Illusions of privacy

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, March 2, 2014

  

Photo: K.R. Deepak

Between the routine vandalism displayed by Hindu fanatical groups like the Bajrang Dal on Valentine’s Day every year and the continuing horror stories emerging from the khap panchayats in Haryana, lies a vast arena of romance, rebellion and repression that is rarely reported. It is the story of many thousands of young women and young men, caught in a time of transition where the old makes no sense and the new is uncharted and frightening.

You get a glimpse of these hidden stories when you read small newspaper items such as the one on February 13 in a New Delhi newspaper. It reported that a 16-year-old girl in Jamia Nagar tried to commit suicide from the roof of her school after being scolded by her teacher and principal. The longer story was that the girl was found to be carrying a “love letter” from her “boyfriend”. For this, her teacher and the school principal reprimanded her. It is not known whether she survived the attempted suicide.

In another story that I heard personally, a 17-year-old girl, daughter of a domestic help, ran away with a man almost 10 years older than her. She came back home three days later only after she persuaded her family not to file charges against the man, who she insisted she loved. She also insisted that he had not persuaded her to leave their home and that she was the one who took the initiative. The mother is understandably angry and confused, not knowing how this could have happened and what she should do next.

These two are not the teenage girls you see in advertisements for mobile phones who seem no different from girls anywhere in the world. They come from conservative families, and yet the world outside their homes appears to assure them that they are “free” to make choices. Technology, by way of mobile phones or the Internet, enhances this sense of choice and freedom.

In fact, mobile phones have effectively created the illusion of privacy. “Secret” conversations are possible. Text messages can be exchanged and erased before they are “discovered”. There is no need for the kind of “love letter” that was found on the unfortunate young girl in Jamia Nagar.

Yet, when these young women pursue their romantic dreams, facilitated by this private world they have created, they end up hitting their heads against the dead weight of tradition and conservatism — traditions that still believe that women have no right to choose who they will marry; traditions that deny the place for romance; traditions that determine that, above all, women must maintain the izzat, the respect, of the clan, the community, the family.

And so millions of our young girls today are being educated, are learning to use new technology, have their heads filled with ideas of romance from television serials and films, but are told none of this is allowed.

How should parents and teachers be dealing with this silent emergency that is all around us? Clearly, scolding, reprimanding, locking up our girls is neither effective nor desired. How do you open up the conversation about love, romance and sex when none of these things is ever discussed in most Indian families? Or for that matter in schools.

The only way is to talk about these issues, to let in the air and the light. It is not possible to shut young people off from influences that are all around us, particularly in urban areas. We are only just beginning to assess the extent to which something like the spread of mobile phones has impacted social relations, including inside families. These processes cannot be reversed.

Yet, if you look at the political discourse in our country, you can see that there is a real effort to do precisely that. Moral policing is only one side of it. By projecting constantly, the lack of safety for women in the public space, for instance, this discourse — in which the media too has a role — is directly and indirectly justifying steps to push women into the four walls of the home, into “safety”. It is upholding the view that young women must be watched and their movements monitored. It is virtually stipulating that the only “choice” for these young women, who have been exposed to ideas and influences vastly different from the world in which their mothers lived, is to quietly accept what the family or the community decides for them.

If an increasing number of young women are literally straining at the leash, it is hardly surprising. It would be tragic if their genuine desire for free choice is repressed and controlled to the point that they will be forced to break out, and sometimes pay a terrible price for such rebellion.

(To read the original, click here.)

Falling through the cracks

  

The HinduAn adolescent girl peeps through a makeshift hut. Photo: Arunangsu Roy Chowdhury

Adolescent girls are particularly vulnerable to violence and sexual abuse in the aftermath of disasters.

The recent news that a young woman, seeking shelter from the communal violence that rendered thousands homeless in Muzaffarnagar, UP, was raped by two men reminds us that following a disaster there are often more personal disasters — many that go unreported. Everyone is affected by a natural disaster or by strife leading to large-scale displacement — men, women and children. But we often forget the special plight of young girls in their adolescence in these circumstances.

In fact, as a recent and most interesting report by Plan International on the impact of disasters on adolescent girls (www.issuu.com) points out, this group is often invisible to those planning relief. Girls in this age group are not children but neither are they women. Yet they are often clubbed together with women with no consciousness about their specific needs.

In societies where women are powerless even in normal times, their lack of power is exacerbated when they are displaced and compelled to spend months, sometimes years, in relief camps.

For girls, the problems are compounded many times over. While some of their needs might be the same as those of their mothers — for instance, access to sanitation and safety around the relief camps — their vulnerability is greater.

They face a higher degree of sexual harassment and violence even as they go about their routine tasks of getting the food dole, collecting water, in some instances firewood, or bathing and going to the toilet.

Fear of this potential violence on girls forces many families to marry them off while they are still underage. The desperation for money also sometimes compels families to look the other way as these young girls are trapped into prostitution. But little is known of all this. It is often unspoken. And it is certainly not part of the accounting system of the impact of disasters on communities.

There is adequate data now to show that women displaced by disasters often experience a disproportionate amount of physical violence. Almost nine out of 10 women affected by the 2004 tsunami in India, for instance, reported having experienced physical violence within two years of the disaster. Many women also suffer much greater violence at home because of the impact of loss of work on the men, who in turn take out their frustration on their wives.

Why is any of this relevant? For several reasons. One, when a disaster occurs, or there is a communal clash as in Muzaffarnagar leading to displacement, the government, media and civil society focus on the event and the aftermath.

The tropical cyclone that hit Odisha and Andhra Pradesh recently, for instance, became the focus of much discussion on effective intervention by the government, especially of Odisha, in moving lakhs of people to safe places. This clearly saved many lives.

But now that the immediate emergency has receded, so has the spotlight. What is happening to the people who are still displaced, in relief camps, with their means of livelihood destroyed as also their homes?

How are the women and young girls managing in the relief camps?

If, as Plan International suggests, the instances of trafficking of young adolescent girls increases after a disaster, is anyone keeping an eye on what is happening to the disaster-affected in these two States?

Then again, the impact of communal conflict is sometimes worse because the displaced have lost trust in the authorities, are imbued with fear and dare not return to their homes.

The reported rape cases in Muzaffarnagar suggest that the venom and anger persist, and women become the collateral damage in this clash. Is anyone assessing these specific and special needs, especially of adolescent girls, for safety and security under these circumstances?

In the run-up to the 2014 elections, the possibility of more communal clashes of the kind we have already seen seems virtually unavoidable. Also, the frequency of natural disasters — thanks to global warming and environmental degradation — is inevitable.

According to the report quoted above, the frequency of natural disasters has increased from 90 per year in the 1970s to 450 per year in the last decade. Clearly, whether it is displacement due to conflict or due to a natural disaster, people, mostly poor people, are going to have to be prepared to spend long years in temporary shelters hoping and waiting for rehabilitation.

If the needs of the most vulnerable, which includes adolescent girls but also the elderly and the disabled, are addressed, all those affected by the disaster will benefit.

(To read the original, click here.)

A tale of contrasts

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, March 6, 2011

THE OTHER HALF

Are women better off today, or worse off? The answers, like most things in India today, are contradictory.

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We should not delude ourselves into believing that a few women making it to the top ... means that Indian women have overcome all barriers.

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Flying high: Sub Lieutenants Seema Rani Sarma and Ambica Hooda, the Navy's first airborne tacticians.

On February 26, the front pages of many newspapers carried a report about a man who delayed a Delhi-Mumbai flight because he did not want to be flown by a woman pilot. After everyone had boarded, and the plane was ready to take off, he heard during the routine announcements made before take-off, the name of the captain. It was a woman! He was adamant that he wanted to get off and reportedly told a fellow passenger, “I don't want to die! She can't handle her home, how will she handle a plane.”

The drama ended after several hours when the passenger was persuaded to apologise to the woman pilot and to the women on the crew. The airline explained that the passenger was of “unsound mind”.

Shared perception?

So we can laugh it off. A cranky passenger holds up a flight. Does that mean the majority of men fear for their lives if a woman is piloting a plane? Probably not. Yet, do men secretly ask the same question: Can she really handle a plane, a business, a bank, the stock market, a newspaper, a TV channel, the defence department, the police etc etc?

In this day of political correctness, few voice such apprehensions openly. There are always the exceptions. Like Maharashtra Industries Minister Narayan Rane. Speaking at a seminar on women and politics in Mumbai on February 24, Rane took the bull by the horns and stated his position: “It's all very well to demand women's quotas in politics but take care of the house and children first,” he reportedly told his largely female audience. “That is our sanskriti and that is what I believe.” Not a hint of political correctness there. Yet, is the minister exceptional in having such views, that women should abide by our ‘ sanskriti' first and then worry about things like political participation, or is he echoing the thoughts of the majority of men in this country?

In the context of March 8, International Women's Day, we do have to ask these questions. Are Indian women better off today, or worse off? Has there been change, or do we still have a long way to go? Have mindsets and perceptions about women's role, their status, their worth to society changed or does it largely remain the same?

Just as India's economic growth story is one of contrasts and contradictions, so too is that of women's status in India.

On February 28, even as Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee was reading the budget in Parliament, the last day of the census exercise ended. For three weeks, 2.7 million enumerators have collected data on our 1.2 billion people. It is being called the biggest census ever attempted anywhere in the world.

For Indian women, the census data holds a special significance. In 2003, the results of the 2001 census were made public. And one of the more shocking statistics that emerged was the male-female ratio. It shook up policy makers and those fighting for women's rights. For, despite economic growth, health programmes, specific mother and child programmes, the sex ratio in the zero to six years group was heavily skewed in favour of boys. Girls were either not being born, or were dying before they reached the age of six.

The story of entrenched son-preference leading to the misuse of technology for sex-selection is now well known. But it was the 2001 census that gave us the real picture, the actual numbers. Will the 2011 census indicate an improvement, or a further decline? We will have to wait until 2013 for that.

Perplexing

In the meantime, there is always news that defies the logic of sex selection and the declining sex ratio. Haryana, the state with one of the lowest ratios of women to men, has been producing a slew of remarkable women athletes. They shone not just during the Commonwealth and Asian games last year but just last week the Haryana women's hockey team came away with a gold medal in the recently concluded National games. How is this happening? Are Haryanvis finally valuing their women more than they did in the past?

Admittedly, these visible signs of change do not represent the whole story. We should not delude ourselves into believing that a few women making it to the top in the world of sport, business, media, or any other arena where women were formerly not noticed, means that Indian women have overcome all barriers. It is also true that the signs of change are more visible in urban areas where you now see women everywhere – even at the on-going World Cup matches as never before.

Just as the census figures will finally confirm whether the efforts to make a dent on son-preference are allowing more girls to be born and to survive their first six years, the latest report by UNICEF on the State of the World's Children reminds us of the distance still to be travelled.

Focusing this time on adolescents (15-19 years), UNICEF's data is not reassuring. It covers the estimated 243 million adolescents in India and points out that 56 per cent of adolescent girls in India are anaemic, that 30 per cent of them are married, and that three out of five women in the age group 20-49 were also married as adolescents. Despite the ban on child marriage, 29 per cent of adolescent girls in urban areas, and 56 per cent in rural areas are married before they turn 18. Worse still, the data reveals that one in five women in the age group 20-49 years had given birth before they turned 18.

Read together, this means that millions of girls, who are underweight and anaemic, become wives and mothers before their bodies are ready to bear children. And these are the women who then form part of the depressing statistic of maternal deaths in this country.

Such data does not discount the real victory of the Haryana girls on the sports field. The media, in its constant effort to appear celebratory about India, tends to discount one reality while overplaying the other. But both are part of the same story, one that indicates some success and many failures.

(To read the original, click on the link above)