Quick to leverage such moments for buck passing, politicians have asked for a statewide ban on the bikini rather than address why they weren’t able to ensure a safer environment for women travelers.

The now infamous comment from Pamela Mascarenhas, Goa's Deputy Director of Tourism (“You can't blame the locals; they have never seen such women…Walking on the beaches half-naked is bound to titillate the senses”) reveals a deep level of denial. She’s apparently forgotten that the state has a long tradition of beach tourism, and also of nudist beaches dating back to the early seventies.

So what are women supposed to wear at the beach then? Billowy saris? All-enveloping burqas?

Bikinis are worn at beaches all over the world, including Egypt, which garners millions in revenue from beach tourism - but that doesn’t make its women easy prey for rapists.

Social activist and university lecturer Janaki Prabhakar puts the issue into perspective. “The problem is that everyone is looking at the issue from a political or economic angle,” she says. “Nobody is thinking about the serious human rights violation the proposed bikini ban might entail.”

And that indeed is the crux of the problem. According to Prabhakar, the rallying cry for a bikini ban amounts to foisting one lobby’s cultural interpretation of clothing over the right of women to dress as they deem appropriate. “It is a shocking infringement of women's sartorial freedom, which further discounts their ability to think and act for themselves,” she adds.

Kamini Jaiswal, a prominent Indian lawyer also finds it absurd that women are invariably expected to hew to tradition in such cases. “Clothes are an extremely personal matter,” asserts Jaiswal. “By telling a woman what she can or cannot wear not only snatches away her personal freedom, but also undermines her intelligence.”

The Indian experience dovetails neatly with an ominous pattern that recurs every now and then across the world. As with French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s banning of the burqa last year, it is but another potent symbol of extremist Muslim belief. Similarly, India’s right-wing political party – the Shri Ram Sena – which has a penchant for molesting and beating up jeans-clad, pub-going women, is a part of the same retrogressive narrative.

In yet another throwback to medieval times, activists of the freshly-minted Hindu right-wing party Sanskriti Bachao Manch have warned shopkeepers in Bhopal, a city in the central state of Madhya Pradesh, “not to display lingerie in public” and that their mannequins should be ensconced in saris, not underwear!

“From now on, keep all undergarments inside. Show it to the customer when he or she asks for it…if the undergarments are still hanging outside, we will light a bonfire of the lingerie,” the party leader threatened.

As Aziza Ahmed rightly argues in her blog, the critique of women's clothing, from burqas to cleavage, is often leveraged for other purposes - whether religious, cultural or political - and should be called out when it’s faux feminism.

According to freelance writer Sarah Seltzer in her article Should The Burqa Be Banned?, “It's also true that almost every cultural or religious group sets standards of appearance that oppress women. Most fashion, from the corset of yore to the bikini to the FLDS (Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) prairie dress to the Nike sneaker -- made by women in sweatshops, marketed to Western women -- tends to hew in some way to patriarchal norms. So the quandary we grapple with, as feminists, is how to acknowledge that fact without alienating, targeting or harassing groups of women for the way they dress.”

Indeed few can deny that a woman’s clothing is often held hostage by antiquated beliefs or dogmas. But, as feminists argue, why should women uphold the weight of a certain value system through their choice of clothes? Bikinis, burqas, hijabs – why should these be allowed to hijack the discourse in modern day politics in an increasingly interconnected and globalized world?

American sociology professor Patricia Hill Collins calls this “identity politics” and defines it as “the matrix of domination” – where women become the soft targets of a society’s expression of dogmas. According to Hill’s theory, women’s clothing continues to be a potential point of conflict even in modern societies.

Take the fuss over the hijab, for that matter. This too started as a women’s protest for the right to wear these headscarves at Turkish universities in 2004. The act defied a strict headscarf ban that had been enforced in Turkish universities since 1997 after the staunchly secularist military had exerted pressure to oust a government it perceived to be “too Islamist”.

As Turkey's population is predominantly Muslim, two-thirds of all Turkish women cover their heads out of choice. But with the ban coming into force, thousands were deprived of their right to education. Many young women who insisted on wearing the headscarves fled Turkey to other parts of the world to study rather than remove them. Some even sacrificed an education for their faith, preferring not to go to university if it meant uncovering. Finally, the ban was lifted in 2008 though Turkish women aren’t sure how long this tenuous truce with the hardliners might last.

What makes this debate so complex is that every country's idea of sartorial propriety differs from the other. In the West, for instance, the practice of covering comes as a cultural shock, so the proposed bikini ban in Goa may seem astonishingly prudish to westerners. Indians, on the other hand, may balk at the fuss over the hijab - or even the burqa for that matter.

This leads us to the question: Can a singular, uniform sartorial template then be adopted to assert one’s faith or religious identity? Or, for that matter can any template pass muster with people of all religions, faiths and nationalities? The answer is obviously no.

If we insist on viewing women as embodiments of “tradition and culture” or societal “values”, then why bother with non-issues? Why not ask instead: How well-educated are the women in our society? Do they have access to reproductive health? Are they empowered to enrich society politically, economically and otherwise? Fussing over trivia like clothing betrays shallow thinking at best and a devious need to deflect attention from an ulterior agenda at worst.

Equal tolerance of all religious sentiments and of their sartorial manifestations is a vital sign of civilized society. Their intolerance betrays a lack of basic civility by placing a premium on religion over rationality, clothing over Constitution and cultural snobbery over compassion.



ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Freelance journalist Neeta Lal writes on politics, lifestyle trends, environment and gender issues for news syndicates, internet publications and newspapers like The Guardian, Inter Press Service (IPS), World Political Review (WPR) and Asia Times. A post-graduate in English Literature and Journalism, Neeta has also been a scholar at the International Summer School, Norway and Concordia University, Canada. Having traveled to over 30 countries, she is also in the process of writing a travel book.

Neeta enjoys cooking, gardening, traveling and photography. She lives in New Delhi with her husband and two children.