Religions and movements for gender equality have often followed different, if not opposite, trajectories. In societies like India, where secularism is a pillar of democracy and in which pockets of religious radicalism resist and are influent in the ongoing allocation of opportunities, a reflection on the relation between religion and women is symbolic.

 

I meet Rajeev Bhargava in his office at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi. White trousers, a long-red burgundy shirt and the canonical small squared glasses. A sofa, a small table, two cups of tea and a full bookcase make the room intimate. There are posters of recent events of the centre, some picture and piles of papers. Author of important books like Politics and Ethics of the Indian Constitution, The Promise of India’s secular democracy and Secular States and Religious Diversity, Rajeev Bhargava is a worldwide expert of secularism and one of the most important Indian political theorists of his generation.

 

Gender inequality, Bhargava says, exceeds the religious vs secular logic. “For thousands of years all ancient cultures, religious or not religious, have had a pretty rotten attitude to women.” Speaking in harsh times for secularism in India, he repeats that it’s not only about religions. Religious as well as us ancient secular civilizations have treated women rather badly. “Civilizations that find their roots in ancient times,” Bhargava recalls, “have placed women lower in a hierarchical set up. They have treated them unfairly. They restricted their freedoms and placed on women the entire burden of keeping culture and civilization, whether good aspects or bad aspects of civilization.”

 

Inside and outside religions, women have not been dissuaded from finding alternative trajectories. Ages before today’s activism, he says, women were finding and created meaningful spaces of freedom and equality. “I can think of many examples,” Bhargava continues. “For instance, in Buddhism, very early on, it was not just a male who could pronounce the word and join the monastery as a monk. Even a woman could do that, which is quite unlike what happened at the same time in many other cultures.”

 

While turning towards the tea-cup on his desk, “And, I am thinking of the Durga images in Bengal as well as in many other parts of India, there must be also something at roots of the glorification of some female goddesses, which are not simply seen as mothers, but who are seen as destroying the evil and therefore extremely powerful. There has to be a social basis to that. It cannot just be a fragment of people imagination.”

 

As he admits, this is not extensive at all. “The traces of severe exclusion and discrimination, which began many thousands of years ago, and which continued through the ages, are still affecting women all over the world. Even today, even after the secured formal rights to be treated as equals and all kinds of rights to freedom.”

Issues like difference and gender equality are regular on the agenda of international organizations, global corporates, political parties and, increasingly, religions. Despite efforts, violence is often underestimated and domestic work is rarely supported by the provision of adequate structure of social protection. If virgin, young women are thought to be pure and focused on school. Women have to struggle to pray collectively at holy places and religious hierarchy is pretty much inaccessible for them. As this were not enough, often, unequal and oppressive practices are the routine within the private domain. Something that can be as little as the division of customary duties and as pervasive as the distribution of resources and opportunities among children of different sexes.

 

For Bhargava, “there are many practices which keep restricting women and some of them are kind of transmitted generationally from one peer to another, which act in ways that undermine their self-resect, their self-confidence and their self-esteem. So, there is still a long way to go for most societies in the world, certainly in places like India. In some temples, for instance, women are not allowed to enter between the ages of thirty and fifty five because this is the time they are supposed to menstruating.”

 

These kinds of things still exist.  And, it’s not only about religions, again. “We know that the testimony of a women is treated half as a good as that of a man,” he says. “Sometimes you need two women to verify that a crime has taken place, while the testimony of a man is sufficient.”

 

“As this were not enough,” he continues while voices of students and the noise of a rickshaw breaks the quiet, “often as women created free and equal spaces for themselves, they brought about a counter reaction and the power hierarchy did not change. Rather, it consolidated.”

 

The clash between impulse for progress and more or less evident intimidation, Bhargava says, is the really struggle that keeps taking place. “There isn’t anything like a linear movement for the progress of women. I mean there is a battle on all the time. In many parts of the world, I am sure, many of the gains that have been made by women’s movement cannot be taken for granted. There is always possibility for them to be reversed. And women have to be very alerted. They must keep pressing harder and harder to secure the advantages that they have obtained for themselves and to push forward for more equality and greater freedom.”

 

Gender equality and women empowerment is not only about the secular, nevertheless. “It is important to question the idea that all evil is in religion and all the good things are in the regular world,” he recalls. “So, I don’t want to work with a crude religion/secular dichotomy.”