Another International Women’s Day dawns, and India’s young women wake to the familiar presence of violent gatekeepers. There is a frightening risk of wasting the talents and aspirations of the 320 million or so Indian girls and women under 25 years of age, if the country continues to suppress their voices and choices.
The government presents itself as an advocate for women’s empowerment. But what distinguishes women’s empowerment from their welfare is the critical ingredient of ‘agency’. As defined by Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen, agency “refers to the pursuit of goals and objectives that a person has reason to value and advance, whether or not they are connected with the person’s well-being.”
A number of legislative proposals and responses to legal petitions at the state and national level over the past year point to inconsistencies in our approach to women’s agency in India today.
A proposed legislation introduced at the end of 2021 by the Union government – the Prohibition of Child Marriage (Amendment) Bill – seeks to raise the marriageable age of girls from 18 to 21 years and is currently under review by a Parliamentary Standing Committee. The voting age for women and men remains 18 years. The government argued that such a legislation was aimed at protecting young women from the higher health risks associated with adolescent childbirth.
Even if we take this reasoning at face value, experts and researchers have pointed out the various limitations of a legislatively driven approach on this issue, clarifying that “in the absence of nutrition and health interventions for women facing greater health risks, raising the age of marriage by a few years would change very little.”
With the current average age of a bride in India at 22.1 years, having steadily increased from 16 years in the 1960s, the government could instead pursue the same goals more effectively by doubling down on addressing poverty, poor nutrition and healthcare, dowry, restrictive social norms, public safety, low-quality (and severely interrupted) education, and the lack of subsequent employment opportunities for young women.
There is evidence for the causal pathway that runs from promoting women’s employment to delays in marriage and childbirth, an approach that could deliver gains in many respects in the current environment where only one in five Indian women participates in the paid workforce.
Similar to the state laws discouraging inter-faith marriages (discussed below), it is difficult not to suspect that indeed the primary gain from such a law would be to allow increased parental control over women when it comes to their personal lives and choice of partner. A woman between the age of 18-21 years who elopes with a chosen partner would be treated as a criminal under the new law, as would her partner.
If the government were indeed intent on increasing women’s empowerment and reducing their health risks, you would expect them to throw their full weight behind convictions for marital rape. And yet, no. It is bewildering to encounter the trepidation of the government and India’s male civil society in the face of the current petition before the Delhi high court to remove the marital rape exception from India’s rape laws.
Article 21 of the Indian Constitution guarantees that “no person shall be deprived of his (her) life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law.” Will the law then protect life, liberty, and freedom from violence, or instead preserve the freedom to perpetrate violence?
One-third of married Indian women report spousal violence, and the average Indian woman is 17 times more likely to face sexual violence from her husband than from anyone else. If half of the population cannot claim the right to be free from violence in their own homes and with their most intimate partners, then India is failing its women at a most basic level.
The government’s approach to women’s agency
Then there is the special matter of women’s agency as it concerns the choice of whom to marry. Endogamy largely prevails in India, cementing patriarchal control along the lines of sub-caste, caste, and religion. As of 2011-12, 95% of marriages took place within the same caste, 60% of women reported having no pre-marriage contact with their partner, and 40% of women reported providing no input in the selection of their marriage partners.
State governments have taken this suppression of women’s agency even further with ten states, including Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Karnataka, legislating to criminalise inter-faith marriages. In January 2021, the Supreme Court declined to intervene against such baseless ‘love jihad’ laws, which in practice are selectively applied to target Hindu women seeking marriage with Muslim men.
This leaves us in a dismal environment where India’s women have little choice on whether or not to marry and when to marry, little choice to pursue romantic love and select a marriage partner, and no legal choice to refuse non-consensual sex within marriage. How does such a reality align with the rhetoric of support for women’s empowerment?
The feminist poet and writer Kishwar Naheed aptly summarised the dilemma of South Asian women when she wrote, “With chains of matrimony and modesty, you can shackle my feet. The fear will still haunt you that crippled, unable to walk, I shall continue to think.”
The fear and mistrust of women’s ability to think for themselves remains pervasive. Whether there is hope for India’s women depends on our collective decision not only to pursue legal and normative changes that support a safe, equitable, and nurturing environment for them, but also our collective commitment to fight for changes that embed women’s agency in our laws, policies, and practice. Until then, talk of women’s empowerment will remain just that, talk.
Aishwarya L. Ratan is an independent research and policy consultant, with over 15 years of experience in examining poverty reduction and gender equity interventions in low- and middle-income countries, and over ten peer-reviewed academic publications and policy reports in these areas. She is an Indian citizen residing in the United States.