Across classes, castes and regions, jeans are ubiquitous in today’s India. Yet this week in a UP village, a 17-year-old girl was allegedly killed by her own family for defying their ‘no jeans’ diktat. She had started wearing jeans during a stay in Ludhiana. This is a grim reminder that the policing of women’s clothes, often dismissed as banter, presents real threats to their educational and work mobility, and even life.
CMIE data indicates that Indian women’s labour participation rate is 11% as compared to men’s 71%. Lack of safety in public places is a credible contributing factor for this shocking situation. But conditions are often bleak inside homes too. NCRB’s 2019 report says a majority 30.9% of crimes against women concern ‘cruelty by husband or his relatives’. NCW notes a sharp rise in domestic violence in the pandemic year.
Plus job cuts of the year have imperilled many a young woman’s big city dream, of greater freedom than at home. It is true that India now has a higher proportion of women STEM graduates at the tertiary level than some developed nations, and their overall GER in higher education has exceeded men’s. The problem is conditionalities: She can go out but she cannot wear the ‘wrong’ dress or meet the ‘wrong’ boys. Women pay a very high price for such injunctions. Let’s stop pretending they are benign.
This piece appeared as an editorial opinion in the print edition of The Times of India.
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