I don’t have a daughter but if I did, would the Selfie with Daughter campaigners look at me benignly and welcome my inclusion in this online movement celebrating the father and daughter bond? Oh, they did not specify that, did they? So mothers can pose too? Yay for equal rights but the issue is whether I and other mothers like me would want to address the bigger questions about the gender equations in India with a selfie.
And so I think of the three teenaged Latawa sisters who hung themselves decades ago in Chandigarh because after multiple pre-natal tests, their parents were overjoyed that they were finally going to have a boy. The mother would often tell the daughters, “When I have a son, you can go hang yourselves.” They did. Sex determination tests are still rampant across India. As is female foeticide. If the Selfie with Daughter campaign was connected to a wider movement to make the country safer for baby girls within the womb and outside it, it would have been more than just a social media trend.
I think of women being forced to tie rakhis to their boyfriends on Valentine’s Day and shudder at the prospect of a mass Raksha Bandhan Diwas being celebrated on the streets of India as if it is the best possible way to show respect to women. Just as a selfie does not necessarily ensure a safer country for daughters, a Raksha Bandhan Diwas won’t ensure suddenly safer streets for women. Remember Asaram Bapu, who once said that Nirbhaya would have been spared rape and certain death if she had called the six attackers, ‘bhaiya’ and fallen at their feet, seeking protection? This ceremonious attempt to relegate women to the status of sisters who must be protected, denies them the right to be their own women, with complete authority over their lives and choices. Because that is a troublesome territory. Choice. That is why members of a Sene once went and beat women in a pub because they chose to socialise in a way that is not conformist and ‘safe.’ That is why women and the men they love are killed by Khap panchayats for choosing a life outside the realm of gotra-bound conventions. That is why women are sometimes forbidden to wear jeans, carry cell phones, marry for love and are even blamed for rape if they board a bus after a movie with a boy who is neither a brother or a father or a husband. Because only these three roles are recognised and approved by patriarchy and any relationship a woman chooses beyond these, somehow threatens the very foundations of our society. And ofcourse, if a woman chooses to speak against sexist comedy shows or raps against Yo Yo Honey Singh’s virulently misogynistic songs, or even questions the point of token campaigns like Selfie with Daughter, she will be taken to task and dragged over burning coals. Maybe, India loves its daughters only when they stay within the confines of a rule book and don’t draw outside the lines. Because once they develop a voice of dissent, they are hounded, abused, threatened with rape and told to not rain on the parade of a gender sensitive campaign that could potentially save millions of daughters from certain foeticide and if they survive that, then…from discrimination, from rape, abuse and more. The irony of this stand however is missed by most of those who spent a good part of last week, trolling activist Kavita Krishnan and actor Shruti Seth. Kavita was told that sugarcane stalks would be inserted into her. She was called a prostitute, the ‘daughter of a negro’, a ‘negro lesbian’ while Alok Nath, famous for his role of a Gandhian idealist in Ramesh Sippy’s soap opera Buniyaad and for playing gentle patriarchs tweeted, “jail..the b..ch.”
Seth was abused too and even her open letter to her detractors attracted more abuse. The moral of the story being, “take your selfie but don’t assert your selfhood.”
Yes, it will take more than a few thousand selfies for India to treat its daughters better. Even those daughters who say inconvenient things and refuse to play the roles assigned to them.
with The New Indian Express Reema Moudgil works for The New Indian Express, Bangalore, is the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, an artist, a former RJ and a mother. She dreams of a cottage of her own that opens to a garden and where she can write more books, paint, listen to music and just be silent with her cats.