A question for Kejriwal

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, March 1, 2015

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  THE HINDU

  Why do women continue to be absent in AAP? Photo: R.V. Moorthy
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  PTI

  If AAP really wants to pioneer an ‘alternative politics’ it cannot overlook the importance of gender.

On February 11, a day after the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) thundered into power in Delhi, early morning walkers noted something interesting. An elderly man, dressed in kurta pajama, a garland of marigolds around his neck, a Gandhi topi and muffler and holding a jhadoo was walking in the park. He was beaming. Most who saw him smiled, laughed, shook his hand. This was in Mumbai, many miles from Delhi.

The Delhi victory sent out waves of optimism around the country even if this scenario will not be replicated elsewhere, at least not in the immediate future. Most people accept that AAP should be given a fair chance this time to demonstrate how different it is from other parties.

Yet, even as I grant that, I still have a grouse. Thirteen months ago, when AAP came to power for a brief period, I had asked why it did not consider calling itself the Aam Aurat Party, or even the Aam Insaan Party. The point I was trying to make then was that aadmi might mean every person but its use is also a reflection of the automatic assumption that terms like ‘man’ or ‘aadmi’ automatically include women.

Perhaps this question is now redundant. Yet, we must still ask why women continue to be absent in AAP. Where are the women, Arvind Kejriwal? How is it that in your cabinet, even if it is small, you could not find place for even one woman? Is making a woman the deputy speaker an adequate token towards gender balance? I think not.

The need to strive for gender balance — still a very long way off in most institutions — is because it reminds us that one half of humanity deserves representation. AAP could argue that it was so focused on winning as many seats as it could that it gave tickets to people who would win rather than ensuring that enough women got tickets. If that is the argument, then how can we assume that AAP represents ‘alternative politics’ as the wise men of the party continue to proclaim? Is this not the excuse used by most mainstream political parties to deny tickets to women?

In this respect, AAP unfortunately does not represent any kind of alternative as this is virtually the norm. Apart from Delhi, seven other states have no women in their cabinets — Telangana, Puducherry, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Nagaland, Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh. Nagaland, Puducherry and Mizoram further distinguish themselves by not having a single woman member of the legislative assembly.

Not surprisingly, the three states with women chief ministers — Rajasthan, West Bengal and Gujarat — have a higher percentage of women in the cabinet. The excuse that there are not enough women to choose from for the cabinet is also not sustainable because even states with a higher percentage of women MLAs do not necessarily have more women in the cabinet.

In the final analysis, does any of this really matter? Is it not more important to ensure that the people we elect — men or women — are not corrupt and are sincere in their commitment to ‘serve the people’, a promise that so ready rolls off their tongues during election campaigns? Yes, and No. Yes, because that is stating the obvious. But No because if we are a representative democracy, then all sections, including women, should play a part in governance. If first time male MLAs, or even MPs, can become cabinet ministers, what stops women from being appointed to such positions? If the attempt to have a caste balance, for instance, ensures that some men get cabinet posts, why not women?

Actually, there are no excuses. The exclusion of women is not always deliberate; it is unthinking. It happens because those who decide, usually men, fail to accept that the inherent disadvantage that the majority of women face in entering politics needs to be compensated by some amount of preferential treatment.

In time, perhaps this kind of preference will not be needed. In many countries around the world, women are now making their way as equal partners and do not need a leg-up. But in many instances, the initial space created did help.

So to come back to Arvind Kejriwal and AAP in Delhi, I accept that the huge mandate they got is a sign of people wanting change, and perhaps even a different type of politics.

Having said that, I still think if AAP really wants to pioneer an ‘alternative politics’ it cannot overlook the importance of gender. Making promises to deal with women’s safety, something that all parties do, does not address the issue. The party needs to acknowledge that a gender perspective is needed in all aspects of governance, that inclusive politics means making an effort to include women in decision-making, and that the perspective such an inclusion facilitates is good in the long run for everybody, women and men.

#Notsosafe

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, Feb 15, 2015

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Fewer than a dozen hands went up when I asked a room of over 500 Mumbai college girls how many did not have a mobile phone. Given the growing belief that technology, as represented by the many functions of a mobile phone, whether it would 

aid the cause of women’s safety?

 

For instance, within a month of the Delhi gang rape in December 2012, a “women’s safety” app named “Nirbhaya” was launched. Since then dozens of such apps have been launched around the country. The latest is “Himmat” by the Delhi police, billed as the first integrated women’s safety app in India.

Given the increasing rate of rape and sexual assault on women, including minors, will these technological interventions make any difference to women’s lives? Delhi and Mumbai have also been promised thousands of closed-circuit cameras in public places to enhance women’s safety.

Will Indian women be safer with the government watching over them through closed-circuit cameras and through safety apps on mobile phones? I think not. For no app, no matter how smart or effective, can substitute for the many steps that need to be taken to make women feel secure. Principally, this involves changing a culture where attacking and sexually abusing women is acceptable.

Within the range of apps now available — with names like SmartShehar, VithU, BSafe, Raksha — the majority merely facilitate a quick call for help to the police and/or to relatives/friends in the event of an attack. A woman fearing an attack or when actually attacked (although how a woman surrounded by several men can grab her phone and use the app is anyone’s guess) is expected to be saved by the app. Designers of these apps are selling the belief that these apps will enhance women’s safety.

That, in fact, is the problem with the apps. For they create the illusion of safety and security without an understanding of the wider context of the persisting lack of safety for women. The conversation around them also fails to accept the reality of class. Apps are available to women with smartphones; these are owned only by 13 per cent of our total population (although there are an estimated 900 million mobile phone connections). And they exclude women without phones or with ordinary phones.

Secondly, these apps can work only if the official state machinery is responsive. Even the single numbers (103, 100) for distress calls do not produce a quick response, or indeed any response. Police apathy, whether you approach a police station or call a number, is virtually a given. Until this changes, the efficacy of any app is greatly limited.

Far more effective is to use technology not just to “protect” women, or give them an easy way to seek help, but to involve them in the process of understanding the issues of safety and danger, and become active participants. An app called SafetiPin, for instance, attempts to do that through its mapping tool. Women can pinpoint areas that they consider unsafe, put down reasons (for instance, dark corners or poor lighting) as well as seek help. An interactive app of this kind allows women to check their surroundings and also encourages them to add to the database so that others are helped. But, ultimately, even this information can make a difference only if the law enforcing machinery and city authorities act on it.

The good news is that women are using mobile technology to help themselves. There are several recent examples. The woman raped in an Uber cab in Delhi photographed the license plate of the cab on her phone, thereby assisting the police to track down the rapist. A young woman on a flight to Bhubaneswar shamed the middle-aged businessman in the seat behind her who tried to grope her by filming him, putting the clips out on YouTube and filing a complaint with the police. Well-known anti-trafficking activist Sunitha Krishnan has circulated an edited version of a shocking video of a gang rape by five men that has been on Whatsapp for some time. She has launched a Twitter campaign #ShameTheRapistCampaign urging people to find and identify the five men seen laughing away as they torture and rape a woman.

New technologies, like smartphones, are empowering and give women considerable autonomy. But in themselves, even if they are loaded with the most efficient apps, they cannot alter the reality of the dangers that women face in the public and private space. The onus should not be put on women to use such technology to keep themselves safe. Technology helps if the state does its job of dealing with crime, and society refuses to be complacent and accept sexual assault as just another crime.

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How about Ma Bachao?

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, February 1, 2015

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This is a season of symbols. A woman air force officer leads the official guard of honour to welcome President Obama; contingents of women and girls march in step during the Republic Day parade; the Prime Minister launches a Beti Bachao Beti Padhao campaign in Haryana, the state with the worst sex ratio in the country. All of this is good. Symbols matter. But are they enough?

It is very well to talk about saving our daughters and educating them, but what about Ma Bachao, saving our mothers? For every daughter that is killed, there is a mother who is demeaned, not respected. If she accedes to the demand to abort a female foetus, it is only because she knows too well what life will be like for a daughter if she is born.

Of course, even if the daughter is not aborted before birth, and is permitted to enter this world, there is no guarantee that her mother will survive. India’s worst-kept secret is that it has the highest number of women dying during childbirth in the world. According to the latest United Nations report, an estimated 17 per cent of the 2.89 lakh women worldwide who died during childbirth in 2013 were in India. In other words, 50,000 women in a year, or 137 every day, or around 11 or 12 every hour die due to pregnancy-related health complications.

For a country that is preening and pretending to be an emerging power in the world, and whose leaders glibly rub shoulders with the most powerful, this is unacceptable. Our place in the family of nations when it comes to our mothers is in fact at the bottom. Even Nigeria, a country beset by so many problems including the brutal killings of girls, women and children by Boko Haram in its northern and eastern provinces, does better than India.

The reason for the high maternal mortality figures is not just the lack of institutional deliveries, which means ensuring that every woman who is pregnant reaches a hospital or medical facility in time. That would help and the rate of such deliveries is gradually improving although not fast enough.

The underlying cause is the persistent malnourishment and under-nourishment of millions of women, many of whom are not yet ready to go through childbirth. According to the National Family Health Survey-3, an estimated 60 per cent of women between the ages of 15 and 45 are anaemic. So even if you get such women to a hospital in time, they might not survive.

In any case, a large number of them are too young to bear children. They should have had the knowledge to protect themselves from pregnancy but know nothing about contraceptives or spacing. Even if they did, they are denied a voice, a say in whether they are ready to have a child. Also, even if such women survive childbirth, they succumb later to infections and diseases and their low birth weight children have slim chances of survival.

What is frustrating about this situation is not just this “silent epidemic”, as someone put it, of maternal deaths, but the fact that women continue to be seen mainly as baby-producing machines.

Since 1994, when India participated in the UN sponsored International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, the world community accepted that women’s health needs to be addressed not just during pregnancy but at all times. If women are healthy, they will be healthy mothers, giving birth to children with a fair chance of surviving. That is such an obvious point that it hardly bears repeating.

Yet, despite the internationally accepted concept of women’s reproductive health and rights that includes giving women the choice to have or not to have children, to decide how many, and to access health care for their other needs, women continue to be viewed principally for their ability to reproduce. And hence, whether it is people like Sakshi Maharaj urging Hindu women to produce five or more children, or so-called ‘population’ experts telling them to have fewer children, a woman is reduced to the sum of her reproductive parts.

If mothers cannot be saved, who will care for the daughters? It is easier to come up with catchy slogans than to get to the root of the malaise in our country, where women are valued only if they produce babies of the accepted gender, i.e. male, and if they do so quietly without raising their voices.

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.

I’ve written no fiction since my first visit to Palestine in 2000: Ahdaf Soueif

My interview with Ahdaf Soueif in The Hindu, Literary Review, January 3, 2015

Lit for Life 2015

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The Hindu

Ahdaf Souief: novelist and political and social commentator. Photo: R. Ravindran

The events following the “Arab Spring” in Cairo’s Tahrir Square have not unfolded quite the way protestors had imagined. In 2011, Egyptians looked forward to a change. Today, three years later, the object of their protests, former President Hosni Mubarak, has been exonerated by Egyptian courts, the experiment with a non-military democratically government has failed and instead today, another military man, President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi is at the helm.

One of the strongest voices during the protests in Egypt and since then has been the remarkable writer and activist Ahdaf Soueif. Born in Cairo and a PhD in linguistics, Soueif caught the world’s attention when her book, The Map of Love, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 1999. Of late, however, she is known for her documentation of the Egyptian struggle for democracy, evocatively captured in her book, Cairo: My City, Our Revolution and her columns in The Guardian. Despite the turn events have taken in Egypt since the heady days of 2011, Soueif continues to write and protest and believes that is what writers like her must do.

 

Would you say that your involvement in the “Arab Spring” and the events in Tahrir Square in 2011 marked a transition in your writing from fiction to non-fiction?

Well, actually, I’ve written no fiction since my first visit to Palestine in 2000. I got caught up in a kind of cultural activism where it always seemed that the next article, the next event had to have priority over any longer project. So the longer projects never got done. This became even more acute with the Egyptian revolution (and, yes, we still call it a “revolution”) and even got formalised in a weekly column for the Egyptian national daily, Shorouk. So Cairo: My City, Our Revolution (second edition: Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed) is the only sustained text of length that I have managed to write in 15 years.

 

Since 2011, Egypt has gone through tremendous change and turbulence. How do you see the situation now, particularly against the background of Hosni Mubarak’s exoneration by the court?

The revolution forced the regime (or maybe gave the regime the opportunity?) to dislodge the Mubarak family. But the revolution never took power. What we’re now seeing is Regime Version 4. Version 1 being Mubarak; 2, the year of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to whom Mubarak delegated power; 3, the year of Dr. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood; and 4 the period of Judge Mansour and General Sisi — post-July 2013. Every group that has taken power since Mubarak fell has tried to continue in his same mode of government but with its own players, and every one of them has sought accommodations with the establishment to do so. We now have a situation where army, police, judiciary, media, bureaucracy, big business have all identified their interests as anti-revolutionary and are working — lying and perjuring and killing — to protect and enhance them.

 

Many of the activists involved in the Tahrir square uprising are still in jail. What about the others who escaped arrest? Have they managed to continue organising, albeit in a clandestine manner?

People are still active, but also a lot are downhearted and divided.

 

In an article in The Guardian on June 29, 2014, you accused the present government lead by President Sisi of “waging a war on the young”. You saw the expedited trial of 24 human rights activists, including your niece, as a sign of this. Do you see any prospect of this changing? Will international pressure make any difference?

At the moment there is no international pressure on Egypt to respect human rights. In fact, the regime is being courted by the West as an ally in the ‘War on Terror’ and rewarded for its rhetoric and its activities in Sinai and who knows where else. Money and promises of money are pouring in from the Gulf countries, loans from the international financial institutions, and contracts, aid packages and arms from Western governments. Having said this, it’s really important to note that there is great concern and solidarity from civil society across the world. The pressure that is coming is coming from citizen groups, human rights groups and professional bodies: Universities, Bar Associations, medical associations and so on. This is the solidarity and the co-operation that we’re seeking now.

 

In another article in The Guardian you wrote, “The great slogan of the revolution — Bread, Freedom, Social Justice — has been whittled down to grateful for a crumb and a quiet corner.” Is this an expression of despair for the future or do you still believe that once people have been awakened to demand their rights, you cannot push them back?

I don’t feel despair. I just feel very sad at all the lives lost and the lives ruined. And that we will have to go through more sorrow and violence before we can start working to create a better society. There were reasons for the revolution, objective reasons: the difficulty of making a living, of providing a decent life for your children, the obscenely widening gap between rich and poor, the breakdown of education and healthcare plus, of course, the ever-worsening police brutality. All these conditions still exist. They’re getting more acute as the state insists on its economic path and tightens its grip on spaces of opposition, and they will lead to the new uprising. The difference next time will be that each faction has learned a different lesson from the events of the last four years, and that the country is awash with arms.

 

One of your remarkable initiatives has been the Palestine Festival of Literature (PalFest) where you believe in ‘the power of culture over the culture of power’, quoting Edward Said. What role do you think interventions of this kind make in informing the world about the realities in Palestine? The media only covers this region when there is conflict. Why do you think arts, literature, cinema coming out of that region needs exposure and recognition?

PalFest (www.PalFest.org) is really a unique literary festival. It travels through the Israeli checkpoints between Palestinian cities, so every day it is with its audience in a different place. The writers do workshops and seminars in universities and literary and cultural events in the evenings. They really get to know the Palestinians as people — not just as a “cause” or a “conflict” or a “problem”. It’s really important that the world understands that in Palestine there is a people who are trying to live, work, write, bank, dance, marry, learn — in other words to live a normal life on what’s left of their land, in the face of tremendous aggression and constant incursions and attempts at take-over by Israel. One of the most immediate ways of conveying the “realness” and the normal humanity of the Palestinians is through their own cultural production and that of their friends and allies.

 

About Ahdaf Soueif

Ahdaf Soueif is a political and cultural commentator and novelist. Her account of recent Egyptian events, Cairo: My City, Our Revolution, was published in 2012, and an updated edition, Cairo: A City Transformed, was published in January 2014. She is the author of the bestselling The Map of Love (shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1999), as well as the well-loved In the Eye of the Sun and the collection of short stories, I Think of You. A collection of her essays, Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground, was published in 2004. She has translated Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah from Arabic into English and commissioned and edited Reflections on Islamic Art. In 2007, Soueif founded Engaged Events, a U.K.-based charity. Its first project is the Palestine Festival of Literature, which takes place annually in the cities of occupied Palestine and Gaza. She has received the Metropolis Bleu and the Constantin Cavafy Awards (2012). She was the first recipient of the Mahmoud Darwish Award (2010) and was shortlisted for the Liberty Human Rights Award (2013).

Wealth issues

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, January 4, 2015

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Unbreakable spirit: Parveen. Photo: Kalpana Sharma

2014 ended on a grim note. The horror in Peshawar with the gunning down of 132 children by the Taliban left everyone, not just Pakistanis, shaken. So as 2015 dawns, will things change, get better, more peaceful?

On current calculations, there is little to indicate that the trend of violence, seen not just in this subcontinent, or in West Asia but around the world, is anywhere near peaking.

At times such as these, when we are filled with despair at the state of the world, and indeed even our own country, where hate-filled talk against people of other faiths and persuasions is now out in the open, I turn to individuals who face life with a courage.

So let me begin this year with the story of a woman in Mumbai. Parveen Sheikh is in her early forties. She is a member of Mahila Milan and organises women in Mumbai’s slums so that they can tackle together some of the myriad problems all of them face.

Parveen was one of eight women I met recently in an office in Dharavi. We discussed politics, problems and possibilities. Maharashtra’s Chief Minister, Devendra Phadnis, is considering setting up a special committee to deal with Mumbai’s problems to be headed by the Prime Minister. What should be the priority for a city like Mumbai, I asked.

Housing was the consensus. Affordable housing for the poor should be top priority.

Parveen’s personal experience illustrates how politics and policies deal with the daunting problem of the homeless in one of India’s wealthiest cities. While the government introduces schemes to deal with the ‘slum problem’ (as if it involved buildings, not people); for people like Parveen, the solution is often worse than the problem.

Parveen lived for decades on a pavement in Sewri, in the north-eastern part of Mumbai. The threat of eviction was constant. Yet, thousands of families like hers remained where they were, making a living by earning daily wages, using public — usually dysfunctional — toilets, and awaiting with dread for the inevitable flooding followed by disease that descended on them every monsoon.

In 2008, Parveen and her neighbours were told that they were going to be resettled. The road had to be widened. The pavement was to be broken. So they would have to move. “I was dying with happiness,” says Parveen. She had never imagined that in her lifetime, she would live in a pucca house.

With tremendous excitement, the families moved to the distant suburb of Govandi. What they found was certainly pucca; a seven-storey building identical to the hundreds scattered across Mumbai as part of the slum resettlement scheme. But you stepped inside and there was nothing. The rooms that were supposed to be their new homes were just bare walls; no lights, no fans, no windows, no doors, no toilet seats, no taps. Anything that could be stolen had been removed. But they had a roof over their heads. And for that they were supposed to be grateful!

The other side of resettlement is rehabilitation. In their new neighbourhood, far from the old, Parveen and the others could find no work. Parveen’s husband was a head loader. Earlier, he could walk to the place where he got daily work. Now he would have to spend a good part of what he earned to travel before finding work. Women who worked as domestics in a mixed neighbourhood had no work in an area inhabited entirely by people like them. So this was a strange formulate for rehabilitation.

Worse still, the area where most such urban poor have been ‘dumped’, as Parveen says, is right next to Mumbai’s garbage dumping ground. According to a recent journalistic investigation, people living in this area suffer from acute health problems, particularly respiratory, and their life expectancy is a third lower than that of people in other parts of Mumbai.

But the point of telling this story is not just to paint the grim reality of being a poor person in a very rich city, but also to recount the unbreakable spirit of women like Parveen. Instead of throwing up her hands in despair, Parveen set about dealing with the problem. With the help of her women’s group and support from the federation of slum dwellers, they have fixed their building. There are doors and windows and taps. There is water. There is even a lift, something that they did not have for the first four years.

Parveen breathes fire when she speaks of the authorities and their attitude towards poor people. But she will not let that get her down. What stands out is her determination to fight the system by organising other women like her. That surely is a recipe to deal with despair.

Roots of the problem

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, December 21, 2014

PTI

Pooja and Aarti meet the press.

I am writing this a day before an unfortunate second anniversary, December 16, a day etched in our collective memory as signifying the horror and pain so many women experience for no other reason than that they are women.

But before going into the grim reality of how little has changed since that winter evening in Delhi in 2012, there is some good news. After my last column about a woman taxi driver, who incidentally worked for one of the new taxi aggregators that have now been banned in some cities, there is some encouraging news. The Mumbai transport department has issued 200 licenses exclusively for women taxi drivers; Hyderabad is launching a women’s service; in Chennai, a non-government organisation is training women drivers, and a taxi aggregator has announced that they will encourage more women to be hired.

This is good news. But let us not confuse this with women’s safety. While women taxi drivers would be reassuring for women passengers, particularly late at night, let us not forget that in some cities, like Delhi, women drivers are not safe. The mere sight of a woman behind a wheel seems to trigger primitive instincts in men who proceed to harass them by chasing them, trying to push them off the road and generally making life hell for them. Given these attitudes, who will guarantee the safety of the women taxi drivers? How can we be sure that male passengers will not harass them? Or will they have to stick to women passengers, an unsustainable business model. So, even if more women taxi drivers would be welcome, this cannot be viewed as a quick fix to deal with women’s safety. It is important because it gives women a livelihood option, one that carries with it a sense of dignity and self-worth.

The bad news is that despite a renewed focus on women’s safety, triggered by the December 6 rape in a private taxi in Delhi, the underlying issue has once again been overlooked. While no one disputes that the new app-based taxi services need to be regulated and more important, the corruption that allows serial rapists and offenders to buy character certificates from the police must be checked; this alone cannot guarantee women’s safety.

What is the other option? The safety of a prison; one where women are told when and if to step out? Or the example of those two plucky Rohtak sisters, Pooja and Aarti, who chose to thrash their tormenters rather than sit back and tolerate? We already know how that story has played out. From being celebrated, and even promised a special commendation by the Haryana government, suddenly the victims have become the villains and the men are being projected as victims of a game of blackmail.

I happened to be in Delhi recently when Pooja and Aarti spoke to the press. They faced a room full of journalists, the majority sceptical and even slightly hostile. The girls were remarkable in the calm way they answered all questions. To me, they came across as straightforward and gritty. In a state, where the sex ratio is one of the lowest in the country, where girls are simply not wanted, where every girl grows up in a highly sexualised atmosphere particularly when she enters the public space, the spirit of these two girls has to be lauded. They travel each day almost 35 km to their college and have to change two buses to do this. Their mother has backed them fully in their desire to study, as has their father. Coming from such a family, these girls have been encouraged not to take so-called ‘teasing’ by being quiet.

Without going into the minutiae of this controversial case, we should look at the issues it raises. Given the reality of constant harassment by men of women, particularly in north India, should we train our daughters to fight back as did Pooja and Aarti? Even as I applaud their courage, I fear for them because they are greatly outnumbered. More so, because no one supported them on the bus and since then there is a clear strategy to discredit their evidence. Such a battering, both physical and emotional, could break any ordinary girl. If these two sisters survive and win their case, it will be all the more remarkable.

Instead of seeing women’s safety as a technical issue to be fixed by putting in place ‘safer’ transport — both private and public — or training girls to fight back if harassed, we need to realise that ultimately there is no shortcut to dismantling the institution of patriarchy, an institution that gives all men a sense of entitlement to beat, harass, rape, kill, injure those women who dare to question their authority.

Women can drive

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, Dec 7, 2014

Sometimes a chance encounter makes you think that perhaps more things are changing than seem evident. Some of that change is depressing; the kind of change that is making cities like the one in which I live, Mumbai, increasingly unlivable. But there are subterranean processes of change, in people’s attitudes, in what they do, in how they overcome even the worst circumstances that are not noticed.

One such chance encounter was with a taxi driver. The majority of taxi drivers in Mumbai are men. This last week, 95 women managed to get the license to drive taxis. Ninety-five out of some 50,000? That’s not even worth a comment, you would think. But it is.

I chanced on Sindhu one morning when I was looking for a taxi. She does not drive the traditional kaali peeli (Mumbai’s iconic black and yellow taxi). She works with one of the city’s proliferating private taxi services.

Sindhu was dressed in light blue jeans and a purple-checked shirt. She wore gold studs in her ears and her nose. Her hair was pulled back in a neat bun. If you did not notice her clothes, she would be your normal Maharashtrian woman anywhere in Mumbai.

Sindhu is that, but I found over the course of a one-hour taxi ride, that she is more than that. For one, she has chosen to drive as a profession. Apart from the taxis that she has been driving for eight years, she has also driven trucks that deliver bottled water to different parts of the city. That brought back memories of Shubha Mudgal’s wonderful song Man Ke Manjeere, and the video with Mita Vashisht as a truck driver (www.youtube.com/watch?v=3O4-l84EKRc).

Why has she chosen to be a taxi driver, I ask her. Driving a taxi, she says, is a good career for a woman. It is flexible. You can decide when you want to drive, for how many hours. You can take a break if you want. No one is forcing you to drive beyond your capacity. And best of all, the money is good.

Like other women drivers in Mumbai, Sindhu first got a chance to drive a taxi, a private, air-conditioned one, when two women entrepreneurs came up with the idea of taxis driven by women. Their selling point was that women passengers would feel more secure, particularly at night, travelling in a taxi driven by a woman. Thus, began Mumbai’s taxi services for women by women.

These services continue. But Sindhu decided that she could do better. So she negotiated a loan to buy a car. And when private taxi services began that were willing to let drivers use their own cars in return for a fixed rate, she calculated that this would work out better. Before this, she had to pay the owner of the cab a fixed rate every day.

What about her family, I ask? Her son, she says, has completed his commerce degree and works in a call centre. He works nights. In the morning, when he returns, Sindhu fixes him breakfast and then takes off. The rest of the day, her husband and son, and the household chores, are looked after by a woman she has hired. In the evening, between seven and nine, Sindhu chooses to be home. The traffic is terrible at that time, she says. But by 10.00 p.m., she is ready to hit the road again. “People like to go out to parties, to dinner. They drink. They don’t want to drive. So I get plenty of work at night,” she told me cheerfully.

Sindhu lives in Cotton Green in central Mumbai, an area that is undergoing a schizophrenic transformation. The old and the new coexist. The new consists of gleaming high-rises, housing offices and luxury apartments. The old are Mumbai’s traditional chawls, homes for the working class who were once employed in the factories that populated this area. Today the factories are gone; the workers remain. Some are still unemployed. Others do any kind of work that’s available. And then there are women like Sindhu who have found ways to negotiate this changing environment.

So confident is Sindhu that she is now planning to take another loan to buy a second car. She will then hire a driver, use it to earn additional money to pay off the loan and still have a surplus.

Does she feel comfortable in trousers, I ask? Oh, yes, she says. I used to wear saris, even cover my hair, she laughs. But ever since I became a driver, and I was given a uniform, I decided this is best for work.

People are changing faster than you realise, she tells me. Could her mother have ever imagined that she would be driving a taxi, I ask. Never, she says. But it is a good career for a woman, she reiterates as we roll into my destination. 

No more births... or deaths

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, Nov 23, 2014

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PTI Women who underwent sterilisation surgeries receive treatment in Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh

Should we forget about the 14 poor women in Chhattisgarh who died earlier this month? Can we write this off as another “unfortunate” incident? Or should we see it as reminder of the fundamental question that Indian policymakers need to ask: are Indian women, especially poor women, entitled to respect and rights due all human beings or will they continue to be viewed as baby-producing machines whose bodies the State can appropriate and control when it deems they have completed their assigned task?

The debate has been sparked by the ghastly tragedy that befell some of the 83 women who were herded into a disused hospital in Takhatpur, Bilaspur district, and subjected to laparoscopic tubectomies within a few hours. The same instrument was used. No time for sterilisation. No time to check if the women were in good enough health to undergo the surgery. And no time to relax and recover before being packed off. And, of course, no one to follow up to see whether they survived the journey home.

Within a day, eight women were dead. In the next days, in other locations where similar sterilisation camps were held, another six died, 14 in all. The doctor who performed the 83 tubectomies – he was rewarded earlier this year for having performed 50,000 tubectomies – was arrested. He says he was not at fault and insists that the women died from consuming contaminated drugs post-operation. It is suspected that the ciprofloxacin tablets given to the women were contaminated with zinc phosphide, a rat poison. And the state government refuses to explain why such a camp was held at a disused, run-down private hospital.

Everyone is blaming someone else. In the midst of all this noise, and the silence that has descended on the homes of the dead women, we must remember that what happened in Chhattisgarh earlier this month is not an exception, a one-off aberration that we can all forget about once the blame is fixed. Between 2003 and 2012, on an average 12 women die due to botched tubectomies. That is 12 too many. No woman should die from this procedure.

Also, whatever government officials might say to the media, the reality is that health workers are expected to fulfil targets by bringing women to these sterilisation camps. If such pressure was not exerted on them, it is possible that fewer women would come. But at least those who agreed to be sterilised would do so after having understood the consequences. And doctors would not rush through with the procedure at the vulgar speed as did the doctor in Chhattisgarh.

Government officials have consistently argued, as they do even today, that sterilisation is the best option for a poor woman with more than two children because she cannot insist her husband uses a condom and she cannot use other spacing methods, such as injectables for instance, because of the absence of health care in the case of complications. But by the same measure, how do governments justify sterilising women and sending them back to their villages without any follow-up? The women who died did so because they could not access emergency health care in time.

Even if poor women opt for sterilisation, surely they are entitled some dignity while undergoing the procedure. We thought the days when women were lined up like cattle, as depicted so starkly in Deepa Dhanraj’s path-breaking 1991 film “Something like a war” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Fq7HSIPVq4), was something in the past, harking back to the days of the 1975 Emergency when mass sterilisation campaigns were implemented ruthlessly across India. But Chhattisgarh reminds us that this is happening even today, although on a smaller scale.

So respect for poor women is the very minimum that must inform any population programme. India has signed an international convention in 1994 committing itself to guaranteeing women their reproductive choice and rights. Simply put, this means that all women have the right to choose the kind of contraceptive method they want to use. It also means that population programmes must be centered on women’s health and choice.

Clearly, this is so much talk without substance. In 20 years, under one guise or another, central and state governments have continued with the policy of targets and camps. And women are those who are targeted, not men. The skew in the population programmes is more than evident, even if one looks at government data.

Also, despite scores of meeting, conferences, policy documents, including the National Population Policy (2000) that links a decline in fertility to many other aspects such as education, overall health, housing, drinking water and sanitation, the desire to fast-forward population programmes through sterilisation appears irresistible to policy makers of all political hues.

As a result, women continue to pay the price for this persistent myopia – especially poor women. 

(To read the original, click here.)

Crossing over

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, November 9, 2014

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A stretch of the US-Mexico border. Photo: Reuters

 

Sometimes a documentary film speaks louder than a thousand words. And so it was last week when I chanced upon a powerful documentary film, Maria in Nobody’s Land. Made in 2010 by a first-time filmmaker, Marcela Zamora Chamorro, and winner of several awards, the film portrays a picture of illegal immigration into the United States about which I had little knowledge.

If you have lived in the U.S., you would know about the push from people living in the countries south of the border to enter the U.S. in any way they can. This has been happening for decades and continues even today. A stark reminder of that is the U.S.-Mexico border, south of the city of San Diego in California. On the U.S. side of the border is vast open land; some of it declared a protected area to conserve a particular bird species. On the other is the town of Tijuana, visible from the U.S. side, a dense urban settlement with houses almost touching the border. Separating the two countries is a steel fence that extends into the sea, slicing the shared beach into two. The entire area is a militarised zone with helicopters constantly buzzing overhead keeping an eye out for desperate immigrants trying to make their way across. Mexico and the U.S. are not at war. Yet, looking at that border, you would think they are.

But the story of the desperate immigrant begins thousands of miles away from this and other similar border posts all along the south of the U.S. And not just in Mexico but even further south. It is also a gendered story, with many of those taking enormous risks to cross what appears an impenetrable border being women. These are single mothers, sisters, aunts — women who are convinced that by crossing over they will guarantee their families a better life. And, as legal immigration appears impossible, they risk taking the illegal route.

The film follows some of these women from the impoverished country of El Salvador, south of Mexico, to the U.S. border. What they encounter en route is a grim and frightening story. That they survive is a miracle; others like them are raped, robbed, kidnapped and killed by criminal gangs along the way. Their own government couldn’t care less. And neither does Mexico. If there is any solace, it comes from voluntary immigrant support groups who provide shelter and food.

One remarkable episode in the film shows a group of women who prepare packets of water and food every day. As a freight train carrying scores of these migrants passes their village, they stand near the tracks and pass out the packets. The train does not stop. It doesn’t even slow down. And yet, these women have figured out a way of getting all their packets to the people hanging on for dear life on the roofs of these trains.

Apart from bringing out the dangers that these women and men face even as they make their way to the American border, the film also reminds us of the gender dimension of immigration. The immigrant — legal or illegal — is not just a man. Increasingly, she is a woman.

In Asia too, women are migrating to other countries to find work and money to support their families. Over the years, women from Southeast Asia (the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia) and South Asia (Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan) have been migrating not just to West Asia but further afield to Europe and the U.S. Unlike the women depicted in the documentary, many of these women are legal migrants. Yet, quite often, the job they think they will do turns out to be something else. Promised jobs as domestic help, for instance, they find themselves in the so-called ‘entertainment’ industry, another name for commercial sex work.

Many of these stories are never recorded. The illegal immigrants constantly fear being found out and deported. And those who have papers fear that if they report ill treatment, they will lose their jobs. Either way, silence is their only option as even the hardships they confront in the countries in which they work are bearable compared to the poverty — and in the case of women, domestic violence — that is the daily burden of their lives at home.

There are many more films waiting to be made, many more books waiting to be written, that will tell these stories. For only then is their hope that countries and their citizens will view the migrant sympathetically and as a person whose only ‘crime’ is to seek a better life. 

(To read the original, click here.)

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.)