The International Women’s Day observed with various programs here and there every year primarily reminds us of how the existing global political, socio-economic and religious-cultural structures driven by the money-and-money-only addictive psychology have perpetuated the slavery of women.
The ardent gender advocates, analysts and strategists have for ages been covering up the truth that women have always been commodified as market objects. In the commodification process, it is unlikely to imagine that their human rights are protected with conscious efforts.
Education itself has been used as a commodification tool rather than as a liberating method. The more showbiz-centered education is given, the more superficial generations grow, resulting also in the superficialization of women’s own perspectives. The gender advocates generally are not an exception to this fact.
Let us cite a Nepali instance of how superficial gender experts are about the suffering of the Nepali women. Dhegani Devi, a widow in Chitwan district, had been murdered on 17 Feburary 2012 by those who accused her of being a witch. Prominent gender experts produced a unanimous conclusion in their Op-Ed Page writing that women are being tortured or murdered just because those involved in such anti-women activities were the victims of superstition and ignorance.
Their analysis has glossed over the roots of the frequently-occurring problem. It defends the existing structures geared towards profiting by the massive exploitation and perpetuation of sufferings. Are the superstition and ignorance the cardinal causes of the torture and murder of women in the name of witches?
But the truth is different. Superstition and ignorance are the effects of actions founded on ill-intentions, ill-effortfulness, ill-mindfulness and ill-concentration. They are directly related to the existing political, socio-economic and religious-cultural structures that institutionalize anti-democratic and anti-justice psychological and behavioral patterns within our minds. We have always let them go unquestioned and have always blamed on individuals for everything bad that happens around us. The Nepali model of gender analysis is a derivative from the global patterns established so far regarding women advocacy. They have always focused on the consequences publicizing them as causes while they have glossed over the rooted causes.
A genuine democracy—not phony and disguised democracy—can elevate women as fully dignified human beings. Very often it is difficult to distinguish genuine democracy from phony or disguised democracy because both of them advocate the principles of democracy and human rights. But the difference between them can be found from what they do practically. Phony democracy trumpets but renews the environment that de-humanizes the women’s lives.
Genuine democracy is a vision that sticks to the well-intentioned implementation of the universal principles of human rights and democracy through the creation of apparatuses accountable to people. So long as generations are trained or brainwashed to stick to phony democracy that institutionalizes human rights violations as a permanent profit-making industry, there will be no better human dignity of women and other communities.
We have been labeling the current rule in the globe as democracy, be it so or not, the main reason being our not being able to think and behave substantially differently.
A vital point to note is that women’s liberation cannot result from the ideology that gives a logic that women are born for catering to corporate profiteers’ market needs. Women’s liberation does not come from the ideology that grades women as sex-trade goods. How can you say that your mother or sister or wife should rent her sexual organ as a dignified profession? When our existing structures have rejected to provide even basic human rights to industrial workers, what’s the point of demanding women’s right to rent their sexual organ registered under the nation’s Company Act? When we preach individual freedom in this respect, can we forget that there are the structures that incessantly produce the consequences that we face at individual levels?
The ultimate strategy is to re-educate the generations from the elementary levels, with a transformative mindset that is based on right perspectives, right intentions, right speech, right actions, right livelihood, right effortfulness, right mindfulness and right concentration—also known as the Eightfold Path developed by the Gautama Buddha, the Universal Mind Engineer born more than 2555 years ago.
As you sow, so you reap!