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        Celebrating International Women's Day, a hardy annual, has occasioned the familiar platitudes about getting for the fair sex its long denied rights. As the Congress spokesperson Jayanti Natarajan has said that women have been fighting for their rights for at least 15 years now but in vain.

        Tamilnadu and Haryana are the only States where the State Commission for Women do not have statutory powers which alone would remove the cramp in their functioning. Of course, injustice for women is a matter not of absence of legal privilege which is formally recognised.

        The problem is that it has not been concretised because of the reservations men have against yielding place to women where equity about which they rhetoricise demands it. This of a piece with centuries old hypocrisies in this area. They would tell foreigners about how Indian scriptures asked for more than equal status for women vis-à-vis men. Without Sakti, Siva is a non-entity, they say but, in actual practice, it is the women who are reduced to be non-entities.

        The liberalism of the Vedas is mocked by Manu's code which says that women should be under the control of parents in their childhood, of the husband in adulthood and of their grown up children in old age. Manu categorically says that women do not deserve freedom.

        In rural areas, the education of girls is imagined to make them a menace because knowledgeability was seen as a force against subservience.

        Christianity sees the ideal woman as a subservient entity to her partner. The status of women in Islam is a crying shame. What the Taliban did to women when they were in power is common knowledge. Basically, all religions seem to be one in upholding Manu's directive that na stree swaatantryam arhati, meaning no woman deserves freedom.

        The progress of civilisation has not been accompanied by progressive thinking in this area except in the form of paying lip service to gender justice. To some extent many mothers are themselves guilty in the sense that they advise their daughters with a note of compulsion in their voice to respect tradition. Mothers of boys express without wariness their reservations against accepting an educated girl as the bride.

        This mindset is being reformed but not markedly. A situation is also emerging in which the educational status of girls is much above its older counterpart and finding a match for them of equal merit is becoming difficult. This is God's way of curbing male arrogance which is behind the greed for extorting dowry. There can be no denying of the change compulsorily effected by modernity with women outdoing men in competitive examinations, seizing higher positions and thus occupying prestigious slots in the field of employment but these instances are fewer than needed for reforming male mindsets.

        The office-going girl faces many challenges in preserving her honour and the right to go up in the professional ladder. There is the law against domestic violence but not all the ladies suffering it would go to court because of their mistaken belief that it would compromise theirs as well as their family's reputation.

        Those who should care for gender justice in legislatures have managed to delay passage of the Women's Reservations Bill. They suggest the enlarging the size of the legislature to preserve their constituencies knowing full well that that a legislature would then be too unwieldily to be managed. Until the legislators are prepared to be resigned to their having to be displaced in some constituencies by women, reform would be a dream and, if it arrives at all, husbands would be backseat drivers of many women legislators.