When the Constitution of India was drafted, its treatment of women was remarkably progressive for its time. It guaranteed equality before the law, prohibited discrimination on the ground of sex, ensured equality of opportunity in public employment and, through Articles 325 and 326, established a common electoral roll and adult suffrage without excluding women.

Unlike several countries, including those in the West, Indian women did not have to wage a separate struggle for the right to vote. It was theirs from the birth of the Republic.

The principle was clear: a woman was not a lesser citizen. Any discrimination against her on the ground of sex could invite constitutional scrutiny and, where specific laws were violated, legal sanctions. Parliament and the State legislatures subsequently enacted several laws to protect women against discrimination, violence and exploitation.

Yet, 76 years after the Constitution came into force, equality remains more a promise than a reality. The contradiction is visible everywhere. Women constitute roughly half the population, but their contribution to the economy is still inadequately recognised.

Consider agriculture. Women are equal partners in sowing, transplanting, weeding, harvesting, processing and storing agricultural produce. They may also look after cattle and perform a host of other farm-related activities. Yet they are often described as "helpers" in a family enterprise rather than as workers in their own right.

The invisibility of women's work becomes even more pronounced inside the home. In 2024, women aged 15-59 spent an average of 305 minutes a day on unpaid domestic services. They also carried a disproportionately large share of caregiving responsibilities.

The problem is not merely that women work without wages. Much of this work is not even counted as economic production. One estimate has put the economic value of women's unpaid domestic and care work at between 15 and 17 per cent of India's GDP. Thus, an Indian woman can be indispensable to her family and still be economically invisible.

The law, meanwhile, has not been the problem alone. India has a formidable body of legislation intended to protect women. But implementation remains uneven. The fact that a woman may still think twice before travelling alone at night tells us something about the distance between a right written in a statute book and a right enjoyed in everyday life.

Women have nevertheless broken many glass ceilings. They have excelled in science, medicine, journalism, technology, aviation, administration, business and almost every other field once regarded as the preserve of men. Politics, however, remains one of the most stubborn male bastions.

The 18th Lok Sabha had only 74 women MPs, about 14 per cent of its membership, compared with 78 women elected in 2019. The situation in State Assemblies is worse. Women constitute only about nine per cent of MLAs on average. In other words, women remain dramatically under-represented in the institutions that make the laws under which they live. This is why the promise of reservation matters.

In fact, given that women constitute roughly half the population, there is a strong argument for eventually moving beyond 33 per cent towards 50 per cent representation. The Almighty alone knows when that will happen.

The experience of local government provides some hope. The constitutional amendments concerning panchayats and municipalities, enacted in 1992 and coming into effect in 1993, mandated at least one-third reservation for women. There were patriarchal voices then which ridiculed the idea and predicted that elected women would merely act as proxies for their husbands or other male relatives. Time has proved many of those prophets wrong.

For more than three decades, lakhs of women have gained experience in local governance. They have learnt how governments function, how budgets are prepared, how public works are executed and how citizens' grievances are addressed. Many have acquired the confidence and experience necessary to move from panchayats and municipalities to State Assemblies and Parliament.

There is, however, one sector where women are denied their due in an especially striking manner: religion.

Whatever the religion, women are among its most faithful practitioners. In churches, women often outnumber men in worship and in partaking of the Holy Eucharist. More women than men visit temples and participate in religious observances. In Muslim families, too, women perform much of the invisible labour that enables men to observe religious practices comfortably. They prepare food, maintain the household and often ensure that men have everything they need before leaving for prayers.

Women are also often more punctual and disciplined than men when it comes to observing religious rituals and prayers. Yet the institutions of religion rarely give women equal authority. The doors of priesthood remain closed to them in most religious traditions. There are Christian denominations where women priests and bishops are a reality, but they are exceptions rather than the rule.

It is against this background that the recent remarks of the prominent Muslim cleric AP Aboobacker Musliyar, popularly known as Kanthapuram, about the role of women are deeply disturbing. I was particularly distressed because I have met Kanthapuram.

I was once invited to address a massive conference of SYS workers at Malappuram. It remains the largest gathering I have ever addressed. I spoke about the important contribution of Muslims to palliative care in India and about the yeoman service rendered in Delhi by my friend KV Hamza and his dedicated team.

That day, I had lunch with Kanthapuram. After that, I had no occasion to meet him or comment on him. I therefore found his observations about women particularly disappointing. If his words are taken literally, women should remain at home while men take responsibility for the outside world. But who has established that the home is automatically a safe place for women?

The experience of the COVID lockdown should have permanently demolished that assumption. Studies and reports during the pandemic highlighted the increase in domestic violence and the difficulty women faced in reporting abuse when they were confined to their homes with their abusers. A woman's home can be a sanctuary. It can also become a prison.

The answer to violence against women cannot be to imprison women in the name of protecting them. The answer is to make homes, streets, workplaces, schools, places of worship and public institutions safe for women. Kanthapuram is not alone in displaying this patriarchal instinct.

Mohan Bhagwat, the chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, has also made statements in the past that assigned women a primarily domestic role. He described a husband-wife arrangement in which the woman looked after household chores while the man provided for and protected her.

If that is the philosophy behind such statements, Bhagwat is no better than Kanthapuram in defining the place of women in society. The difference is largely one of religious and ideological vocabulary. One speaks from an Islamic religious platform and the other from a Hindu nationalist organisation. But whenever men prescribe where women ought to be, the result is the same: half of humanity is reduced to a role defined by men.

The RSS is essentially a men's organisation. Women associated with its wider ideological family have their own organisation, the Rashtra Sevika Samiti, rather than being members of the RSS itself. That arrangement sits uneasily with the proposition that women and men are equal partners in nation-building.

If women are equal partners in society, why should they not be equal partners in every organisation that seeks to influence the country's social and cultural destiny? Women do not need men to decide where they belong. They have already decided for themselves.

They have entered almost every profession and demonstrated that competence has no gender. Indira Gandhi was one of India's strongest Prime Ministers. The Emergency remains a serious and indefensible aberration in her record, but it does not erase the fact that she exercised political power and authority with an effectiveness that few male politicians of her generation could match.

Today, India has a woman as its President. Droupadi Murmu is the country's 15th President and has occupied the highest constitutional office since July 2022. That fact alone should make it difficult for anyone to argue that a woman's natural or ordained place is confined to the home. The irony is that women are already doing both jobs.

They run households and offices, raise children and run institutions, care for ageing parents and build businesses, work in fields and laboratories, teach in classrooms and serve in Parliament. Men have traditionally been allowed to specialise in their careers because somebody else—usually a woman—has taken care of everything else.

Women are not asking for permission to abandon the home. They are asking for the freedom to decide how they wish to divide their time, talent and responsibilities. A woman may choose to devote herself entirely to her family. Another may choose a career. A third may do both. None of these choices makes her more or less of a woman.

The responsibility of society is not to prescribe her choice but to ensure that she has one. This is where both Kanthapuram and Bhagwat deserve to be challenged. Religious or cultural authority does not confer the right to decide the limits of a woman's freedom. The Constitution does not recognise a separate citizenship for women. Nor does it say that equality ends at the doorstep of the home.

There is perhaps no better illustration of the problem than what happened recently in Paris.

The Government of India has done well to dissociate itself from the controversy surrounding the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha, or BAPS, a religious organisation from Gujarat, following allegations that women employees of the Eiffel Tower were asked to remain out of sight during a visit by its monks.

The incident resulted in the closure of the iconic Paris landmark for an entire day after workers went on strike in protest. They wanted to express solidarity with their female colleagues who, according to staff unions, had been sidelined during the visit.

The episode raises an uncomfortable question: can the religious practices of one group be allowed to dictate how employees of a public institution behave? The answer must be no.

BAPS says its monks observe strict rules concerning contact with women. That is a matter for the organisation and its monks. A secular society must respect religious practices as long as they do not infringe upon the rights of others. But a woman's presence cannot become an inconvenience merely because a religious visitor chooses not to interact with her.

The episode is particularly uncomfortable because of the proximity between BAPS and the Indian establishment. Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed, through video link, those attending the inauguration of the BAPS temple in the Paris region. Indian embassy officials were present at the ceremony and conveyed their good wishes. A couple of years earlier, Modi, along with the BAPS spiritual leader, had inaugurated the organisation's temple in the United Arab Emirates.

There is nothing wrong with a religious organisation establishing a temple abroad. Nor is there anything objectionable about citizens following religious practices, however unusual those practices may appear to others.

But proximity creates responsibility. A government that repeatedly speaks of women's dignity and empowerment, symbolised by its Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao campaign, cannot afford to appear comfortable with a situation in which women workers are allegedly expected to make themselves invisible in a public institution to accommodate religious sensibilities.

The larger issue is not BAPS, Kanthapuram or Bhagwat individually. It is the persistence of patriarchy in different forms and under different names.
Religious traditions are not immutable. Even within religious traditions, there have always been dissenters and reformers. A group that broke away from the BAPS tradition, for instance, is reported to have created a sect in which women could become monks. Such examples demonstrate that religious practices are capable of change and debate.

Nor should political leaders confuse proximity to religious organisations with social progress or diplomatic achievement. A secular government must maintain a respectful distance from all religions and all religious organisations. It can respect faith without surrendering constitutional principles.

If men want women to be respected as equal partners, they must first stop speaking as though women need male permission to become equal. The Constitution gave Indian women equality as a right, not as a favour. It is time society stopped treating that equality as negotiable.