The other day, at a party-organised Chhatron ki Goonj event in Pune, Rahul Gandhi fired a cheap shot to indirectly put Hindus on the defensive. His point was about women fighting patriarchy, but he chose a verse from the Manusmriti to make his point. The verse, number 9(3), says that a female must be subject to her father’s rule in childhood, in youth to her husband’s, and in old age to her sons”.
It’s a cheap shot because he knows that no Hindu can easily defend this statement in the smriti, and if one does so, one can easily be labelled as upholding patriarchy. In the past, several anti-caste activists have burnt copies of Manusmriti without reading it, and one can bet that Rahul Gandhi too is unlikely to have read the smriti in any depth. Nobody has to defend what the Manusmriti claims as a moral code, but one does expect more nuance in criticism of the smriti, which was written in a different era, for a different set of circumstances.If Rahul Gandhi wanted to suggest that religious scripture may play a part in upholding and reinforcing patriarchy, he could easily have quoted from the Koran or Bible or Torah – in fact almost any religious text – to emphasise this point. That he chose to focus only on the Manusmriti makes his statement a political dog whistle. You cannot quote from scripture without context, and that is precisely what he did.
