When Protection Becomes Permission, Freedom Has Already Been Compromised
Namo Bharat Times Editorial
Every age develops its own vocabulary for limiting women. Rarely is the language openly hostile. More often, restriction arrives disguised as affection, tradition, morality, honour, security or protection. A woman is described as precious, and therefore she must be guarded. She is placed on a pedestal, and therefore she must not step beyond boundaries drawn for her. Her safety is invoked until safety itself becomes an argument against her freedom.
The recent remarks by Kerala-based Sunni cleric Kanthapuram A.P. Aboobacker Musliyar have reopened precisely this uncomfortable question. Reports of his address quote him as arguing against women entering the public sphere, defending purdah as protection, and comparing women to gold ornaments whose value is preserved when they are safely kept away. The remarks have understandably attracted criticism. But to reduce the debate to one cleric, one religion or one community would be intellectually convenient and socially dishonest.
The larger question belongs to India.
Why, even today, does society remain so comfortable with the idea that a woman’s life requires somebody else’s permission?
Women’s Freedom: The Problem With the Language of Protection
The metaphor of gold is revealing precisely because it appears complimentary. Gold is valuable; therefore, it is locked away. A woman is valuable; therefore, she must similarly be protected.
But the comparison collapses the moment we recognise a fundamental truth: gold is a possession. A woman is a person.
A locker cannot diminish the aspirations of gold. A locked door can diminish the possibilities available to a human being.
There is consequently a profound difference between creating conditions in which women are safe and creating conditions in which women are restricted in the name of safety. The former is the responsibility of a civilised society. The latter is merely control dressed in respectable language.
If streets are unsafe for women, make the streets safer. If workplaces discriminate against women, reform workplaces. If public transport exposes women to harassment, strengthen enforcement. If men cannot behave responsibly around women, the answer cannot perpetually be to regulate women.
The burden of male behaviour cannot continue to be placed upon female freedom.
Women and Education: Why Must Ambition Have an Expiry Date?
For generations, the life of an Indian girl has too often been imagined as a sequence designed by others.
She studies—but only until education has served its social purpose.
She grows—but with marriage approaching as the inevitable destination.
She marries—and adjustment becomes virtue.
She becomes a mother—and motherhood is gradually permitted to consume every other identity she possessed.
Then come the years of raising children, maintaining homes, caring for ageing parents, supporting husbands and holding families together.
There is nothing insignificant about any of these responsibilities. Motherhood is not inferior to employment. Homemaking is not an intellectually lesser contribution. Caring for a family can be one of life’s deepest commitments.
The objection begins when these cease to be choices and become assignments.
Why must a woman’s ambition expire when her marriage begins? Why must motherhood erase the person who existed before the mother? Why should a girl be encouraged to study only until the day society decides that her education has made her sufficiently marriageable?
The question is not whether women should marry, raise children or care for families.
The question is much more fundamental:
Who has the authority to decide that these must constitute the limits of a woman’s life?
Women at Work: Family and Ambition Are Not Opposing Forces
Indian women have already demolished the argument that domestic responsibilities and public achievements cannot coexist.
They run households and corporations. They raise children and lead institutions. They care for families while practising medicine, arguing in courts, teaching in universities, building businesses, serving in government, writing, farming, researching, flying aircraft and wearing the uniform of the nation.
Women have never lacked the capacity to occupy multiple worlds.
What they have often lacked is an equitable society within which to do so.
Indeed, the more relevant question may be why women continue to be celebrated for “balancing” everything when that balance so frequently requires them to carry responsibilities that should have been shared in the first place.
A progressive society cannot merely applaud the woman who manages career, children, kitchen and family. It must ask why the architecture of family life still assumes that so much of this management belongs primarily to her.
Equality is not achieved by allowing a woman to work outside the home while continuing to treat everything inside it as exclusively her responsibility.
Religion and Women: Patriarchy Has No Single Faith
There is also a responsibility upon public discourse not to turn this controversy into another communal contest.
It would be easy to take the cleric’s remarks and construct an argument exclusively about Muslim women. It would also be wrong.
Women have been instructed, restrained and judged in virtually every community. The vocabulary differs; the instinct often does not.
One community may invoke religion. Another invokes family honour. Another invokes culture. Another invokes tradition. Another invokes safety. Families invoke reputation.
The woman receives the same message in different languages:
There are boundaries around your freedom, and we will tell you where they are.
And when women themselves become custodians of restrictions once imposed upon them and pass those restrictions to another generation, question that too.
Patriarchy does not become progressive merely because a woman administers it.
Rise, Women: The Revolution Must Begin With Ownership of the Self
The answer to regressive ideas about women cannot simply be anger at one speech. Anger disappears when the news cycle changes.
What is required is a more enduring refusal.
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India speaks today of ambition, development, global leadership and national capability. Such aspirations become hollow if half the country must still negotiate for elementary control over its own choices.
A strong India cannot be constructed around weak women.
And strong women cannot be created by teaching girls that obedience is their highest virtue.
The revolution required is therefore not a revolution against men, marriage, motherhood, religion or family.
It is a revolution against ownership.
Against the ancient assumption that somebody—a cleric, father, husband, community or eventually even one’s own children—possesses a superior claim over an adult woman’s decisions.
Women are not gold to be locked away.
They are not symbols to be protected.
They are citizens.
And citizenship carries something far more significant than protection:
“We are not possessions to be protected through confinement. We are individuals capable of determining the dimensions of our own lives.”
That is the voice women must raise—not against a particular religion, not against family, and certainly not against men as a whole, but against an idea that has survived for far too long: that a woman’s freedom is something another person is entitled to regulate.
Rise, women.
Not because someone has permitted you to.
But because no society that speaks seriously of progress can continue asking its women to remain smaller than their abilities.
