GS Mains Model Question & Answer: Do you agree there must be a feminist foreign policy for South Asia ? Give your arguments.
Q. Do you agree there must be a feminist foreign policy for South Asia ? Give your arguments. (12.5 Marks)
(General Studies Mains Paper I– Society : Role of women and women's organization, population and associated issues, poverty and developmental issues)
Model Answer :
Feminist Foreign Policy for South Asia
Not much distinguishes Indian and Pakistani women from each other. We share similar genealogies, and labour under the same masculine patriarchies. We care similarly about our children, our homes, our environments. We are programmed to be peacemakers, each in our own small way and we weep similarly for lives lost. We want literacy, empowerment, liberation from hierarchies that keep us confined in spaces and prevent the full flowering of our talents as capable, gifted, human beings.
This cannot be a relationship that has nuclear weapons at its core. Neither can it just be about victimhood: Indians as victims of cross-border terror or Pakistanis as victims of perceived Indian arrogance or inflexibility. It is about our future, and whether we wish to sentence ourselves to the nightmare we have made our own because win-win is not a concept we understand. Through it all, there is the festering problem of Kashmir — Kashmir, the incomparable, the Valley that embodies the crucible of our opacity and rigidity (in both India and Pakistan), of sorrow, of alienation.