Constable Michael Sanguinetti was being breathtakingly stupid and shamefully chauvinistic when he said at the York University safety forum in Toronto that “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized”. Well, there are people like him. Appallingly, these people still seem to represent the larger cross-sections of society. So, women in Canada decided that they have had enough. They protested by walking the streets dressed like “sluts”. Their protest rallies spread to other countries, became bigger, and were called the Slutwalk. It spread across 60 cities worldwide as a backlash against society’s tendency to put the blame on victims of sexual assault by saying that they had dressed ‘provocatively’.

The Slutwalk demonstrates the power of the feminist voice. It cannot be denied that such dissent was warranted. It is also true that such protests are relevant in almost every country today. So, when the girls of Delhi joined the Slutwalk or the “Besharmi Morcha”, it seemed right, especially since Delhi is one of the most unsafe cities in the world for women.

Nonetheless, when an Indian woman looks at the Slutwalk from a distance — from, say, a remote village in Bihar, Jharkhand or Manipur, or even from a distant alley in North Calcutta — a certain amount of scepticism creeps in. A scepticism about feminism’s reach and scope in a country as diverse and culturally complicated as India. It would be unfair to question the legitimacy of the Slutwalk that represents the urban, middle-class Indian woman’s demand for her right to dress as she wants. On the other hand, it cannot be forgotten that India is a country where a large number of women are not allowed to be born, and a larger number are not given enough food to survive, let alone proper education and a healthy life. An even larger number are married off at an early age, raped randomly and repeatedly; sometimes killed, wounded or tortured by their own family members. The right to choose their dress is a distant proposition for them.

It is not that these women are not spoken for or that their plight is not taken up as issues of protest. But these issues are so ‘mundane’ for the urban woman — who is often not directly affected by them — that rarely does a rally to protest against female foeticide, child marriage or dowry death gather as much momentum in the media as the Slutwalk or the Pink Chaddhi campaign did, for instance.

In this context, an interesting fact rears its head. The sexual harassment at workplace bill was passed by the Indian Parliament last year. It will protect professional women from being sexually harassed or assaulted in their workplaces. It is a laudable achievement for Indian feminism, to say the least. But the bill is rather selective: it creates a restricted zone in which the urban, middle-class working woman is protected in most of her avatars. But outside that stereotype, there is a whole world of working women to whom the bill will do no good. The legal battle that led to the passing of the bill had started with the case of Bhanwari Devi — a social worker in a village in Rajasthan who had tried to stop child marriage, and was gang-raped as a consequence. It is ironic that for such women, the bill still provides no definitive protection.

Is feminism an all-pervasive, homogenous ideal with set principles, or is it a social reality that is subject to constant influx depending on the society it is being applied to? How meaningful has the urbanized feminism of India been to women across the country who struggle for the basics of survival? Globalization has brought to us the opportunity to make common cause with the world. It has also given us the option to choose our own worlds. Is ‘feminism’ a fantastical word that the urban Indian woman has picked up in order to ‘belong’ to a distant wonderland? These are dangerous questions, yet inevitable, because it seems that the face of feminism in India needs a cleaner mirror.