Second class life for Asian women

Press, 22 December 1987, Page 38

Second class life for Asian women

NZPA-Reuter New Delhi For the old woman squatting beside a heap of stones in a busy Delhi street, a hammer in her hand, life is unending drudgery. “It’s work,” she said simply as she broke stones to mend the road. Her life might be particularly wretched. But 40 years after much of the subcontinent gained its independence, most women have yet to emerge from a life of subservience. This is in spite of Sri Lanka providing the world’s first woman Prime Minister, Sirimavo Bandaranaike; and Indira Gandhi ruling India for almost two decades up to her death in 1984 at the hands of Sikh assassins. Women’s groups in India say the lot of women has barely changed, particularly in the countryside where two-thirds of the population live. The birth of a girl is often considered bad luck, a son a boon, a high technology medicine can nlav an unwitting part in making sure a family has a Women’s groups say can lead to an tSSrton « get Boy»

the lion’s share of attention, 47 per cent of them ending up being able to read and write, compared with 25 per cent of girls. In rural areas the inequality is even worse. In Nepal, there is no movement to campaign on behalf of women, almost 90 per cent of whom are illiterate and whose lives are characterised by early marriage, high fertility, poor health and a life expectancy of only 43 years. A Terai plainswoman in Nepal is not allowed to speak to her husband’s older brothers or, sometimes, her father-in-law. In India and Nepal, the idea still holds that a woman is looked after and protected by her father while a child, by her husband after marriage and by her son in old age. The majority are still bartered in arranged marriages, where the bride and groom barely meet before the ceremony. But once married, a bride’s problems might only just be beginning. Demands for extra dowry gifts, although illegal, often continue after the wedding, with the bride facing cruelty and sometimes death at the hands of her new family. A woman’s ultimate act of fidelity, some believe, is to commit suttee by throwing herself on the funeral pyre of her hus-

band, thereby becoming a demi-goddess. But the grim death of a young bride in September on her husband’s cremation pyre sparked outrage in India and the tightening of laws against suttee and those who abet it. According to Madhu Kishwar, who runs "Manushi,” a Delhi-based magazine devoted to women’s rights, a woman can break out of the vicious cycle. But much depends on her family. “If a woman has the sympathy and backing of her parents, and not only from a powerful family, there is absolutely no limit to what she can do in India,” she said. In Pakistan’s maledominated society, educated women can work as doctors or teachers, but very few work in offices, and only then in the big cities. Village elders in some parts of north-west Pakistan ban women from voting in elections to save them from the gaze of unrelated males while they wait to cast their ballots. Across the border in Afghanistan, however, Left-wing politics and nine years of guerrilla war have brought women out of their traditional seclusion. Government officials sayithat in the Kabul area alone, some 6000 women are doing duty as armed

guards. India has one woman Cabinet Minister and Sri Lanka two. But often the women who have made it to the top in South Asia have come from powerful families or succeeded close relations killed in political upheaval. Indira Gandhi was the daughter of independent India’s first Prime Minister, Jawarhalal Nehru. Sri Lanka’s Bandaranaike was elected Prime Minister in 1960, succeeding her assassinated husband and holding the job for 12 years over two terms. In Bangladesh, two women spearheading an opposition campaign aimed at forcing out President Hossain Mohammad Ershad both became public figures in the aftermath of political murder. Sheikh Hasina was barely known until her father, Bangladesh’s first president Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was killed in a coup in 1975. Begum Khaleda Zia took to politics only after her husband, President Ziaur Rahman, was killed in an abortive army mutiny in 1981. Benazir Bhutto is one of a handful of women who have surmounted Pakistan’s social and religious customs, taking on the mantle of her father, the executed formqr Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.