Slogans Do Not Bring about Lasting Changes

 

Slogans Do Not Bring about Lasting Changes

An explanation at the outset. I do not shy away from using the word “sex” when it is most appropriate. Sex discrimination is based on chromosomes; gender discrimination is based on a person’s gender identity and expression (earlier, it used to be confined to English grammar). In this post, which is a critique of an opinion piece in the daily newspaper, I am taking the more definitive issue (a more objective one?); hence, it will be sex discrimination through and through.

I read an opinion piece that pins the issue of sex discrimination in public dialogue in India on political campaign slogans. This is barking up the wrong tree. I contend that slogans have an extremely short shelf-life, and hence, the yoke of social change should not be tied to them (mixed metaphor; so be it).

The opinion piece is nearly 40% on the history of campaign slogans, and the best part of it is that none of those slogans have shown the capacity to even direct social mores in a desirable direction. For example, Indira Gandhi’s Garibi Hatao did not hataoe the garibi! Indeed, measuring poverty started showing progress more by changing the definition of poverty! Perhaps, a political compulsion?

I remember the DMK promised three measures of rice (approximately five eighths of a measure is one kilogram) per one rupee in the State Assembly elections in the late 1960s. They rode that slogan to power, but upon assuming power, found out that the government coffers did not accommodate that promise. The slogan vanished and people were offered two measures for one rupee (you may check the above). People were happy that they got something!

The above is not to deny the emphasis, made all too briefly, on how politics and politicians, male or female it does not seem to matter, promote highly patriarchy–supporting slogans. Do catchphrases create or establish political identities? If at all they do, they are ephemeral, unless they are self–serving for the groups that leverage them.

Yes, as the writer points out, some of these catchy slogans are brain vomit. The writer, however, goes overboard when she decontextualizes the slogan that, in English reads, “Save the girl child, educate the girl child”.

The slogan does not mean that daughters need saving–this is precisely and explicitly the writer says; rather, the slogan offers an alternate reality–and it has had an unusually longer shelf-life– that educated girls can “bring home the bacon”, the line that projected a woman who smoked Virginia Slims, in the 1950s and 1960s! Some feminists took issue with the given English phrase, saying that the woman has not been relieved from her other household chores even as augmenting the income of the family is loaded on to her shoulder. The point is any slogan could always be taken exception to if the discussion is taken to represent a social movement. Slogans, then, will engender their own opposites. The result is zero-loss, zero-gain.

The writer writes, “...slogans not only be backed by systemic changes, but also they disrupt traditional ways of thinking about women’s roles and possibilities.” This is where she goes wrong – a slogan is too flimsy to carry the assigned burden, particularly when at least women in certain stations in life themselves propagate traditional roles on to women.

If you saw a man making tea for himself and his wife in an advertisement that should not be marked by the wife’s raised eyebrow. This is an advertisement on TV now. She should be casual about it. Let men “cook the bacon”!

That is when systemic changes can have longer shelf-life.

Raghuram Ekambaram