New Delhi, July 28
The suggestions included ‘Sardar’, ‘Pradhan’, ‘Neta’, ‘Karandhar’ and ‘Chief Executive and Head of the State’, but the Constituent Assembly settled on the term ‘Rashtrapati’ for India’s top constitutional post.
However, in the last 75 years, there have been multiple calls for a gender-neutral term for the head of the State and debates over it. This has been reignited by the political furore over President Droupadi Murmu being referred to as ‘Rashtrapatni’ by Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury who claimed it was a “slip of tongue”.
Some women rights activists on Thursday said over the years some words and phrases have been replaced with more gender-neutral terms in various spheres.
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Yogita Bhayana, a women’s rights activist who heads People Against Rape in India, said like chairperson, president is also gender neutral. Translated into Hindi, the word president gets a different overtone but the relevance is the same, she said.
“But Chowdhury’s comments were very insensitive. I think he wanted to be very specific about gender because he wanted to make a patriarchal statement. We never judged Pratibha Patil (former president) like that.
“One can think about going gender-neutral while referring to the president, but he (Chowdhury) made the statement for a different reason altogether. However, there must be a suitable term for the post in the future,” Bhayana
