Four problems Maharashtra can't wish away by chanting 'Bharat Mata ki jai'

My latest on Scroll.in on the Bharat Mata Ki Jai obsession:

http://scroll.in/article/806121/mr-fadnavis-shouting-bharat-mata-ki-jai-wont-drive-away-the-crippling-drought

Muzaffarnagar to Murthal

Indian Express, March 17, 2016

(Op-ed in Indian Express)

When public figures speak violence, the fallout goes beyond their immediate targets.  In ways seen and unseen, those most affected are often women. 

Recently, we saw an illustration of this during the Jat quota stir.  In a sea of men blocking highways and railway tracks, women were invisible.  In fact, they were not there at all. 

Yet, they figured, not as participants but as targets.  Although everyone seems to deny that any molestation or rapes occurred at the end of February, there are several reports that suggest that women were attacked and that most of them will not speak out.

That is hardly surprising.  Did we not see that in Muzaffarnagar in September 2013?  In the communal riots preceding the 2014 general elections, only after the violence had subsided, an estimated 60 people had died and 60,000, mostly Muslims, had been displaced, did the stories of rape begin to be told.

Till today, there has been no closure.  Just a few days ago, one of those cases was closed because the survivor and her family “turned hostile”, another way of saying that they were either intimidated, or decided to keep quiet for fear of consequences.

Despite changes in the rape law, and an increase in general awareness after the 2012 gang rape in Delhi, the reality for rape survivors who fight for justice is either endless delay and humiliation, or threats forcing them to withdraw charges.  Statistics of the low conviction rate amply illustrate this reality.

Muzaffarnagar and Murthal tell us the same story.  When there is public violence, by way of riots or agitations, the consequence is often heightened levels of violence against women.  This is not unique to India.  Studies around the world have established this reality in multiple locations.  The most ghastly in recent memory is Rwanda, where during the genocide in 1994 when Hutus systematically eliminated Tutsis, in the course of 100 days of violence, an estimated half a million women were raped or killed.  The legacy of that violence has still not been erased.

In the current atmosphere in India, where statements are made almost on a daily basis about chopping off heads, slicing tongues and taking revenge, there is real reason to worry.  This kind of heightened violence, much of it going unchallenged and even endorsed by the very people who should be stopping it, leaves all women vulnerable, not just those belonging to the targeted groups.

What this does is that it makes violence acceptable as a way of settling scores.  If ministers in the government speak such language, and they get away without being reprimanded, and are not even hauled up for hate speech, then what is to stop any person from assuming that such talk, and the actions that follow, are permissible?

While data has established that the majority of incidents of violence against women occur in the home or familiar neighbourhoods, a heightened atmosphere of violence affects women’s access to the public space.  At such times, the problem is viewed as a breakdown in law and order. In fact, it is a direct fallout of a culture of political violence that is deliberately perpetuated and thereby becomes the norm.

The government needs to recognise this and address it because it undercuts its stated efforts to “empower” women. Beti Bachao and Beti Padhao will remain empty slogans if girls fear stepping out to go to school or women are terrified at the thought of giving birth to another girl who will have to confront increasing violence, at home and outside.

A survey conducted by the group Breakthrough in 2014 in five states and 15 districts in India indicated that girls on their way to school had to fight off sexually explicit verbal comments, stalking and sometimes molestation.  The unsafe spaces women listed included bus stops, railways stations, open toilets, public toilets, markets and streets.  In other words, practically all public spaces.

In election season, women will be more constrained and restricted if these public spaces that they must necessarily negotiate every single day also become the sites of political violence. The fear of molestation and rape will hold young girls back from attending school, prevent women from going out to work, and in myriad other ways directly affect their mobility. 

The more dangerous aspect is not just the random violence in the public space, but the targeted one, when women become a part of the plan to wreak vengeance by one group of men on another.  This is what we saw in Muzaffarnagar.  And this is what could repeat itself as the electoral temperature rises, particularly in Uttar Pradesh. 

These realities are constantly obscured in the continuous talk about achievement and empowerment of some women, or in the increasingly empty and consumerist agendas that now dominate the celebration of International Women’s Day on March 8.

Beyond Kanhaiya Kumar

March 6, 2016

Something really unusual and encouraging has been happening in the last days. Apart from JNU, which has been in ferment, young people in many other parts of India seem to be waking up and speaking out as never before.

I spent all day yesterday surrounded by enthusiastic, intense youngsters who hung on to every word spoken by a range of speakers about secularism, communalism, democracy, the media, and history. The meeting was organised by a small group who call themselves the Mumbai Collective.  I can't remember such an electric atmosphere in this city in a long time. Keeping my fingers firmly crossed that this is not a passing phase but part of a deeper churning.

My piece in Scroll.in

Beyond Kanhaiya Kumar: Is this the student awakening that has been a long time coming?

Kanhaiya Kumar’s words, as he delivered his passionate speech in Jawaharlal Nehru University hours after being released on bail following 23 days in custody, will continue to reverberate in our ears for some time to come. “We want freedom in India, not from India,” he said as he went on to define what he meant by that freedom, that “azadi”.

Kumar left those who listened to him at the venue, and on television, speechless. He probably left his detractors, who have called him “anti-national”, sleepless. For what Kumar said on the night of March 3, and what he represents, cannot be ignored anymore.

But is this the story of only one exceptional person, a young man not just with admirable oratorical skills but also commitment, perspective, passion, courage and insight? Or does this represent an awakening among India’s students and youth, a stirring that has been a long time coming?

Rise and spread

What began in September 2014 in Jadavpur University in Kolkata in the form of a demand to investigate an incident of sexual harassment, spread to the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune in June 2015, when the students went on strike against the appointment of Gajendra Chauhan to head the institution.

Like the “infection” the Delhi High Court judge who granted Kumar bail fears, it then spread to the Hyderabad Central University in August 2015, culminating in the tragic death of Rohith Vemula in January this year. And then on February 9, JNU became “infected” as students demanded their right to protest and were instead charged with sedition and being “anti-national”.

Since the arrest of Kanhaiya Kumar on February 12 on charges of sedition and the subsequent arrest of two other JNU students, Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya, students from many more universities across India have come out in their support. This kind of solidarity among students across universities has not been seen in recent times.

These protests could, of course, subside. The majority of students might decide to get back to classes, and to worrying about their careers. But the chances that this “infection” will spread are greater because the JNU students and the Dalit students from Hyderabad Central University have widened the ambit of their protests. It is not just freedom of expression that they are demanding; they are equally passionate about freedom from caste. It is this combination that must worry the current dispensation at the Centre, or at least should worry them.

Past passion

You would have to delve quite far into your memory to remember a time when Indian universities were in ferment. But there was such a time. If you were in any university or college in the 1960s or 1970s, student politics was alive. There were passionate debates about the country’s future, about injustice and about freedom. There were Gandhians, Socialists, Communists, Maoists. I can’t remember too many Sanghis in those days.

Whether you were politically inclined or not, expressing your views on everything and anything was the norm. And no one was afraid. There was no one telling you what was allowed or not allowed. And there was certainly no one accusing anyone of being “anti-national”, not even if you believed that “power came out of the barrel of a gun”.

The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the Naxalbari movement at one end, and Jayprakash Narayan’s call for Total Revolution at the other. Both attracted educated young people, including students who left their studies to go and work in the villages. There were study circles and intense debates. Many young people who followed JP dropped their surnames so as not to identify with any caste. Despite opposition from parents, young people were giving up jobs, education, comfortable homes to follow their convictions. They did not want to wait, to be safe. They wanted to take risks.

For the young people who were politicised in the early 1970s, the declaration of Emergency by Indira Gandhi in 1975 was an inflexion point; it confirmed their worst fears about the Indian state. When the Congress Party president DK Barooah declared that “India was Indira and Indira was India”, the frame within which rights, such as freedom of expression, could operate had been set. If you were critical of Indira or her policies, you were against India, hence anti-national. In today’s context, this sounds creepily similar.

Lessons not learnt

Although there have been other galvanising events that have drawn out young people since the end of the Emergency in 1977 and today, I would argue that there has been nothing that has been this widespread. The issue of communalism did bring young people out on the streets after the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992 and the Gujarat violence in 2002. But their participation was not on the scale we have seen today.

Since the 2014 election and the formation of the Narendra Modi government at the Centre, the demand for “azadi”, in the way Kumar describes it, has been spurred because the state now defines what we can say and cannot, what we can do and cannot, what we can eat and cannot, what we can read and cannot. You don’t have to be a student of JNU to understand that this is unacceptable. Young people have always demanded the right to question, to rebel, to choose their own paths. As Kanhaiya Kumar presciently pointed out, the more you push them down, the stronger they will emerge.

This is precisely what has been happening. Instead of recognising the legitimacy of the demands being made by students on these different campuses, the government has chosen the hammer of “sedition” and the “anti-national” label to knock them down. In turn, it is now facing the ballooning rebellion of students, political and apolitical, who instinctively react against arbitrariness and oppression.

Pertinent reminders

What is particularly pertinent about the struggles of the students in JNU is that they are going beyond demanding freedom of expression. By placing on the same plate caste oppression, these youth have launched a campaign that has relevance and should have resonance. Relevance because it is unacceptable that in 2016 caste should still be a factor that determines a person’s future in this country. And resonance because in 2014, as Kumar reminded us, 69% of the voters did not vote for Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party. There is a large constituency of people out there who do not subscribe to identity politics and the divisiveness that is being deliberately fuelled by this government.

Kumar has also reminded us that there is an India that lies beyond university campuses and television studios. It includes places like his village, where his mother is an anganwadi worker. He is in JNU only because there is a system that accommodates people like him. In those places beyond the reach of the media, what is “India”, what is “the nation”, who is a patriot and who an “anti-national”? Does it really matter?

Listening to Kumar’s passionate speech at JNU, I recalled an incident from 40 years ago. I was meeting students at a village school in Panchgani, western Maharashtra. They were curious about Bombay. Some had heard of it, many had not. They had no idea who was the prime minister of India, or the president.

And then I asked, “Which do you think is the biggest city in India?” In an instant, a little girl dressed in the regulation uniform common in most village schools, with her hair neatly braided into two plaits, raised her hand. “Satara”, she said, with utmost confidence.

Irom Sharmila: Woman who will not bend

March 2, 2016

The news this morning that Irom Sharmila, that indefatigable campaigner against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) had been released, with the court stating that the police cannot rearrest her, came as some good news after a long week of terrible developments.  But by later in the day it was clear, that nothing has changed.  Sharmila is determined to fast and has said so.  And the police has once again arrested her, according to the latest reports.

Much has been written about this "Iron Lady".  I too have written about her (http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/Kalpana_Sharma/i-am-sharmila/article4515503.ece?homepage=true) and met her briefly in 2009 in Imphal when the same drama of release and rearrest took place.  She is a person one cannot forget -- frail yet strong, smiling through the pain visible in her eyes, and determined in a way one has never seen before.  It makes you feel humbled, even over-awed.

But we cannot stop at admiration. The cause for which she is prepared to inflict such suffering on herself is one that should be a concern for all of us, even if we are not subject to the draconian AFSPA that has made life a hell for people in Manipur.  The demand for its withdrawal should not be limited to the people living under it.  All of us who care for a just society, where abitrary powers are not placed in the hands of people with no respect for human rights, must oppose AFSPA.

In the meantime, we wait and watch.  Will someone listen -- anyone? To quote what I wrote earlier:

"What will it take for the deafness of the government, and its obduracy, to give way to a listening ear and an open mind on the issue? How many Sharmilas will it take? Should all of us who care, who feel outraged at this state of affairs, decide to become Sharmilas?"

Maneka Gandhi’s suggestion on mandatory sex tests aims to absolve doctors of blame for foeticide

Feb 4, 2016 on Scroll.in

The minister’s remarks are a response to a campaign by the medical community to change the sex selection law.

 

Kalpana Sharma  · Today · 10:30 am

Is Maneka Gandhi just shooting her mouth off or is a policy change imminent?

According to reports by journalists who heard her speak at a conference in Jaipur on Monday, the Union Minister for Women and Child Development seems convinced that the way to deal with sex-selective abortions, which has led to a precipitous decline in the sex ratio, is to make sex-determination tests on pregnant women mandatory.

Her logic is hard to fathom. The minister has suggested, in all seriousness, that doctors should reveal the sex of the foetus to pregnant women whether they want to know it or not. She believes that by doing this, women will then be afraid to abort female foetuses as its sex will be part of public record.

“It is really not feasible to go around trying to catch every ultrasound technician for revealing the foetal gender to parents in violation of the PCPNDT Act,” Gandhi was quoted as saying. “Rather, why not reverse the strategy? The moment a woman gets pregnant, we should find out the gender of the child, tell the mother about it, and immediately register it in public records. Then we can track which pregnancies are carried to full term.”

She continued: “Since the gender is already known, and given the law, families would be compelled to go through with the pregnancy especially when the foetus is female.”

If it ain’t broke…

In other words, Gandhi wants to turn the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act on its head. The law prohibits the revelation of the sex of a foetus as it could lead to sex-selective abortions and it penalises doctors and ultrasound technicians who reveal the sex of the unborn child. The new proposal seems to suggest that the Union minister wants to shift this burden to the shoulders of pregnant women who will be considered criminals if they decide to abort a female foetus.

The proposal might never get through but it is worth considering the consequences if it did.

The Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act was the result of campaigns followed by consultations with groups that linked the use of sex-selection and sex-detection technologies to the decline in the sex ratio in India. They argued that the misuse of these technologies aided society’s preference for sons. The fact that the sex ratio had declined even in wealthy districts pointed to the widespread use of these technologies to limit the births of girls.

Paperwork pain

Doctors and ultrasound technicians were held responsible for revealing the sex of the foetus because this was a straightforward way to check rampant sex selection and the sex-selective abortions that followed.

Of course, this meant that all sonography machines had to be registered and doctors had to go through additional paperwork when dealing with pregnant women. However, this was considered a small price to pay given the enormity of the problem.

The law also kept in mind that women who were compelled to have multiple abortions before they produced a male child had no choice. They did this under circumstances where they were blamed if they produced only female children.

The medical lobby

Gandhi was quick to clarify that her remarks were just loud thinking and not the precursor to policy change. Yet, her proposal did not emerge out of thin air. It is in response to a concerted campaign by the medical community to change the Pre-Natal Conception and Diagnostic Technologies Act.

Doctors have complained not just about the paperwork but that they were being charged even for minor “clerical errors”. This argument has held sway in many cases and accounts for the low level of conviction in cases that fall under the law forbidding sex determination. Doctors have also complained about corruption by officials who demand bribes when they come to inspect papers.

In Maharashtra, doctors have been particularly vociferous in their demands for a change in the law. Not surprisingly, the first response to Gandhi’s statement came from the president of the Maharashtra branch of the Indian Medical Association, Dr Jayant Lele, who said, “The sex ratio has not dramatically improved after this law came into force. If expecting couples are tracked after sex determination shows it is a female foetus, they will be more fearful of breaking the law.”

In short, the medical community would like to be absolved of all responsibility and Gandhi’s proposal is precisely what it wants.

Fix basics first

Apart from being highly impractical, Gandhi’s proposal are unacceptably intrusive. In a country with over a billion people with millions being added every year, how will the government monitor every single birth to make sure that sex selective abortions are not taking place? Who will do it?

If even the basic job of ensuring that all pregnant women receive antenatal care so that they survive the pregnancy and deliver healthy babies is not being done how will health establishments across the country take on this additional task? And should they?
The proposal is even more perplexing when Gandhi suggests that the monitoring of every pregnant woman in the country will encourage institutional deliveries. The leap of logic she uses to arrive at this conclusion is unfathomable.

In a country where the word “inadequate” would be a gross understatement when it comes to the ratio of hospital beds to people, does the minister for Women and Child Development really think that we are ready to abolish home deliveries and compel all pregnant women to go to hospital for their deliveries?

Millions of babies are born at home, delivered by trained village dais, and survive. Yet, Gandhi believes “home deliveries pose a threat to the newborn as there might be an attempt on its life” and recommends that they be abolished.

If we have to put up with such ill-informed statements from a person tasked with ensuring the survival of women and children in India, perhaps the post of minister for Women and Child Development should be abolished.

To understand why job quotas for women don't go far enough, take a ride on a Mumbai train

January 22, 2016 in Scroll.in

Employers should recognise that women start working long before they get to the office – and continue when they get home.

 

Kalpana Sharma  · Today · 04:30 pm

Photo Credit: Rupak De Chowdhuri/Reuters

“Why aren’t India’s women working?” This was the headline of an article in the August 23 edition of The New York Times. The headline writers ought to have known better. Indian women work hard, and all the time. Yet, their work is largely not considered “work”. Only work for which you are paid is counted. And much of the work that women do is unpaid.

The premise that bringing more women into the paid workforce will help women and the Indian economy is behind policies, such as the one announced on Tuesday by Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, to reserve 35% of all government jobs for women.
Kumar is not the first to take this step. Madhya Pradesh already has 30% reservation for women in government jobs, as does Gujarat at 33%. In addition, the Union home ministry sent out an advisory to all state government and union territories on August 26, 2014 on increasing women in the police to 33% of the total force.

While 33% of positions in the constable rank are reserved for women in the Central Reserve Police Force and the Central Industrial Security Force, 15% are reserved in the Border Security Force, the Sashastra Seema Bal and the Indo-Tibetan Border Police. As the local police come under the state government, they are expected to fall in line and work towards increasing the number of women recruits – currently in short supply as evidenced by the Delhi Police, a force in which women comprise only 9.27%.

Discouraging factors

But while quotas are well-intentioned, they are clearly not enough. The Parliamentary Committee on Empowerment of Women, which looked specifically at the question of increasing women’s presence in the police force, underlined the simple and rather obvious problems that need to be addressed even as the number of women recruited for these jobs increases.

In its December 17, 2014 report, the committee emphasises the need to improve the facilities available to women when it writes, “despite a spate of efforts from the Government, lack of basic amenities/rest rooms/mobile toilets is still a major problem for the women in police in many States.”
In other words, it is not enough to just recruit more women. Both government and the private sector need to ensure that the conditions at work do not dehumanise women or place an additional stress on their lives. Apart from toilets, provisions of crèches and benefits such as maternity leave should not be seen as special favours. Women enter the paid workforce on unequal terms. A paid job is in addition to the unpaid “work” that they do every day – child care, elderly care, domestic chores, among them.

There will be those who will argue against quotas for women in government jobs. Such people ought to travel by the women’s special trains at peak hour from Churchgate station in Mumbai. Here you meet women, many of them employed by the state government, who wake up at the crack of dawn every day, prepare food for their families, and then set off on their long commute to work.

At the end of the day, they use the train ride to prepare for the tasks that wait exclusively for them once they get home: cook, clean, wash and at some point sleep before the day begins again. Government jobs, with all their security and benefits, are not exactly a gravy ride if you are a lower-middle-class woman.

The other important component to increase women’s presence in the paid workforce is safety. From sexual harassment to sexual assault, women face these dangers every day as they step out to earn a living. The recent distressing case of an Accredited Social Health Activist worker in Uttar Pradesh, who committed suicide because the man who raped her threatened to release the video of the act, brings home the dangers that even those women part of government programmes face. Just having a paid job does not protect them from sexual predators.

A matter of perception

In any case, even if every state government follows the lead of Nitish Kumar and others by reserving government jobs for women, it is unlikely to make more than a tiny dent in the larger problem of getting more women in paid employment. India is close to the bottom in the list of countries when it comes to the percentage of women in paid employment or “female labour force participation” (termed FLFP). While the global average is 50%, which means every other woman is in the labour
force, in India it was 33% in 2012 and has now slipped further.

Why do we need to increase the number of women in paid employment? Is it just tokenism if employment means a double burden on them?

The most obvious significance is that a woman contributing to family income has a better chance of being treated more decently than one who does not. That, of course, is an assumption that is not always born out with the statistics which reveal that even well-educated women in good jobs are at the receiving end of domestic violence. Also, in many cases, they do not have control over the money they earn. Yet, there is change, especially in urban areas where the cost of living is inducing more women into some form of paid employment.

The larger significance of more women in the workforce is that of perception. In the last several decades, women have entered many fields that remained closed to their mothers. Rabia Futtehally, for instance, was one of the first women pilots in India. Today, out of 5,100 commercial pilots in India, 11.7% are women (the average worldwide is 3%). This has been achieved without quotas but illustrates how the opening up of new avenues for employment for women encourages more women to consider these options. And even if entrenched attitudes, which will not accept that women have capabilities and rights, do not evaporate, they are challenged.

Reserving jobs for women is one way to increase the percentage of women in paid jobs. But in the long run, neither more money, nor job security, will make a difference to women’s status unless we recognise and value the real “work” that millions of women do every day, all day.

Why Haryana CM's claim that state's sex ratio has improved is dangerous for women

On scroll.in  Tuesday January 19, 2016

Opinion

By claiming that the declining sex ratio can be turned around by a high-profile campaign, Khattar is trivialising an important issue.

Kalpana Sharma  · Today · 12:30 pm

Photo Credit: Roberto Schmidt/AFP

It is quite extraordinary that the chief minister of a state with the lowest sex ratio should claim that there has been a dramatic turnaround in less than a year. Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar was reported on January 16 as saying that the child sex ratio in his state had improved from 834 girls to every 1,000 boys in the 2011 census to 903 in December. He attributed this jump to the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao campaign launch by Prime Minister Narendra Modi last January.

The sex ratio, male-female and child sex ratio (0-6 years) cannot be measured every day – unlike, say, pollution levels. It is tracked over a period of time. Changes in the sex ratio become apparent in the census, conducted once every ten years. Thus, it was with the 2001 census data that alarm bells first rang out about the extent to which the sex ratio in India was skewed in favour of males, especially in the more prosperous districts. Specifically, it is the fall in the child sex ratio that caused concern as it fell from 927 in 2001 to 919 in 2011, clearly indicating that sex selection was widely prevalent.

However, civil society groups had warned of the dangers of the declining sex ratio three decades before the 2011 census when they noticed the growing misuse of medical technology to detect and abort female foetuses. In the 1980s, the first technologies to indicate the sex of the foetus came to India. Amniocentesis, an invasive process that removes amniotic fluid from the uterus of a pregnant woman to test the sex of the foetus, was costly and not widely available. Even so, it was evident that those who could afford the test went ahead and paid for it, followed by an abortion if the foetus was found to be female.

Misusing technology

The first group to begin campaigning and drawing attention to this came up in Mumbai. The Forum Against Sex Selection exposed the misuse of amniocentesis, meant to detect abnormalities in the foetus, and demanded that this and other such technologies be banned. In fact, in the early 1980s, Mumbai’s local trains carried advertisements selling the idea of sex selective abortions at centres that provided both services, amniocentesis and abortion, under one roof.

The FASS campaign eventually led to the Maharashtra government passing a law banning sex selection technologies in 1988. But by then, the technology had changed: it become non-invasive, cheaper and easier. Sonography machines could detect the sex of the foetus much earlier than amniocentesis, making abortion safer. There were no curbs on these machines. They were small and easily portable. Sex selection spread from cities to smaller towns and even villages.

The Maharashtra law led to the central government being persuaded to take note of the dangers of the spread of this technology and in 1994, the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act 1994 was passed.

But all such laws have their limitations. It is not just a matter of checking the misuse of such technologies but stemming the demand for them. Sex selection is essentially the desire by thousands of Indian families to avoid giving birth to girls. If in the past, some communities resorted to infanticide, today technology provides a neater, easier way of getting rid of the problem – avoid giving birth to girls.

Many justify the use of sex selection by arguing that it will spare girls the tortures they will encounter later in life. It is a strange argument, for it accepts that woman in Indian society can never hope for fair treatment. Also, the fact that the better-off use sex selection clearly establishes that at root the issue is one of property and not any concern for the safety of girls or women.

Misguided measures

Not surprisingly, a law passed to give women equal rights to inherit ancestral property, the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act 2005 went against them in places like Haryana where the status of women is low in all respects. As this article by Chander Suta Dogra points out, since the law came into effect, the desire to avoid giving birth to girls has accelerated in Haryana rather than decreased.
Ironically, many government schemes aimed at checking the decline in the sex ratio are aimed at poor people through cash transfer schemes, such as Dhan Lakshmi and Ladli, Kanyadan, even though the groups that are most likely to practice female foeticide is well above the poverty line.

Even as we accept that sex selection is a symptom of the larger problem, the implementation of the PCPNDT Act has been patchy at best and mostly indifferent. Even in Haryana, where the declining sex ratio has been the focus of many campaigns for well over a decade, only 58 FIRs had been registered under this law in the last six months. These are registered cases, not convictions. In many instances, those operating sonography machines without registering them are caught but there is no way to prove that they have been used for sex selection. Even if this law was enforced more strictly, it only deals with the technology of sex-selection when the problem is embedded in societal attitudes.

Regressive environment

In Haryana, these attitudes have a long way to go before they change. Political parties, including the BJP that has launched the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao campaign with such fanfare, refuse to take a stand against regressive institutions like the khap panchayats that have a direct impact on the status and rights of women in that state.

Whatever the credibility of the figures recently released by the Haryana government about the improvement in the child sex ratio, the larger problem of women’s rights remains unaddressed. By claiming that something as serious as the declining sex ratio can be turned around by a campaign high on optics is to trivialise an important issue. Such boasts are not just false, they are dangerous. What they do is deny the process required to change mindsets. Even if a state has a reasonably good sex ratio, if its women are harassed, denied choice in marriage, restricted in their movement, dictated what they should wear and what they can do, can we conclude that women’s status has improved and that all girls in the future will be safe? This is the question Khattar and his colleagues need to answer.

Read the original here.

Unheard voices

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, Jan 10, 2016

inShare

A note to my readers:

 

After a run of 22 years in The Hindu (and before that 4 years in Indian Express), this is the last column to appear in print (at least for the moment).  The Hindu's editors informed me that they were dropping it, and some other columns, to make way for "new content".  

Sadly, despite my long association with the paper, the people in-charge did not have the courtesy to call and speak to me personally about this, or to give me enough notice and finally agreed to this last column on my prompting!  On top of it, they removed the line that indicated clearly that I was stopping the column only because they wanted it and not on my own volition.

Be that as it may, I will, as I've written, continue to write about these issues, on this blog, on other digital platforms and hopefully in print.

The Hindu

Irom Sharmila's fast without end and her plea that the Armed Forces Special Powers Act be withdrawn has so far fallen on deaf ears. Photo: Sushil Kumar Verma

 

 

As 2016 begins, one prediction will not go wrong. There will be noise, much more noise on the Indian political-scape. Five state elections. Each will be as fraught as the next. But in the midst of this noise, some voices will be drowned out, voices that are barely heard even when it is quiet.

This column has tried, in the 22 years that it has occupied this space, to remind us that these unheard voices need an audience. Urgently.

Voices like that of Irom Sharmila in Manipur. Her fast without end and her plea that the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) be withdrawn has so far fallen on deaf ears. Sharmila continues her protest; successive governments continue to justify the imposition of AFSPA in northeastern States like Manipur and in Kashmir. And the voices of those who bear the brunt of this policy are heard only when there is an “incident”, when enough people die to be noted by the national press. And that is where the story ends.

Voices like that of Lakshmi, who lived on a Mumbai pavement for decades. Her plea that cities also belong to the urban poor, that they too are equal citizens who are guaranteed the same rights as those who live in 100-room mansions, has also fallen on deaf ears. Our cities are for people with houses, with cars, with holiday homes but not for people like Lakshmi who hold up the city and make it work. There is money for sea links, flyovers, broad roads, gleaming new airports and swanky business districts, but no money for affordable housing, potable water supply, sanitation systems that reaches the poorest.

Voices like that of Veena Devi, the mukhiya of Loharpura panchayat in Bihar’s Nawada district. She has only basic literacy skills. Yet she has managed to grasp the essentials of good governance, brought solar lighting to her village so that women feel safe, and figured out that being humane and efficient is not rocket science. There are thousands like her across India. Their voices will disappear if the law that Rajasthan and Haryana have enacted laying down minimum educational criteria for panchayat candidates, is accepted across the country.

Voices like the rural women journalists who work without fear or favour in the rough lands of Uttar Pradesh. The women who bring out Khabar Lahariya in five dialects remind us, who live in cities, that there is an India that our urban obsessed media so readily forgets. These women, trained to be journalists, set out fearlessly to expose incidents of harassment, rape, dowry and other social issues. They also cover local politics. They report, edit and produce their paper. For it they get brickbats, they face harassment, but there is also enough appreciation to keep them going. But their voices are not loud enough to drown out the ruckus that mainstream media generates on any number of issues every day.

Giving space to such voices is not something special; it is what journalism should be about. I chose ‘The Other Half’ as the title for this column because I believe that journalism should be about telling the stories that are not obvious, that don’t automatically hit you in the face. In our rush to meet deadlines, we journalists sometimes miss out on other perspectives. We fail to invest enough in listening to those who speak in quiet voices, those not quite sure about what they feel, those who appear inarticulate to the outside world.

These are often women, poor women, but also men who belong to groups so long marginalised that they have internalised the belief that their views do not count. So they never step forward and speak to you. If you are interested, or concerned, you have to seek them out and convince them you want to listen.

As we go into a new year, followed by one that stood out for growing intolerance, perhaps we should find ways of being more intolerant, but about issues other than the ones that cropped up last year.

We are too tolerant. We tolerate abysmal poverty in the midst of strident consumerism; we tolerate the infamy of millions of our citizens who continue to be discriminated against and marginalised by virtue of their caste; we tolerate unacceptable levels of violence against women within their homes and outside; we tolerate sex-selection and son-preference leading to a skewed sex ratio; we tolerate the existence of millions of undernourished and stunted children in a country where waste is becoming a symbol of prosperity and “progress”; we tolerate women dying at child-birth when this is not a life-threatening disease; we tolerate the excesses of the state in the name of “national security” even as our justice system fails to serve the powerless. The list of what we tolerate, and should not, is endless.

As I sign off on my last column in this space, let me assure the readers of The Other Half, who favoured me with sharp and useful comments through these years, that the other half of the story will continue to be told.

Maneka Gandhi is right

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, December 20, 2015

The Hindu

R.K. Pachauri continues to head TERI while his successor is yet to take over. Photo: Prashant Nakwe

 

 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi runs a tight ship. Hardly any minister in his cabinet speaks out of turn. Except one. Union Minister for Women and Child Welfare Maneka Gandhi appears to have no hesitation in voicing her unhappiness with some of the decisions of her government.

So while she is already on record asking that marital rape be criminalised even though her government thinks otherwise, in May this year she objected to the cutback in central funds allocated to programmes under her ministry. She was particularly upset that the allocation for the Integrated Child Development Services, a programme that has been crucial to improving nutritional levels of the most vulnerable children and women, has been cut by almost half. Furthermore, even the National Nutrition Mission launched in December 2014 by her government has been given short shrift. Far from the Rs.28,000 crores over five years that it was expecting, it has been allocated only Rs.100 crores so far.

In the recently released Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Programme, India’s maternal mortality figure of 190 (number of women who die for every 100,000 live births) is substantially higher than even war-torn Syria (49) and Iraq (67). Its child mortality figures are equally depressing as compared to many other countries.

Her latest missive to her own government is equally significant. In a letter to Union Finance and Corporate Affairs minister Arun Jaitley, Gandhi has asked him to make it mandatory for companies to reveal whether they have set up an Internal Complaints Committee (ICC) as required under the Sexual Harassment at the Workplace Act 2013. This is a reasonable request. Yet, Jaitley has dismissed it saying that such an additional demand on companies is “undesirable”.

How does the question of whether it is “desirable” or not enter the picture? The law has mandated that all companies and organisations must have an ICC. It also requires companies to inform employees about provisions of the law and train members of the ICC on the law and what constitutes an offence.

The non-compliance levels of Indian companies underline why Ms. Gandhi’s request is not unreasonable. According to a report titled “Fostering Safe Workplaces” by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry and Ernst and Young, one in every three Indian companies, or 31 per cent, has not set up ICCs. Of those who have, 40 per cent have not begun training the members in the provisions of the law, 35 per cent are unaware of the penal consequences of not complying with the law and 44 per cent have not circulated information about the law to their employees. FICCI has just signed a Memorandum of Understanding with UN Women to advance “gender equality and women’s empowerment”. A good start would be to get its members to comply with provisions of the sexual harassment law.

According to the National Commission on Women, the complaints of sexual harassment at the workplace have doubled from 249 in 2013 to 526 in 2014. These represent a sliver of the reality. For every one case reported, there are likely to be dozens that remain hidden, with the women too afraid to raise their voices for fear of losing their jobs or being further victimised.

We know from the recent sexual harassment case at The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) how difficult it is for a woman to pursue a case against a powerful individual. When the TERI employee first complained against the head of the institute, Dr. R.K. Pachauri, TERI did not even have an ICC. Once constituted, the ICC upheld the woman’s complaint. Dr. Pachauri was asked to go on leave and the board (after some pressure from the media, one might add) appointed his successor. Yet, Dr. Pachauri continues to head TERI while his successor is yet to take over. Meanwhile, the affected woman has resigned. In her resignation letter, she states: “TERI failed to uphold my interests as an employee, let alone protecting them. The organisation has instead protected R.K. Pachauri and provided him full immunity, despite being held guilty of sexual harassment by your own inquiry committee.” This case is as clear an illustration as any of the skewed power equations in sexual harassment cases.

Compliance with the law is obviously only the first step. The minimum requirement is an ICC. Yet, as is clear from the TERI case, it is not enough. Organisations must support those women who find the courage to speak up. Instead, in their desire to avoid any slur on their reputations, many organisations end up protecting the harasser and literally hounding the complainant to leave. So, Maneka Gandhi is right. Insisting that registered companies (and other organisations) comply with this minimum requirement is not asking for too much.

Is violence the new normal?

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, December 6, 2015

The Hindu

 

Has violence against women become so commonplace in India that we have stopped noting it? Do we need anniversaries — December 16 is coming up — to remind us of something that happens every day? Every year, the United Nations designates 16 days for activism against gender-based violence. So from November 25 to December 10, Human Rights Day, a slew of statements and events focuses on this. Useful as that is, we have to ask why we need specific days to express our concern for something that ought to be part of our daily discourse.

Gender violence does not occur occasionally. It happens everyday, everywhere. Yet, we only take note when something out of the ordinary happens, something horrific like the December 16, 2012, gang rape in Delhi. The sheer brutality of that rape and murder is seared into our collective memories. It galvanised people, who had never before been out on the streets, to shout that enough is enough and this culture of violence must end. 

That was three years ago. Today, that culture of violence remains embedded, throwing up new shoots every day. What is frightening is the ordinariness and the pervasiveness of sexual violence: the acceptance that it is there and will always be there; that women will get beaten up; that girls will be sexually assaulted. It is this ordinariness that makes us immune, almost indifferent to the daily litany of sexual assaults against women. 

 

Look at any newspaper. The stories leap out at youevery day, any day: “Nine-year-old sexually assaulted by her teachers”; “21-year-old jobless youth held for sexual assault of two-year-old.” What we read about is but a sliver of the whole. Because the whole of it takes place behind closed doors, in hidden places where there are no eyes to note, no cameras to record. It includes crimes that we don’t read about, because no one goes there to witness them, to listen to the victims, to understand that violence against women is the new normal in some parts of our country.

One such place is Chhattisgarh. With deadly regularity, there are reports of encounter deaths. What is not reported is what precedes or follows these encounters. Some of these stories have been reported in local newspapers but barely a word has appeared in the national media. As usual, a curtain of invisibility falls on incidents that occur in places that the media cannot access or does not try to access.

A few brave local journalists have tried to report on some of these stories that would otherwise be forgotten. And they have paid a heavy price for this. Two of them, Santosh Yadav and Somaru Nag, are still in jail in Chhattisgarh after being picked up in September and July respectively on suspicion of being sympathetic to the ‘Naxals’.

Apart from “encounter” killings, women in these troubled districts of Chhattisgarh have been targeted. Their stories remain largely unreported and uninvestigated. The report by Women Against Sexual Violence and State Repression that recently sent a team to investigate the impact of the conflict on women, speaks of the violence, rape and sexual assault that the local women live with every day. Their report, about incidents during October 2015, is based on testimonies by dozens of women.

One such story was that of a 14-year-old girl from Peddagulur village in Bijapur district. According to the report, the girl “was grazing cattle with other women when she was chased by security forces. Overpowered and blind-folded, she was raped by at least three people before she became unconscious.” Another tragic story is that of a four-month pregnant woman who was stripped by the security forces, “repeatedly dunked in the stream, and then gang-raped.” Other women spoke of being chased, beaten, their houses looted and their property destroyed.

Despite this report, the higher ups in the police dismiss the complaints as propaganda. When you divide a population into ‘us’ and ‘them’, and the latter are seen as ‘terrorists’, then anything can be denied. Crimes against humanity become propaganda. And by refusing to even acknowledge that these crimes have occurred, the state seeks to erase them from history.

In this case, there are two small factors that give some hope. One, that the women’s group and the local media were able to reach these villages and record the testimonies of the women. And two, that some of these women could travel to the district headquarters and depose before a district collector who was willing to listen and a police officer who was open to filing an FIR.

It is still a long haul from this stage to one where the men involved will be caught and punished. But given that practically no case of this kind has made it even to the FIR stage, it is worth noting. To come back to special days, and activism against gender violence, this is needed, every day, and against all forms of violence. Not just the sexual assaults in our cities, or those that the media choose to highlight.

Talking Taboo

The open discussion on menstruation is #Happy To Bleed's biggest achievement

Started by a college student, the campaign has chipped away at the structures of patriarchy that remain in place in India.

Kalpana Sharma  · Yesterday · 03:30 pm

Photo Credit: Facebook

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We usually do not speak about it in polite company. Yet, not only was the hashtag #HappyToBleed trending a few days ago, but the issue was a discussed during prime time on a mainstream news channel and endorsed by anchor Rajdeep Sardesai.

It is the M word – menstruation.

Menstruation has become a subject of open debate largely thanks to 20-year-old Nikita Azad. Earlier this month. Prayar Gopalakrishnan, president of the Travancore Devaswom Board that manages the Sabrimala Ayyappa Temple in Kerala, had justified keeping menstruating women out of the shrine. Azad reacted by starting a counter campaign, urging young women to hold placards or sanitary napkins reading "Happy To Bleed". She started a Facebook event for this purpose and a related hashtag on Twitter.

The campaign is novel because we never discuss menstruation so openly. It’s often spoken about in private – between women, between mothers and daughters, between sisters – but never in public.

We grow up not saying “to menstruate” or “I’m menstruating”. Instead, girls will say they have their “chum” (a strange term). At most, they might say “period”. The old-fashioned will say “menses”. In Marathi, you will indirectly say it is that time of the month.

But that time of the month is not a time for celebration. You don’t jump with joy when you start to bleed. Far from it.

Difficult experience

What I’m about to narrate is probably a familiar story. When I began menstruating, I was horrified. I didn’t know what was happening to my body. I was irritated, angry and depressed on being told that this was not a one-off, a medical condition that would be “cured”. It was a permanent condition that would affect me every month, or rather every 28 days.

“Not fair”, I told my father, who had more patience to discuss these matters than my mother, who thought I was an argumentative brat. “I wish I was a boy,” I wailed. “At least then I wouldn’t have to suffer this nonsense for the rest of my life”.

My understanding father countered: “But boys also have problems. They have to shave every single day.”

“Yes, but they can grow a beard to avoid shaving. I have no such option,” I said with a sense of defeat. My father had no comeback and decided to leave the matter there.

So menstruation is not a happy occurrence for girls. It is frustrating, inconvenient and happens far too often. Sometimes there are cramps before it comes. Often there is pain when it comes. And it’s messy.  It hampers your movement, changes your walk, and makes you self-conscious. Don’t tell us that the latest sanitary napkins or tampons have altered this reality. It has only allowed us to manage the situation better

But Nikita Azad and her supporters are absolutely right in asserting that what happens to their bodies is not dirty and impure. It is a fact of life. And they are not apologetic.

There is little comfort in knowing that it is not just Hindu temples, but other religions also place restrictions on menstruating women. Why? And what logic justifies this sustaining tradition? This is what is being asked today.

It’s truly bizarre that the Sabrimala priest should suggest that a machine be invented to check whether a woman is bleeding before she can enter a temple. A man of religious dogma is turning to science to enforce illogical tradition: it must be a first.

Positive movement

#HappyToBleed may disappear after a few weeks, but it’s what the hashtag represents that we need to understand.

Feminists have campaigned through the ages for the rights of women over their bodies. This meant fighting for the right to abortion, the right to use contraceptives, the right to healthcare that extended beyond the reproductive organs, and the right to feel comfortable in our skins. Feminist campaigns have been anchored in the belief that just because men and women are biologically different, women cannot be treated as lesser beings where the difference is used to whip them into submission and into accepting secondary status.

What is notable about many of the recent campaigns by young women is their ability to turn this basic belief into one that projects their own confidence and comfort with who and what they are. In many ways, launching a campaign like #HappyToBleed and posting pictures of themselves holding up sanitary napkins containing the hashtag demonstrates that today’s feminists are as confident and creative as women in the past. They have the added advantage of new technologies and new platforms that allow for different forms of campaigning, which they use to their benefit.

What is also noteworthy is that they see these campaigns not as a gimmick but as a way to challenge what lies beneath – the P word, or Patriarchy. Nikita Azad was at pains to explain that her campaign was not about temple entry for women but "a protest against patriarchy and gender discriminatory practices prevalent in our society".

Every such campaign chips away at the structures of patriarchy that remain in place in India. The structure is in no danger of crumbling just yet. But if enough young women learn to question and challenge regressive attitudes, perhaps there is hope.

We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in

What do elections mean for women?

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, November 22, 2015

PTI

 

 

They were everywhere. Women in colourful saris, smiling broadly, proudly displaying their voter IDs, standing in line to cast their vote. Once the dust settles on Bihar 2015, these images of Bihari women will linger.

But there are many questions. What was behind those smiles? Were they proud to be voters? Were they pleased that the act of voting made them visible? Had they really decided independently on their choice of candidate? Why do elections appear to mean so much to some women who appear otherwise to be virtually invisible to politicians, media, and society?

Many in the media concluded that the high turnout of women voters contributed to the victory of the Grand Alliance in Bihar. The Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) was more cautious after its post-poll survey, saying there was no clear correlation between the women’s vote and the Grand Alliance’s dramatic victory. In any case, how can we know for certain how many women voted for which party?

What the CSDS survey did conclude was that it was younger women and poor women who were most enthusiastic about voting. And they voted mostly for the Grand Alliance. More than that, by turning out as they did in large numbers on polling day, they reminded us yet again that despite all its problems, democracy is alive and breathing in this country.

How did this happen, this engagement by women in a process from which they had largely been excluded? Politics in most parts of India had been a male game. Of course, there were women but they found their space by virtue of their association with a powerful man and rarely on their own terms.

The change began with the 73rd and 74th amendments to the Constitution in 1992 that devolved power to local governments. It allowed for an increasing number of women to contest for seats in local bodies because one-third was reserved for them. In Bihar, it was Nitish Kumar, now once again the Chief Minister, who set off a trend by increasing reservation for women from one-third to half in 2006.

Even if we presume that half the women who stood for elections and won seats in panchayats and nagar palikas did so as proxies of their husbands, that still leaves a substantial number of women who knew what they were doing. What is also interesting is to see how those who initially accepted being proxies gradually began asserting their own agency. In fact, it was in Bihar that I saw this when I spent time with a woman mukhiya of a panchayat in Nawada district. Unlettered, a widow, and completely new to politics, within one term this woman had grasped the essence of what was expected of her. After her first term, she won again from a general seat.

The sad part of this story is that while women are voting and participating in panchayats and urban local bodies, their numbers are still miserably low in State Assemblies and in Parliament. That is evident in the results of the 2015 Bihar elections. According to data on the Election Commission’s website, only 25 women were elected out of 243 elected representatives. Of these, just under half, or 12 women, are from Lalu Prasad Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal. Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) had only five.

Perhaps one should not read too much into this. It is interesting, however, that while interviews with women during the election campaign suggested that the majority of them rated Nitish Kumar’s rule much higher because he was perceived to have enhanced safety for women, the RJD appears to have done better in choosing women candidates who could win.

Win or lose, the essential point of reservation, or encouraging more women to enter the political fray, is to accept that women have an equal right to participate in governance. If the scales are weighed against women’s participation because society lays down that they remain at home, there has to be active intervention to encourage them. That is why we need reservation. But just greater numbers of women in elected office will have little meaning unless the process of participation accommodates men and women as equal partners.

This is what a photograph of the new Cabinet of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, which went viral on social media, demonstrates. It underlines that it is feasible and completely normal to have a Cabinet with an equal number of men and women. When asked by a reporter to explain, Trudeau replied, “Because it is 2015!” Exactly. That is something we need to hear here. Working with women as equals is not a favour that men bestow on women. It is how the world should work. It is how the world can work.