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OP-ED June
17, 2003: MD I must admit that when I went to the Sikh Coalition's Women's Empowerment Conference in New York last weekend, it was initially to support my wife in her desire to pursue equality for Sikh women. But in coming home I realized how many more questions I have about our social practices. The conference made me question the status quo. Why is it that when a girl is born in our community, we cry but if a boy is born, we celebrate? It is not just the men who do this; it is us as an entire community. We tend not to offer our women the same opportunities as our men, and we measure the value of women by things we attribute to that gender, i.e. how many children she has borne. To be honest, this really wasn't stuff that I had thought about before now. The first day of the conference focused on the Guru's Vision of Gender Equality and the history of Sikh women. After all, Guru Nanak first preached the radical notion that men and women were equal by stating "why consider her inferior, the one who gives birth to kings." Many people haven't heard the stories of Mata Khivi Ji, Mehr Kaur, Bibi Dalair Kaur and the Sikh women who were captured by Mir Mannu in an effort to convert these women. These women are the faces of Sikh history and show exemplary strength and unwavering faith during difficult times. The next day, after reflecting upon what our Gurus have said and the history that had been pointed out to us, we tried to understand where society has gone wrong and what we can do about it. We talked about social issues such as feticide and infanticide, dowry, sati, raakhi and other social rituals and practices where women are not considered equal to men. We noted that women as well as men serve to oppress women through social norms and institutions. One man told us a story about how when an only daughter with five brothers went to claim her share of her father's inheritance, it was not her brothers who stood in her way but her mother and five sisters-in-law. These are common issues in our community and it cannot be said that men are the only perpetrators of women's oppression, as it is all of us - men and women. We talked about the current women's seva issue in Amritsar and one of the conclusions we had come to was that it is important that women take an active grassroots role in participating in our gurudwaras and doing all forms of seva, even if that means challenging people who do not agree that women can and should do all types of seva. Sikh women need to participate in all facets of society and all of us, regardless of our gender or what generation we come from, need to support and encourage Sikh women to do so. I'd like to thank the organizers of the Sikh Coalition's
Sikh Women's Empowerment Conference for opening the eyes of this Sikh
man and making so many of us think about how far we have strayed from
the ideals of our religion and what we can do to change that.
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