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Does India need a Feminist Foreign Policy?
Recently, the World Economic Forum released its annual Gender Gap Report 2021 in which India had slipped 28 spots to rank 140 out of the 156 countries covered.
Need for Feminist Foreign Policy
- Feminist approaches to international affairs can be traced back to the 1980s, though largely rooted in traditional thinking and activism.
Need for Feminist Foreign Policy
- Lack of political representation of women: Within the 156 countries covered in global gender gap, women hold only 26 per cent of parliamentary seats and 22 per cent of ministerial positions.
- India in some ways reflects this widening gap, where the number of ministers declined from 23.1 per cent in 2019 to 9.1 per cent in 2021.
- The number of women in Indian Parliament stands low at 14.4 per cent.
- Moving ahead from conventional considerations of development assistance and domestic policies: In a time when 104 countries still have laws preventing women from certain types of jobs, and over 600 million women live in countries where domestic violence is not punishable, a gendered approach has to be mainstreamed into broader policy objectives.
- Development of better basket of options in decision making: With the growing gamut of diplomacy and foreign and security policy, the inclusion of diverse voices makes for a better basket of options in decision making and is no longer simply a virtuous standard to follow.
- Successful UN Missions involving women: In 2007, India deployed the first ever female unit to the UN Mission in Libya and also supporting gender empowerment programmes through SAARC, IBSA, IORA and other multilateral fora.
- Broadening India’s gender-based foreign assistance needs: It needs to be deepened and equally matched with lower barriers to participation in politics, diplomacy, the bureaucracy, military and other spaces of decision making.
- Lack of Women in Indian Foreign Policy Discourse: India’s traditional, male-defined notion of security has remained intact, ignoring the particular needs of women, emphasizing hard security issues, and, in turn, eschewing soft-power diplomacy matters.
- Provide fresh perspective to foreign policy machinery: It deepens the global understanding on how a developing democratic nation that comes from strong cultures of patriarchy may consider adoption of an FFP Framework.
- Wider approach towards decision making: The FFP Framework explores a realm outside conventional considerations of war, peace and development assistance, and includes other arenas of foreign policy (economics, finance, environment, health, trade, etc.) where there is space for stronger mutual cooperation, peaceful co-existence, civility and accommodation.
- Broader planning on gender considerations: The adoption of FFP Framework could offer an opportunity for India to place some of its existing efforts in a wider strategy on gender mainstreaming with a stronger long-term impact.
- FFP approach goes beyond the limited interpretation of the word “feminist”: It should be launched with an aim of re-thinking traditional centres of power which rests on two important pillars:
- Greater representation at the decision-making table to create environments that foster innovative thinking and allow for diverse representation; and
- Policy outputs that consider the impact on women and the marginalised
- Gendered Approach to the Pandemic: The feminist scholars are rightfully pushing for gender analysis on how socially constructed roles and identities affect vulnerability to and experiences of an outbreak.
- The International Labour Organization found that women perform more than 75 percent of unpaid care work which is three times higher than the rate for men.
- Case of India’s Health Workers: The health centers are tasked with a range of public health responsibilities including providing supplementary nutrition, informal preschool education, nutrition and health education, immunization, health check-ups, and referral services.
- Burden on India’s Weak Health Systems and its Informal Economy: India spends only 3.5 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health care, with per capita health expenditure a mere $69 (2017) against a GDP.
- The OECD said this indicator provides a measure of the resources available for delivering services to inpatients in hospitals in terms of number of beds that are maintained, staffed, and immediately available for use.
- Need for Stronger Health Security for Indian Health Workers: India needs a systematic plan to protect health workers and not merely contingency measures in the midst of a pandemic.
- The female health workers contribute an estimated $3 trillion to the gross world product, almost half of this work is unrecognized and unpaid primarily because women are recruited for unpaid health roles.
- Idea of Feminist Foreign Policy confined to west: The current conversation around a feminist/gendered foreign policy is still largely in small circles in North America and Europe.
- Gender considerations in India’s foreign policy are limited: It is generally located under the development assistance paradigm and peacekeeping.
- Presence of racial discrimination in foreign policy making: Foreign policy analysis, either as an academic or as a public intellectual, remains one of the whitest and most male dominated fields - especially, and ironically, when it comes to Africa.
- Along with increasing representation, women and marginalised sections of society need to have a voice to provide alternative perspectives to policy making.
- The greater diversity in thinking will allow for a global policy to be tailored and thus operationalised in a wider geography, accounting for vastly divergent social norms and practices, and lived histories.
- India requires a more formal designed approach that goes beyond a purely development model to wider access, representation and decision making.
- India’s election to United Nation's Commission on Status of Women (CSW) was a ringing endorsement of its commitment to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment in all its endeavours.
- India’s gender-based foreign assistance needs to be broadened and deepened and equally matched with lower barriers to participation in politics, diplomacy, the bureaucracy, military and other spaces of decision making.
POSTED ON 27-04-2021 BY ADMIN
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