Unheard voices

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, Jan 10, 2016

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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Irom Sharmila's fast without end and her plea that the Armed Forces Special Powers Act be withdrawn has so far fallen on deaf ears.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 Her fast without end and her plea that the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) be withdrawn has so far fallen on deaf ears.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.

Wisdom beyond schooling

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, Jan 18, 2015

Veena Devi is unlettered. I use that word rather than ‘uneducated’. When I met her more than five years ago, she was the mukhiya, or sarpanch, of Loharpura panchayat in Nawada district in south Bihar. She is now in her early forties. At a time when the government had reserved half the seats in panchayats for women, Veena Devi had been elected twice from general seats.

In her first term in the panchayat, she admitted that she felt lost. She did not understand fully what was going on. One could hardly blame her for this. Married at 13 to a man much older than herself, a widower with two children, she became a mother at 15 and a widow at 17. Veena had seen more than her share of life and its sorrows even before she became a major. Going to school was nowhere on the horizon.

Yet, perhaps because she was compelled to learn in the ‘school of life’, she had a wisdom beyond her years and certainly more profound than anything taught in our schools. Without being tutored, she had a sense of what people needed, how to order priorities in terms of the use of developmental funds, and how to listen to the people who came to her with problems.

I thought of Veena Devi when I learned that the Rajasthan Government had passed an ordinance stipulating that only those who have cleared Std. VIII or X can contest panchayat or zilla parishad elections in that state. If such a law had existed in Bihar, a woman like Veena Devi would never have had a chance to contest.

The assumption behind this ordinance, promulgated without any justification of its urgency, is that because panchayats have to handle considerable developmental funds, ‘educated’ people will be more efficient and less corrupt. The assumption defies not just logic but evidence that shows that corruption certainly has no connection with levels of education. Make a list of the most corrupt people in India and the majority would be so-called ‘literate’.

My own experience of meeting women like Veena Devi has been humbling. How easily those of us with privilege and access to education think we are wiser. And yet the clarity of these women shouldering the responsibility of managing developmental funds for a panchayat remind us that reading numbers and letters, going to school or college in itself does not make you a wiser person or a better administrator. It does not automatically imbue you with a concern for other people. It does not necessarily teach you how to listen to people, how to empathise, how to understand what people are trying to tell you.

None of this means that we must not ensure that every child does go to school; that by the time she is ready to contest an election she does possess basic literacy skills. But let us not, while we wait for that to happen, cut off from our systems of governance women like Veena Devi.

The best part of the 73rd amendment that laid the grounds for elections to panchayats and reservation for women is that it has brought into governance systems over 1.5 million women, many of them poor, from the lower castes, and also often with very little schooling. And although one should not generalise, and there are many instances of such women being used by men as proxies, there are an increasing number now who understand the system and who are able to work it so that it serves the interests of the largest number of people.

Let me return to Veena Devi to illustrate what I mean. Despite the handicap of minimal education, she quickly worked out how to overcome it. For instance, when she was handed petitions, she would ask people to give her some time to get back to them. She would then get a trusted person to read and tell her the content of the petition and come to a decision.

She also had the benefit of some sympathetic higher officials, including a woman bureaucrat, and a non-governmental organisation that invested in training her and giving her sound advice. As a result, when she had to decide about the use of funds for one of the villages, she chose a scheme of installing solar lights in the public areas of the village, knowing that this would benefit women in particular. In return, people of that village expressed satisfaction with her leadership.

For every Veena Devi, there are literally thousands of other women who are providing decent governance inputs at the panchayat level. They are largely unseen; they do face problems; they could benefit from more training and from getting literacy skills. But their main qualification is their commitment and their desire to serve their community. These women do not deserve to be left out of the picture because some misguided people in Rajasthan have decided that schooling equals wisdom and honesty.