What an irony of fate it is!

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We all know that gender bias is very strong in India where males dominate both the family and the society. But still India has women in leading positions, especially at the political field. The most powerful individual in the country is a woman. One of the most powerful individual in the country’s biggest state is a woman. The leader of the Opposition is a woman. The state of West Bengal has also got a woman as its Chief Minister in the last election. This is an extraordinary conjunction, especially when one considers the historic oppression of women in India down the ages. India’s major religions, Hinduism and Islam, are in scriptural and practical terms deeply inhospitable to the emancipation of women, to the emergence of individual women as independent actors who can take their own decisions about how to live their life, rather than having these decisions taken for them by fathers, brothers, or husbands. And yet, here we have the policies of the country as a whole, and of several massive states within it, being shaped by women. Hundreds of millions of Indian men are now having their fate and future determined by those women who have traditionally regarded as being subservient to them. Indeed, it is an irony of fate. Isn’t it?