armour" stereotypes of fairytales and sending the message that women are their own saviours, also explores the power of womanly attributes with "let it go" - an ultimate bad girl anthem, symbolising the internal struggle of unleashing the power within. Queen, meanwhile, a soppy, me-too Bridget Jones two decades too late, where the jilted heroine's defiance is going off on her own for what would have been her honeymoon, drinking and burping in an "unfeminine" way on the streets of Paris, taking selfies, singing vacuous "Hungama" songs and taking way too long to get over a jerk who should ideally have been dismissed from heart and mind over one vodka shot.

And if last year the media's most significant contribution to women's rights was the Deepika Padukone and Times of India face-off, where the leading English daily, often criticised for the sexualisation and tabloidisation of content, insisted on the "right" to print demeaning images of the actress' breasts within its pages, this year AIB roast had FIRs against participating actors for ostensibly outraging their own modesty by choosing to kiss at the event.

Clearly, whether it is arguments of rape counsels - "How can a modern women be forced into sex" asked the lawyer of the alleged Delhi Uber rapist - or media projections, the line between right to express sexuality and "asking for it" misogyny is not something we are yet to cross. Therefore, it's no surprise that a banal "A Bad Girl " chart, quite unremarkable for the nine messages it sends out - the right to pout and the right to party in Goa, leave your hair open in public, the right to eat too less or the right to eat too much - has nearly broken the internet at home.

Really, Indians across the board - "feminists" included - need to get a grip and get over the obsession with sex, sexuality and the woman. There's more to women, to women's rights and to feminism.