The audacity of a sexist PIL

Every year in October or November, the Indian mediasphere explodes with thinkpieces and online posts defending Karva Chauth, a mostly North Indian festival in which women fast to pray for their spouse’s longevity. Some try (and fail) to give the occasion a feminist spin, others equalise things by fasting with rather than for their partner, and some get really defensive. Amusing or annoying, the discourse, if it can even be called that, is mostly harmless and with very low stakes. For the most part, women rising to prove that Karva Chauth is not a sexist tradition aren’t trying to recruit others into observing it en masse as much as they are trying to parse or assuage their own complicated feelings about it. But trust the patriarchy to take things a step further. Last week, the Punjab and Haryana High Court dismissed a PIL put forth by a Haryana resident named Narender Kumar Malhotra petitioning for a law to make Karva Chauth mandatory.

Specifically, Mr Malhotra had wanted for the festival to be renamed as either “Maa Parvati Utsav” or “Maa Gaura Utsav”, and for there to be a law that would make the observance compulsory for “all women, irrespective of their marital status, including widows, divorcees, separated women, and women in live-in relationships”. Single women — the minority of women with the mixed but mostly good fortune of never having been married in this socio-cultural milieu — or just the young and yet-married weren’t mentioned. I’d like to think they didn’t want to acknowledge us, because to do so is usually a bit scary for conservative mindsets. Also, according to this petition, organisations or individuals denying women participation in this festival ought to be held punishable by law.

The whole thing is out of a patriarchal fantasy. Imagine: just under half the nation starving for an entire day, by law, praying for the well-being of the menfolk of the land. India sat at an alarming 105 out of 127 in the 2024 Global Hunger Index. Imagine if ordinary folk with relative privilege thought about that a little more, rather than cheering façades of development and trying to push the culture back into medieval mores.

This event falls into the category of “frivolous litigation”, and some may also find it frivolous to dwell on it. The Punjab and Haryana HC has, after all, dismissed it entirely and also penalised the petitioner for wasting the court’s time and taxpayers’ money with a token `1,000 donation to a welfare fund in Chandigarh. This High Court responded sensibly, but that such a PIL was filed at all is disturbing. Not only is Karva Chauth a sexist ritual, but it is also a strictly Hindu festival. The desire to impose it by law is tied to all kinds of religious and societal restrictions and discriminations, many of which do not need the backing of legality to already be in practice. That desire is also not one citizen’s alone: he acted knowing that the prevalent cultural tide would support such steps, even if one court turned him down. We are all swirling, swimming or suffocating, within that tide — and it only gains force.