Women’s rights
Since the 2006 political change there have been vast improvements in Nepal’s legal and constitutional provisions on women’s rights. The new constitution criminalizes all kinds of violence—physical, mental, sexual and psychological—against women. It also recognizes women’s rights as among fundamental rights, which is not the case even in India, and guarantees a minimum 33 percent representation of women in both federal and provincial legislatures. Moreover, the provision that the country’s President and Vice-President must belong to “different genders or communities” increases the chances of a woman always holding one of the two highest offices in the land. Already, three of the five most powerful people in the country are women, as they currently occupy the offices of the President, the Speaker and the Chief Justice. The new constitution also removes many ambiguities regarding women’s right to confer citizenship on their children. So the country has come a long way since 2006, and Nepal today is a more equal society as a result of all the progressive measures that have been adopted since. There is now a separate bill being considered by the parliament, which, if enacted, will let parents decide who gets their property, instead of the property being directly transferred to sons, as was previously the case.
But, as we observe the International Women’s Day today, there is still quite a way to go to truly level the playing field between men and women. For instance, even though the constitution proscribes any kind of violence against women, Nepali women still face many kinds of violence. The patriarchal society perpetuates a culture that continues to treat women as inferior to men, and this increasingly manifests in indirect ways. For instance, although there has been a reduction in the number of women burned alive every year for dowry, there has been a corresponding increase in suicides among married women. This happens because it is still rare for the husband’s family to make the newly-wed wife, who has left her loving parents to come and live with total strangers, feel at home.
She, even as she is acutely aware of her rights as a modern woman, is still expected to play the role of a docile daughter-in-law. This creates tremendous mental pressure. Then there are women of the Far-west many of whom till date spend the whole of their menstrual cycle out in the cowshed.
There are some discriminatory provisions even in the new constitution. For instance the offspring of Nepali women married to foreign men don’t get Nepali citizenship as easily as Nepali men married to foreign women. Nor does the constitution categorically say men and women have equal rights to parental property, whether they are married or not. Nepali men’s mindset, long accustomed to seeing women as subservient, has also been slow to change. Education, it turns out, is no antidote to ingrained cultural prejudices. So this women’s day, let us celebrate all that we have been able to achieve in the past decade or so—and it’s a substantial achievement—while also reminding ourselves of the need to constantly build on that achievement. Otherwise, it would not be long before even the progress we have achieved is lost.
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