Can Indian women fight?

The Supreme Court of India says they can. Or at least that they must be allowed to fight. The case is that of enlisting in the army, usually considered a man’s preserve. So far, India has accepted women army officers under a short service commission, which means enlisting for a specific, and I suppose not long, period.

But these soldiers are then denied a permanent commission, even though their rank might remain unchanged. The reason for this is that the army's permanent commission officers have a chance of being deployed in combat. And the army thinks that women will not be particularly good at that. Or perhaps they think that, being women, even ones with guns, they might be vulnerable to enemy soldiers, who are likely to be all men.

Whatever the reason, or the prejudice, the army doesn't like the idea of officers who are women.

But the Indian air force has always had permanent women officers, and so a soldier in the army, Major Lina Gurung, went to the Supreme Court saying her right to equality had been violated. The court asked the government why women in the air force were differently treated and was told that the air force offered non-combat roles in engineering and in logistics, which might not be possible in the other services.

The court wasn't impressed by that explanation and has ordered a change. The government does not like to be forced to change but it must obey. And so shall we, like America, have women in combat gear strutting about with guns?

Not yet. For now, the government has said, quite grudgingly, that it will deploy women only in the army's legal and education departments, where presumably no combat happens. But the matter is unlikely to rest here.

Though India is not at war with another state, there are several current combat duties soldiers must perform, in Kashmir and in the northeast where there are active and quite violent separatist movements. And so, sooner rather than later, another female officer will move court and question why she isn't being allowed to fight though she has been trained and equipped to do so, and indeed is being paid to do so.

And, once again, it is likely that she will find reason on her side.

Societies often evolve slowly through such small changes, and the Supreme Court, because it tends to be liberal, is a good place to drive cultural change. It is always a good thing to have an equality of the sexes, now that we on the subcontinent are in the 21st century chronologically if not entirely mentally and culturally. But I must say that I find the association of women and war uncomfortable. Violence seems to me a silly and uniquely male preoccupation.

The ancient Greek poet Aristophanes might have agreed with me.

In his comic play Lysistrata, Aristophanes wrote about how the women of Athens and Sparta bring to an end the long and vicious war the two states had been fighting. They do this by going on a bedroom strike, not allowing their husbands to make love to them. The strike is effective and, at least in the play, the war ends and the two states are friends again.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 4^th, 2010.