The modern world – a global village under universal ideas – is a design and function of post-renaissance Christendom. Guns, cannons, industry or technology; all tools were effectively used by Europeans, of Europe, of America or elsewhere, to further their remoulded set of values packed in a universal bag. They were successful, extremely. So much so that hardly any intellectual ponders over their influence’s cancellation.

Can you think of cancelling fundamental rights? Liberty? Or in fact, the third realm of Christian theological world, secularism? Well, you can but then you can’t be an intellectual anymore. Another one of Christianity’s magnanimous influence – larger in this century – is feminism. For a third world non-Christian country, it’s largely just another tool to convert people to a neo-Christian set of values, again packed as ‘universal’.

Most prone to such global experiments are non-Western civilisation states that have their own unique culture, society and values. Civilisational states face dangers from fast accelerating cargo trains of western modernism or newer, redesigned and carefully explicated Christian theological expansionism. 19^th and early 20^th century were like a foxtrot of western dominance. Widespread power projection, colonisation, forced sequestration of native ideas, lands & resources and expansionism of their hallowed ideas; was the implicit reality.

Indian women protest new citizenship laws, joining a global ‘fourth-wave’ feminist movement

With the turn of decades, their power deteriorated. Coming to a point when clear political colonisation was pushed into a realm of aversion and new global systems arose. But still, the western influence stayed. West’s powers have relatively declined but they’ve managed to maintain, or some may even say expanded their influence. More so in all the major democracies. All the global experiments sprouting from western elite clubs touted as universal, now aim only to proliferate indirect western power, in the form of ideological influence, in other democratic nations, most of them they once ruled directly.

India is also a democracy. Hence it’s the people’s will that’s most prone to baneful influences. How do you design and control the propaganda play in a democratic society? By controlling the mass-media of course. And among thousands of acrimonious and anomalous tricks from the heaving list of propagandas, the best is still fear. Fear is more useful – and far easily eliciting – than confidence. A fearful culture and tumultuous society always allow indirect powers to meddle with little opposition.

Feminism is a theory of political, economic and social equality of all genders. Feminism began as a form of resistance against the social order that confined women to assigned gender roles such as birthing, caring and managing the household. It then grew into organised, multi-faceted negotiations for economic, civil and political rights that were denied to women. Today, feminism has expanded to include the concerns of the evolving spectrum of gender, sexuality and its inter-sectional dynamics.

Feminism is therefore, a movement for equality and collaborative participation among all. A movement for equality cannot be wrong in its intention, because equality is a progressive concept that will always be relevant in a civic society. Most of our political struggles are based on establishing equal treatment of their respective stakeholders. Despite being in the very same ideological space, feminism faces particularly strong resistance from all quarters. One of the most popular allegations against feminism is that it harbours and encourages a man hating conscience. 

As it was apparent, a couple of years ago, in the Sabarimala temple case. A discernibly unique and significant temple environment – whose deifying ecosystem was contingent on adherence to strict rules of deity’s Brahmacharya and requires no entry to menstruating women – was demonised and attacked continuously. It’s special entry rules were mocked and battered by feminists-atheists and anti-Hindu lobbies – under the pretext of breaking men’s entrance prerogative and symbolically destroying patriarchy – after the country’s apex court ruled on September 2018 against temple’s distinct uniqueness.

A five-judge bench ruled 4:1 that the temple was violating women’s rights and reduced the temple’s tradition as ‘gender discrimination’. Judgement was met with huge protests by devotees. Multiple under 50-year-old feminists-activist, including a Muslim activist, leftist, atheists and a New York Times journalist, rushed to enter the sanctum sanctorum with the dastardly aim of garnering historic attention. The nationwide mainstream media, the Kerala government and its police were backing them. Despite the devotees’ valiant attempts, 2 women managed to enter the temple. A temple’s sanctity was challenged and beliefs were turned into a pantomime of deranged ideals; as a result of the deep settled influence of the global feminist movement.

Pernicious propaganda and cases mocking Hindu faith, since long, are constantly floated around. Each year’s Navratri spawns a narrative designed solely to indirectly target Hindu faith. A month ago a High Court Advocate and controversial activist, among many, ridiculed the Hindu community inimically linking rapes to Hindu worship of a goddess in a cartoon. Woke media websites regularly carry highly opinionated articles written solely for attacking Hindu faith & its culture. Feminists’ extension of the Sabarimala verdict carries the objective of dissolving not only community temples but also your home’s temples traditions without trying to understand the significance of such traditions.

And evident to any keen observer, the wagon of proposed reforms, clearly destructive in long run, doesn’t stop just at a few traditions being defied. The repeated battering of Hindu family & marriage system has been a tract associated with all waves of the feminist movement. Hindu symbols of married womanhood such as sindoor, mangalsutra are under series of unbridled mockery. Feminist hate and aversion for simple housewives and family system exceed all limits where father and mother both, by default, are portrayed as evil in varying degrees.

Modern conservative intellectuals of the Hindu Right have maintained a solid demotic stand that Hindu culture is feminist in nature. Image and significance of a goddess are for them just icons for modernist feminism. Yet despite such a liberally high priest stand, the movement of feminism’s inherent design betrays all expectations of the right-wing, increasing its own hunger of finding toxic masculinity.

‘Feminism in India’ views even Hindu goddesses-like Devi Kāli or Devi Lakshmi, not fit for ‘feminism’. For them “It is a token representation, merely symbolic. The trope of Stri-Shakti and goddess worship is Hinduism’s oldest trope, absolving itself from patriarchy and caste discrimination that it is deeply rooted in.”

Very few of the conservative intellectuals correctly predicted that trying to fit Hinduism as per the whims & wishes of feminism will only create a slippery slope with no end and infinite hunger for the disrespecting Hindu faith which is fairly seen in how feminists view goddesses, in complete contrast to how the right-wing hoped. Feminists argue that the Asuras and Danavas which the Goddess slays, “are Dalit and Adivasi people, that Brahmanical Hinduism portrays as perpetrators of crime and violence.” “Goddess worship is very much a part of the patriarchal and casteist practices of Hinduism, masked as ‘respect for women’”, added the Feminism in India piece.

Influence of the movement & its champions leaves little doubt that its main dealing is with the gradual destruction of family structure, Hindu faith and society. Educated commoners often fall for feminist arguments like they fighting for women’s rights, safety, security and progress, but in reality, they do exactly the opposite.

Contrary to portrayed depiction, the movement of feminism has turned out to do less for women’s sustaining well being and more to eviscerate women of womanhood itself. the end goal of the movement is to drag women into the same league with men, despite both being fundamentally different. One which requires women to compromise her women-hood, her role as a nurturer, for a prejudiced predefined set of values as present in the western world.

And yet it has successfully made inroads, from the west, into other parts without much intellectual scrutiny. Its handlers & spear-headers are well aware of the weakness in democracy and modern society as a whole. Its extent of mainstreaming can be accessed from the fact that rarely do we see any academic critique of it. The primary reason for this accretion of feminism is the implicit moral typecasting of human society, developed over thousands of years. Moral Typecasting is a phenomenon when a society exercise mental shortcuts in their assessment of moral events relating to both genders. 

A Typecasting framework is solely designed on how humans instinctively perceive moral behaviour through a cognitive template, which is shaped over the years of human development. Throughout history, men – in their quest for dominance, power and possession – have primarily been the perpetrators and women – under their patient, tender, yielding and gentle character – have mostly been the victims. And hence this historic stereotype helps in creating a typecasting framework which, by default, sees a man as perpetrator and woman as victim, until proven otherwise.

Feminists cleverly and obviously use this typecasting framework to extract benefit and further an even more rigid anomalous form of it. Despite a significant change in modern society in terms of equality (of both power and significance) for women and men, feminists have actively pushed to exacerbate the same mental stereotype problem. Researchers predict that perpetrators of harm will be more easily exculpated for their misdeeds if they do not conform heuristically to the perpetrator role or if their targets do not conform heuristically to the victim role.

This is why feminists see evil forms of patriarchy in everything, even in cities. “Toxic masculinity is built into the fabric of our urban spaces” as said by author of Feminist Cities, Leslie Kern. Kern described evil misogynist structures of skyscrapers as “upward-thrusting buildings ejaculating into the skies”. Another feminist, this time a geographer Jane Darke said: “Our cities are patriarchy written in stone, brick, glass and concrete.” As far back as 1977, an American poet and professor of architecture named Dolores Hayden in an article wrote – in words of The Guardian – into the male power fantasies embodied in this celebrated urban form. For Hayden, everything from office tower, poles, obelisks, spires to columns and watchtowers, were architecture of patriarchy.

Feminism is a modern expansionist creation of the west, feeding on age-old mental typecasting, disparate natures of men and women and liberally desperate setup of the modern world, it aims to batter the social structure so as to suit its ‘patriarchal’ foxtrot. As it slowly and very silently makes its way into our land, culture & religion, we must be able to discern all its cadences and the lilts and counter it for the prudence of our own Hindu society. At a time when all the modern ideologies either want a woman to be a working man or just a material for possession or a tool for political manipulation or either a gender-less monotheistic capitalist pawn, it is Hindu traditionalism, the only present ideology & social setup which asks women to be just women, true to their biographic & mental nature.

References:

feminisminindia.com - By Sukanya Shaji
pragyata.com - Yogendra Singh