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INEQUALITY is more a function of politics and ideology than it is of technology and economics. In other words, inequality could be explained away in many ways, but is perpetuated by decisions and choices made by the centers of power. Such policies need narratives of justification. Overtime, that narrative becomes the byword for ‘folk wisdom’; eventually it morphs into something akin to ‘gospel truth.’
A fertiliser company is reinforcing these myths through its advertisement campaign, complete with a Kalashnikov-firing female protagonist. In their minds, they have checked all the right boxes (an ‘empowered female farmer’ fighting a ‘misogynist system’) but the messaging, ie zameen tau maan hey (land, after all, is mother) and yeh betiyan nahin betay hein (these are not daughters but sons), keeps the inequality grind going.
Unfair trade-offs are made to favour the society’s elite. These choices are sold to the masses wrapped in the foil of tradition. What leaves indelible impressions on our minds are not the books we read, nor the inanities the 24/7 news channels spew; it is the advertisements also called commercials that stay with us the longest. Whether state institutions orchestrate this directly or are mere beneficiaries of the blurring of lines between pseudo-culture and corporate interests is debatable.
Advertisement myths keep the inequality grind going.
Want to test this theory? How many lines do you remember from the talk show you watched last night? ‘Zero’ is the answer, even if it happened to include a cleric heaping scorn on more than half of the country’s population. Here are advertisement nuggets from 10, 20, even 30 years ago; ‘ae khuda meray abbu’; ‘mashroob-i-mashriq’; ‘meri mutthi mein band hay kia?’ If you are between the ages of 30 and 50, you have correctly guessed these to be from the advertisements of a state-owned insurance company, a sherbet and a paan masala, respectively. Without belaboring the point, different jingles can be referenced for the younger demographic cohort, and they would recall the messaging just like their seniors.
This may not be lost on the defenders of ideology, but let us leave them aside for the time being and focus only on those who manufacture sundry products like cement and fertiliser, and render services such as banking and housing — sorry if all roads lead to Rome? How about the good old private sector; it too is a stakeholder in maintaining the status quo? It creates jobs and fulfills corporate social responsibility but does not want to challenge the ideological narrative.
Gender inequality is perpetuated by advertisements underlining stereotypes. Why did the life-insurance jingle pray for the long life of the father, and not that of the mother? Some would say it just depicted the reality of the age, ie there were more men in the workforce then. But that remains true even today, a new narrative was as much required then as it is now to change that reality. Even today, you are fed advertisements ranging from mattresses to banking where families obsess about marrying off the girl, but in the boy’s case it is the career. While some commercials have broken the taboo and show men cooking and washing, more reinforcing the archaic keep coming up.
Consider two huge socioeconomic problems that are being perpetuated by advertisements parroting the biased narrative, ie the right of inheritance for women, and poverty. Though they are intertwined and feed off each other, let us look at them separately.
Women generally do not get any share of inheritance in both urban and rural settings in Pakistan, and those few who do hardly ever get their due share. The problem is exacerbated where agricultural land is in question. Since we are still an agrarian society and more than 60 per cent of the population lives in the rural areas, the scale of this injustice to women is unfathomable. Part of what keeps this going is the incessant repetition of a myth, ie ‘land is mother’. Once this myth is bought into, there is no question of letting go of the land. A married woman is considered to have become a member of her husband’s household, and heaven forbid if any part of the ‘mother’ goes with her, lest the in-laws sell it or actually start sharing irrigation water, another resource we refuse to treat as a productive commodity despite not caring anything for its conservation.
Similarly, millions of farmers cannot cultivate whatever little land they own because they do not have the financial resources for equipment and inputs like tractors, seeds and power for tube wells. Access to finance through agricultural loans for small farmers is a joke that requires a separate telling. Only if they could sell a piece of land to be able to till the rest of it productively, they are good for a couple of generations. However, the indoctrination that disinherits women and keeps millions in grinding poverty as the only asset they own has been sacralised.
The writer is a poet and analyst.
Published in Dawn, January 9th, 2021
