Common Minimum Pause

Among the plethora of promises that the Common Minimum Programme makes to the people of this country, is one that has not really created much public frisson and has, not surprisingly, witnessed little action. The document that the UPA government so proudly paraded six months ago was quite fulsome in its intention to “fully empower women politically, educationally, economically and legally”. Yet there has been a disappointing pause in terms of actual policy as far as women’s well-being is concerned.

Since the UPA government came to power, in fact, there has not been even one significant women-centric intervention taken by the government at the Central level. Meanwhile, there is a steady stream of bad news pouring in — whether it is the continuing decline in the child sex ratio; the rising violence against women, within the home, in the workplace, on the street; or the growing seriousness of women-specific health concerns. The latest report on international trends in HIV/AIDS, for instance, indicates how vulnerable women, who have often no rights over their own bodies, are to the epidemic.

So can we see some more concerted action on this front, please? It is nobody’s case to claim that laws are the panacea for all ills, yet there are serious silences in the legal system vis-a-vis women that requires urgent attention. Take the shoddily drafted Protection from Domestic Violence Bill that was introduced in Lok Sabha in 2002 as an example. Surely the Central government has had enough time to address its inadequacies by now? Could it be that it does not think matters relating to women are serious enough for urgent action? If that indeed is the case, we would urge the Union minister of law, the Union minister of human resource development, the Union minister of social justice and empowerment, and the Union minister of health and family welfare to visit the crowded family courts in any one of our cities, spend a day in the maternity wing of a public hospital, and visit a rural school to see the complexities of women’s existence at first hand. And they must promise to keep their eyes open.