The Laws That Push The Women Down

The Laws That Push The Women Down

Immediately after descending from the womb, a son shares equal rights with the father to the property owned by the family. To be able to do the same the daughter has to meditate up to the age of 35, unmarried. Even after that, should she decide to get married, her property thus acquired automatically goes to her brothers. Some very efficient switch-button mechanism is in place. Things need not get this complicated. It the brother choose to partition the family property before their sister reaches that dangerous age of 35-as all brothers in these circumstances who are not foolish choose to do-she gets no share. A married woman cannot claim for, partition until she is 35 and 15 years of marriage have been completed. But first prove you are not being provided with food and lodging! Even if you somehow mange to acquire property after the hurdles race fundamentally hostile to you, you have no right to manage it. There is trouble all long. A male head may, at any time he wishes to and without consulting the wife, the unwed daughter above the dangerous age of 35 if there is, or daughter-in-law, dispose the entire movable and up to half of the immovable property. A woman or unmarried daughter, on the other hand, needs the permission-the holy permission-of her son or father, before she may dispose more than half of her immovable property acquired through partition. When the male head of the family dies, the grandson is favored over the daughter for the inheritance of family property. Let the dear father alone, you may not inherit your dear mother's earnings either, if she happens to have any, that is. The father or your brothers are most probably surviving. The daughter or daughter-in-law may not inherit the tenancy rights of her father's or father-in-law's land. What happens when there is no male in the family to inherit the tenancy rights? The legal system of this country has no idea. Men may adopt children on whim. Women too may adopt children, but not if the husband is alive or there is a son fro a co-wife. The woman is covered from head to feet under the law on adultery. If it is proved the woman has gone to bed with another man or if she just even confesses to that effect in court, as many women are forced to do, the marriage legally terminates. Men? They are made up of some very different protein. Under certain condition-if the first wife is barren, has an incurable communicable disease, or otherwise has physical 'defects'-he can even have a second wife, permanent adultery under the same roof. It the first husband be sterile, impotent, disabled or suffering from an incurable disease, the woman cannot get a second husband for herself. How dare you: It she is foolish enough to dare to, she will be punished, imprisoned. The husband can choose to prosecute both the wife and the lover. Both can be punished. If the husband dies before or after conviction, the charges are dropped off the lover. He is released. He is a man. The wife does not get this favor done to her. She happens to be a woman. Should a male Nepalese get himself a wife from another country, she is readily awarded with Nepal's citizenship. If a female Nepalese marries a foreign male, he dare not ask for a citizenship card. The implication, more often than not, is the dreaded Indian might come. If we are so concerned about the 'purity' of this country, the law should bar both males and females form marrying foreigners. But it is not the 'purity'-whatever that might mean-that seems to be at stake. Were it so, the law would have denied citizenship also to the foreign females who marry the Nepalese males. Why cannot a Nepalese woman fall in love with the man of her choice, regardless of citizenship? The state does not feel the need to dictate the private life of the Nepalese male. Why does it feel the need to draw the outlines of the private life of a Nepalese female? If we claim to love this country, any of us, what we are saying is we care for the 20 million people that make up this country. A country is its people. If a Nepalese woman should fall in love with, say, an Indian man, does not patriotism imply a show of respect for the woman's decision, for her happiness? This world needs all the love that it can possibly get. A married woman may not go for foreign travel without the consent of her guardian. A married man, on the other hand, does not need any such permission. A man and permission? They do not match. He can think for himself, can't he? A Nepalese man's child is a citizen of Nepal, but a Nepalese woman's child is an alien creature who has to live in Nepal for 15 years before he or she can claim to be a citizen of Nepal.

This country is sexist.

Immediately after getting into power, which is in 2001, the Morcha shall strike down all laws smelling of sexual inequality with a single stroke of a pen aid shall compose a legal framework devoid of sex discrimination, in whatever form.

Self-Hate

All oppressed communities tend to share some similar traits. One is for its members to feel the oppression they are having to experience is an isolated case and not a group phenomenon and hence must be taken in silence. Women, for example, consider it a disgrace to talk about the physical abuse their husbands might subject them to . This only contributes to the confidence of the oppressor. It seems the desire to be readily and unconditionally accepted an equal by the fellow human beings is so basic and so strong in all of us that when we are denied the respect of equality, our first instinctive reaction is to refuse to see it and act as if the denial has not taken place. Another common trait is the sentiment of self-hate, the members of an oppressed community hating the fellow members of the same community as well as themselves in manners often so subtle that the self-hate is understood not for what it is but normal behavior of the child is breast-fed less, it is not because the child has to suck the father's knee. It is the female breasts that are speaking the language of sex discrimination. The legendary domestic envies and quarrels, cold wars and hot wars among the female relatives of a family are another expression of this self-hate.

It seems, besides our individual brains, we all tend to share one single large brain, the community brain. If that community brain thinks in terms of sex discrimination, all members, male and female, the discriminator and the discriminated, tend to think in terms of sex discrimination. When that community brain thinks in a hate-the-Terai fashion, all members, hills folk and Teraifolk, tend to think so. The natural impulse of those from the hills becomes to hate those from the plains, and the natural impulse of those from the plains becomes to try and convert into a hilly identity and hate the rest of the plains people.

This community brain needs to be operated upon.

Some people like to claim there is sex discrimination in society because Nepal is a poor, largely uneducated population. As Nepal will get richer, they say; and more and more people will go to school, sex discrimination will gradually be phased out. This is a misleading logic. Wife-beating is not unheard of in high-income, well-educated families. Sex discrimination is not a matter of wealth and education. It is a matter of attitude.

The Women And Five Political Parties

After the attainment of democracy, there has been much hue and cry over the state's insensitivity to the cultural diversity of this land but the sex discrimination that cuts across all barriers of ethnicity, language, religion and caste has been a non-issue, not even a minor one, with any of the five political parties in the country. After all, the present political climate is the aftermath of a peoples movement in which the masses of a district sent a present of bangles, ornaments and sindoor-symbols of the feminine sex supposed to symbolize cowardice-to the masses of another when the latter were thought not to have been acting revolutionary enough.

All the live parties in the country are strictly male-dominated and, evidently, male-dominated-to-be. Sahana pradhan, one of the two or three leading female politicians in the country presently, the wife of pushpalal, the founder of the communist movement in Nepal, says, "The simple fact is that men do not want to see women as equals. After all, they are products of our culture."

Yet it is these same five parties, the political opponents of the Sangram Morcha, that will be quick to try and label the Morcha as a party that advocates premarital sex, teenage pregnancies, divorces and weak family values. This would be a false label.

The Morcha stands neither for nor against premarital, post marital or any other sex for sex is part of the privacy of an individual and every individual deserves a degree of privacy. The gaining global momentum of gay rights movement is bound to touch this soil eventually. No discrimination based on sexual orientation, which has a genetic basis. The only Morcha stand on sex is for that of a forced nature. Forced numbers. The clout that the Morcha is to build through an increasing membership and mass mobilization may not be used by any level of its leadership to bulley the fine threads of family values of the individual families.

It is one of the aims of the Morcha to create an educational awareness and the availability of family planning devices throughout the country such that all the pregnancies are planned, none accidental or undesired. But the Morcha will take a pro-choice stand on abortion when the debate eventually surfaces. The female body is religious grounds need not have it. It is up to the individual females to decide. And teenage pregnancy, no doubt, is a social responsibility.

The Morcha is dedicated to strong family values. The family is the greatest social institution that was ever designed.

Much as the five political parties in the country and the politicians of the present political establishment would like us to believe, this country does not belong to a single sex. If the nation is a chariot, man and woman are its two wheels. The Morcha is to follow the 50-50 rule within its party structure. There is a certain taboo in this country about women coming into active politics. It is assumed 'respectable' women from 'reputed' families, whatever that might mean-all families are equally respectable, do not dream of politics as a career. Parallels are drawn between politics and prostitution.

"Go back home. Your husbands need you to look after them." Said Krishna Prasad Bhattarai, the chairman of the ruling congress party, while addressing a political gathering of women while he was interim premier.

And Bhattarai is not the most conservative of politicians. This is the voice of the collective male ego designed to harass the women as a group. Husbands and wives, brothers and sisters joining the Morcha ranks hand in hand is the best way to dismantle this stigma. Girls and women should come forward to make the female weight of the Morcha roughly equal to its male weight, roughly half of its total weight at all levels of the party apparatus.

Women Need To Stand Up And Speak

Rights are earned. They are not has had as birthday presents. Women need to stand up and earn their rights of sexual equality. By the crudest of mathematic roughly half of all the politicians in the country should be women. One is to one is God's ratio, man may not change it. The Morcha is to contest at least 100 female leaders for the parliamentary elections due in 2001. It is not a matter of gradually attaining rights. Either you have your rights or you do not. There is no grey. It is a challenge in black and white.

So far only princes have gone on to inherit the throne. The rule should change. The eldest child of the royal couple, girl or boy, should go on to occupy the throne. Let us pray to Lord Pashupatinath, the historic guardian deity of the royal household whose name is cited at the conclusion of every royal address, that prince Dipendra's first child be a princess. Then we can have a queen on the throne.

This last decade of the 20th century of the Christian calendar-the Nepalese calendar is different, sometimes 56, sometimes 57 years ahead-has been declared the South Asian decade for the girl child. The girl who grows up to be the woman. The most denigrating acts of sex discrimination on the planet are committed in South Asia. The female Morcha leaders should go on to ignite the women's liberation movement for the rest of South Asia too.

Oppression exists because neither the oppressed see anything wrong with the existing situation. The first step is to realize things are not all right as they are. Women should have the courage to see sex discrimination as it is. Only then can a new vision of equality emerge, otherwise not.

In sexual equality lies the woman's happiness. But there in lies man's happiness too, because wherever there is oppression there is suffering, and this suffering is always two-sided. It is not only the oppressed but the oppressor too that suffers. For example, my personal vision is the greatest amount of lovemaking shall take place on earth when there will be complete sexual equality in all spheres of life. Is that the reason I believe in sexual equality? Although my personal feeling is the most beautiful thing we human beings can do with ourselves is make love-equally, I think rape is as ugly as love-making beautiful-and I would like to love in a world where love is made at least half a dozen times every day, I would still believe in sexual equality if I did not see this relationship between sexual equality and the incidences of love-making. Sexual equality is not an option but a compulsion for all societies, a basic postulate for all human affairs, because all human beings are born equal, all die equal, and all human beings live as equals. This postulate of human equality is to all aspects of human affairs that the energy-mass equation is to the same sex-what a boring world that would be-the same monthly income, the same hairstyle, or everybody being from the hills or Europe. It is to do with the mutual respect we human beings accord each other.

I as a Terai guy know now it feels when people simply refuse to accept you an equal. That has been the story of my childhood and adolescence. Prejudice is like air pollution. It is in the air. Sometime it is blunt, most of the times subtle and deep.