Political Science

Ch-4 Gender, Caste and Religion

Gender division: This is a form of hierarchical social division seen everywhere, but is rarely
recognized in the study of politics. The gender division tends to be understood as natural and
unchangeable. However, it is not based on biology but on social expectations and stereotypes.

SEXUAL DIVISION OF LABOUR:

A SYSTEM IN WHICH ALL WORK INSIDE THE HOME IS EITHER DONE BY THE WOMEN OF THE
FAMILY, OR ORGANISED BY THEM THROUGH THE DOMESTIC HELPERS.

PUBLIC/PRIVATE DIVISION
In most families: women do all work inside the home such as cooking, cleaning, washing
clothes, tailoring, looking after children, etc., and men do all the work outside the home. It is
not that men cannot do housework; they simply think that it is for women to attend to these
things.
When these jobs are paid for, men are ready to take up these works. Most tailors or cooks in
hotels are men. Similarly, it is not that women do not work outside their home. In villages,
women fetch water, collect fuel and work in the fields.
In urban areas, poor women work as domestic helper in middle class homes, while middle
class women work in offices.
The result of this division of labor is that although women constitute half of the humanity,
their role in public life, especially politics, is minimal in most societies.
More radical women’s movements aimed at equality in personal and family life as well. These
movements are called FEMINIST movements.

FEMINIST: A WOMAN OR A MAN WHO BELIEVES IN EQUAL RIGHTS AND OPPORTUNITIES

FORWOMEN AND MEN.

Ours is still a male dominated, PATRIARCHAL society. Women face disadvantage,

discrimination and oppression in various ways:

 The literacy rate among women is only 54 per cent compared with 76 per cent among men.
Similarly, a smaller proportion of girl students go for higher studies. When we look at school
results, girls perform as well as boys, if not better in some places. But they drop out because
parents prefer to spend their resources for their boys’ education rather than spending equally
on their sons and daughters.
 No wonder the proportion of women among the highly paid and valued jobs is still very small.
On an average an Indian woman works one hour more than an average man every day. Yet
much of her work is not paid and therefore often not valued.
 Patriarchy: Literally, rule by father, this concept is used to refer to a system that values
men more and gives them power over women.

 The Equal Remuneration Act, 1976 provides that equal wages should be paid to equal work.
However in almost all areas of work, from sports and cinema, to factories and fields, women
are paid less than men, even when both do exactly the same work.
 In many parts of India parents prefer to have sons and find ways to have the girl child
aborted before she is born. Such sex-selective abortion led to a decline in child sex ratio
(number of girl children per thousand boys) in the country to merely 914. As the map shows,
this ratio has fallen below 850 or even 800 in some places.

WOMEN’S POLITICAL REPRESENTATION

In India, the proportion of women in legislature has been very low. For example, the
percentage of elected women members in Lok Sabha has crossed 10 per cent of its total
strength for the first time in 2009.
India is behind the averages for several developing countries of Africa and Latin America. In
the government, cabinets are largely all-male even when a woman becomes the Chief Minister
or the Prime Minister.
One way to solve this problem is to make it legally binding to have a fair proportion of women
in the elected bodies. This is what the Panchayati Raj has done in India. One-third of seats in
local government bodies – in panchayats and municipalities – are now reserved for women.
Now there are more than 10 lakh elected women representatives in rural and urban local
bodies.
RELIGION, COMMUNALISM AND POLITICS
This division is not as universal as gender, but religious diversity is fairly widespread in the
world today. Many countries including India have in their population, followers of different
religions.
Unlike gender differences, the religious differences are often expressed in the field of politics.
Consider the following:

 Gandhiji has remarked that religion can never be separated from politics. What he meant by
religion was not any particular religion like Hinduism or Islam but moral values that inform all
religions. He believed that politics must be guided by ethics drawn from religion.
 Human rights groups in our country have argued that most of the victims of communal riots
in our country are people from religious minorities. They have demanded that the
government take special steps to protect religious minorities.
 Women’s movement has argued that FAMILY LAWS of all religions discriminate against
women. So they have demanded that government should change these laws to make them
more equitable.
Ideas, ideals and values drawn from different religions can and perhaps should play a role in
politics. People should be able to express in politics their needs, interests and demands as a
member of a religious community.
 COMMUNALISM
When beliefs of one religion are presented as superior to those of other religions, when the
demands of one religious group are formed in opposition to another and when state power is
used to establish domination of one religious group over the rest. This manner of using
religion in politics is communal politics.
Communal politics is based on the idea that religion is the principal basis of social community.
Communalism involves thinking along the following lines:

 The followers of a particular religion must belong to one community. Their fundamental
interests are the same.
 Any difference that they may have is irrelevant or trivial for community life.
 It also follows that people who follow different religions cannot belong to the same social
community.
 If the followers of different religion have some commonalities these are superficial and
immaterial.
Their interests are bound to be different and involve a conflict. In its extreme form
communalism leads to the belief that people belonging to different religions cannot live as
equal citizens within one nation. Either, one of them has to dominate the rest or they have to
form different nations.

COMMUNALISM CAN TAKE VARIOUS FORMS IN POLITICS:

 The most common expression of communalism is in everyday beliefs. These routinely involve
religious prejudices, stereotypes of religious communities and belief in the superiority of
one’s religion over other religions. This is so common that we often fail to notice it, even
when we believe in it.
 A communal mind often leads to a quest for political dominance of one’s own religious
community. For those belonging to majority community, this takes the form of majoritarian
dominance. For those belonging to the minority community, it can take the form of a desire
to form a separate political unit.
 Political mobilization on religious lines is another frequent form of communalism. This
involves the use of sacred symbols, religious leaders, emotional appeal and plain fear in order
to bring the followers of one religion together in the political arena. In electoral politics this
often involves special appeal to the interests or emotions of voters of one religion in
preference to others.
 Sometimes communalism takes its most ugly form of communal violence, riots and massacre.
India and Pakistan suffered some of the worst communal riots at the time of the Partition.
The post-Independence period has also seen large scale communal violence.
 SECULAR STATE
Communalism was and continues to be one of the major challenges to democracy in our
country. The makers of our Constitution were aware of this challenge. That is why they chose
the model of a secular state.

 There is no official religion for the Indian state. Unlike the status of Buddhism in Sri Lanka,
that of Islam in Pakistan and that of Christianity in England, our Constitution does not give a
special status to any religion.
 The Constitution provides to all individuals and communities freedom to profess, practice and
propagate any religion, or not to follow any.
 The Constitution prohibits discrimination on grounds of religion.
 At the same time, the Constitution allows the state to intervene in the matters of religion in
order to ensure equality within religious communities. For example, it bans untouchability.

CASTE INEQUALITIES
Unlike gender and religion, caste division is special to India. All societies have some kind of
social inequality and some form of division of labour. In most societies, occupations are passed
on from one generation to another.
Caste system is an extreme form of this. What makes it different from other societies is that in
this system, hereditary occupational division was sanctioned by rituals.
Partly due to their efforts and partly due to other socio-economic changes, castes and caste
system in modern India have undergone great changes.
With economic development, large scale URBANISATION, growth of literacy and
education, OCCUPATIONAL MOBILITY and the weakening of the position of landlords in the
villages, the old notions of CASTE HIERARCHY are breaking down.
Now, most of the times, in urban areas it does not matter much who is walking along next to
us on a street or eating at the next table in a restaurant. The Constitution of India prohibited
any caste-based discrimination and laid the foundations of policies to reverse the injustices of
the caste system.

CASTE IN POLITICS
Caste can take various forms in a politics:

 When parties choose candidates in elections, they keep in mind the caste composition of the
electorate and nominate candidates from different castes so as to muster necessary support
to win elections. When governments are formed, political parties usually take care that
representatives of different castes and tribes find a place in it.
o Political parties and candidates in elections make appeals to caste sentiment to muster
support. Some political parties are known to favour some castes and are seen as their
representatives.
o Universal adult franchise and the principle of one-person-one-vote compelled political leaders
to gear up to the task of mobilizing and securing political support. It also brought new
consciousness among the people of castes that were hitherto treated as inferior and low.
The focus on caste in politics can sometimes give an impression that elections are all about
caste and nothing else. That is far from true. Just consider these:

No parliamentary constituency in the country has a clear majority of one single caste. So,
every candidate and party needs to win the confidence of more than one caste and
community to win elections.

No party wins the votes of all the voters of a caste or community. When people say that a
caste is a ‘vote bank’ of one party, it usually means that a large proportion of the voters from
that caste vote for that party.

Many political parties may put up candidates from the same caste (if that caste is believed to
dominate the electorate in a particular constituency). Some voters have more than one
candidate from their caste while many voters have no candidate from their caste.

The ruling party and the sitting MP or MLA frequently lose elections in our country. That could
not have happened if all castes and communities were frozen in their political preferences.

POLITICS IN CASTE
There is not only a one-way relation between caste and politics. Politics too influences the
caste system and caste identities by bringing them into the political arena.
Thus, it is not politics that gets caste-ridden; it is the caste that gets politicized. This takes
several forms:

 Each caste group tries to become bigger by incorporating within it neighboring castes or
sub-castes which were earlier excluded from it.
 Various caste groups are required to enter into a coalition with other castes or
communities and thus enter into a dialogue and negotiation.
 New kinds of caste groups have come up in the political arena like ‘backward’ and
‘forward’ caste groups.
Thus, caste plays different kinds of roles in politics.