Meet The Gender Equalist: Vidya Bal
Tanuja Nailwal is a second year engineering student at JIIT, Noida. She loves meeting new people and her love for food is infinite. This avid debater loves to be around kids and is striving hard to leave her footprints on this Earth. She wants the world around everyone to be beautiful and she tries doing that by her writings.
Meet The Gender Equalist: Vidya Bal
The women in our society have seen all sorts of barbarities living in a male-dominated society. Be it dowry deaths, a plethora of sexual harassment cases, domestic violence, child marriage, rapes, and now recently the denial of entry for women in a lot of renowned temples and mosques,women in the society have been at the receiving end of all atrocities imaginable.
Fighting these is veteran female rights activist and gender discrimination rebel, Vidya Bal, who is an ardent feminist by philosophy and a profound admirer of the works of Maya Angelou, Virginia Woolf, B.R. Ambedkar and Mahatma Gandhi. She now works with her organisation, Nari Samata Manch which she founded in 1982.
“It amazes me to no extent to understand the fact that India has been a free nation for about 70 years now. The journey had been quite a ride,” said Ms. Bal. “How women suffer on the insides till they turn hollow and tolerate the violence, is a story that has always been a very sad one.”
While the ways of harassment against women have been ‘evolving’ (yes, because people seem to be creating new ways of doing this)with time; earlier it used to be Sati, then dowry deaths, then rape, and acid attacks to the denial of entry to mosques and temples for women. The only thing that has remained constant is how women have had to suffer in silence and accept their ill-fate as destiny. This is exactly what got Ms. Bal to set up a ‘vent’ out’ centre as an initiative at Nari Samata Manch where women could pour their hearts out.
Ms. Bal believes in putting an end to patriarchy and strongly affirms that it can and will improve the situation from the core and thus we chose to tell you about the success story of this feminist. She has been fighting for what should have been a democratic right for women as a human; gender equality. She has been fighting against ancient rules, against oppressive patriarchs, against the unlawful and even immoral activities against women, against archaic traditions that don’t let women do anything out of their free will. Fighting against all these things is Ms. Vidya Bal.
The question is, why has she been fighting against this for so long? Are the shackles of religion so tight that we forget the fact that women are humans essentially? The gatekeepers of religion, our priests, apparently are maintaining the sanctity of temples and mosques by not allowing women to enter through. Now, how valid is THAT? Let’s decode the reason behind the stupendously audacious statements of the religious society.
Ms. Bal says the issue is not about the temples, or Gods, or ancient practices, or even sanctity. It’s a very broad issue about equality, here. It’s about granting females equal rights as men. It’s ironic not to let this pass without a grin how Durga, Saraswati, Lakshmi are Goddesses and yet women are denied entry to these temples. It’s a point simply hard to ignore. To take the Shani Shingnapur temple, for instance, the argument given is that the vibrations or rays emitted by Lord Shani are very powerful and could hurt women in bad ways. To this, Ms. Bal had a powerful counter argument. Her team led some pregnant women near the idol to examine the scientific ‘hurt’ caused. Guess the result? Yes, nothing happened.
The Ayappa temple in Sabrimala has a somewhat similar explanation; menstruating women cannot enter the temple premises. There are a lot of examples similar to this but the crux lies in knowing the fact that women are humans first, THEN females. Why have some people in the name of religion and prevalent obsolete traditions created a ruckus about it?
“Gender sensitization”, says Ms. Bal, “Gender sensitization, especially in rural areas is the only way out. Breaking the patriarchal stereotype, and creating awareness that it is about being a good human being—and not about being a “feminine woman” or a “manly man” is the next task, only then, we can aspire for an equitable society,” she says, “is the next big step this generation ought to take.”
India being a land of culture NEEDS to look back into its sacred texts which people worship and understand the status given to them in medieval times and learn something from the history. A woman is as much a human as a male is and for her to get the right which she deserves; the first step is to CONSIDER HER AS A HUMAN and nothing less. God never differentiated between man and woman while giving them this beautiful gift called “Life” then who are these people to stop women from reaching a place where everyone believes that God resides.
