ADDRESS BY SHRI K.R. NARAYANAN, VICE‑PRESIDENT OF INDIA, AT THE CENTENARY CELEBRATIONS OF THE CROSTHWAITE GIRLS' COLLEGE

ALLAHABAD, APRIL 4, 1995

Chief Justice of the High Court of Allahabad and Presidents of the Association for the Education of Women, Allahabad, Smt.  Prakash Dave, Miss Sapru, the respected Principal of this College, distinguished members of the faculty, students present and past, and ladies and gentlemen,   

I am very happy to be in this very aesthetic and friendly surroundings here.  My wife and I are grateful to you all for the very warm and affectionate welcome you have extended to us.  This is the centenary year of the Crosthwaite Girls' College.  It is a miracle that a school establised by a British Lt.  Governor has continued over 100 years to flourish into a college. It has done 100 years of service to the education of women of this State which is the largest in India, a state of 150 million people.  ëtI is a miracle. But at the same time there is another mircale which I should describe as a negative miracle that after 100 years this College has not yet become a degree college.  I know that Smt.  Indira Gandhi laid the foundation for a degree college building here in 1970 or 1971. 

It has been described in the write up about your college that that stone is lying still.  I wonder if we need another Indira Gandhi to come and touch the stone to turn it like Ahilaya into a live institution, a first grade college.  If Mahatma Gandhi were to talk to you, he would have said that the women themselves should take the initiative to collect the funds by selling or asking other women to give their jewellery for building a higher institution here.  Today, probably that is only necessary as a gesture of challenge to the men of this state.  The foundation stone that Indira Gandhi laid lies as a challenge to the men of Uttar Pradesh and Allahabad to turn this institution into a college.  I think they would accept this challenge of the women of Allahabad who have maintained this institution for a hundred years and that for the next 100 years or more they would ensure that this college will become not only a degree college, but a post graduate college for women.   

The importance of the women's education, I do not have to specially emphasise.  We in India are the inheriters of the thought, actions and sacrifices of Mahatma Gandhi and other great leaders.  It is Gandhiji who threw a challenge to the women of India, to the ordinary women of India to take part in the freedom struggle and they came forward as a result of his call, and if we are independent today, it is partly because of the sacrifices made by our women folk.  I am not saying this many years after the event.  You know that, I think, it was in 1936 that the Indian National Congress passed a Resolution, a solemn Resolution, thanking the women of India, for their participation in the freedom struggle and the sacrifices they have made for it.   

The Hon'ble Chief Justice has just said, how important is the education for women.  I recollect Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru saying several times that the stage of the developement of a society is determined by the status of women in that society.  This is the best measuring rod.  I would like to read to your just one sentence.  He said, "I am quite sure that our real and basic growth will only come when women will have full chance to play their part in public life.  Whenever they have had this chance, they have as a whole, done well, better than, if I may say so, the average men." I have had the good fortune to serve under one of those who was associated or was on the register of this College, Smt.  Vijayalakshmi Pandit.  As a junior diplomat, I served under her when she was High Commissioner in London.  I can say from my own experience that when Pandit Nehru said, was completely right.  As a junior diploment, among all the ambassadors I have served she was not only the most charming and beautiful but the ablest.  In every field women have accomplished themselves with distinction and that field has been enlarging in our country.   

The other day, I think, one of the Justices of the Supreme Court of India said, it took the United States 200 years to appoint a woman Judge.  But it took India only 45 years after independence to appoint a woman Judge to the Supreme Court of India.  This has been the achievement of women at top levels in our country.  Today women who have been educated, occupy the highest positions in our country and whenever they go abroad, they have made a mark not for themselves but for this great country.   

When you talk about education one has to start as this College started at the school level.  The most important part of education is primary education and I must say that we have lagged sadly behind in educating our boys and girls at the primary level.  Even today only one third of the girls of the school going age are enrolled in schools at all levels whether it is primary or secondary.  This is one gap we have to fill and that can be filled not by governmental of action but action by voluntary agencies, particularly by colleges and universities and the students studying there.  It is time that there is a new movement like the one which Gandhiji started for adult education in which the general public participates.  A college like this, its teachers, its students should immerse themselves in this task of educating our illiterate people.  If an example is shown, I am sure that the general public will follow, out of shame, at least, I am quite sure about that.   

We all know by now that the education of women has its impact on the total development of the country.  It has its impact on many human development factors.  It has a positive impact on population growth, health, nutrition, on the general quality of life of the people.  I come from a state, Kerala, which has achieved 100% literacy, where women are almost as literate as men. Several studies have been made about the consequences of the education of women on social and economic development.  It has been proved that if there are two families ‑ one which has an educated mother and another a mother who is not educated, even if they are at the same level of income, the family with the educated mother gives a better diet, looks after the hygiene of the children better, reduces infantile mortality and ultimately having an effect on the size of the family itself.  This crucial role of women's education, if it is understood, we will take the mission of educating women not as an affair for the women only but for the entire nation because that is the key to national development, national health and national prosperity. 

Now I mentioned earlier about women in high places.  We are remarkable in respect of that.  But all over the world they say that in Parliaments, there are not more than 10% of women representatives.  In India it is only 5 or 6%.  Smt.  Rajender Kumarji Bajpayee is here who was a Member of Parliament and a Minister.  I know that there are several able women like that in our Parliament.  But they are only a very small percentage.  This percentage has to be increased.  Not only for giving rights to the women, but for the sake of the sanity of our political system.  I am a strong believer that if there are a larger number of women in our Legislatures and in our Parliament, and in our politics, our politics would most probably be cleaner, saner and more purposive.  We have today the great experiment in Panchayat Raj as 30% of panchayat positions have been reserved for women.  It is a small beginning in a sense because we know that most of the women now elected at least a good number of them are wives or sisters, or cousins of important poeple.  They might not have come up on their own as members of the Panchayats.  But that would be a transitory phenomenon. 

This right would be grasped by women at the village level largely and they will avail of it and exercise the rights and powers of the Panchayat Governments.  But we have an obligation in training these 30 % members of Panchayats and those also at the block and district level, training them through orientation courses so that they know how to exercise power effectively at the Panchayat, Block and District level.  I know that the government has instituted several orientation programmes but what we need is a concerted effort by universities, colleges and voluntary organisations to give periodic training to these women panchayat members so that they will be able to utilise the opportunities that have been given to them.  I am emphasising this because this 30 % constitutes nearly a million, including blocks and district levels, may be 1.5 million women in possession of power at the Local Government level.  So we should take special care and effort to see that these new representatives of women in the villages are trained so that we can be proud of them, so that they can introduce a new dynamism into our panchayat democracy.   

Of course when you talk about women's education one cannot escape the very ugly fact in our society of crimes and atrocities against women.This has been increasing in our country very paradoxically and everyday we read in the press unbelievable stories of crimes against women.  How do we deal with this immense and agonising problem?  One thing is that, I find that some of the very major incidents which has shaken the very whole of India somehow after the few months of furore in the newspapers and some debates in the Parliament, it is forgotten.  I do not know, for example, what was the ultimate punishment anybody received for these atrocities they have committed.  There is a very silent strategy of hushing up, that is operating in our society with the connivance of the menfolk and with people in authority.  I think women themselves have to take up this question. 

I am reminded of the great story of Draupadi who is today in drama, dance and literature resurrected as a symbol of the condition of women in our country.  There is a certain Draupadi syndrome in our society.  I have been in many countries as a diplomat.  But I have not come across of as a common punishment or humiliation of women as the disrobing of Draupadi which took place in Mahabharata and which takes place almost everyday to innumerable girls and women in our country.  I ask myself why is it in this country only the punishment meted out by the menfolk to women is by disrobing, insulting and humiliating her.  We have to think very deeply about it.  There is something in our social psyche from the Mahabharata onwards where the great Pandavas sat silent, where the great Bhishma was silent and nobody tried to raise a protest.  It is like in Delhi buses when a college girl is insulted or molested, all the passengers sit silent without saying a word.  Maybe the Mahabharata experience is so much, so powerful that is in minds of our menfolk. 

Most often, these criminals are banking upon the modesty, upon the virtue, upon the shyness of our womenfolk which normally is an adornment to their charm and beauty because they don't talk about it in social customs, they are held at the mercy of their adherence to our social morass and ways of doing things.  But in Draupadi, if you go back, she was a challenger, she challenged, she challenged the Kaurava's court, she challenged her husbands and she even argued like a lawyer, " Please ask my husband, if he lost his freedom first and then offered me as a wager, in which case he has no right because I am not his property if he has become slave first by wagering himself away but the great Bhishma gave a verdict which we must all remember, that a husband even if he deserts his wife, even if he himself becomes a slave has property rights over his wife.  It is a major point in law, Mr.  Chief Justice, and I think, there are many loopholes in our legal system which makes it easy for menfolk not to obey some of these laws.  We know that bigamy is banished by law.  But there are some very interesting loopholes in this law. I read in the newspapers of some very important people, giving interviews, saying that they have two wives, and how happily they live and both are interviewed.  I think where is our law of bigamy?.  But there are loopholes and this loophole, I understand is based on the modesty of the women because unless the first wife or a family member objects nobody can take a case to the court it seems. 

Anyway, there very many legal loopholes which have to be filled and I read this morning what the Chief Justice said about the need for reforming our legal system.  I think, reform in our legal system is most urgently required in regard to the rights of women.  In spite of all these obstacles and difficulties it is a glorious tribute to the womanhood of India that they have expressed themselves in every walk of life and if a women has to be recognised in society for her work, I am told there are some studies which shows that she has to be twice as meritorious and able as a man if she is to be recognised half as meritorious as him.  So it is against immense odds that our women folk have been struggling and coming forward in our country. This College, during the last 100 years, is an example of this patient successful struggle of our women to educate and to uplift themselves.  On the occasion of its Centenary, I should like to pay tribute to this College, which has educated so many women, which has brought light into their lives and which has brought life into their homes.  May I wish the Crosthwaite Girls College many hundred years of glorious service to the women and to the nation.

 Thank you.