Patronising communication in era of gender equity

Vikash Narain Rai
Former Director, National Police Academy, Hyderabad

WELCOME the social hostility that helped neutralise loads of repulsive gendered communication emanating from public stages recently. The directly prejudicial variety, crass or subtle, easily occupied the centre of criticism, such as cricketer Hardik Pandya boasting of his lewdness on a TV show or Rahul Gandhi taunting Rafale-ducking Narendra Modi about hiding behind his female Defence Minister. However, the less noticed critically but more harmful to the cause of gender parity would be the metacommunication variety that remained shrouded in the patronising version. The underlying message of disparity in this genre seeps into mundane activities as well as fresh initiatives as it draws from the organisation’s retrograde cultural profile eroding the concept of equality between man and woman. To borrow a related research paper title, organisation becomes a gendered communication act.

Albert J Mills and Peter Chiaramonte’s paper focuses on the metacommunication character of organisation, its impact upon the gendering of persons, and that organisations, as social constructs, are reflections of a gendered reality, i.e., the concept of organisation has been significantly shaped by sexist understandings. Through an emphasis upon metacommunication, the paper takes issue with the notion that sexual discrimination can be addressed through improvements within organisations if the concept of organisation is left unquestioned; that changes in patterns and styles of inter-personal communications can lessen discrimination if questions of metacommunication go unexplored.

Metacommunication is a secondary communication about how disguised information is meant to be interpreted. The organisation of the family, most patronising of them all for girls, the steely fulcrum of gender spin, was given a jumla push by PM Modi right in the beginning of his innings, through the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao call from the historic battleground of Panipat in Haryana. His government has since then rewarded improved sex ratio statistics, opened namesake one-stop centres, set up outdated Mahila police stations and flaunted death penalty as the ultimate deterrent to crimes against women. Underneath the façade of this tough veneer, the family is left to its old ways of nurturing two equal sexes into two unequal genders. This they do by organising and showcasing boys as boys and girls as girls, while denying daughters their lawful share in parental assets.

These days, a large number of middle-class Indian families, even of rural origin, take pride in claiming that they have brought up their girls as boys. How many would like to raise their boys as girls? One unintended fallout of China’s single-child policy of four decades is reflected in their free flow of parental investment in the education of the girl child. I met Ting Wang Lowan, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Legal Studies at Kenyon College, Ohio, last September. In her early thirties and possessing excellent driving skills, a PhD from the University of Kansas, she would have ended up as a small-time taxi driver in her native town near Shanghai, like her parents. There are millions of Tings to be found inside and outside China. The impact of this generation on Chinese society is such that even the shift to a two-child policy since 2016 has failed to disturb gender parity within the family set-up. Ironically, it has even upset the government’s campaign to arrest the trend of declining youth population in China.

How sexist can organisations be! The Indian Army Chief recently justified the exclusion of women from combat roles, citing their sexual vulnerability if captured by the enemy. Much like the era when wars were fought for women? Or, is it that a male soldier’s existence, say at the volatile Pakistan border, would be considered less vulnerable even though he had greatly risked humiliating torture, mutilation and death? Another supporting voice would make us believe that female officers leading male troops at borders might vitiate the combat environment within the unit itself. Yet no one from the establishment has ever called these arguments sexist. Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has instead expressed the intention to induct women in a small fraction into the military police, for the limited purpose of dealing with allegations involving women and children.

That should take the cake. Control under the guise of care! In the meantime, adorn your Republic Day parades with ornamental female contingents. A female Defence Minister is in order, but not a female soldier. Don’t extremist groups enter female combatants in real-time skirmishes? What about increasing women intake in allied branches of the Army? The government’s own report in early 2018 had pointed out the extremely unacceptable low female percentage in the armed forces. It quotes the strength of women officers in the Army as 1,561, compared to 41,074 of their male counterparts. Notwithstanding innumerable excuses and promises, and countless talks on employability, no announced ground map is in place to indicate the Army’s intent to move against its chronic deficiency in female employment. Nowhere has it happened overnight. The US struggled with the gender employability debate throughout its Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria conflicts, obtaining only in 2016 the clearance for ‘all positions to all sexes’ approach to staffing. Can this be a route for the Indian Army to overcome its dilemma of not garnering enough officers from a gender-constricted job market?

The Supreme Court, which is never shy of patronising the cause of women in the fight against social, moral and religious policing, faltered in two important matters recently. It ended up reinforcing the cultural norms of women as a source of obscenity and religiosity, respectively, while still extending the liberty-enhancing model of gender justice to Mumbai bar dancers and Sabarimala women devotees. On the face of it, the constitutional right of dancers to work and earn a livelihood and that of devotees to religious freedom has been upheld. However, the two verdicts are likely to remain symbolic and support the patriarchal vulnerability of women, socially, politically and administratively.

Let us recall here the limitation of the apex court’s intervention in a series of reported instances of sexual exploitation of girls in government-linked shelter homes, which were supposed to be run as pious models of patronisation. There are any number of punitive inquiries ordered since then all over the country into the working of individual shelter homes, but only within the scope of their existing cultural character and administrative profile. Without questioning the gendered origin of the institution of shelter homes, it is petering out to be another exercise in familiar metacommunication. Even within the framework of government models, the independent orientation of a working women’s hostel would be far more metamorphosing for shelter home inmates, provided the policy emphasis is shifted to strengthen their earning skills rather than a patronised existence. While attacks on sexist outbursts are definitely serving some purpose, let us view the sexist origin of organisations and institutions wherein these assertions are rooted as the real culprits.