Recently, Uttarakhand Chief Minister Tirath Singh Rawat made a statement that left much of the country thinking, “Huh?”
He said that he was shocked seeing women wearing ripped jeans and that it sets a “bad example” for society and will cause a “societal breakdown”.
Soon after, social media was filled with pictures of women, even celebrities, showing off their ripped jeans to counter CM Rawat’s statement, highlighting how nobody should be judged by the clothes they choose to wear.
However, CM Rawat’s wife Rashmi Tyagi, a professor of Psychology at Garhwal university, went on record to defend her husband and say that his words “were not being presented in full context” and was being “wrongly interpreted”, reports The Indian Express.
She went on to add that women have the responsibility to save our country’s cultural heritage, our identity, and our costumes.
“He (Tirath Singh Rawat) said that women’s participation is unprecedented in building the society and the country. It is the responsibility of the women of our country to save our cultural heritage, save our identity, save our costumes,”
Hindustan Times further quoted her saying:
“He was talking about how we are aping western culture blindly and not following our own traditions and values which are seeped with thousands of years of cultural wisdom. But his one word was picked up and blown out of context and wrongly interpreted.”
Why does the onus of protecting a country’s cultural heritage fall on women?