(Brinda Karat is a Politburo member of the CPI(M) and a former Member of the Rajya Sabha.)It was just as well that Hema Malini, the BJP MP from Mathura, did not defend her statement that "40,000 widows of Vrindavan from Bengal and some from Bihar should go back to their States." She didn't just get her facts wrong - she got her ethics wrong too.
Widows in Vrindavan had voted in the last elections. Did Hema Malini the candidate use the same language when she canvassed for their votes as she did after she had got the vote and won the elections?
As an MP, isn't it her duty to care for citizens living in her constituency regardless of where they may have been born? If she could declare that it was "love for Lord Krishna" that drew her away from Mumbai to his birthplace to serve him, why deny the widows a similar right?
She confused 4,000 with 40,000. According to various surveys, including those conducted earlier by the Mathura municipality, there are approximately 4,000 to 5,000 widows of whom around 3000 are Bengali. She was confused again when she reportedly said "widows have bank balances and get cheques and still they beg." A bank balance is not the same as a bank account, Madam. You could be had up for defamation for wrongly and cruelly implying that the widows are on the make.
Her statement brought a sense of deja vu. The year was 1999 - the time of the Vajpayee Government when Uma Bharati was the Minister for Women and Child Development. The Secretary of the Ministry, backed by her Minister, made a sensationalist statement that the Central Government had asked the West Bengal Government to stop the influx of "thousands of widows from Bengal to Vrindavan whose numbers were increasing." Recounting that time in her wonderful and insightful book on the widows, called "In Radha's Name", Malini Bhattacharya, then member of the State Women's Commission, quotes the headlines in some of the newspapers "HRD Minister asks Bengal Government why 16,000 widows are living in Vrindavan". She writes of the "dangerous turn things took with administrative personnel talking about 'operation pushback' to send special forces to man railway stations to forcibly prevent the widows from entering the town."
Could anything have been more bizarre? Forces to push back widows? Think of the terror the widows must have experienced in the face of this aggressive language. But as the survey then done by the State Women's Commission showed, there were not 16,000 but around 2,100 directly from Bengal; a few more hundred who were Bengali had come earlier from refugee camps that had been set up after the Bangladesh war. The flood of widows reaching Vrindavan was nothing but a figment of perverse imagination.
At the time, Bengal had one of the highest scales of widow pensions and also some of the most effective social security schemes, so it was unfair to blame the State Government and to accuse it of being the "worst State for widows." The blame game against Bengal was and is both misplaced and ahistorical.
However this does not mean that widows in Bengal and elsewhere live a life free from discrimination or from oppressive social codes of dress and behaviour. The hard lives of the majority of the 40 million widows in India represent a reality that any democratic country should be ashamed of. 40 per cent of women of those who are ever married over the age of 60 in India are widows, the percentage of men who are widowers is much lower at 16 per cent, indicating that remarriage is rare for women and common for men. But more than remarriage, which she may not want, it is the absence of respect and dignity in the lives of many widows at many layers of our society which is so shameful.
Centuries ago, the Manu code had decreed that "the widow may fast as often as she likes, living on flowers, roots and fruits.. She should be long suffering until death, self-restrained and chaste, striving to fulfil the unsurpassed duty of women who have one husband.." It is no coincidence that in the State of Rajasthan, where the practice of widow murder which goes by the name of sati is still glorified in some places, a statue of Manu not Ambedkar occupies pride of place on the premises of the High Court.
The MP would do well to join the fight against religious orthodoxy that sanctions retrograde social practices rather than targeting their victims. Better still, she could take on corrupt temple managements who for years have exploited the widows, paying them a measly amount for non-stop bhajan singing, literally making them sing for their supper. Such steps would allay apprehensions that the fact that the widows have been targeted, both times under BJP Governments, is a mere coincidence and does not reflect a deeper saffron urge to clear Vrindavan of its "inauspicious" citizens.
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