Women have to fight every day, at home and outdoors. Women cannot even survive without fighting. When the environment is anti-woman, with patriarchy in control, women are on the battlefield right from birth. Men too fight to survive, but women have to fight twice as much. Yet, to everyone’s surprise, Indian Army Chief General Bipin Rawat stated: “In this country, the battlefield is still not for women. Women have many problems in getting into combat situations, beginning with maternity leaves. Furthermore, Jawans are not yet quite ready to accept women as commanding officers in battlefields.”
The General wants to say that the battlefield is for men only, not for women; women need maternity leave and for that reason, it is appropriate that they are not commanding officers in a battlefield. People do need holidays during illnesses, no one has any problem with that. But not accepting women for important jobs with the excuse that they need maternity leaves is not new. Maternity leaves are long; when the leader of a unit goes on that vacation, another would be assigned to lead that unit. Introducing this provision in the army is not particularly difficult. The problem mentioned is not impossible to solve. Besides, nowadays women do not give birth every year but produce one or at the most two children. All countries give maternity leaves as a rule. In many countries, not only the mother, but arrangements have been made for both parents to get such leaves. In civilized countries, especially in North European countries, if women get to leave for six months, so do men. It has been observed that less educated parents spend their leaves together over the same period, but couples with higher education take their leaves in tandem, one after the other. The father takes his paternal leave after the mother has spent the maternal leave and joins her work. Less educated folks believe that the main responsibility of fostering a child rests on mother, the father takes his leave at the same time as if to merely help the mother in her child-rearing. But the educated believe both parents’ responsibility in rearing the child to be equally important; the responsibility of raising the child is not the mother’s alone but the father too bears equal responsibility. That is why the father’s role is not merely to help the mother raise the child but his responsibility includes raising the child. Research has shown that children, who receive equal attention and care from both parents and even equal rearing-time from both parents, grow up to be healthy and well rounded. Studies have further shown that infant death rates are the lowest in countries where mother and father both take part in fostering the child. Civilized countries believe both parents have equal responsibilities toward their children and hence paternal leaves are as important as the material. The question could then be raised that do men lose their fitness to be commanding officers in battlefields because they enjoy paternal leaves? They do not. By the same token, women do not lose their eligibility as commanding officers in battlefields just because they take maternal leaves. Anyone leaving for vacation can be replaced by another assuming her work. All the women in the army do not get pregnant at the same time. Here the real problem is not with vacation per se but with the gender needing the vacation. Men do not consider persons with female gender as human beings as if their only job is to sit home, produce children and raise them.
General Rawat has further said: “If a female officer dies on the battlefield, and she has children, just imagine the consequences her family would suffer; they would be ruined. Besides if any Jawan peeks in on a lady Officer in battlefield changing clothes that would be even more trouble. Then the female officers would have to register repeated complaints to the authorities. Denying maternity leave on grounds of duty might cause an uproar.”
Death of a female officer at war might indeed ruin the family. But a male officer dying at the battlefield might ruin his family in the same way; is that a reason not to send male officers to war front? I do not see any rationale to stop female officers from going to battle in case some Jawans peep while they are changing clothes. Men and women officers both register complaints to the authorities all the time for various reasons. One hundred and one of these reasons pose no problem, only the complaints about peeping Jawans causes all the problems. If such complaints convert boorish Jawans into civilized humans then it must be a useful one. Peeping by Jawans might also occur while male officers are changing. Even the male officers might feel uncomfortable while some female officers might not feel any discomfort due to Jawans’ peeking. As a matter of fact, feeling discomfort is not necessarily gender-based but depends on the individual. Also, peeping/prying is not the characteristics of all Jawans but of only a few. Isn’t there a system of court-martial for punishing those who commit crimes? Is the system broken?
The Chief of Staff has observed: “A majority of the army jawans come from very far remote villages near the borders. Would the Jawans agree to go into the battle on the orders of a female officer? I wanted to send women into battle, but we had to take all these different issues into consideration.”
Listening to General Bipin Rawat one gets the feeling that Indian forces are not yet fully ready to send women into battlegrounds. There is no objection to women’s presence in the army as Doctor or Engineers. But the time to combat the enemy with weapons in hand, he says, has not come yet. Time does not drop from heaven; one has to usher it in,. Have the women ever said that they do not want to be commanding officers? They have not. The General has said that the Jawans from villages do not take women’s commands seriously. In that case, rather than stopping women from taking command, educating the Jawans seems to be a priority. Jawans have to be taught the lesson that the commanding officer, male or female, has to be obeyed. In the army not willing to obey a direct order from a higher officer results in a court-martial. Disobeying a Female officer’s command should have the same consequence; if not, then there must be some kind of flaw in the application of rules in the army revealing administrative weakness. If the culprit Jawans escape punishment, Jawans are not to blame. The fault lies with that influential, misogynist inauthority who want to achieve their heinous objectives while putting the blame on the Jawans. They want to see women as housewives, not as warriors. They want to see women with children in their laps and cooking pots and utensils in their hands. They do not want to see women as equally competent to men in all fields of work. They want to see women as soft, weak, dependent on others, scared beings. The truth that they can equal men in physical and mental strengths, firmness and sharpness – is not tolerable to such men. It does not stand to reason that just because Jawans have come from villages, they would not change even with a good education. One should not treat them with such contempt just because they are villagers. How many city-boys would willingly accept commands from women? Just because they are unwilling, should we deprive women of the opportunities to work in all fields? Absolutely not. Depriving them would make the misogynists victorious and we would only prove that it is quite easy to displace women from different workplaces. We should instead try to remove the immense hatred and jealousy from the minds of women-hater misogynists. Only then an unequal society could be transformed into one of gender equality and fairness.
At a certain point in time, our society was not willing to let women even be educated and objected to their working outside the home. When women slowly progressed ignoring and disobeying the opponents, even then they were kept under control with restrictions to prevent them from this or that work. If the misogynists’ opinions were valued, women could not be Doctors or engineers even today; they would remain as school teachers or nurses. That is why I say, listening to women-haters would destroy the society – the more you defeat them, the better.