I’m not a feminist in that I think that when all social constraints of patriarchy are removed men and women will be equally represented in positions of power. To be short about it I think that males have dispositions of personality which make them more liable to gravitate to what we might perceive to be positions which require some ego. But, I also think that the total exclusion of women from the public square which one can attest to in Saudi Arabia, or in ancient democratic Athens, is artificial, and unhealthy. The voice of women are unlikely to be equal in politics without proactive social engineering, but for them to be totally silent also requires proactive social engineering. So I view what is happening in Manipur as health, In Manipur, Women Take the Lead:
India is the land of a million mutinies, in V. S. Naipaul’s indelible phrase, but almost all the mutinies I have witnessed have been led and populated by men. When the farmers of Uttar Pradesh demonstrate against a new highway, they leave their wives at home. When the Jats agitate for caste-based job and education preferences by sitting on railway tracks, their daughters remain in the village, their faces, in all likelihood, covered by dupattas.
Even the massive marches against corruption in New Delhi during Anna Hazare’s hunger strike had an overwhelmingly male cast. When the barricades go up in India, it seems they are almost always manned by men.
But when I rolled up to an agitation in the village of Gamgiphai in Manipur earlier this fall, the ramparts were lined almost exclusively with women. The road connecting the village, which sat nestled in the hills outside the state capital, had been torn up. The protesters had blocked the roads into Manipur, as so often happens in this remote region. They hoped that strangling commerce would force officials here to grant their request: a separate administrative district for their ethnic group, the Kukis. I used my cellphone to record a video that captured just how unafraid Manipuri women are to confront soldiers.