In PM Modi’s hand, ancient and modern blend
The talk about women's empowerment is almost as old as the system that oppresses women, but kudos to the Prime Minister for enlivening the conversation by giving it a traditional mooring as well as a contemporary flavour. During his monthly radio talk show, Mann ki Baat, Mr Modi approached the issue of women's empowerment through two separate prisms: Financial inclusion and familial pride. In the first case, he urged men to bring in more women into the social security net by buying them insurance policies.
Earlier this year, the Government launched a life insurance scheme, an accident insurance scheme and a pension cover with an ambitious target of bringing crores of people around the country under a social security net. Currently, insurance cover in India is abysmally poor, and the vast majority has no formal financial mechanism in place to protect it from unplanned setbacks.
The situation is especially precarious for women, many of whom are still often dependent on the menfolk for sustenance. The Prime Minister's soft Raksha Bandhan deadline to buy insurance is a master-stroke. First, it makes the purchase a time-bound act; this is important because most first-time insurance-buyers don't consider insurance to be a priority investment.
They need extra motivation, so a deadline that coincides with a festival definitely helps. Second, Raksha Bandhan is about the promise of taking care of each other. By linking the insurance scheme to the festival, the Prime Minister has underlined the concept of social security in a way that no speech or Government advertisement could have achieved.
This, yet again, shows how well the Prime Minister understands his audience. That Opposition leaders have twisted the Raksha Bandhan peg into a ‘communal' matter, is disappointing. Perhaps they need to be reminded of the early Mughal King Humayun who, upon receiving a rakhi from a besieged Rani Padmavati, sent his troops to defend her kingdom. Or of how Rabindranath Tagore used to the festival to foster peace between Hindus and Muslims after the first Bengal partition of 1905.
The second big takeaway from Mr Modi's Sunday address is the social media trend, #selfiewithdaughter. Technically, it's a culmination of two trends, selfies and hashtags on the micro-blogging site, Twitter. It was initially pushed by a panchayat in Haryana, one of the most patriarchal States in the country where almost all social indices are tilted against women — be it the sex ratio or women's education or maternal health and mortality. But the State is slowly turning around, as the early popularity of the #selfiewithdaughter trend showed. On Sunday, the Prime Minister made it a national success story which is now reverberating across the world. Habitual naysayers will complain that Twitter trends don't change ground realities. But social media, like traditional media, has immeasurable influence on social mindsets, and the mindset is the starting point of all change.
