When Rahul Gandhi takes on patriarchy, Congress’s dynasty stares back

There was something almost irresistible about Rahul Gandhi's recent decision to take up the cudgels against patriarchy. At “Chhatron Ki Goonj,” a Congress-led, student-focused, nationwide outreach campaign, he invoked the Manusmriti, quoted its rather unflattering instructions regarding the place of women, and then made the perfectly unobjectionable argument that a woman does not belong to her father, husband, or son. She belongs to herself. One would have to be unusually committed to misogyny to quarrel with that proposition. The difficulty begins when Rahul Gandhi decides that the Manusmriti is the most convenient exhibit in his case against patriarchy. For, while the text certainly contains prescriptions that are thoroughly incompatible with the constitutional principle of equality, it is neither the Constitution of India nor a universally accepted rulebook of Hindu conduct. You would rarely find any Hindu consulting it to decide whether to send their daughters to college or whether their wives may work. And it has no place in the hierarchy of modern Indian law.

This gives his political opponents an exceedingly convenient opening. If the problem is patriarchy, they can reasonably ask why the indictment should begin with an ancient Hindu text. Patriarchal ideas have appeared in the doctrines, institutions and interpretations of virtually every major religious and cultural tradition, and one need not undertake an elaborate comparative study of scripture to establish that, throughout history, men have told women that their proper place is somewhere slightly behind them. The BJP has, predictably, already seized upon this opening, questioning why Rahul's attack should focus on Hindu traditions rather than the treatment of women in other communities. That, in fact, is where his argument could have been much stronger. He could have said that patriarchy survives in contemporary India, across religions, castes, classes and political parties, and that no sacred text, family tradition or claim of cultural authenticity can justify denying a woman autonomy. That would have left his opponents with considerably less room to wriggle.

But then comes the more amusing part. Rahul Gandhi speaks about patriarchy while representing an organisation whose own relationship with hierarchy, hereditary authority and internal democracy is anything but revolutionary. Congress has spent years assuring the country that it believes in internal democracy, while also spending years demonstrating that certain democratic principles apparently become more flexible when they come into the vicinity of the Nehru-Gandhi family. The Congress high command is one of those peculiar institutions of Indian political life which has survived every lecture about decentralisation, empowerment and participatory democracy. It has a remarkable ability to recognise that ordinary citizens deserve a voice, yet seems somewhat reluctant to extend the same privilege to its own cadre. It has indeed produced some of India's most powerful women, while simultaneously remaining a political organisation in which the most important question has often been not who commands the confidence of the party's rank and file but who belongs to one particular family. That is rather an inconvenient arrangement for a political movement that wishes to lecture the country about inherited authority.

And the transformation did not begin with Rahul Gandhi. Indira Gandhi, for all her formidable political abilities, helped turn Congress into an increasingly personalised instrument of power. The high-command culture, the erosion of internal democracy, and the elevation of personal loyalty over institutional autonomy became the template. What followed has sometimes looked less like a political succession than a family relay race in which the baton is handed over before anyone has had the opportunity to ask whether the next runner has actually qualified. After Indira Gandhi, what precisely has the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty offered as a qualification for political inheritance? Rajiv Gandhi's entry into politics and his extraordinary elevation to the prime ministerial office owed considerably more to his being Indira Gandhi's son than to any political apprenticeship of his own. Sonia Gandhi's route to the centre of political power was similarly inseparable from her marriage to Rajiv Gandhi, even though she subsequently demonstrated considerable political skill of her own. Rahul Gandhi's most enduring qualification, meanwhile, remains the fact that he is Rajiv Gandhi's son. He has never held ministerial office in the Union government, despite having had ample opportunity to establish an independent political record, and what he has demonstrated so far has been considerably more political resilience than executive accomplishment. And then there is Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, whose most conspicuous political asset has often been the carefully cultivated resemblance to her grandmother, as though genetic continuity were a legitimate category on a party application form. One begins to wonder whether the Congress talent pool is so shallow that the party has confused hereditary succession with political merit.

The irony becomes even sharper when Rahul Gandhi's argument is considered on its own terms. His case against patriarchy rests on the principle that an individual should not be defined by a relationship of ownership or subordination, that a woman is not the property of her father, husband or son, and that her identity and agency are her own. Quite so. But political parties are also institutions composed of individuals, and political authority should presumably not be inherited as though it were an ancestral estate. If inherited authority is objectionable when a patriarch tells his daughter what she may do, it is worth asking why it becomes somehow more sophisticated when a political organisation passes its authority from one generation of a family to the next. Congress may object that Rahul Gandhi has been elected to the positions he holds. But that does not resolve the larger question of whether a party that has revolved around one family for generations can credibly present itself as the great philosophical adversary of hierarchy and inherited privilege.

There is another difficulty for Congress, and it lies in its own record when questions of women's rights have collided with the political sensitivities of religion. Rajiv Gandhi's government famously responded to the political pressure generated by the Shah Bano judgment by enacting legislation that effectively overturned the Supreme Court's immediate legal position on maintenance for divorced Muslim women. Whatever the subsequent legal nuances of the legislation, the episode remains one of the more awkward reminders that the party's commitment to principle has not always survived contact with electoral arithmetic. The Sabarimala controversy provides another example of the complications that arise when gender equality, religious sentiment and electoral politics collide. Congress's positions in Kerala have hardly been a model of philosophical consistency. It is difficult to denounce patriarchy with absolute certainty while treating politically inconvenient manifestations of it with considerably greater caution.

Nor is this merely a Congress problem. Indian politics remains deeply patriarchal, and the BJP, the Left and virtually every regional party would have difficulty passing an examination in gender equality with distinction. The persistence of male dominance in political organisations is hardly an invention exclusive to Congress. And that is precisely why Rahul should have made his argument universal rather than religiously particular. If patriarchy is the enemy, then it should be confronted wherever it appears. The proper target should not be Hinduism, Islam, Christianity or any other faith. It should be the idea that women require male permission to exercise the same autonomy that men take for granted. There is a perfectly respectable argument buried inside Rahul Gandhi's speech. Unfortunately, he wrapped it in historical and religious terms, allowing his opponents to change the subject. Instead of discussing whether women should possess complete autonomy, the country is now debating Manusmriti. Instead of examining contemporary political patriarchy, we are invited to compare ancient texts. And instead of asking why Indian political parties continue to concentrate power in remarkably few hands, we are once again treated to the familiar spectacle of politicians discovering that the sins of society are always easier to diagnose than the sins of their own institutions.

Rahul Gandhi may be right that a woman belongs to herself. He would strengthen the proposition considerably if he demonstrated that he believes the same principle applies to Congress workers. After all, if the patriarchal principle is that authority is inherited and obedience is expected, the Manusmriti is hardly the only place where one might begin looking for it. One could always start at the Congress headquarters.

(The author is a National Award winner for Best Narration and an independent political analyst. Views expressed are personal.)