White Feminists: Stop Trying to Save the Indian Woman in India

Sarah Abraham, TIR, 19 August 2014: Feminism has got a seriously bad rep now. If you ask people if they support equal rights for everybody no matter what their gender might be, most will say yes. Those who will say no, please know that you are absolutely and completely wrong. But there has been a real rift with feminism, mostly because of the glaring lack of intersectionality within it.

Don’t go away because I said ‘intersectionality’! Come back and keep reading, it gets better, I promise! One of the reasons why we – Indian women in particular, but many women of colour – react badly to many white feminists is their reactions and opinions every time an atrocity against women in India is brought to light. Yes, we know things can get pretty bad, we do live here, remember? We go out and deal with the eve teasing (what a benign word for something that can make you despair and question your choices!), we get older and get the ‘well, she’ll never get married now, she’s too old, better try to get the younger sister married off before she gets too old too’ rhetoric, we deal with everyday sexism and harassment.

But we have a real problem when white feminists come up with their ‘save the poor Indian (or Asian or African or Hispanic) women from the savage brown (or black) men’ theory, followed by the ‘how barbaric is India (insert country of choice)! Really, you should never travel there’ opinion. This is often backed by a small and shallow analysis of a religious political party’s policies, whether it be Islamic or Hindu, to show how this is a structural norm in our country.

Well, we in India do have politicians who sorely need to be educated on gender issues, we do need a better structure where women are safer and the onus of women’s safety is not on ‘women, watch what you wear or when you go out or what you say or what you do and you won’t be blamed for being attacked’ but on ‘men, you better not attack or you will find yourself in jail for years’. This vastly benefits the majority of men and women who want attacks of all kinds to be a thing of the past.

But this isn’t the point, you see, when most white feminists from Europe or the US talk about the plight of women in India. The point is that if they want to blame religion as one of the key factors in women’s rights, they should look closer to home before attempting to blame religions they usually don’t seem to understand.

If a religion is named as part of a constitution in the US or in a European nation, it is likely to be Christianity. This focus on Christianity has passed laws that have put restrictions on women in both the US and in some countries in Europe. Now, generally, we would follow the advice we dole out to white feminists: don’t write about things you don’t truly understand, because even an Indian Christian rarely grasps the implications of being a Christian in such a country. Indian Christians are usually used to laws not being based on what the Pope says. But when these laws of predominantly white countries affect immigrants, we have to care and we have to speak up, especially on the back of the heavily anti-immigrant results of the EU Parliament elections.

Right now, the focus is – or should be – on the Republic of Ireland. Ireland is a wonderful country and the Irish are some of the friendliest people in the world, as well as welcoming. It is also very Catholic, the faith spilling over into their constitution. For the second time in a couple of years that we know of, a woman of colour has had her rights violated. The first time in recent times happened when Indian dentist Savita Halappanavar, who was pregnant, was in Ireland when she was admitted to a hospital with severe pain. It was soon clear that while the foetus still had a heartbeat, it was not viable and there was no way it would survive. In increasing agony, she made repeated requests that her pregnancy be terminated since it was making her extremely sick and, despite it being a desired and planned pregnancy, there is no point in waiting out a doomed pregnancy while the pregnant woman gets sicker by the hour. As long as there was a heartbeat, however feeble and doomed, Savita’s health and life was secondary to that little beep. They denied her request repeatedly. Savita died as a direct result of this denial of termination.

Now we have another case in the same country: a young immigrant woman was reportedly raped when she was still a minor and she got pregnant. At eight weeks pregnant, she was depressed and suicidal – a natural enough result for a young woman in a new country who has been raped. She tried to get an abortion. She was denied it and her request was delayed. She went on a hunger strike. With the reported threat of a court order, when she was 25 weeks pregnant, she was made to have a Caesarean. The young woman is reportedly around 18 now, and the prematurely delivered baby’s health is unknown so far. But a young immigrant woman who was raped was forced to carry her pregnancy on until a point when the foetus was barely viable (at 25 weeks, the odds of the baby not having a disability is not very high), at which point the state pretty much forced her to have a c-section.

It would be cruel to try to superimpose one situation on the other. The plight of women being denied choices anywhere is cruel. But perhaps we are justified in asking that white feminists in Europe and the US focus first on changing such own barbaric laws that deny women such rights before they attempt to save us from the savage brown men, especially when these barbaric laws in these countries are inescapable for women of colour, especially refugees, who cannot simply travel to a neighbouring country with more understanding laws like they can because of visa and financial restrictions.

We have our problems; we have lots of them. We will solve them, but we must do it our way. The last thing we need is for those who do not understand, cannot understand the dynamics within our country and our culture to show us how. What we do need is for all women to have access to compassionate human rights – it will never be done from a moral high ground that simply does not exist.