I make it a point to research and authenticate non-fiction with relevant friends in multi-domain professions across the world. ?Full green light. It?s a surprise for me to learn about French society from an Indian man!? wrote Jerome Buscail, my advocate friend in Paris, authenticating my last week?s article on Simone de Beauvoir?s The Manifesto of 343 Sluts that led to legalising abortion in France. Former French health minister Simone Veil, who actually legalised abortion against rancorous opposition from men, is the subject of my gender equilibrium series today.
When Britain?s 11th Armoured Division liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany on April 15, 1945, they found 53,000 half-starved, seriously ill inmates inside, and 13,000 corpses lying unburied. Simone Veil, who also has Auschwitz number 78651 tattooed permanently on her arm, was among these survivors. Her mother was among the dead. In 1940, Hitler?s Germany occupied France and forced Frenchmen to hand over Jews for ?The Final Solution?, a euphemism for extermination. The Nazi regime manipulated Catholics and Jews, the two faiths that had never mixed, like petrol and water in a container. Simone?s father, a World War I soldier who?d raised his family to be French Republic patriots, staunchly believed his Catholic countrymen would never capitulate to Nazi demands. But French Catholics were of four types: (1) secular (2) sitting-on-the-fence (3) who joined the Resistance Movement together with Jews and (4) the ?colabo?, who voluntarily helped identify Jews for delivering to the Gestapo. British India also had traitors like Mir Jaffer, who helped them conquer Bengal in the 1757 Battle of Plassey. Other treacherous acts led to Surya Sen, the anti-British revolutionary, being hung for raiding the Chittagong British Armory in 1930. Simone?s family was victim to deportation in March 1944. Her father and brother perished under Nazi butchery, she and a sister survived.
?Pain is the root of knowledge,? said Simone Veil. Suffering unimaginable atrocities at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, she and her sister unexpectedly also faced brutal judgment on re-entry into France. Catholics hypocritically questioned, ?How did they come back? It proves death camp was not so horrible.? Simone?s tragic Holocaust experience, humiliation and agony gave her the courage to correct what she considered as denial of rights. On her return, without succumbing to despair, she studied political science, attended law school where she met and married Antoine Veil in 1946, and even became a magistrate. She championed modernisation by improving prison conditions, reforming adoption rights, providing illegitimate children the same rights afforded to children of married couples, and fought for the rights of women, older adults and immigration.
In 1974, President Georges Pompidou suddenly died and technocrat Val?ry Giscard d?Estaing of a new centre right party was elected. He chose Simone Veil to be France?s first woman minister. As health minister, she quickly took measures to break the 1810 Napoleon Penal Code of abortion being punishable. In 1974-75, she introduced what came to be called Veil Law that gave women legal rights to control their own bodies. The hue and cry from conservatives and anti-Semites was inconceivable. Male parliament members harangued her, comparing abortion legalisation to genocide, like throwing baby embryos into Auschwitz crematorium ovens. Anonymous letters condemned her, swastikas were painted on her car and house. But women from all sides supported her. ?No woman takes abortion lightly. It?s a tragedy and will always be so,? she said, but this right will provide safe medical care to the million French women, who secretly undergo dangerous abortions every year. With the support of opposition left-wing members, although she belonged to the rightist party, she managed to pass the law permitting voluntary termination of pregnancy.
Simone Veil achieved many ?firsts?, the first president of the European parliament through direct-suffrage European parliamentary elections, and the first woman to do so. She continues campaigning for Europe as an ideal and a cause, mentioning the importance of a Holocaust survivor presiding over the European parliament. She was the first woman conseil constitutionnel, France?s highest legal authority. She?s invested as an ?immortal? in Acad?mie Fran?aise, France?s most prestigious intellectual club. Yet at each stage, she had to overcome male resistance, even from a loving, learned husband, who saw her as a wife and mother at home, a judicial system uncomfortable with a woman judge exposing age-old wrongs in prisons, to male politicians for whom women ministers are tokens in government.
Watching a French TV literature programme on Simone Veil?s published memoirs called Une Vie, I was struck by this lovable unique woman, who stood up for women?s legal rights against heavy personal attacks in hardcore Catholic French society. Yet this Jewish survivor, with a tattooed number, has no animosity towards anyone. She said the so-called weaker sex had greater capacity for resistance, and unlike men, women helped one another in unselfish ways in concentration camps. In 2005, she returned to speak at the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau camps, where I very often go to pay homage to victims there.
As I write about dignity and gender equality, we witnessed a horrific gang-rape case in Delhi on a 23-year-old girl last week. Not only did six hoodlums in a bus violate her in front of her male companion, they tortured her with a metal rod that damaged her intestines. This is exactly how women were tormented in Nazi concentration camps 70 years ago. Just imagine the same has happened in India?s public space today. No women activist, law or politicisation can correct such wrongs until men at large voluntarily take a vow to ?respect and save women?. Law is just a written code, but if execution excellence does not exist in administration, Indian women can never be safe from barbaric situations. Every Indian man of any age, from rural to city, should take this oath and put it in execution.
Shombit Sengupta is an international creative business strategy consultant to top management. Reach him at http://www.shiningconsulting.com
