As evidenced by the country’s plunging female-male ratio (933:1,000), open, continuous and seldom interrupted violence, prejudice and disrespect against the second sex is practised not only overtly by way of pervasive sexual harassment and molestation of women (casually dismissed as ‘eve teasing’ in the local argot), rape, dowry murders and workplace discrimination, but also more subtly by way of convenient, self-serving gender stereotyping.

A case in point is the multi-channel television advert of the Mumbai-based corporate HDFC Standard Life Assurance. In the ad film, a perfectly healthy 60-plus male is discussing his retirement with his equally aged wife. He gravely informs her that as he has retired, domestic economy will have to be practised. In one scene he informs her that the housemaid has been sacked, so her (the wife’s) workload will increase. In the next frame he magnanimously informs her that he’ll uncomplainingly accept her cooking, as the cook has also been sent packing. Ditto the driver.

Obviously dismayed, the wife suggests soliciting some help from their son. The lazy old geezer displays great indignation. Never has he ever asked a favour of anyone, except when he proposed to her decades ago! Then what were the savings for? she asks tremulously. To show you around Singapore! says the retired worthy, triumphantly producing a set of airline tickets. Suddenly all is well and the ad film ends with the company message that careful planning for retirement with HDFC Standard Life guarantees financial independence even after retirement.

This ad film has been highly rated by several ad rating agencies and has topped the ‘ad diagnostics chart’ (which measures the likeability, enjoyment and believability of ad shorts on television) of the new business daily Mint (December 24). But some disturbing questions linger in the mind. Why couldn’t the perfectly hale and hearty retiree volunteer to share the household work? And what happens after the five days and four nights holiday in Singapore is over? Is the smug gent likely to help out his old lady? Most unlikely. Thus ad industry geniuses perpetuate gender stereo-typing and sexual harassment, and receive rave reviews.

Eulogy backlash

The Delhi-based pioneer newsweekly India Today, which started rolling off the presses during the height of the Emergency (1975-77), has since metamorphosed into the country’s most fearlessly outspoken, bestseller newsmagazine outselling Outlook, which hit the newsstands in the early 1990s by 2:1 every week.

Yet the year 2007 ended on a sour note for media mogul and publisher-editor-in-chief of this venerated weekly, Aroon Purie, following his mysterious choice of Prakash Karat, general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) as India Today’s â€˜newsmaker of 2007’. Although Karat has been much in the news for his dogged opposition to the Indo-American nuclear cooperation agreement (allegedly on orders from Beijing), there were other players who strutted and fretted on the national stage in 2007, who arguably could have been more deservedly conferred this honorific by Purie.

Although India Today presented a wide-eyed eulogy of the quintessentially Cadillac communist general secretary who is wont to holiday en famille in Tuscany and the Maldives with his brother-in-law Dr. Prannoy Roy (yes, Mrs. K of the king-size bindi is the television media tycoon’s sister-in-law), Purie & Co. received a sharp slap of typical communist duplicity.

Following the publication of a full-page interview in the venerable weekly (December 24) in which he threatened to withdraw CPM support to the UPA government at the Centre, Karat denied having said anything of the sort. On the contrary in Ganashakti, the CPM’s Bengali language publication, he accused India Today of “yellow journalism”.

The denouement of this ill-advised choice of the newsweekly’s ‘newsmaker of 2007’ is an anguished rejoinder in India Today (December 31) penned by principal correspondent Satarupa Bhattacharjya who was present at the Karat interview. Confirming that Karat had said all this and more, she accused the general secretary of “running with the hare and hunting with the hound (sic)”. However Bhattacharjya’s full page rejoinder is mysteriously silent on the issue of whether the weekly possesses an electronically recorded version of the contested interview. Surely an elementary precaution, especially when interviewing comrades and commissars to whom lying, double-cross and duplicity is politics by other means.

Landmark test case

The virus of casteism is so deeply embedded in the national psyche that even though a Dalit woman chief minister rules with a massive majority in Uttar Pradesh — India’s most populous Hindi heartland state — she is unable to persuade students of a government-run primary school to eat the government-provided mid-day meal cooked by a Dalit woman.

Barely 30 km from Lucknow’s Vidhan Sabha where the state’s 400-plus legislators debate policy, 80 students of the Bibipur Primary School adamantly refuse to eat the mid-day meal cooked by Phook Kumari Rawat, a Dalit. The students’ mid-day meal boycott which started on December 10 continues, with only a few Dalit students eating food cooked by Rawat. The children, it is being speculated, have been instigated by the village pradhan, a member of the opposition Samajwadi Party who owes allegiance to the state’s former chief minister and Mayawati’s arch political rival Mulayam Singh Yadav. With the majority of children in school unrelenting, the village panchayat sacked Rawat on the ground that the children’s boycott was prompted by unhygienic and poor quality of food preparation.

Supported by several social organisations, Rawat has brought her fight to the state capital turning her protest before the Vidhan Sabha into a media event. A widow with three children who was hitherto a daily wage earner, she alleges an upper caste conspiracy against her.

Given that under the rules of the ambitious mid-day meal scheme, employment preference has to be given to lower castes and women in particular, and that there are some 50,000 Dalit cooks offering meals to 1.35 lakh children in UP’s government schools, there is widespread expectation that the outcome of this drama in Lucknow could prove to be a landmark test case for the mid-day meal scheme.