In a multilingual country, we are accustomed to storming tea cups over the misuse of language, but the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has been accused of misusing the word “President” instead of President for President Draupadi Murmu by a Congress leader. The noise raised was extraordinary. As a suffix, “pati” means “master” in Hindi, and the word refers to the same command of a state that a “general” possesses, for example, of an army. “Pati” alone means “husband” and her gender change to “wife” was taken as an attempt to demean India’s top office and even humiliate all Indian women and tribals. Did the widely-anticipated gap in marital power feed Thursday’s high-decibel show Outrage?
The episode highlights Montagu Norman, a British central banker of the colonial era, who finds nothing strange in explicitly saying that India’s central bank should be like a wife in a joint family who advises but She does exactly as she is told by her matrimonial master. This absurdity was said before our independence. Yet, arguably, neither gender equality nor the emancipation of the central bank has made as much progress as it should have in 75 years. Instead of noise, a heartfelt Lok Sabha debate on both would be welcomed.
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