Hunger games

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, October 26, 2014

The Hindu Hunger, malnutrition, under-nutrition… are not the talking points at election rallies or television debates .

In this season of festivities, when urban lifestyle-based diseases are getting a boost as we stuff our stomachs with forbidden foods, and our homes eat up even more of scarce electricity, one in every third child will go to bed hungry. Her home will be dark, without even the light from the hearth that cannot be lit because there is no cooking fuel.

Hunger, malnutrition, under-nutrition… these are not the talking points at election rallies or television debates but they remain a hard and unrelenting reality for million of Indians. I fear that — in the drummed-up euphoria surrounding cleaning up India, making in India and other such slogans — this depressing reality will be obscured and forgotten.

The good news, we are told, is that acute hunger is decreasing. On the Global Hunger Index 2014, prepared by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), India now ranks 55th of the 76 countries and its situation has moved from ‘alarming’ to ‘serious’. That is good.  But is it something to celebrate? That from 45.1 per cent of underweight children under five years of age in 2005-06, there are now 30.7 per cent of underweight children as of last year? It is progress, but that still leaves virtually one in every three children under five years of age that is underweight. This means this child will never be able to catch up as an adult because she has been deprived of adequate and nutritious food in the first five years of her life.

We should also be worried that the very programmes that helped this decline are now in danger of being neglected, or reformulated in a way that could prove detrimental. For instance, IFPRI acknowledges that government programmes that have contributed to this decline in child hunger are the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) under which balwadis in villages provide young children with a nutritious supplement; the committee to monitor malnutrition set up by the Supreme Court; the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) that has increased access to health care for many in rural areas; the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), which has guaranteed employment to millions of people; and the Public Distribution System (PDS), which provides subsidised food grains to people below the poverty line.

Apart from hunger caused by inadequate quantity of food, millions also suffer from hidden hunger, due to the deficiency of micronutrients in the food. If you are poor, not only do you get little to eat, but what you eat is also of poor quality. This is what aggravates the already deadly impact of undernutrition. Whenever these subjects come up for discussion — and internationally and in India they do so all the time — there are many technical fixes that are discussed such as bio-fortification, which involves increasing the micronutrient content of food crops.  In other words, the same grain that you eat will be fortified so that even if you eat the same quantity, you will get more nutrients into your system.

While all that is well-meant, if you are poor, you need money to buy food, even if it is subsidised. And you need work to earn the money to buy that food. Despite its shortcomings, MGNREGA has been responsible for putting that money in the hands of millions of rural poor. Yet, this programme is being deprived of funds and could end up a mere acronym.

The technical fixes also misfire because the approach is sometimes top-down without taking in the particular needs of different parts of India. For instance, one of the solutions for malnutrition among children is to give them a high-energy protein paste, that includes crushed peanuts, through the ICDS programme. But the solution, although it makes sense, does not take into account the fact that children’s tastes and eating habits differ in various parts of India. Or that severely malnourished children — like those in isolated tribal hamlets in some parts of Maharashtra, for instance — cannot digest this rich mixture because they are so emaciated. Rather than giving them nourishment, the mixture can cause acute diarrhoea. So, universalised solutions do not work if there is no flexibility built into such programmes.

Just as a handful of long-handled brooms will not clean India, there is no magic wand for ending hunger. The real measure of a country’s progress should surely be the child hunger index. And here India continues to fall short. Moving from ‘alarming’ to ‘serious’ is simply not good enough.

(To read the original, click here.)

Out in the open

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, October 12, 2014

Absence of sanitation facilities for women during disasters enhances their vulnerability. Photo: AP

The absence of sanitation facilities for women during disasters enhances their vulnerability.

Last month, while our attention was diverted by what our politicians were doing on foreign shores and at home, tragedies on a massive scale were being played out in many parts of the country.

Besides the devastating floods in Kashmir last month, vast swathes of the rest of India have also been inundated by floodwaters. Odisha, Bihar, Assam and Meghalaya have seen some of the worst flooding in years. For these states, floods are an annual phenomenon. But this year they have been worse and in places where the waters never advanced with such force in earlier years.

So even as the usual tamashas and tirades occupy our news space, spare a thought for the women, men and children in these states who are still struggling. Even as I write this column, an estimated four lakh people in Assam and Meghalaya, spread over 4,446 villages in 23 districts are homeless or badly affected by the floods. Thousands of people remain in relief camps because they cannot go back to their villages.

In Odisha last month, rising river waters submerged thousands of villages in 23 of the 30 districts in the state. In Bihar, too, the flooding has been relentless, spreading destruction, destitution and disease.

While the reports in the media on these states are few and far in-between — you have to make a determined effort to mine out the news from mainstream Indian media — the few reports that have appeared make heart-rending reading.

One report that I found particularly touching appeared in The Hindu on August 27, 2014, under the headline, ‘Women fight shame in flood hit Bihar’ (http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/women-fight-shame-in-flood-hit-bihar/article6356043.ece?homepage=true). It quoted women in Bihar’s Supaul district talking about the particular challenge that they face as women in the wake of floods.

A woman in her thirties was quoted saying, “Poor women like us face more problems to relieve ourselves when floods force us to flee our villages. It is our fate. No one can imagine this except those like us.”

Another older woman said, “We have no option but to relieve ourselves in the open by closing our eyes and minds to the hell-like situation.”

What they are talking about is the pathetic absence of any sanitation arrangement for women during such disasters. You might argue that in any case many of these women would not have toilets and are therefore used to open defecation. But can anyone imagine what this woman means when she says they close their “eyes and minds” when they go out to relieve themselves in a flooded landscape?

Why, people would legitimately ask, should we make such a fuss about women’s problems at such times when everyone — men, women and children, as well as the elderly — are affected? I do so because in many ways women’s vulnerabilities are enhanced at such times. If they confront a daily challenge of sanitation, this is compounded during floods and other disasters. Yet, when relief measures are put in place, the particular needs of women are often overlooked.

In a powerful article that Assam-based journalist Teresa Rehman wrote after the 2010 floods in her state (infochangeindia.org/environment/features/sanitation-in-the-time-of-floods.html), she quotes a woman called Salma Begum from Sonitpur district: “Sometimes we have to seek permission from the owners of a dry patch in order to defecate. Most often we have to do it discreetly, on other people’s land, as it becomes difficult to control oneself. Sometimes, during the floods, we starve ourselves so that we do not need to defecate.”

In this instance, women like Salma were beneficiaries of the government’s Total Sanitation Programme, in particular low-cost toilets. Yet, one flood, and everything including these toilets are washed away. Women like her are then left with no alternative but to revert to the age-old practice of open defecation, with the added complication of not finding a dry spot.

Floodwaters are indiscriminating. They sweep away everything and everyone that comes in their way. But for the survivors, the story varies greatly depending on class, caste and gender. And this is where the voices of women like Salma from Assam or the women from Bihar must be heeded. The process of relief and rehabilitation must necessarily be ‘gendered. The absence of toilets is a woman’s problem in a very specific way.

Sweeping our streets clean is all very well but surely cleanliness must mean that women do not need to live through ‘a hell-like situation’ on a daily basis.

(To read the original, click here.)

A woman’s worth?

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, Sept 28, 2014

• 
  The widows of Vrindavan. Photo: V.V. Krishnan
• 
  The widows of Vrindavan. Photo: V.V. Krishnan

So let me add my voice to the controversy generated by Mathura Member of Parliament Hema Malini’s comments about the thousands of destitute widows and abandoned women who live in her constituency. In the fashion of most public figures caught out, Hema has proceeded to retract her remarks, and claims that she wanted the sons and daughters of these women to take responsibility for them.

However, the issue is not just her insensitivity towards these women, many of who barely survive on alms and die miserable lonely deaths, but that the Bharatiya Janata Party member has also cynically used these women to rake up an entirely pointless issue of regionalism. Go back to where you came from, she said in effect. For someone who is supposed to be aware of the Indian Constitution and the rights it gives its citizens, this exceeds limits of not just insensitivity, but ignorance.

The only salutary purpose the BJP MP’s remarks have served is to draw attention again to a shameful tradition that has no place in 21st century India. If Hema is worried about the conditions in which these women live, she should be questioning the very reason that drives them to Vrindavan.

What she and all of us need to question is why in India a woman’s worth is measured primarily through the institution of marriage. Why should a woman’s life end when her husband dies, or abandons her? Why does she become ‘inauspicious’ when this happens? How can we support or justify ‘traditions’ that debase women for no other reason than that their husbands have died or have abandoned them?

We cannot speak of women’s rights and equality as long as traditions like this exist, traditions that are reinforced by politicians who suggest that the solution to the situation in Vrindavan is to get families to send their destitute widows to temples in their own states.

The National Commission for Women (NCW), at the behest of the Supreme Court, had done an interesting survey of the women in Vrindavan. In its 2009-10 report, the NCW makes a number of useful recommendations that Hema ought to read and pursue, given that she represents these women in Parliament. She should also take time to read the report as it contains useful data, including more accurate estimates of the number of widows and abandoned women in Vrindavan. Based on detailed interviews with 216 women, the report documents their pathetic life and the reasons for their coming to Vrindavan. Although the majority of them were from West Bengal, there were also women from other states including Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha, Assam, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh. Most of the women were in the 60 and older age group. Also, while the majority were widows, among them were women who had been divorced or separated, women who came to Vrindavan with destitute and ailing husbands, and women who had never been married.

The report quotes the 2005 survey conducted by the Vrindavan Nagar Palika Parishad that estimated the number of such women at 3,105. Another survey in 2008-09 of the number of women receiving pensions placed the figure at 3,710. Even if these are underestimates, and they most likely are, the total figure would surely not exceed 10,000 in a population of 63,005 in Vrindavan (2,011 census). Incidentally, between 2001 and 2011, the population of Vrindavan grew by less than 10,000. So there is more than a little exaggeration in the numbers of widowed and abandoned women flocking to the city. Numbers aside, even if a handful of women are compelled to leave their homes and travel to a temple town many miles away just to survive, it is a matter of shame. We have to rethink the value of a woman within the institution of marriage. As long as she is measured first by the amount of dowry she brings, second by her ability to produce a male heir, and third by dying before her husband, the tragic saga of the widows of Vrindavan will continue.

The Prime Minister is busy travelling around the world, projecting the image of an India impatient to change and move ahead. Perhaps he should turn his gaze to the condition of widows in his own constituency, Varanasi, and that of his party colleague’s, Vrindavan. India will move ahead when we understand what is holding back half our population.

(To read the original, click here.)

Devil in the detail

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, August 31, 2014

The Hindu Students express solidarity. Photo: Kiran Bakale

Crimes against women have become a popular talking point in India. They figure in the Prime Minister’s Independence Day speech. They find a mention in a statement by the Finance Minister about how the growing incidence of crimes against women is affecting tourism in India. And they are the focus of a plan by the ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, to win the 2017 Assembly elections in India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, albeit with a twist.

The BJP is concerned about crimes only against women of one community (read Hindu) and has concluded, without any evidence, that the perpetrators are all of another community (read Muslim), who are waging something that exists only in the imagination of the Hindutva rightwing, namely ‘Love Jihad’.

Where does all this leave Indian women, of whatever community? Should they feel reassured, more secure, that the highest in the land are concerned about their welfare? Or should they be afraid that this concern is ultimately only instrumental, to push a political agenda, or an economic one — such as making India a more attractive tourist destination?

Whatever one concludes, it is evident that those making statements from the top have little idea of what happens on the ground when women are assaulted, and particularly when they pick up the courage to report the crime and to fight the case through our courts.

August 22 was the first anniversary of a brutal gang rape in the heart of Mumbai when a young woman journalist went on a work assignment to the abandoned Shakti Mills compound. Her resilience and determination played no small role in ensuring that the case was registered, the perpetrators apprehended, charged and committed. But only now, a year later, do we know the details of what she went through in the process of seeking justice.

These facts are brought out in two important recent articles. One by Flavia Agnes, Audrey D’Mello and Persis Sidhva in Economic and Political Weekly of July 19, 2014 (http://www.epw.in/insight/making-high-profile-rape-trial.html) informs us in considerable detail about what happened before and during the Shakti Mills trial. It exposes the insensitivity that infects the entire system — from police to prosecution to the media — where the welfare of the survivor seems to be the lowest priority. If the survivor did not have the support of the Majlis Legal Centre, to which the authors of this article belong, her fate would have been much worse. For instance, it is they who insisted that her privacy should be protected from the intrusive and persistent media when she entered and left the courtroom during what was supposed to be an ‘in camera’ trial. The authors also write about the mockery of the confidential nature of the trial when the public prosecutor gave out all kinds of details of the trial to a hungry media.

Even more disturbing is an article written for the web by a colleague of the Shakti Mills gang rape survivor. Titled ‘That hashtag was my colleague’ (https://in.news.yahoo.com/that-hashtag-was-my-colleague-060844991.html), the article gives us a different insight into what happens in such a situation, including the gross insensitivity of the media concerned only about an ‘exclusive’.

What I found personally most disturbing was the description given in the article about the Test Identification Parade (TIP). In popular TV crime serials and films based on systems in the West, we see a one-way glass between the survivor and the suspects. Each suspect carries a number and the survivor is supposed to state the number of the person or persons she considers responsible for the crime. In India, the system is truly brutal. In one room, often without any women police, a rape survivor has to face a line-up of men. She then has to walk up to the men she identifies as the perpetrators of the crime, touch them on the shoulder and then announce loudly what they did to her. One cannot even imagine the trauma that a woman who has been brutalised must go through with such a grotesque system in place.

There is much else in both articles that will disturb anyone concerned about the issue. But what speaks loudest is the urgent need to address these details of our criminal justice system so that women subjected to sexual assault do not have to go through further assaults on their selves in the process of seeking justice. 

(To read the original, click here.)

Invisible women

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, August 17, 2014

At a garment factory. Photo: K. Pichumani

Should women ‘work’ after they get married? I put the word work in inverted commas deliberately because women work all the time but only when they do paid work is it considered ‘work’.

One imagines that this question need not be asked anymore because India is changing. But is it? Going by recent reports and studies, it is evident that some things never change, or change so slowly as to be imperceptible. And the one equation that does not change is the expectation from women once they get married. Their priority has to be ‘the family’ and all else, including jobs that could be something they enjoy doing, must be set aside.

An advertisement that is being passionately analysed and discussed on social media depicts a woman boss instructing her junior, who turns out to be her husband, to work over-time to complete a project. Meantime, she heads home and instead of putting up her feet and relaxing, proceeds to cook up a gourmet meal for the husband. She then sends him the pictures through her phone to tempt him to come home for the meal.

So is this depiction of woman as the boss ‘progressive’ or is it ‘regressive’ because ultimately she conforms to the stereotype of the wife who must please her husband? If the roles had been reversed, would the husband boss have done something similar? At most, he might have ordered in a great meal, or asked the domestic help to cook something special. Incidentally, where was the domestic help when the woman ‘boss’ was slaving in the kitchen? It stretches credulity to believe that a woman at the top in the corporate sector would not have domestic help.

Perhaps we are making too much of this but the advertisement raises other, more important, questions about the ability of women to continue doing paid work after marriage. This paper carried an interesting analysis on this subject on August 11 (http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/marriage-driving-urban-women-out-of-jobs/article6301574.ece). The article reported research that showed that women dropped out of paid work once they got married or/and had children. The exceptions were women in the upper income bracket and the poorest, who had no option but to continue some form of wage work. Poor women in villages also had no choice although their work was often unpaid as it was part of agricultural tasks that they were expected to do in the family.

What the advertisement represents is the exception to the rule. For the majority of women who are poor, whether in city or village, there is really no choice. Speak to any woman who works as a domestic. You hear identical stories. There is not enough in the house to make ends meet. The man either has no work, or cannot work due to addiction, or is in a low-paid insecure job. Often, the woman’s salary is the only steady amount coming into the family kitty. As a result, these women — come rain or shine, illness or family tragedy — are forced to continue to work. What is interesting is that despite the drudgery of domestic work, many of them persist because it gives them a chance to escape the greater drudgery of the work they must still do in their own homes.

The article in The Hindu, however, does touch upon a group of urban women who are neither so poor that they must work for survival nor so well-off that they can continue to work outside their homes because they have help at home. It is the women in the middle who get caught. For them, paid work is ‘permitted’ so to speak, only until they get married. And then it has to stop. Unless the family into which they marry ‘allow’ them to continue. So the little bit of autonomy they gain through earning something through their own labour is snatched away from them the day they get married. Apart from the blow to their own self-esteem, this is a waste because these women could be productively employed.

We do not read enough about this class of women. They are all around us in our cities — working in garment factories, in offices, as saleswomen in the growing retail sector, in call centres etc. Yet, they are virtually invisible. What are their stories?

Perhaps it is time the camera focused on these lives. 

(To read the original, click here.)

Boy, girl or super athlete?

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, August 3, 2014

The Hindu Dutee Chand. Photo: K. Murali Kumar

Our sport authorities need to be educated. Urgently. They need a crash course in understanding human biology, that there is no clear binary between male and female and that there are many conditions in-between.  But clearly, this knowledge, that has now become fairly commonplace, has failed to trickle down to those controlling Indian athletics.  They continue to believe that testing testosterone levels will conclusively establish whether a woman athlete is indeed a woman!

 So even as women athletes are bringing home medals from the Commonwealth Games, the Sports Authority of India (SAI) and the Athletics Federation if India (AFI) will be better remembered for denying, virtually at the last minute, the chance for one of our most promising runners to compete in these games in Glasgow.

 The case of Dutee Chand will not surprise people who have followed the often farcical and always tragic cases of leading women athletes around the world who have been barred for something over which they had no control. “Sex tests” as they are called, or gender determination tests, are now more refined than the crude form they took earlier.  But they are still not conclusive because nature is sometimes inconclusive in clearly defining the so-called “maleness” or “femaleness” of individuals. Children born with this kind of biological confusion — that is now recognised medically — grow up as boys or girls depending on the way they are socialised. They believe they are boys or girls. They grow into men or women. But the problem arises when the stereotypical definitions of what constitutes a man or a woman clash with the way a person appears.

 So if women athletes are supposed to be weaker than men, a strong woman is suspect.  Is she really a woman? Is she taking drugs to heighten the male hormones, thereby giving her greater strength? Or was she born this way? The latter question is not taken into consideration. Instead, the so-called “unfair” advantage that a strong female athlete might have is used as a stick with which to beat her. And many times, such promising athletes are ruined for life.

Dutee is regarded as one of India’s most promising track athletes. She has consistently brought home medals, the latest just six weeks ago at the Asian Junior Athletics in Taipei where she won two golds. Just as she was getting set to participate in the Commonwealth Games, she was made to undergo this so-called ‘gender determination’ test and thereafter held back. 

 The girl is just 18. She comes from a poor weaver’s family in Odisha. At one shot, the very people who should have been nurturing her for the future have virtually destroyed her career. Luckily for her, the Odisha government and sports association have promised help and are willing to invest in whatever medical intervention is needed to set right her hormone levels. But the question should still be asked: why do we have these tests? And when it is mandatory that even if tests are conducted, that they be kept confidential, why is this information put out in the public space? Dutee says that within days of the news of the tests, journalists landed up at her home in Gopalpur and demanded from her bewildered parents an answer to the nonsensical question: “Is Dutee a boy or a girl?” 

 A woman who knows well what this feels like is the outstanding woman athlete Santhi Soundarajan, who was stripped of her silver medial won at the 2006 Doha Asian Games when she failed a “gender” test. Santhi has managed, with immense difficultly, to overcome her despair and has rehabilitated herself.  But when she heard about Dutee, here is what she said, “They have tested her at the last minute, humiliated her and broken her heart… Now, if she re-enters the sports field, things will not be normal. Even if she takes treatment, people will kill her with their suspicious gaze.”

 Depressing words from Santhi, but Dutee should look at the example of another female athlete similarly humiliated. Caster Semenya from South Africa was considered the fastest woman on earth after her spectacular performance in 2009 at the World Championships.  Like Santhi and now Dutee, Caster “failed” the test and was humiliated.  But she dug herself out and went on to compete in the London Olympics where she won the silver medal in the women’s 800 metres. South Africa had her carry the country’s flag.  When will our sports authorities grow up and develop knowledge and sensitivity to nurture our future women athletes?

(To read the original, click here.)

In the war zone

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, July 20, 2014

inShare

AFP Children flee from the war zone. Photo: AFP

 

 

There is a photograph that has appeared in most newspapers around the world. It is of a young Palestinian boy, no older than 10 or 11, weeping inconsolably. His father was one of the hundreds who was killed in the brutal bombing of Gaza by the Israeli armed forces during this month when the residents of that area are praying and fasting.

In this escalation of hostilities in one of the world’s most volatile of regions, this nameless boy, and thousands of children like him, force us to face the ugly truth — that wars kill children, not a few, but millions. They wound children. And they leave them bereft and scarred for life.

Earlier this month, the United Nations released its annual report on children and armed conflict. It makes depressing reading. It documents the ever-expanding arena of war and conflict, between and within countries. It states that armed conflict has ‘a disproportionate impact on children’ and that indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas as well as the use of terror tactics was taking a worrying toll on children.

The report also reminds us that despite campaigns to stop using children, national armies and armed groups continue to recruit young children. The UN report says that last year, children were used in 23 conflict situations around the world. It gives a long list of countries where this is happening and specifically names 51 armed groups that continue to use children.

Apart from Palestine, almost every day we are reminded about what war and conflict do to children. Remember the 223 schoolgirls in northeast Nigeria abducted by the armed rebel group Boko Haram? It is now three months and they have still not been released. On July 13, the leader of the group released a video where he mocked the efforts of people like the brave Pakistani girl Malala Yousafzai to negotiate their release. What is happening to these girls? Will they ever return? And if they do, will they be able to deal with what they have been through?

The UN report also gives us a glimpse of this aspect of war and children, that of sexual violence that boys and girls face. We do not know what is happening to those girls in Nigeria. What is already documented is the violence that children are facing in places like Syria, where there appears no end to the war. The UN report mentions that apart from repeated sexual harassment of women and girls at government checkpoints, there are reports of the abduction of young women and girls in groups at checkpoints. These girls are then released a few days later and sent back to their villages, thereby ‘intentionally exposing them as victims of rape and subjecting them to rejection by their families.’

Children are killed, kidnapped, forced to fight. But apart from that, in on-going conflicts, such as the situation between Palestine and Israel, they live under the daily cloud of violence, where the ordinary routine of daily life like going to school become impossible.

Here is a quote from the UN report about the situation in the West Bank last year. Change the year to 2014, and you will get a sense of what has become a frequent, almost permanent, state of affairs in Palestine: “Fifty-eight education-related incidents affecting 11,935 children were reported in the West Bank, resulting in damage to school facilities, interruption of classes and injury to children. Forty-one incidents involved Israeli security forces operations near or inside schools, forced entry without forewarning, the firing of tear gas canisters and sound bombs into school yards and, in some cases, structural damage to schools. In 15 of the incidents, Israeli security forces fired tear gas canisters into schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), some during class hours, without forewarning. In a majority of instances, schoolchildren and teachers were delayed or prevented from going to school owing to checkpoints, areas closed for military operations or exercises, military patrols in front of schools and preventive closures by the Israel Defense Forces. In 32 cases, teachers and children were arrested inside the school, at checkpoints or on their way to school.”

Like that boy in the photograph, generations of young children in Palestine and elsewhere do not know what it is like to simply go to school, to study, to dream of a better future.

(To read the original, click here.)

Kicking out sexism

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, July 6, 2014

inShare

The Hindu Mumbra girls at a practice session.

They weep, they scream, they explode with anger, they dance with joy — millions of football fans around the world are right now focused on only one thing — World Cup Football in Brazil. The controversies that preceded it have been all but forgotten as lovers of the game, men and women follow every move.

But the players are all men. Football remains, in popular imagination, a man’s game.

Yet, women also play football. Including Indian women. You would not know that as precious little is written about them. But this year, for a change, there has been some welcome reporting on the women who also kick the ball around.

One of them is a remarkable 36-year-old from Manipur — Oinam Bembem Devi. Her claim to fame is that she plays excellent football, so good that she captained the Indian Women’s Football team thrice. Yet, at the age of 12 when she began kicking a ball around with the boys in her neighbourhood, she could not have imagined this. In fact, according to reports about her, Bembem was so keen to play football that she cut her hair short and changed her name to Bobo so that she could continue to play with the boys.

Inevitably, she was found out. But that did not deter her. She continued with the game, played so well that she got a job with the Manipur police and went on to captain not just one of the teams in Manipur but the Indian team. Since Bembem’s early efforts to play football, things have changed considerably and today more girls and than boys play football in Manipur.

The Indian women’s football team has a higher FIFA ranking than the men’s — 50 as opposed to 154 for the men. It is also ranked 11 in Asia, while the men’s team is 28. But 50 is still not good enough for it to qualify for the Women’s World Cup Football that will be played in Canada next year.

Should it matter whether Indian women play football or qualify for world tournaments? The only reason to even discuss this is because the very fact that women are playing — and playing well — a game that is traditionally seen as a male sport has a significance that is greater than just the game.

This newspaper carried a wonderful story about a girls’ football team in Mumbra, an urban settlement outside Mumbai that is 95 per cent Muslim (http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/mumbai/mumbras-women-footballers-have-grounds-for-rejoicing/article6130903.ece). They began playing despite objections from their parents. But within a year, not only have they made their parents proud by winning in a couple of football tournaments but they have also succeeded in getting the Thane Municipal Corporation to reserve a 1.5 acre plot exclusively for women’s sports.

Earlier, Mumbra’s claim to fame, or rather infamy, was that it was home to Ishrat Jahan, the young woman tragically shot in a fake encounter in Ahmedabad in 2004. Today, these girls who play football are demonstrating how conservative norms can be broken even in an area where women’s literacy is low and girls are expected to marry young. If this can happen in Mumbra, surely it would not be so difficult to achieve elsewhere in India.

Whether the girls in Mumbra go on to become professional players is not so important as the fact that they have a chance to play, to enjoy the exhilaration of sport and the taste of freedom that it gives them.

Yet, ensuring that this trend continues and grows is an uphill battle. With the rise in the incidents of sexual assault on young women, parents are tempted to prevent girls from going out. Yet the safety of confinement will not make the world safer for girls.

What we need is for society to accept that girls have an equal right to the public space, that they too need the joy of being able to run free, to kick a ball, to hold a bat, to sprint, to jump over hurdles or to swim in the river, the sea, the pool. This is not a special favour being conferred on them.

So even as the football season peaks and then winds down, let us look around and see how many of our girls can go out there with confidence and kick a ball.

(To read the original, click here.)

That R word again!

The Hoot

SECOND TAKE
Kalpana Sharma

Every day, reporters routinely file thousands of words of copy and only a fraction of this sees the light of day. It is part of the ‘collateral damage’ of the news world – only news that’s fit to print, we are told, survives. Or is it news that fits the emerging definition of what is “news”? 

Those who have been in the print media for the last three decades will be familiar with how this definition has changed over time. Yet, every time an ostensibly ‘newsy’ development is covered, but not printed, one needs to ask why. 

I can distinctly remember at least three press conferences where the media was present in full strength but the next day, there was practically no report. 

The first was some time in 1989 when workers from Hindustan Lever had been locked out from its Sewri plant. In protest, they had begun manufacturing a soap called Lockout, which they sold to raise funds for the workers. The newspapers reported such developments even if the space given to the workers’ point of view was perfunctory. In response to a request from the union, a fact-finding committee was constituted to look at whether the lockout was legal, and also at the conditions of the workers who had lost wages during the lockout. Krishna Raj, the well-respected editor of Economic and Political Weekly, headed this committee. 

When the report of the committee was ready, a press conference was called at the Press Club to release the report. At that time, I was a Senior Assistant Editor at The Times of India (TOI). I went to the press conference as I was interested in the report.  Reporters from my paper and practically every other newspaper in the city crowded into the room and asked many questions of the committee.  One expected that the result of such a lively press conference would be reports in the newspapers the next day. But no, there were no reports, or practically none. Certainly, TOI did not carry anything although I do know that a report was filed. I gathered that the company’s representatives had managed to speak to the newspaper’s senior management and ensure that nothing appeared. 

After I joined The Hindu, something similar happened. A woman reporter from the TV channel Sahara Samay went public with a sexual harassment charge against the person in-charge of the channel. She named him and gave detailed instances of the way she had been harassed. She also reported how the company had responded by first transferring her and then dismissing her rather than looking into her charges. Once again, the press conference was packed, this time with many television channels also recording her statement and speaking to her afterwards.  Yet, the next day, none of the Mumbai papers reported this. I filed a story that appeared in The Hindu, but the paper does not have a Mumbai edition. 

I was reminded of both these instances last week when I saw a virtual repeat of them unfold. The Mumbai Press Club must be commended for taking a risk to organise a release of Paranjoy Guha Thakurta’s controversial book “Gas Wars: Crony Capitalism and the Ambanis”. Apart from the author, the club had assembled a panel consisting of former Petroleum Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar and senior journalists Kumar Ketkar and Govindraj Ethiraj. It was a lively discussion. Press Club President Gurbir Singh spoke of how they had tried to get a representative from the Ambanis to join the panel but the company declined because the book contained matter that they considered defamatory and for which a legal notice had been sent to the author. 

While Guha Thakurta spoke about the book and also the legal notice he and others had received from the Ambanis, Aiyar, in his inimitable style, provided several quotable quotes as he spoke about his stint as minister. He also gave his opinion on gas pricing, an issue that is currently in the news because the Modi government has decided to defer any decision on this until September. Even if the book has already been in the news since its release in Delhi, Aiyar’s comments were worthy of at least a few column inches. 

Yet, the next day, there was almost nothing on this discussion in any of the Mumbai papers; not even the financial papers, although representatives of these papers asked several pointed questions of the panelists. Only Mumbai Mirror carried something because its columnist, Ajit Ranade (who is not a journalist), used his column to write about the event and the issue of gas pricing. Asian Age had a short item, and a PTI item focused only on Mani Shankar Aiyar’s comments on gas pricing was picked up by the Economic Times. 

If this had been a big news day, one would have understood that newspapers had no space. But nothing earth-shattering happened in the city, except a fire in the administrative building of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST), a stone’s throw away from the Press Club. 

Significantly, Ethiraj stated that he had received a “friendly” call from a representative of the Ambanis informing him that the author of the book had been slapped a defamation notice! 

So one wonders, how many other “friendly” calls were made before  and after this event to ensure that nothing of it was reported the next day.  Even if they were not, has the media decided to be ultra cautious about reporting on the Ambanis to pre-empt any legal action? Is this not a kind of self-censorship that should have no place in a democracy? And are we going to see more of this in the future?  

These are questions that we in the media need to discuss and ask ourselves. How have we come to this stage where 39 years after Mrs Indira Gandhi imposed press censorship during the Emergency, the Indian media has decided to censor itself?

Going after the green

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, June 22, 2014

Pocket of rich biodiversity.Photo: Arunangsu Roy Chowdhury

Crimes against women have been constantly in the news. But crimes against nature remain largely unreported.

Given the current climate, with the Intelligence Bureau claiming that non-governmental organisations like the crusading international environmental group Greenpeace, are detrimental to India’s progress, and with the ubiquitous ‘foreign hand’ making a serendipitous comeback, such crimes are likely to become invisible, noticed only by those who have been damned as ‘obstructionist’ or worse still, ‘anti-national’.

As I tend to identify with that tribe, let me address this column to the elements that ensure that our physical environment does not become an endless landscape of roads and buildings, leaving no space for the unregulated, the wild, the unexpected that only the natural environment, left inviolate, provides.

A big part of this unregulated environment is trees. Today, they are in danger. They will drown as more dams are built, or the height of existing dams is raised. They will be razed to make way for infrastructure — roads and highways, airports, electric power stations. They will be stifled and killed by the concrete pavements surrounding them in our expanding cities. They will be excavated from our forests to make way for open-pit mines producing the minerals considered essential for a ‘modern’ India.

The former environment minister Jairam Ramesh and the current Prime Minister Narendra Modi both spoke of the need for toilets rather than temples. Will anyone now say that India needs more forests not freeways? That even if factories, roads and railways, airports and sea ports are essential, so is a tree cover that saves the soil, replenishes the water, provides sustenance to millions of forest dwellers, cleans the air and absorbs some of the filth and poisons being generated by our modern lifestyles, poisons that will accumulate in the atmosphere and ruin the health of future generations.

The new environment minister, Prakash Javadekar, whose ministry is also supposed to take care of forests and address climate change, is a man in a hurry. He wants to clear ‘obstacles’ to progress in the form of pending environmental clearances. To do that, he wants to change the old criteria that classified forested areas as ‘violate’ or ‘inviolate’. The latter category was formulated to ensure that nothing — no project, no mine, no dam — could disturb certain forested areas.

The parameters set out to decide whether a forest area is ‘violate’ or ‘inviolate’ are the quality of the forest area, the produce it generates, its biodiversity, hydrological, social, aesthetic and economic value. All these are essential. So in what way can this list be ‘rationalised’ or altered by the new minister? Why should these parameters be changed? The only reason would be to find a way to grant clearances to projects that will go against these criteria.

Forests are also about people, not just trees. An estimated 350-400 million people in 173,000 villages live within forests, or depend on them. That is not a small number. So if forests are destroyed, to make way for a mine, a factory, a dam, a power plant, there are people whose lives are also destroyed. The previous government passed laws protecting their rights, giving them the power to decide whether a forest area can be diverted to other uses.

What will happen to these rights? In the name of ‘progress’ and fast-tracking environmental clearances, will laws like the Forest Rights Act be revised or negated? If and when this happens, will the voices of those who have fought for the rights of forest dwellers, and for the protection of our remaining forests, be heard?

These are questions that need to be asked now, not after policies are put in place that facilitate the destruction of the natural environment and that deprive nature-dependent communities of their rights. If environmentalists are apprehensive about the future, they are justified. So far, nothing has been said or done to assuage their fears.

Despite this, what they can and must do is document the importance of fighting to preserve the environment — in the way the TreesIndia Group is doing on the India Biodiversity Portal (http://treesindia.indiabiodiversity.org/). Spend a few minutes on this site. It will give you a sense of the wealth that we have in India and what could disappear without a trace if we don’t speak up now on behalf of nature.

(To read the original, click here.)

#casteprice

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, June 8, 2014

PTIRelatives of the Badaun victims.

We have run out of words. How does one express outrage, disgust, despair when two Dalit teenage girls are gang raped, murdered and hung from a mango tree in UP’s Katara village?

No candlelight vigils this time. In the long list of such crimes against Dalit women, against all women in this country, this one has been noted. Katara has seen the usual procession of politicians offering sympathy and funds and the media displaying more than a passing interest.

But they have left now. Before long, Katara will slip back into anonymity. And even as the mothers and fathers of lost, raped and murdered daughters continue to mourn, we will fail to understand the real meaning of what is happening to our society.

Ever since the widespread outrage following the December 16, 2012, gang rape of a physiotherapy student in Delhi, talk about rape has become mainstream. Rapes are not minor items on the crime pages. They are given more space in print, and talk time on television. But at the end of all this, when yet another horrendous crime is reported, what do we do? We read, we rage and then we turn the page.

We move on without accepting that what we are witness to is not just an increase in the incidence of rape and sexual assault but something that can best be defined as a ‘rape culture’. If two teenage girls forced to go before day break to ‘relieve’ themselves, as newspapers like to put it, because their village has no toilets are raped and murdered, what else is this but a culture of rape? We need to stop talking about statistics. Instead we should ask what has brought us to this point where women cannot go about their daily tasks without fearing rape and assault.

‘Rape culture’ is not unique to India. In the U.S., for instance, people are talking about it, triggered by the recent incident where a 22-year-old man went on a shooting spree killing six people, including five students of the University of California at Santa Barbara. In a video he uploaded on the Internet, he claimed he was doing this to avenge his rejection by women even though he considered himself the ‘Alpha male’.

The shooting has raised questions not just about the terrible and incomprehensible gun culture in the U.S., but also the misogyny and the sense of ‘sexual entitlement’ that makes men justify assaulting women who reject them.

Social media has seen an outpouring with over half a million people responding to the hashtag #YesAllWomen. In an interview with Democracy Now!, writer, historian and activist Rebecca Solnit says #YesAllWomen was in response to the argument that all men are not bad. “We know not all men are rapists and murderers, are not abusers and misogynists, but all women are impacted by the men who are,” she said. “We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it’s almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.”

Solnit said that her country needed to “stop treating rape as sort of isolated, aberrant incidents and treat it as a widespread problem that arises not from anomalies in the culture, but from the mainstream of culture.” We might argue that, in India, violence does have a specific caste context, for instance, and not just gender. Yet, her point about rape now being part of mainstream culture is relevant.

It is not just the number, the types, or the location of rapes, but the culture that allows men to believe that they can assault women at will that we must confront. If men continue to believe that they have ‘sexual entitlement’ and that women do not have a right to reject or resist, then this culture of rape will continue to grow.

As we mourn for those two young women, we must stop and ask ourselves: Is this the society we want? If not, what are we doing to change it?

(To read the original, click here.)

What should we expect?

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, May 25, 2014

Photo: The Hindu photo archives

The shouting is over. The voters have voted. India has a new set of rulers. And for the majority, who did not cast their votes in favour of the party now in power, this is a time for reflection.

How do we weigh this outcome? How should we respond if we feel less than enthusiastic? Should we be resigned and say ‘the people’ have decided and therefore we must accept? Or do we, the majority that did not vote this party into power, take on the role of the real opposition — one that is as essential a part of any democracy as elections?

And then again, if we consider ourselves the real opposition, given the truncated elected opposition in the Lok Sabha, how should we conduct ourselves? How do we make our voices heard when an election has allowed one grouping to get what is termed a ‘brute majority’?

In the post-election euphoria, these might not seem the relevant questions to be asking. But this is precisely the moment when these issues should be discussed.

Let’s take the question of women, for example. Since the December 16, 2012 gang rape in New Delhi, India has gained the reputation worldwide of being a country where its women are under attack — in the public space, in their homes, in villages, in conflict zones. Some of the reporting in the western media is out of context, even alarmist. Yet no one will dispute the reality that violence against women is growing and that it ought to be an issue of urgent concern for any group that claims it will provide the country with good governance.

Every mainstream political party endorses ‘women’s welfare’. The much-overused term ‘women’s empowerment’ slips off the tongues of politicians of all hues with ease. Yet, the women of India know that there is a difference between rhetoric and reality, between promises and performance, between the ‘safety’ of being confined and the ‘safety’ of being free.

So as a new government takes power in Delhi, what should we as women be demanding of it and what should we expect?

The most obvious demand is likely to be the passing of the Women’s Reservation Bill. It has been passed by the Rajya Sabha and awaits the consent of the Lok Sabha and half the state assemblies before it can become the law. This ‘brute majority’ should have no problem passing the Bill. But will it?

Even if it does, will that establish the new government’s credentials as a supporter of women’s rights? Not necessarily because even the most vociferous advocates of this law know that political representation is only a very small part of the overall struggle to ensure that all women get equal rights.

A more important test, I believe, will be to monitor if and whether the party in power reins in members of its ‘Parivar’ who have little regard for women’s rights. We have seen these elements in action as they attack young women in pubs, stop films where they conclude without any evidence that ‘Indian’ culture is being demeaned, demonstrate the extent of their misogyny when they launch personal and vitriolic attacks on women who speak out, women like the actress Nandita Das.

These elements have in the past supported the barbaric tradition of ‘sati’ claiming it was part of ‘culture’, they have refused to condemn honour killings, they have looked the other way when men like Babu Bajrangi, now serving a life sentence for the 2002 Naroda Patiya massacre of 97 Muslims in Gujarat, forcibly prevented young people of different faiths getting married. According to such people, the rights of Indian women are confined within the definition of what they choose to call ‘Indian’ culture. The new Prime Minister of India has already equated Hindu and the nation in his self-definition as a ‘Hindu nationalist’. So women should worry as the line between ‘Indian’ and ‘Hindu’ has been erased.

The real threat to the rights of all women, irrespective of class, caste or creed is from these self-appointed defenders of ‘Indian’ culture — the likes of the Sri Ram Sena, the Bajrang Dal and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad —who will feel no compulsion to hold back now that their ‘family’ members are in power.

Don’t let it die

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, May 11, 2014

The Hindu Young girls walk past a market area in Delhi.

When the election noise subsides, some perennial issues will re-emerge. And one such is how we deal with the growing violence against women in India.

There is little doubt that violent assaults on women have increased. The law is tougher now, but is it being implemented? Recent reports suggest that even today, women have a tough time getting a complaint registered.

In any case, regardless of the law, we know that ultimately it is the attitude of people, and particularly men, which must change if we are to see any serious decline in such violence — both within the home and outside.

In the last two years, rape has been the subject of discussion and debate in India. But attention to it waxes and wanes. For instance, in the last couple of months, there is hardly any mention of rapes. But they are occurring, every day, somewhere in the country.

For the media at the moment, there is only one story — the election. Even if the media gaze were to turn once again to sexual assault, it would not solve the problem. But it would act as an important reminder that here is a problem that is not going away.

In that context, it is interesting to look at the way the United States, which on paper at least has a higher incidence of rape than India — although the higher figures could also be because more rapes are reported than in India — is dealing with the problem, specifically with rape on American college campuses.

According to statistics, there is rape every 21 hours on some college campus in the U.S. The most vulnerable are the women who have just begun their college stints. Nearly one out of every five women going to college is in danger of being sexually assaulted during the years they spend on a college campus. So it is a serious problem; one that has recently drawn more attention as students from several high-profile universities complained to the government about the ineffectual action taken by the authorities when they filed complaints of rape and sexual assault.

In response, US President Barack Obama and Vice-President Joe Biden have taken an initiative that is noteworthy in many respects. They have set up a White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault and launched a public campaign against college rapes. The website www.notalone.gov is an attempt to reassure any college student who is raped that there is a way that this rape can be reported and followed up. Additionally, a video with several well-known male actors titled “1is2Many” is being widely shown where the essential message is: “If she doesn’t consent or can’t consent, it’s rape, it’s assault.”

In addition to this public campaign, the federal government has also tied funding to universities to compliance with stricter laws on sexual harassment and sexual assault on college campuses. For instance, it is compulsory for all instructors and those in positions of authority over students to undergo training on sexual harassment. This informs them about the existing laws but also tests them on their ability to know which law applies in certain situations and what constitutes sexual harassment. It is the kind of training that everyone who is a manager of any kind should be given. We have nothing like this in India, as far as I know.

Another interesting initiative is called “bystander intervention”. Students receive training on how to intervene when they see a situation where a woman is being forced upon, or is not in her senses and does not know what is happening to her. Students themselves have come up with many different and innovative ways of doing this. It is not vigilantism; it is a way of being aware and concerned. It also involves young men in ways where they see how they can help.

Vice-President Biden is quoted as saying, “It doesn’t matter what she was wearing, whether she drank too much, whether it was in the back of a car, in her room, in the street — it does not matter. It doesn’t matter if she initially said yes then changed her mind and said no. No means no. (Sex) requires a verbal consent — everything else is rape or assault.”

You would think much of what he states is obvious and has been said before. Women have been shouting this from the rooftops for decades. And yet the message somehow fails to get through. Why is society so deaf? Why should women the world over keep repeating the obvious?

In India, the Justice Verma Committee Report and the Criminal Law Amendment Act 2013 were just the first steps after the furore over the December 16, 2012, gang rape in Delhi. There is much more to be done to create awareness, to set in place systems within organisations that give out a clear message that sexual harassment and assault are unacceptable, and to give women the support they need to file complaints and follow through on them. This is a conversation that must not stop. 

(To readd the original, click here.)

Rhetoric of hate

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, April 27, 2014

This general election for the 16 Lok Sabha will be remembered for many reasons. It is being seen as a dramatic departure from past elections because of the presence, influence and use of the media; because of the focus on a handful of personalities rather than any issues and because polls are predicting a dire outcome for India’s oldest political party.

Apart from these factors, what this election stands out for is the sickening depths to which some of the election-speak has sunk — from attacking critics and minorities and virtually asking them to leave the country to suggesting that men who rape women should be forgiven because they have made a ‘mistake’.

Admittedly, many of these remarks have been amplified because of the omnipresence of the media that is waiting to pick up anything that can be spun out into a controversy and into endless debates on television channels. It is fascinating to watch politicians either deny what they have said although they know it has been recorded, or have their spokespersons attempt to explain their controversial comments.

Thus, for instance, the recent rabid anti-Muslim comments by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s Pravin Togadia were dismissed by the Bharatiya Janata Party spokespersons as having no relevance to the BJP’s stance because he was not a member of the party. That the VHP is a part of the larger Sangh Parivar is conveniently brushed aside. In another talk show, a journalist with known sympathies to the BJP, described the comments as “rather reckless” and suggested that they could not be linked to the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi because Togadia had a “visceral hatred of Modi” and was a “wild unguided missile”.

Despite such dismissive remarks or denials, it is evident that the electronic media, with its obsessive coverage of the election campaign, has put on record the regressive attitudes of many men in political life, attitudes that will have a bearing on how the future India shapes up.

Some argue that all this is just election talk, that after May 16, once results are out, life will revert to ‘normal’. But what will be ‘normal’ if such verbal violence and viciousness have marked the campaign leading up to the final result? Is it not inevitable that if you have political parties justifying such hateful rhetoric, then the politics of revenge and retribution will also be justified in the future?

Look at Mumbai, a city that until 1992 was known for a certain level of tolerance of difference — political and religious. Of course, there have always been concentrations of certain communities in different areas of the city. But by and large, much of the city had a mixed population of Hindus and Muslims and other religious groups as well as people from different regions. It was a given that everyone had a right to the city.

Since 1992 and the post-Babri Masjid communal riots, the city has gradually changed. One reason for this change in the city was the hate speech that was doled out virtually every day. The late Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray minced no words. His editorials in his newspaper Saamna were vicious as they targeted the minorities. Although civic-minded individuals objected, and even took the paper to court, the language did not change. Overtime it infected the minds of a large section of those consuming the message every day.

As a result, when in addition to the hatred of Muslims, the Shiv Sena and its breakaway group the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) turned on “North Indians”, a euphemism for the people from Bihar and UP who migrated to Mumbai, there was little protest against such campaigns. Today, Mumbai is a city that is deeply divided and there is barely a whiff of its famed ‘cosmopolitanism’.

So if we hold that hate-filled political rhetoric and its dissemination through the media has an impact on people’s mindset, one only has to look at Mumbai over the last two decades and more.

Election-speak has also included several regressive remarks on issues concerning women. Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh’s remark about rape — and that it was a ‘mistake’ by some young men — generated considerable heat. But what is worrying is the mindset it represents, one that too readily blames women for the violence they face, one that will not accept women as equal partners, one that believes that women should remain culturally bound to norms that deny them a voice.

This time women constitute 47.62 per cent of the electorate. Women voters have already established that they go out in larger numbers than men to vote. We will have to wait and see whether they judge their candidates and the parties they support on the basis of their attitude towards women’s rights.

As we wait for May 16, we need to consider whether there can be anything like ‘normal’ after such an election season where hatred, mockery and insensitivity have become virtually a norm.

(To read the original, click here.http://www.thehindu.com/features/magazine/mag-columns/rhetoric-of-hate/article5951237.ece)