Men’s parties, clubs and committees meet for decades without scrutiny. When women form a group chat, it is called a revolt.
Every few months, a familiar complaint returns to our timelines disguised as concern. The latest came from two men who decided that women’s private online groups were a public problem. Women, they said, gather in small circles, gossip, and share stories about the men in their families. One critic went further and questioned whether such groups should exist at all.
Consider what is being alleged. Thousands of women have joined online spaces to talk to one another. Not fraud, not extortion, not organised harm. Conversation.
Set that against the world these critics live in comfortably. Men have political parties, trade bodies, bar associations, press clubs, mosque committees, alumni networks and WhatsApp groups with hundreds of members. Nobody asks what is said in a shopkeepers’ group at midnight, or among men sitting together after Friday prayers. That privacy is simply assumed. When women build the same thing, the assumption reverses, and the space is treated as suspicious until proven innocent.
The objection, then, is not about morality. It is about supervision. A private female space means an absence of oversight, and some men experience that absence as a loss. They cannot walk in. They cannot correct the record. Hence the contradictory labels: feminism, rebellion, revolt. These are not diagnoses. They are names for a discomfort that would sound absurd if stated plainly.
Yes, some of what passes in these groups is gossip, as in every human gathering. But look at what else is there. A woman asking how to handle a husband who has stopped paying school fees. Another comparing notes on a doctor before spending money she cannot spare. A widow asking how to transfer her late husband’s papers. A student learning of a scholarship nobody at home had heard of. Information is reaching people who were long kept away from it, and that is precisely what unsettles.
Misuse does occur. In any group of thousands there will be leaked screenshots, reckless advice and settled scores, and women are usually the ones harmed. But nobody proposes dissolving a political party because some of its workers break the law. The remedy for a badly run association is moderation, clear rules, accountable administrators and the ordinary law. Every male institution receives that remedy as a matter of course. Collective guilt for thousands of women on the evidence of a few is not a safeguard. It is a pretext.
In much of Kashmir, a woman’s access to public life remains thin. For many, a phone and a group of strangers is the only public square they are allowed to enter, usually late at night after the day’s work is done. To brand that space a conspiracy is to say she should have no space at all.
A society that tolerates a thousand men in a party office can tolerate a thousand women in a group chat. If it cannot, the problem was never the group chat.
