The last roti is for her
With which
She has to craft
The next day's sun.
– Premranjan Animesh in Pichhali Roti
Mao Zedong is believed to have said that the more chillies you ate, the more revolutionary you became. Judging from the fire in the press-statements of the Maobaadi commissars of Nepal, they must have bitten fistfuls of jyanmaras (killer chillies) in their childhood. But like most Nepalis, they too must have grown up eating loads of the staple rice as well. Despite tall claims of the Maobaadi leadership about the emancipation of women, indications are that the lot of the 'fairer' sex among insurgents is no fairer than their fate in the society at large. If we are what we eat, something is seriously wrong with the Southasian staple—rice and rotis.
Eating mountains of rice with streams of daal flowing over is bad enough in terms of gender sensitivity for we all know who does the cooking, but the roti-eating male of the species seems to be gastronomically programmed to be a male-chauvinistic-you-know-what. The female resigned to the fate of rolling rotis and boiling rice. Rabri Devi, the Chief Minister of Bihar, claims that she still loves to spend some time in the kitchen, specially rolling chapattis, for her husband-cum-party president Laloo Yadav. Women's rights is nowhere on the agenda of this housewife turned head-of-government in the blighted state of Bihar.
Not that this reluctant 'leader' is an exception in South Asian politics. Sheila Dixit has miserably failed to make New Delhi safer for women. She can claim that law and order is the responsibility of the central government. But then she failed to get her party even raise this issue in the Indian parliament in an effective manner. The time and effort the Congress (I) spent in fending off the onslaught on the foreign origin of its president Sonia Gandhi could have been better utilised to project her as the hope of half of the population of the biggest democracy in the world. But Sonia's (wo)man-Friday, Ambika Soni, seems to be too busy projecting her boss as the 'he-man' of her party. With women like these at the helms, why bemoan the attitude of the male of the species?