Women's rights as a power play

International Women's Day falls tomorrow, that time of the year when journalists' inboxes are flooded with entreaties to cover some corporate initiative or the other to "empower" women.

- Kanika Datta

The impact of these disparate well-meaning efforts, some of them quite successful, become moot when you read about recent appalling events at Sandeshkhali, West Bengal and Dumka, Jharkhand. Both underline the "distance to horizon", to use the terminology of surveys, towards gender equality and the deeply problematic nature of Indian society in which the political class across the ideological spectrum is complicit. Halfway through the third decade of the 21st century, women's "empowerment" remains a victim to political power play.

The ructions in Sandeshkhali offer a good example. Knowledge of the various crimes of Shahjahan Sheikh, the powerful local overlord of this village in the North 24 Parganas, 80 km southeast of Kolkata, are not new. The assaults on local women by him and his goons were also well known. The rest of India only learnt of them when women, emboldened by the manhunt following an encounter with the Enforcement Directorate, came forward to complain.

Note two points here. First, Mr Sheikh was only expelled from the party for six years after he was arrested, fully 55 days after he went into hiding a mere 30 km from his home. The Trinamool Congress spokesman said the party was "setting an example".