Page 18 - A Gender-Sensitive Indian Foreign Policy- Why? and How?

Indian Council
of World Affairs

Why should India pursue a Gender-Sensitive Foreign Policy?
My answer to this question would be very simply that it is the
right thing to do.

would be at the heart of our policy - whether with regard to stranded
overseas Indians or with regard to refugees at our door.

And what of border disputes and multiplying arsenals and perfidious
neighbours, the old school might well ask? A gender lens on those very
problems might suggest that the costs of not transforming them would
outweigh the advantages of manoeuvring through them. A gender-sensitive
foreign policy would prioritise dialogue, official and non-official; enable
confidence-building programmes through which different constituencies can
interact, and facilitate functional and technical cooperation in an accelerated
way to create the conditions for conflict transformation.

2. Why should India Pursue a Gender-Sensitive Foreign Policy?

My answer to this question would be very simply that it is the right thing to
do. All genders pay a heavy price for aggressive, nationalist, self-aggrandizing
foreign policies that are expressed through sexist rhetoric and depend on
people playing stereotypical gender roles. No one really benefits, rarely even
the states in question. The objective of a gender-sensitive foreign policy
would therefore be peace through fair, win-win negotiated solutions to
common problems. The quest for a just and equitable peace is simply the
right way to go.

But for such a policy orientation to be credible, any country, and India too,
will need to undergo a dramatic internal social transformation for that policy
to be credible. That, to my mind, seems less likely today than it did ten or
twenty years ago. In other words, every time we ask a rapist to marry their
victim; every time we nominate an abuser to contest elections, every time we
vilify women human rights defenders and journalists as seditious and every
time, we use transphobic or homophobic terms to criticise our opponents in
public life, we move further away from being credible advocates of a gender-
sensitive polity, leave alone, foreign policy.

Amb. Nirupama Rao Thank you Swarna for those very incisive remarks. I forgot to mention while
(Chair and Moderator) introducing Swarna that she runs a trust and a consultancy in Chennai.
The trust is called Prajnya trust and the consultancy is called Chaitanya
which works in education, advocacy networking, so she is doing wonderful
18 groundwork on the very issues that concern us in our discussion today.

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