#DespiteBeingAWoman: Why invoke Indira Gandhi to counter Modi's 'praise' for Hasina?

The truth is, far away from the comfortable fighting pit of Twitter, women are systematically made to suffer the consequences of being born with a uterus. And mostly we don’t fret over it. In fact, many of us go and dutifully ’like’ pictures taken by friends on vacations - of Rajasthani women balancing multiple matkas on their heads as they trundle across the desert, or of women blowing into a chulha to stoke the fire or tea garden workers carrying babies in sacks tied to their backs as they pluck tea leaves. Before we quickly type in our ‘wows’ in the comments section, we mostly don’t think about what the picture really implies behind its National Geographic aesthetic. Women who have to travel miles to get drinking water, women who have to jeopardize their lungs to put a basic meal together, women who have no maternity leave or childcare in their lives. The world in which these women live, and everything they do, is indeed achieved ‘despite being a woman’. No hashtags are necessary. When Narendra Modi, with his usual theatrical flourish, announced how amazing it was that Sheikh Hasina, ‘despite being a woman’ was resolved about fighting terrorism, he epitomized why being a woman continues to be such a challenge. It is because neither education, nor success, nor exposure to modern professional spaces can bust the many stereotypes that we nurse about women. And the lower we go down on the economy ladder, the gender roles become more defined and more unquestioned. [caption id=“attachment_2285166” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Narendra Modi and Sheikh Hasina. AFP.[/caption] Modi was not being deliberately sexist. He was actually manifesting a more dangerous form of it - the kind when you think you’re actually praising a woman by saying, ‘OMG, a woman did this?’ Here the awe actually stems from the belief that women can’t do several things associated with men. It is the same kind of subconscious sexism that spurred the editor of Aaj Tak to question how Smriti Irani could have been made the HRD minister. Curiously enough, on stage, the man was accompanied by a woman anchor who was asking as many questions as Ashok Singhal himself. For someone who presumably is used to seeing women working in similar professional spaces as men, Singhal showed that the country still nurses rampant stereotypes about gender. A case in point is the hashtag that was started to chide Modi for the comment. Called #DespiteBeingAWoman, it was perhaps started to underline the misogyny underlining Modi’s comments. While some tweeters were able to see the irony of Modi’s comment about a woman who like him runs a country and has done so for longer and put out sarcastic tweets about daily chores with the hashtag, others took to expounding about many ‘successful’ women to make their point. So there were tweets about Marie Curie, Indira Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi and Smriti Irani, pictures of women holding guns, quotes of African-American civil rights activist Rosa Parks, references to mathematician Shakuntala Devi.The underlying message seemed to be, look, a woman can be as good as a man. Ironically, at least in the clique of people who use Twitter, that should be a fact, not an argument. Saying, “Look, so and so won a Nobel Prize for Physics. And she is a woman.” is only a mild variation of, “OMG, she won a Nobel Prize for Physics? A woman?” As we point at exceptionally successful women almost in defence of our worth, we actually suggest that being an ordinary Indian woman is of no consequence at all. It’s equivalent to saying that you have to be exceptionally good to match a man. The question is, in this day and age, should we even point at exceptionally successful women to bolster the argument that men and women, most rationally, are intellectual equals? In fact, should we even grace ‘despite being a woman’ with a argument? Denounce it, yes. But explaining why, trying to arise to the defence of women by tabulating lists of women achievers credits those arguments and stereotypes with more intelligence than they deserve. The fact that sexism thrives among the most educated and the so-called ’elite’ too isn’t quite a secret. If you are a woman and a sports geek, you’re sure to have run into men, and women, who stare at you with wide admiration if you have an opinion on a football match. If you’re out smoking on the street, you have caught the disapproving uncle and the scandalised aunty staring at you for doing what men do. That uncle might be scandalised that a woman smokes on the street and Narendra Modi might be impressed that a woman fights terrorism but they both stem from the same stereotypes about what women can do in a men’s world. These reactions are not driven by logic, they come from the lack of it. Women do all kinds of things that men think is their province and some men need to just get used to it #DespiteBeingAMan.