By Kavita KrishnanThe Delhi Government has recently released an advertisement on television, which is quite disturbing for two reasons.The Aam Aadmi Party had projected itself as a party of the ordinary citizen – in marked contrast to the BJP’s reliance on its single 'Great Leader. The advertisement however destroys this illusion, It leaves us in no doubt that the Delhi government is now a personal project of another 'Great Leader', Arvind Kejriwal, whom the woman in the advertisement nearly compares to God.The advertisement also shows how in the political imagination of AAP, the aam aurat (common woman) is equated with the patriarchal ideal of selfless service to her husband and family. The ideal Delhi woman, they imagine, must cook and care for her child, and feed her husband, single-handed, while her husband sits on the sofa watching television. Tellingly, the ad does not even see her sitting down with her husband to share the meal she prepared!In the AAP's mental world, if not in real life, women still eat after they've fed their husbands. In other words, this is the woman Kejriwal described in his International Women's Day address, the woman who works selflessly for her family and never says 'Uf', never utters a word of complaint.It is amusing, however, to see BJP or Congress criticize this advertisement. After all, BJP's government and even party are now all about the larger than life figure of Modi. Who are they to criticize the cult of Kejriwal? They're the same party that recently blamed lazy mothers for addiction to Maggi!Congress too promotes the idea of one or two all powerful individual leaders from one all powerful family. And Congress is very careful never to rock the gender boat. Sonia Gandhi, for instance, took good care never to utter a word of criticism against the Haryana khaps when her party ruled Haryana. And they too project their women leaders in the mould of 'good mother', 'good bahu', and so on.The AAP has defended the ad against criticisms of sexism, with predictably sexist arguments. An AAP spokesperson, Preeti Sharma Menon, tweeted to me, “Housewives exist, and they have an opinion. Deal with it.”Other AAP supporters, or even critics willing to concede the point about the Kejriwal cultism, are deeply uneasy with any questions about gender stereotypes. Those ridiculing feminists for critiquing the Kejriwal ad are stubbornly repeating one of the myths dearest to patriarchy: that questioning men’s lack of responsibility towards housework amounts to insulting women who do housework. When we accuse the ad of sexism, does it mean we are saying it’s sexist to cook; or are we deriding housewives? The opposite: we are saying it is sexist to accept and propagate the patriarchal notion that housework is the work of housewives.Let us break this argument down some more.Is it ‘natural’, ‘normal,’ ‘common sense’ that women do all the housework because they stay at home while the men earn? Is this a natural division of labour? Think about it. When a woman also earns, she is still expected to be responsible for housework. If an earning man needs a wife to take care of him and his needs – how come an earning woman is not expected to need a wife?This is the question raised in the 1970 feminist classic piece by Judy Syfers ‘I Want a Wife’, that begins with this paragraph: “I belong to that classification of people known as wives. I am A wife. And, not altogether incidentally, I am a mother. Not too long ago a male friend of mine appeared on the scene fresh from a recent divorce. He is looking for another wife. As I thought about him while I was ironing clothes one evening, it suddenly occurred to me that I, too, would like to have a wife.”I recommend that AAP leaders lecturing us on housewives read this short piece. Even when a woman only works at home and does not earn, we must question the assignment of the burden of domestic labour to her and her alone. Are there not other things she might like to do with her time, if her husband were to share the burden of housework?For instance, when can we expect to see a political ad that shows a husband cooking while his wife heads out to distribute leaflets or address a rally? Or one in which both husband and wife chop vegetables and cook together, discussing politics as they watch TV? Ask these questions, and you get the answer: “That’s not real life.” Well, real life has both corruption and people fighting corruption: AAP chooses to project the latter as a model and does not accept the former as a given. Similarly in real life, you have casual, aam sexism, and you also have scores of aam aurats and aadmis challenging and changing sexist stereotypes. Why show one ‘reality’ as a given, and mock at the other reality?In her book Housework Is Everyone's Work: Rhymes For Just And Happy Families, feminist Kamla Bhasin has penned rhymes that reflect that other, more progressive reality. One such rhyme is especially apt in our discussion. Kamla Bhasin’s nursery rhyme, with an accompanying visual, shows how we can do this differently: “Father's like a busy bee, making us hot cups of tea. Mother sits and reads the news, now and then she gives her views.” AAP talks big about revolution – why does it balk at such small, simple steps that reflect and encourage social change?The assignment of labour on the basis of gender should offend us as much as the assignment of labour on the basis of caste. Any revolution worth its salt in India, would need to challenge and change both. Why does it appear that in ‘AAP ki kranti,’ ‘housewives’ will still be stuck with ‘housework’? Every time we question the notion that cooking and care-work is women’s work, we are told by some that we are just ‘feminists full of negativity.’ Ordinary women, they say, happily accept housework as their duty, done out of love, without complaint. Women who protest; feminists, are somehow not real women, they say. I would like to remind them of the testimonies of women for the past thousands of years, who have raised their voices to protest domestic drudgery.2600 years ago, a Buddhist bhikhuni, a Therigatha nun called Mutta, wrote an eloquent poem declaring: “Oh woman well set free! How free am I, How thoroughly free from kitchen drudgery!”In the 19th century, Rashsundari Debi who taught herself secretly to read and write, wrote an autobiography Amar Jiban where she described her life as a wife, daughter-in-law, and mother in terms of unremitting, life-sapping labour. Historian Tanika Sarkar observes that Rashsundari challenges the popular icon of “happy, self-effacing motherhood,” using the image of “the blind-folded bullock moving mindlessly round the oil-press” to describe her life. (Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife Hindu Nation:: Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism, 2001, p 120) What do these accounts tell us? A nun in the 6th century BC experienced domestic work as enslavement and sought liberation from it. A 19th century woman compared her domestic life to that of a ‘kolhu ka bail’ (beast of burden that turns the oil press). So, women’s quest for liberation from domestic work for as long as domestic work has been assigned to women.Raghuvir Sahai, the socialist and Hindi poet, has a short but scathing poem, ‘Padhiye Geeta’ on the gender roles and domestic burdens that crush women: पढ़िए गीता बनिए सीता फिर इन सब में लगा पलीता किसी मूर्ख की हो परिणीता निज घर-बार बसाइए । होंय कँटीली आँखें गीली लकड़ी सीली, तबियत ढीली घर की सबसे बड़ी पतीली भरकर भात पसाइए ।Read the GeetaBecome SeetaThen strike a match to lifeBecome some idiot’s WifeAnd set up house.Lips breakEyes leakWood wet, health weak Cook up a massive pan of rice, be meek(Loose and admittedly inadequate translation by me) Writing in 1919 after the Russian evolution, Lenin challenged his comrades to recognize that laws alone could not emancipate women; true emancipation of women could take place only when care-work was socialized and ceased to remain the private burden of households, and women inside households: “Notwithstanding all the laws emancipating woman, she continues to be a domestic slave, because petty housework crushes, strangles, stultifies and degrades her, chains her to the kitchen and the nursery, and she wastes her labour on barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-racking, stultifying and crushing drudgery.” Revolution and women’s liberation are unimaginable without the agenda of liberating women from the drudgery of domestic labour.The projection of cult leaders as messiahs is ominous for democracy. Many imagined that AAP represented the possibility of a politics that is about citizens' participation rather than individual messiahs. But AAP has mercilessly strangled that hope. And as for a politics that boldly imagines women as human beings and political beings resisting gender stereotypes, most parties barring the Left do not even dare profess this agenda. The author is Secretary, All India Progressive Women's Association (AIPWA)