Wikipedia article on Jashodaben Narendrabhai Modi – the objections that I expect

As I described in another post this month, the Wikipedia article on Jashodaben has been deleted four times already. In another post from September 2014, I discussed some reasons why I support Jashodaben’s demands for recognition as the Spouse of the Prime Minister of India. There is pressure on the Indian media to avoid discussing her, and that pressure ripples from India to all international media coverage, but I am glad that I have Wikipedia as an outlet for organizing what information is available that has come from good journalistic coverage. I am going to describe some reasons why I expect Indian people will object to the existence of a Wikipedia article about Jashodaben. My target audience for this post is people outside of India, who do not understand Indian culture.

1. The main reason for avoiding discussion of Jashodaben is that there is a taboo in India on discussing relationship problems. There is no concise way to describe this to anyone who is from Western culture and who is not familiar with Indian culture. Some of concepts which both cause this taboo and are a consequence of it are the belief that marriage problems should not be discussed publicly, that shame comes to a woman if she is unhappy in her marriage, that typical people with religious devotion can pass their lifetimes without wanting love or sex, and that divorce or separation need not be addressed because those things require an examination of a relationship. Any Indians who would read what I wrote would not understand anything that I have just said, nor would many Western people, but it is the best way that I know how to express the situation. One thing that would surprise many Western people about India is that there is no concept of relationship counseling in India, and even almost no concept of mental health services. Whereas practically everyone in the Western world either uses mental health services either for themselves or for someone in their family at some time in life, in India, mental and social problems are handled outside the context of health services. It is very hard for Indian people to imagine stress as a health problem, especially if it is stress from a social relationship and even more if it is stress from a romantic or marriage relationship. From a Western perspective, having strangers probe and examine very personal relationships and sex issues is very common in mental health services, and the result is a different concept of freedom of speech and that all people can talk about personal problems much more freely than could happen in India. I am not suggesting that the Western way or the Indian way is better or worse than the other. Probably it is best to say that both systems have benefits and problems for the people in their respective cultures, and it would be good to exchange ideas. My opinion is that the Indian relationship model probably makes society have happier lives but creates very serious problems for a few people who are weak or poor, whereas the Western relationship model has more justice even for weak people but overall makes society more unhappy, paranoid, and confused. All of this explanations are a little confused, but the point is, Indian people do not like public discussion of very personal relationships when in Western society, this is expected.
2. Another reason which is very important is that there is a taboo in India about having money. Again there is no easy way to explain this to someone who does not already have experience in both Western and Indian culture, but overall, the fantasy in India is that the best way to live is to have a bank balance of zero but to somehow still have comfort and nice things in life. A problem with discussing Jashodaben in Indian society is that Modi is rich and his wife Jashodaben is poor. Anyone outside of India would say “Yes this is completely obvious and no one could possibly argue with that” but then in India practically everyone would argue. Many people would say that Modi is not rich because he has no cash and only owns a small bit of real estate. By his bank account and tax filing he is poor, but at the same time, for decades he has lived a life where people around him provide him with whatever he wants. In Indian thought the sin and evil in money is in touching it, and not in getting the wealth that money can buy, so if a poor person receives expensive gifts then still Indian society would not call them rich. Leaving Modi aside, Jashodaben is very poor. She had a job as a teacher in a village. Now that she is retired, her pension is ?14000/month (USD 200), so when she worked, presumably she made about that much. It is true that many people in India make less money than this, but by any standard, she is poor. To talk about the marriage or Jashodaben and Narendra Modi is also to talk about the money that one has and that the other does not, and how Jashodaben is missing some of the things she needs financially for a happy life. Because there is the strange Indian idea that Modi is not rich, and because there is the strange idea that people do not need money to have fulfilling lives, and because it is absolutely prohibited to talk about family members sharing money, there can be no talk of the financial relationship between Jashodaben and Narendra Modi. From a Western perspective, the thing to do in the case of this relationship is to make a sum of the wealth (not the money) that Modi consumes in a month. This is not less than one crore rupees (150,000 USD per month). Send Jashodaben a fair percentage of this, or otherwise, negotiate a financial settlement with her. A marriage is a social contract, and also in the case of Jashodaben and Narendra it was religious, but also it is a legal and financial agreement and Jashodaben is owed cash money. From an Indian perspective, it is very wrong for a woman to ask for money as a result of a marriage separation or divorce. People would call her greedy or a prostitute or shame her religiously or say any bad thing about her if any Indian woman would ask to talk about separating finances in the way that is common in the Western world. It is a cultural difference.
3. Most people in India would say that Jashodaben enjoys being alone. This is because in India being celibate is a virtue. People in India presume that other cultures respect celibacy also because the concept is so deep in Indian culture, but from outside India, living a lonely life and not having sex is an unfortunate problem that harms health and does nothing good emotionally or spiritually. Jashodaben has been compared to Yasodhara, the wife Buddha left behind; Ratanawali, the wife Tulsidas left behind. There are a series of women who would be called heros in Indian tradition but who are very unfortunate from a Western perspective Savitri, Shakuntala, and Sita, and commentators have compared Jashodaben to them because all of their circumstances are horrible and Jashodaben is supposed to enjoy her mistreatment and bad luck just like the other women did for the presumed and absent love of their husbands. Also from a Western perspective both Jashodaben and Narendra Modi should be having sex either with each other or with other people or by themselves, because sex is good for physical, mental, and spiritual health. From an Indian society perspective they are too old to think about sex and religious also so the religion has removed sexual desire from them. Only Indian culture would imagine this.
4. It is only a minor reason to presume that Indian people would object to having access to the story about Jashodaben because of political support for Modi. Modi’s communication team has suppressed information about Jashodaben in various ways, and that should be noted because it has a real effect, but there is no emotional backing to the political barriers in telling this story. The problems are the others described above.
5. Related to the general suppression of information, there is a bit of troublesome propaganda which Modi’s communication team has told. They frequently call his marriage to Jashodaben a “child marriage“. The idea is that Modi and Jashodaben were married when they were young, and that they are victims of society because this is an outdated practice, and that Modi should not be responsible for the marriage because he entered it as a child. Many people feel that Modi should get pity and that he is a hero for leaving a child marriage. A problem is that none of the media sources say that Modi was 18 years old when he had the wedding, and that they tend to suggest that the marriage was settled when Modi was about 5 years old when the parents first planned the arrangement. No doubt Indian parents put a huge amount of pressure on their children, but still, 18 years old is not a child marriage for Modi. Jashodaben was 15-16 at the marriage and an even bigger burden is on her, because in this part of India, it is socially impossible for a woman to get remarried after she has been married once. Already she was poor, and one parent was dead, then she married Modi at 16, then by the time she was 20 her other parent died and so parents could not even try to arrange another marriage for her even though that would have been very unlikely anyway. 18 years old is old enough to take some responsibility for what you do. If Modi had the courage and “guts” (Indian people often say Modi has guts) to leave his home to pursue a life of service then he should also have the courage to acknowledge his debts and duties. He owes Jashodaben something. In India, duty to parents comes before duty to spouse, but in other places, duty to spouse comes first.
6. This is hardly a reason, but it is a point that I should make – both Narendra Modi’s supporters and opponents are united in agreeing that information about Jashodaben should not be generally available. Politics in India is important, but cultural practices relating to the treatment of women take precedence over getting votes and political support. There are many things that Narendara Modi’s political opponents could do if they wanted to raise the issue of Narendra’s treatment of Jashodaben as a political fault. I know very well that many politicians have done this a little bit, but as I know Indian politics and media I know that they could have done and said a lot more if they wished to do so. The reason why Narendra’s opponents did not complain more about Jashodaben is because most people in India would agree that the treatment she is getting is fair, so no political scandal can be made of this. If anyone speaks up, it would be have to be on the basis of a concept of justice which does not exist in Indian society.