Different Degrees of Woman Empowerment

The Yadav troika of Mulayam, Lalu and Sharad will do anything to block the Women’s Reservation Bill. Soon after it was was passed in the Rajya Sabha, but the stauts of woman in bastions—Saifai in Uttar Pradesh and Madhepura in Bihar—and found women’s empowerment at the Panchayat level .

Pooja Devi, 44, was elected sarpanch from Larkhaur on a seat reserved for women, but villagers address her husband Avadh Kishore Agnihotri as “pradhanji”. They call Pooja Devi “pradhanin”, or the woman of the pradhan’s family. Larkhaur is about five km down the dusty road to Jaswant Nagar from the shiny and pampered oasis of Saifai, the village Mulayam Singh Yadav calls home; it falls in the Jaswant Nagar Vidhan Sabha constituency currently represented by his brother Shiv Pal Singh Yadav.

Uttar Pradesh is scheduled to host the fourth round of elections later this year after the institution of 33 per cent reservation for women in tandem with caste-based reservation in all three tiers of the panchayati raj system, but the language of discrimination against the elected woman representative is writ large. Mostly, it accurately mirrors the distribution of power in the household of the pradhan.

But Pooja Devi doesn’t see it that way. “They call him ‘pradhanji’ to give him barabari (equal billing) with me, so that he doesn’t feel slighted,” she insists.
At home, Pooja Devi doesn’t sit down in the presence of her elder brother-in-law or sister-in-law. For her work as pradhan outside the house, she depends on her husband to drive her around on his motorbike. The first she sees as a small compromise for keeping peace in the house: “There is a big difference between the city and the village. Here, some things don’t change, and appearances must be kept up, especially at home,” she explains. The second, she dismisses as matter of practical necessity: “How else will I go? There is no public mode of conveyance available to me. So my husband must take me to the meetings.” All 34 woman pradhans of Saifai block, she points out, are accompanied by either their husbands or their sons to these meetings

Courtsy: Indian Express