Editorial: Pati, patni and power

Indeed, our democracy is a grand edifice but parts of it are just ridiculous. Take this case from Chhattisgarh, where the authorities are wondering how to proceed against six men who took the oath of office in place of their wives who had been elected as panchayat representatives.

Paraswara village went to the polls to elect 11 ward members, six of which were reserved for women. When the swearing-in was held on March 3, the husbands of the six women who won turned up to take the oath of office. The panchayat secretary administered the oath to them without batting an eyelid. The video of the all-male ceremony has gone viral and now the election officials are being asked searching questions.

Trivial as it may sound, the practice of men fielding their wives in seats reserved for women and then performing all their rightful duties (while enjoying the privileges) is so prevalent across India that it has a name, ‘sarpanch-pati’ (husband of the village chief), and an abbreviation, SP, all to itself. Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself recalled, in 2015, meeting a man who breezily described his occupation as SP, for sarpanch pati.

The idea of husbands taking ownership of the attainments of their wives is welcome, if they do so in the same manner that homemakers routinely do their laundry. But the SP phenomenon is nothing like a spousal sharing of burdens. It is pure-ghee patriarchy muscling in on the rights given to women by Indian democracy and a mockery of the 73rd Constitutional Amendment of 1993 that mandates a quota for women of not less than 33 per cent in local government.

It would be silly to see the sarpanch pati syndrome as a ‘we’re like this only’ triviality. In fact, it stems from the entirely diabolical notion that everything that belongs to the woman belongs to her husband and draws sustenance from any number of examples in our political practice of elected office being wielded like family legacy.

In 1997, Lalu Prasad stepped aside from office when an arrest warrant was issued against him in the fodder scam case and arranged for his wife Rabri Devi to become chief minister. In 2014, Nitish Kumar used Jitan Ram Manjhi as seat warmer when he needed to take a break from office. More recently, Arvind Kejriwal stood down as Delhi chief minister when he could no longer function in full capacity and yielded to Atishi as his temp. Such arrangements of convenience are often sanctified with allusions to mythology, as in Bharat ruling Ayodhya using Ram’s footwear as a token of legitimacy.

But sarpanch pati reflects wider gender disparities than just husband-wife dynamics. The truth is elected women in local government find it extremely difficult to function because the entire panchayat environment is constructed in a male way and it is entirely plausible that elected women find it simpler to second their husband to the job than to cut through the thicket of masculinity that confronts them.

What can the law do to the husbands of Paraswara? They will perhaps cop a charge of impersonation under Section 204 of BNS, which entails a prison term of six months for impersonating a public servant. A better deterrent would be to do what Rajasthan does to sarpanch patnis: A woman public representative who allows her husband or relative to do her work can be removed from office. Even more stringent action, such as disqualification of impostor spouses from holding any political office, would work even better.