Rahul Gandhi's cheap shot: Using a verse from Manusmriti does not reinforce anti-patriarchy message

The other day, at a party-organised Chhatron ki Goonj event in Pune, Rahul Gandhi fired a cheap shot to indirectly put Hindus on the defensive. His point was about women fighting patriarchy, but he chose a verse from the Manusmriti to make his point. The verse, number 9(3), says that a female must be subject to her father’s rule in childhood, in youth to her husband’s, and in old age to her sons”.

It’s a cheap shot because he knows that no Hindu can easily defend this statement in the smriti, and if one does so, one can easily be labelled as upholding patriarchy. In the past, several anti-caste activists have burnt copies of Manusmriti without reading it, and one can bet that Rahul Gandhi too is unlikely to have read the smriti in any depth. Nobody has to defend what the Manusmriti claims as a moral code, but one does expect more nuance in criticism of the smriti, which was written in a different era, for a different set of circumstances.

If Rahul Gandhi wanted to suggest that religious scripture may play a part in upholding and reinforcing patriarchy, he could easily have quoted from the Koran or Bible or Torah – in fact almost any religious text – to emphasise this point. That he chose to focus only on the Manusmriti makes his statement a political dog whistle. You cannot quote from scripture without context, and that is precisely what he did.

It is highly unlikely that misogyny and patriarchy originated even in multiple religious texts, for most religious texts were compilations made over centuries. They are more likely to have codified what appeared to be happening in society, or in order to reinforce existing power structures.

Patriarchy is likely to have originated in social choices made millennia ago, when tribal and other community groups opted for a division of labour between men and women, with the latter focusing more on nurturing and care and the former on bringing in the food and offering protection to the group. The social norm of one-person-one-spouse would have reinforced this division and, inevitably, changed gender power equations forever. Protectors can turn predators in certain circumstances because they wield more physical power. It was this shift in social trends that religious and other scriptures codified, thus giving patriarchy a divinely-sanctioned reality.

Where religion may indeed have influenced patriarchy is the other reality: almost all current religions were created by men. It is difficult o name one woman founder of any religion today. When men write the scriptures, why is it surprising to find their religious insights tilt towards one direction, even if a religion broadly seeks equality and fairness?

What Rahul Gandhi did was no different from what Jack Dorsey did when he was boss at social media platform Twitter. Dorsey chose to be photographed with some young people carrying the placard: Smash Brahminical Patriarchy. It would appear that patriarchy is a uniquely Brahminical feature, and other segments of society would have been free from it but for the priestly class. The role of the priesthood in reinforcing an idea cannot be disputed, but to believe that a small priestly class can impose patriarchal rules at will on an unwilling group of women, who often constitute marginally more half the population, is foolish.

The problem, whether it is about quoting the Manusmriti selectively, or any other religious scripture, is that is seeks to hang guilt on the current generation of inheritors of a tradition when that scripture was written for the time when it originated.

It also ignores the reality that unlike the Abrahamic religions, which tend to relay on scripture for their laws, Hindus have not been entirely dependent on scripture to develop their own modes or codes of behaviour, whether relating to gender or caste or anything.

Speaking specifically of Manusmriti, I don’t know any Hindu who has even read the book (barring a few scholars), and practically none who assert that their current behaviour is sanctioned by this smriti. A smriti is a human work, while a shruti – the Vedas – are seen as divinely revealed insights. Any smriti is, by definition, not infallible. Our constitution is a smriti, and can be amended. While a Manusmriti cannot be over-written, it can be reinterpreted and partially ignored when the message does not resonate with modern society.

What Rahul Gandhi was indulging in is the familiar colonial trope of finding objectionable things in Indian heritage and practices (Sati, untouchability, or even open defecation) and use that to demonise all of Hinduism. This way they can justify their own colonialism and superior attitudes as a civilising mission. Gandhi correctly called Katherine Mayo’s 1927 book Mother India, “a drain inspector’s report”, for while it did report on some dubious practices in Indian society truthfully, it looked only at the negative side of the ledger.

Rahul Gandhi is today’s Katherine Boo, carrying forward the broader colonial mission of converting Hindus into a self-loathing people (or creating its mindless opposite, the chest-thumping Viswaguru). He is not doing the cause of ending patriarchy any good by targeting only one community, and one book.

One can wonder whether any thinking student in his audience can really accept his claims at face value.