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Sarpanch Sahib!

2010-03-19T23:26:00.000-07:00

SARPANCH SAHIB: CHANGING THE FACE OF INDIA
edited by MANJIMA BHATTACHARJYA
Harper Collins India, 2009

An anthology of essays by top women writers in India telling incredible stories of women sarpanches across India!

Get it at all nearby bookstores now! And available online at the wonderful filpkart.com, see http://www.flipkart.com/sarpanch-sahib-changing-face-india/817223905x-yv23f7x9lb

'The book talks about seven gutsy women in seven far flung villages of India: Deepanjali, the adivasi graduate sarpanch treading new waters in Kalahandi; Chinapappa, the non-literate panchayat president in Tamil Nadu making education accessible to children; Sunita, struggling against a corrupt system in Madhya Pradesh; Maya, comingg to terms with sudden electoral defeat in the hills of Uttarakhand; Maloti, finding innovative ways of governing her constituencies in tea estate in Assam; Veena Devi, young widow and seasoned politician, navigating the criminalized politics in Bihar; and Kenchamma, the first Dalit woman president of Tarikere panchayat in Karnataka.

Essays by: Indira Maya Ganesh, Tishani Doshi, Manju Kapur, Abhilasha Ojha, Sonia Faleiro, Kalpana Sharma and Manjima Bhattacharjya.

Implications of migration on the health of communities

2009-08-17T22:40:00.001-07:00

Diseases such as HIV/AIDS and the current swine flu pandemic have highlighted the connection between the large scale movement of people and health. With more than 200 million migrants in the world, migration - internal and across borders - is here to stay. It thus makes sense for all countries to put a migrant-friendly health system in place, argues Manjima Bhattacharjya

Over the last few weeks, the panic of swine flu has led to a new addition in the regular ‘check in-security check-boarding’ and ‘disembark-baggage claim-customs’ routine of international air travel. In between, you now have to line up before masked medical health professionals to ensure that you haven’t brought the H1N1 virus with you. It is usually at such times that migration or movements of people, and health, intersect visibly in the media and in the minds of people and governments.

But migration and health have been, for long, areas of concern for public health professionals, particularly in the last two decades when migration has increased manifold. Migration has occurred throughout human history, but globalisation has led to a new phase in its history with unprecedented movement of people. While HIV/AIDS (especially for migrant men) and trafficking (especially for migrant women) dominate the discourse around migrant health, it is increasingly imperative today to see the broader connections between migration and health or the implications of migration on health patterns of migrants themselves. More importantly, it is crucial to integrate migrants’ rights and their needs in health policies of a nation to arrive at more holistic results and, in public health terms, a healthy population.

Migration is here to stay

Migrants are mostly perceived in a negative light – as carriers of disease, as a burden on host countries or as a statistic that pulls down national health figures. Their health concerns still fall outside any positive efforts by a nation to create conditions for a healthy population. This is part of the general schizophrenia that seizes governments when it comes to migrants. On the one hand, many countries run on migrant labour -including undocumented migrants - and are heavily reliant on them across sectors. On the other hand, governments are erecting fencing along borders or putting into place stringent migration policies to make it more difficult for migrants to enter.

Such an attitude avoids addressing what could be a critical public health problem in the future. Migration, it has been established, is more or less an irreversible process, as irreversible as globalisation. For many groups of people both internal (rural to urban mostly) and international (developing countries to developed countries) migration has become a strategy for people’s livelihoods. In Rajasthan a study by the Aajeevika Bureau, an NGO that works with migrants (1), found that migration was no longer a response to drought or related to distress factors; instead, it had become a regular (and the most common) livelihood strategy for most men in the area studied, replacing agricultural labour. People spend about eight months of the year migrating to urban centres like Ahmedabad in Gujarat to work in certain sectors of labour (construction work, loading, hotel and restaurant labour, diamond cutting, and so on).

Millions of people move around the world or within their countries for many reasons – for livelihood, to survive, to create better lives for themselves, to escape conditions of poverty, drought, conflict or war-like situations.

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) reports that there are over 200 million migrants in the world (not counting the estimated 20-30 million who are unauthorised migrants), whose labour in 2007 accounted for US$ 337 billion in remittances worldwide. Of this amount, US$ 251 billion went to developing countries. The IOM states: “Migration is one of the defining issues of the twenty-first century. It is now an essential, inevitable and potentially beneficial component of the economic and social life of every country and region. The question is no longer whether to have migration, but rather how to manage migration effectively so as to enhance its positive and reduce its negative impacts. Well-informed choices by migrants, governments, home and host communities, civil society, and the private sector can help realise the positive potential of migration in social, economic and political terms.” (2)

It is thus naïve to think that some day migrants will go back or reduce or such movement will stop and all will return to “normal”. Realistically speaking, then, it makes good sense for a government to accept this reality, recognise the different populations in an area and their different health profiles and needs, and design policies and schemes accordingly with the target of achieving a healthy, productive and happy population. To do this, it is vital for governments to understand, in depth, the implications of migration on health.

How migration affects health

Migration patterns show that people usually move away from conditions of relative poverty to more affluent societies, or at least to seek better lives for themselves. It is debatable whether they come from more “unhealthy” conditions in terms of poverty or disease stricken environments, but often the better life that they are in search of eludes them. Demographics show that migrant communities survive in difficult conditions in host countries as well, living in often crowded, unsanitary and inferior quality housing, often unable to afford healthy or sufficient food, and working in low-paid, insecure and sometimes dangerous areas of work.

In many cases they are affected by a new set of health concerns. Manuel Carballo and Aditi Nerukar of the International Centre for Migration and Health, in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases (3) note that there are added risks and vulnerabilities of psychosocial disorders, drug abuse, alcoholism and violence. This gives us the impression that the experience of migration is a negative experience. However, there is also enough evidence to show that migration, especially for women, offers them an opportunity to escape many strictures and allows them to find many freedoms and realise many of their human rights that were not possible in their places of origin because of rigid social structures and watertight gender roles (4).

Migrants carry their “health prints” with them, which is essentially their own immune system often borne of their socio-economic conditions at the place of origin that will determine how susceptible or how resilient they are to some conditions, such as differences in weather, for example. If they come from places where there has been less focus on immunisation, this “non immunity” moves with them; migrants are therefore likely to carry with them vulnerabilities present in their original communities.

The question of immunity is particularly important in the case of diseases like tuberculosis (TB) or HIV/AIDS which are directly related to immunity. In the case of diseases like TB, for instance, migrants’ proclivity to contract the disease has been reflected in some national statistics where the data have been disaggregated. For example, Carvallo and Nerukar note that in nine countries of Europe, the incidence of TB was low till the 1990s, when increased migratory flows saw TB levels increasing too. In the Netherlands, TB rose by 45% between 1987 and 1995; over 50% of the known cases occurred amongst migrants. In England and Wales approximately 40% of all TB infections are estimated to occur in people from the Indian subcontinent. In Germany, migrants are three times more likely – and in France six times more likely – to be diagnosed with TB. There is a higher prevalence of TB in migrants, and given the connection between TB and HIV/AIDS, this is a concern for HIV policy also. Patterns of HIV prevalence, though, are not so stark or consistent: for example, HIV incidence is higher among migrants in Sweden, especially those from Africa, but in Italy, HIV among migrants is less than among nationals.

Migrants also bring with them their own cultural beliefs about what is hygienic, healthy or unhealthy, and approaches in general to death and disease. Sometimes, acknowledging mental health problems is taboo, making it difficult for people of that community to acknowledge that they need medical intervention for psycho social problems. In other communities sex-related health issues are taboo, making it difficult for women or young people to obtain information about contraception or sexually transmitted diseases. Practices like eating with chopsticks from the same plate or sharing a meal are seen as communal behaviour by Vietnamese but in Australia are considered unhygienic and conducive to spreading of disease (5).

Migrant women’s vulnerabilities

A defining feature of migration this decade has been the “feminisation of migration”, a term that refers to the phenomenal number of female migrants moving in search of livelihoods. Although discussed within the framework of marriage in the past, and later in the context of trafficking, more and more women are migrating independently. Statistics from the IOM show that women constitute 49.6% of global migrants. A large proportion of women are concentrated in the informal sector, including domestic work.

For women, unsafe migration and the vulnerabilities associated with it, including the dependency on possibly unreliable male escorts, can put them at additional risk of sexual abuse and exploitation. This makes them vulnerable to STDs and HIV in a specific way. Other vulnerabilities arise when they have low levels of information and poor knowledge about contraception, abortion and other reproductive health issues, and when they have low negotiation power to ensure the use of condoms. Young single women who migrate for work and may be sexually active are seen as especially vulnerable because of these factors; in some countries, the rate of unwanted pregnancies among them is high.

Statistics show that problems such as neonatal mortality, underweight births, premature or complicated deliveries are more common to immigrants. Part of this is due to the women’s health profile (such as a higher incidence of anaemia or malnutrition) in their countries of origin. And partly it is that immigrant women often approach the health system at later stages in their pregnancy or may not have undergone relevant monitoring or care under the larger health care system.

The challenge for governments

While migrant groups are likely to have different sets of issues, on the whole they share some characteristics, the most common being difficulty in gaining access to health systems in their new locations. Questions of legality, cumbersome and unfamiliar documentation, and the bureaucracy of health systems in many countries leave them outside the loop.

Sometimes, even simple problems remain untreated because of unfamiliarity with existing health mechanisms. For example, getting off-the-shelf medication is almost impossible in many western countries with a prescription being necessary even for common problems. In many developing countries, it is easier to buy medication off the shelf, and people go so far as to informally consult the chemist or pharmacist rather than a doctor for an ailment. Some see local quacks, or use alternative methods of healing or resort to traditional health recipes to treat the ailment. In a completely new and radically different health framework where each medication needs to be prescribed, many migrants are in a quandary, even across classes.

For any government all this poses a challenge to ensure that whoever lives in their country remains healthy. One of the biggest problems is that there are limited data to begin with on patterns and trends in migrants’ health and the problems they have in using the health system. There is no systematic gathering of the health profile of different communities nor is existing data disaggregated accordingly to devise suitable policies. There are enough studies, however, to indicate that migrants are, more often than not, more “unhealthy” than host populations.

Also a challenging issue, and one that immediately conflicts with human rights, is the system of health assessment that a government has for prospective legal migrants. Migrant rights activists allege that such assessments are used by governments to restrict the entry of legal migrants. For example, HIV testing for migrants is a sensitive issue. Often the screening process for employment of workers or professionals from other countries involves an HIV test, sometimes conducted without consent, confidentiality, counselling or general information support. Apart from the issue of the test, what are the implications of being found to be HIV-positive? Do people living with HIV have a right to migrate for livelihood or treatment? Also of concern is the treatment of migrants who are found to be HIV-positive. This is particularly relevant to victims of trafficking or migrant women in prostitution, who face additional discrimination, mistreatment and stigma and are deported back in inhuman conditions with no thought to what will happen once they are back in their country. The challenge is to define or find policies and public health responses – both preventive and treatment measures – that adhere to basic human rights.

There are, in addition, specific problems related to specific national health systems. This is less of a problem in internal migration (although there are problems here too, for example, the absence of the village health centre, having to go through bureaucratic procedures in large government hospitals, the financial constraints of private hospitals, and so on). In international migration there are likely to be gaps in understanding, information and access. What kinds of insurance exists, what is the health system, how formalised is it, what are migrants entitled to, what is the documentation required, what are the covers or schemes for specific occupation-related migrants and so on – this information has to be clearly available in languages that migrants understand.

Another gap is that even when specific schemes for migrant workers exist, they do not extend to cover families. This has been an important concern in international human rights and migrants’ rights circles. Families of migrant workers are often left out of the loop even if the male primary worker himself has some access to health benefits. This adds a special burden on women and children, whose health remains nobody’s concern.

Putting a migrant-friendly health system in place

The four principles of a good public health approach that takes care of migrant health concerns, or that could be the pillars on which a migrant health policy is based, have been expounded by the World Health Organisation (6) as the following:

Avoid disparities in health status and access between migrants and the host country
Limit discrimination, stigmatisation and impediments in access to the health system
Put into place life-saving interventions so as to reduce excess mortality and morbidity
Minimise the negative impact of the migration process on migrants’ health outcomes.

These are only broad goals which can help governments frame policies with the human rights of migrants in mind. Various countries though have different approaches and perspectives on the issue.

Some perspectives see the question of migrants’ health rights as an aspect of multiculturalism, as part of the “integration process” that countries with diverse populations talk about, like in Canada, the USA, France and Germany. Health care is often given as a good example of how “integration” can be mapped out in real terms, and tests whether public institutions are capable of dealing with cultural diversity. Pro-migrants and anti-racism organisations have politicised this issue consistently in some countries, forcing governments to ensure that cultural sensitivities are incorporated into their health care system. For example, pregnancy check-ups are sometimes an important first contact with national health systems and a time where cultural differences in approach exist. In mental health care, also, adjustments are needed to provide mental health care for groups whose social situation and cultural background is different from the mainstream population.

Governments need to invest money, time and thought into these matters proactively rather than as a response to isolated events. Sometimes it is only after an emergency or an incident reported in the media that they are pushed to respond or act. For example, the death of an Oriya migrant worker in Surat set off alarm bells and alerted the state to the fact that there are more than 600,000 Oriya migrant labourers working in Surat, many of them from Ganjam district. (7) Although no study was done, based on the assumption that there was an “alarming rise in AIDS among migrant labourers” the health department of the government of Gujarat and the district administration of Ganjam reportedly signed an agreement to issue health cards to migrant labourers. While a response that included both source and destination administrations was commendable, the strategy itself lacked an understanding of the problems and possible solutions.

Migrants’ health issues are not fully understood even by NGOs. The Kerala State Aids Control Society has a specific migrants’ sexual health intervention project. (8) Although Kerala has a low prevalence of HIV, there is a high rate of ‘in-migration’ into the state, and an initiative like this aims to maintain the low prevalence in the state. The project is based on the assumption that migrants are more likely to engage in risky behaviour as they have the “freedom to experiment with new norms”. The programme is focused on “construction workers, hotel workers, truckers, street vendors, cable workers” and comprises the regular elements of any HIV prevention programme – behavioural change communication, STI management, condom distribution and usage etc – without having any deeper understanding of the health concerns of migrant workers. Isolated HIV initiatives may be rendered ineffective if other crucial aspects of migrants’ health are not addressed.

The Aajeevika Bureau’s project which aims to build a robust support system for migrants has a deep understanding of the issues that affect migrants’ health, especially seasonal migrants who move from Rajasthan to Gujarat. These migrants are vulnerable to disease, accidents, unhealthy living conditions and inadequate nutrition because of high prices of food, and also difficulties in finding means and space to cook, as a result of which they eat poorly and irregularly. This results in much wider prevalence of tuberculosis and malnutrition. Aajeevika’s programmes run in both ‘destination’ and ‘source’ places thus providing a connection between the two. While some element of health is covered in their work, this is not a separate programme, and neither is the inclusion of issues like HIV/AIDS where testing, information, counselling or treatment can be sought, sustained or at least carried out properly over the period of migration.

This lacuna – the absence of deeper knowledge of migrant health issues within the HIV/AIDS programmes, and the absence of an HIV/AIDS component in migrants’ rights programmes – needs to be filled. Often, both HIV and migrants lobby groups work separately without realising the importance of bridging this distance and seeing the broader question of migrants’ health and its impact on migrants themselves and on the communities they have migrated to.

Moving beyond HIV/AIDS

Much has been said about migrants and their proclivity to spread HIV/AIDS, but their overall health condition and reduced access to health care has been ignored. Only recently has it been noted that the wider health implications of migration must be placed at the centre of the debate to really be able to address a range of public health concerns, including HIV/AIDS.

The IOM’s programme itself has changed to reflect this trend. In 2004 its key contribution in migration health was the document ‘UNAIDS/IOM statement on HIV/AIDS related travel restrictions’ (9) which described HIV related travel restrictions and their impact, reviewed relevant human rights laws and principles and discussed humanitarian and ethical issues, stating strongly that such restrictions have no public health justification and only result in the exclusion of people living with HIV/AIDS. This was an important validation of the human rights of people living with HIV/AIDS to travel and to migrate and a critical document. However, since then the scope has widened beyond HIV, and the mandate has been expanded to cover general health issues of migrants. It has started migration health activities (comprising assessments of migrant health situations, assistance to migrants as well as support in strengthening of national health systems) in over 40 countries worldwide, as compared with only a dozen five years ago.

The connection between migration and HIV/AIDS was made long ago, but it was within a paradigm of paranoia and fear and resulted in creating a stigmatic association, and, compounded by general antagonism to migrants, only added to their vulnerabilities. It is time to move beyond this; unless we recognise the overall health issues of migrants and how it plays out, we cannot really get to the heart of the problem and design effective responses.

Endnotes

Aajeevika Bureau: solutions, security and support to rural migrants. www.aajeevika.org
International Organisation for Migration. www.iom.int
M Carballo, A Nerukar. ‘Migration, refugees, and health risks’ in Emerging Infectious Diseases. June 2001; 7 (3): 556-60. Available on: http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol7no3_supp/carballo.htm
Jagori. ‘Rights and vulnerabilities: A research study of migrant women workers in the informal sector in Delhi’. New Delhi: Jagori; 2004. Available from: www.jagori.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/migration-final-report.pdf
Quynh Lê, Thao Lê. ‘Cultural attitudes of Vietnamese migrants on health issues’. Paper published by the Australian Association for Research in Education. Available from: http://www.aare.edu.au/05pap/le05645.pdf
World Health Organisation. Health of migrants: Report by the secretariat. EB122/11. 20 December 2007. Available from: http://www.who.int/hac/techguidance/health_of_migrants/B122_11-en.pdf
Vikraman Pillai. Citizen Log. Surat Diary. March 30, 2008. Available from: http://www.merinews.com/clogarticle.jsp?articleID=131494&category=India&catID=2
Kerala State AIDS Control Society. Migrants’ Sexual Health Intervention Project – Kerala. Available from: http://www.ksacs.in/migrants.php
UNAIDS/IOM statement on HIV/AIDS related travel restrictions. June 2004. Available from: http://www.iom.int/jahia/webdav/site/myjahiasite/shared/shared/mainsite/activities/health/UNAIDS_IOM_statement_travel_restrictions.pdf

InfoChange News & Features, June 2009

Women at work: The betel nut crackers

2009-08-17T22:36:00.000-07:00

A photo-essay on the poor, lower-caste, mostly non-literate women of Karnataka who labour undocumented and unrecognised behind the scenes of the multi-crore betel nut industry.

Text and photographs: Manjima Bhattacharjya

Book Review: Shiv Sena Women: Violence and Communalism in a Bombay Slum

2009-05-27T22:56:00.000-07:00

Shiv Sena Women: Violence and Communalism in a Bombay Slum
Atreyee Sen

Zubaan (an imprint of Kali for Women), New Delhi, 2008
Rs. 395
219 pages

A few years ago a group of women in Nagpur hit the headlines when they stormed a court and stoned a man to death. Their victim had been a gang leader on trial for 24 crimes and had allegedly raped, beaten and extorted money regularly from many of the women in the mob. In the debates that followed, questions were raised about how such hitherto passive women had undertaken such an extreme and violent act? Were women capable of such violence at all? Was it women’s resistance or mob violence? Could such vigilantism be justified and accepted?

Atreyee Sen’s excellent book on women in the Shiv Sena and their own brand of vigilantism makes us reconsider these dilemmas and raises many more.

The book is based on Sen’s ‘immersion’ into the life-worlds of low-income, working class women living in a Mumbai slum who are also active members of the Mahila Aghadi, the women’s wing of the Hindu right-wing Shiv Sena party. Like poor women living in slums everywhere, these women also work tirelessly in the informal sector to make ends meet, often facing sexual harassment from contractors or employers. They live in tense, sometimes violent domestic relationships ruptured by structural changes (like the closure of mills or rising male unemployment), in homes that could be razed to the ground any minute and raise children in difficult circumstances. But they also lead another life. As members of the Aghadi, they go on rampage in moments of communal conflict, engage in public aggression, destruction of property and persons and overtly take part in organized militancy. More covertly, through gossip and rumours, they systematically construct their lives as being ‘at war’ with the enemy Other – the Muslims – and regularly provoke their husbands to prove their manliness by participating in acts of communal violence.

The Mahila Aghadi began as a support group for the Shiv Sena but rose to prominence when they played a crucial role in the Hindu-Muslim riots in Mumbai of 1993. Following this, the Aghadi was given due importance by the Sena as ‘women warriors’ in the Hindutva project. By and by, members of the Aghadi became prominent leaders in the community working even outside their political mandate and becoming an ‘autonomous task force’ (or really a ‘gang’, as Sen points out), often taking the law into their own hands to deliver speedy ‘justice’ to wronged women by beating up or threatening ‘rapists and wife-beaters’, men who had deserted their families or those who had asked for sexual favours in exchange of employment opportunities.

How do we reconcile these various facets of women? Worker, wife, mother, homemaker… and ‘warrior’? Sen’s riveting account of their lives shows us how violence is used by poor women and children for various ends. She finds that, in the backdrop of the fight for survival and space and insecure existence that is slum life, as well as the breakdown of family systems caused by migration from rural areas to urban metropolis like Bombay, it is the affiliation with the Shiv Sena that gives them a sense of security, self worth and identity and keeps their lives from falling apart.

A space like the Mahila Aghadi offers older migrants a way of consolidating social relations and negotiating survival in the city, and helps newer migrants find a foothold in the community and make sense of their new surroundings. The flexible nature of the Aghadi and its inherent understanding of women’s compulsions also helps in garnering support for it from women in all kinds of situations. By holding meetings in neighbourhood squares, or in temples or near water collection points, they make sure that they work around the reality of women’s lives. At the same time, they constantly challenge the patriarchal boundaries of the slum (and the party) where women are not supposed to take part in public activities or leave their domestic spaces.

Through their acts of violence at opportune moments against the Muslim community (interpreted as ‘religious valour’) in a predominantly male playground, women become legitimate public players and wrest power from men in many ways, becoming more powerful not only in the community as a collective but also in the domestic sphere. By manipulating the nationalist line, these women are actually expanding their own freedom and serving their own personal and collective gender interests.

In Sen’s book, communalism is not just a matter of political engineering by parties to raise mass sentiment and garner votes, but has a real material base and serves a social function, even for women, as women. These women are not interesting in killing off the enemy (unlike their children, who routinely play games that kill off the Others) but in keeping the conflict alive. Their everyday acts of maintaining a culture of violence and communalism are fascinating. How this permeates the lives of children in the area and sows the seeds of another generation of communal hatred is particularly heartbreaking. Sen’s chapter on ‘Sena Boys and Survival’ on the children of the Sena women and their inevitable ‘soldiering’ is perhaps the highlight of the book and guaranteed to move you to tears.

Sen also looks at two areas which have been the preoccupation of feminist scholars. One is the rewriting of history to reclaim women’s position, or write themselves into historical moments. Here Shiv Sena women attempt to do the same through their oral tradition. By scripting women’s valour and warrior-like qualities into ancient myths around Shivaji, they negotiate their own legitimacy in the public world of the Sena and increase space for their political participation, consciously creating a militant ‘herstory’ for future generations of Sena women. Another area is how women imagine their future. Feminist utopias have been imagined as egalitarian, secular, non-violent safe spaces but Sen jolts us back to reality when she draws what women in the Sena want: an army society where women have a militaristic position.

Sen is a skilful storyteller. In parts she manages to transport you to her world, as if you were there when her suitcase fell open at Mumbai Central spilling out her specially tailored saffron salwar kameezes onto the platform or when in a Kodak moment, both Hindu and Muslim children break into a dance together to a Bollywood song, or when she dances with the Sena children in the rain. Despite the violent acts that are sometimes hard to look beyond, Sen imbues her subjects (many of who do become her friends, especially the children) with a human-ness, a vulnerability and depth that only ethnography as a research methodology can. Although her own position as being “from London” is often mentioned, Sen refrains from the lingo and ‘culture shock’ that sometimes creeps into diasporic academic works. Her ‘shock’ is of a different kind. Like the shock of being bundled into a car and asked to lie low after one of the senior Sena leaders give her the glad-eye. Or the shock of watching the women beat a man to pulp or heckle a group of Muslim women while on an outing to Juhu beach. While Sen stands watching, unable to intervene and do anything as it endangers her relationship with her research subjects, we encounter the risk, trauma and ethical concerns of doing such research.

Other than the tiny print of the text which makes for very difficult reading, this book is a compelling read and has the potential to have a wide audience. It is relevant for academics and activists across disciplines, as well as the common man. Atreyee Sen’s work is a good sign of times to come and heralds new voices, new questions, new directions for Indian feminism.

(From the Indian Journal of Gender Studies, January 2009)

Another kind of Terror

2009-03-21T22:34:00.000-07:00

The Indian State and citizens are pledging to fight against political terror. But what about the sexual terror that all women have faced, survived and continue to silently battle? Why has no government ever called for a war against this kind of terror, asks Manjima Bhattacharjya

By now, much has been written about the mind-numbing violence in Mumbai on ‘26/11’. But this New Year, cast as it was in the dark shadows of the terrorist strikes, I was reminded of an incident that occurred last New Year’s eve which also saw some middle class ‘waking up’ as well as a series of outrages. Most critically though, it reminded me of another kind of ‘terror’ that women live with every day.

Last year, outside a hotel in Mumbai, two women, apparently visitors to a nearby hotel for their New Year bash, were walking to their vehicles on the main Juhu-Tara road with two male companions when they were publicly molested by a mob. As shocking pictures of the incident shattered the post-holiday bliss, middle class India’s smugness at being the second fastest growing economy in the world collapsed like a house of cards. Despite the outpourings of shock and outrage, nothing happened in the case, with the victims engulfed in humiliation and that special shame so unique to South Asians, choosing to escape more trauma by making a hasty retreat to their home state, although photographic evidence of the molesters did exist and some in the mob were duly identified.

This incident was only the tip of the iceberg, and in the statistical scheme of things, even rather common. After all, every 26 minutes a woman is molested in India. Dodging molesters, whacking gropers and ignoring catcalls is part of our everyday existence. But added to that are other forms of violence, threat and terror reserved for womankind that eat up our bodies and erode our minds again and again, and hardly get the attention or action they deserve. This New Year’s eve also, 22-year-old K.Swapnika from Hyderabad, who along with her friend was attacked with acid thrown in her face by three unidentified assailants (apparently a ‘spurned lover’), succumbed to her injuries after battling for her life for over two weeks.

The burning of brides, murders of widows for property, rape, battery, spurned lovers throwing acid on young women’s faces because they dared to say no (in fact, the BBC reported that kerosene and acid were increasingly the weapons of choice in India), jaw-dropping statistics of female infanticide and pre-natal sex selection. We have such a high tolerance threshold for violence against women. Everyday violence marks women’s lives, whether in times of war or peace, terrorist strikes or not.

Everyday violence

“The word terrorism invokes images of furtive organisations of the far right or left, whose members blow up buildings and cars, hijack airplanes, and murder innocent people in some country other than ours”, writes academic Carole J Sheffield in a poignant essay.1 “But there is a different kind of terrorism, one that so pervades our culture that we have learned to live with it as though it were the natural order of things. Its targets are females – of all ages, races and classes. It is the common characteristic of rape, wife battery, incest, pornography, harassment, and all forms of sexual violence. I call it sexual terrorism because it is a system by which males frighten and by frightening, control and dominate females.”

Sheffield goes on to discuss the theme in one of her classes in college. Women students talked about their secret terrors – fears of jogging alone, walking to their cars after evening class on campus, shopping alone, going for a movie alone, being driven home late at night by men (even those they knew), as the male students listened fascinated. When it was time for them to talk about their ‘secret terrors’, these things did not feature on their list. In fact, hard as they tried, they could not come up with any examples that were similar to the fears experienced by the women. They did experience fear of violence in general, being in places like Harlem or ‘disreputed’ neighbourhoods, but never did they experience ‘vague terror’ as the women had articulated walking to their cars or at the movies or in the evenings. They never feared being attacked simply because they were male.

During my own doctoral research with young women from Delhi and Mumbai trying to make it in the glamour industry, similar emotions were echoed. As single, young women especially in a city like Delhi, being in an industry which had its fair share of sleazy characters, undercurrents of ‘sexual terror’ had become part of their lives. The term itself was used by many of the women themselves in trying to articulate and pinpoint what this feeling, this essence, this fear was that they were talking about. A 21-year-old from a well-to-do family from South Delhi said, “On the road, the way men stare… it’s like ‘I will terrorise you!’ Girls get this kind of attention.”

Some talked in detail about the kind of planning and preparation that went into avoiding such encounters and guarding themselves from potentially harmful situations, especially in public transport, roads and other urban spaces. A young model shared how the clothes they had to wear to an audition often was inappropriate to travel to the venue of the audition in, therefore they sometimes wore a shirt over the ‘costume’ or wore subdued make-up en route to the venue, and once there, would change according to the needs of the audition. Some monitored and modified their lifestyle, behaviour, way of talking, dressing, curtailed their own freedoms at times to deal with this feeling of always being under some sort of threat. Others spoke of the virtues of pepper spray, chilli powder, safety pins and mobile phones that they made sure found a way into their handbags for any possible act of terror against them. Their concerns only magnify the terror that underlies most urban spaces for women in our cities, spaces which continue to be strongly male and women-unfriendly. Kumkum Sangari notes that the urban space is strongly linked in male imagination to the westernised woman, she who is “a blind follower of western fashion which reduces her to little more than a sexualised body to be gazed at and at times, even groped”.2 Such are the everyday realities of women in times of relative peace.

A fear lurking within us is one thing, being a target of such terror is another – whether it is through stalking, obscene phone calls, internet harassment or acid attacks. Currently in the spotlight is a proposed legislation to specifically address the phenomenon of acid attacks, looking at more rigorous punishments (including the death penalty) and making accessibility of acids more stringent. A state minister noted that there had been 73 cases of acid attacks on women in Karnataka since 2001.

Acid attacks (most of which are on women, and almost half of which are on young women below 18) are notorious in the region: Bangladesh already has a law in place, having suffered over 200 acid attacks, especially on young women (even girls below 10) per year since 1999. In 2002 it introduced the death penalty as the number of victims grew to 500 a year. A few months ago, a group of teenage girls on their way to school in Kandahar were attacked with acid for daring to go to school3. As for Pakistan, Human Rights Watch reported that nearly 280 women were killed and 750 injured through acid attacks in Pakistan in 2002. What were the motives behind these attacks? Refusals of marriage/love/’friendship’, to dowry disputes, domestic violence, property disputes, revenge, stepping out of line, ‘family honour’, not wearing the veil, being outside the home, being immodestly dressed, provoking male anger in general.

In conflict zones

In situations of conflict, war or unrest, sexual terrorism takes an ominously different form. An insightful report from USAID4 defines ‘sexual terrorism’ in the context of the Rwandan genocide and civil war in 1994: “Rape and associated violence against civilians (women, men, girls, and boys) have been widely employed as weapons in the multiple regional and civil wars that have plagued the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Such violence … became more frequent in1994 in the context of regional conflicts stemming from the Rwandan genocide and the pursuant exodus of Rwandan civilians and armed groups into eastern DRC. … Perceived as a particularly effective weapon of war and used to subdue, punish, or take revenge upon entire communities, acts of sexual and gender-based violence increased concomitantly. Attacks have comprised individual rapes, sexual abuse, gang rapes, mutilation of genitalia, and rape-shooting or rape-stabbing combinations, at times undertaken after family members have been tied up and forced to watch… Victims range in age from four months… to 84 years of age.”

In the genocidal violence in Gujarat 2002 or as recently as the rape of Christian nuns in the Orissa communal killings in 2008, such acts of terror have been systematically used as a weapon of war to shame, humiliate, target, terrify and ‘punish’ a particular community. In Iraq, even as the horrors of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo5 are fading, increasing reports of sexual terrorism are emerging. Amnesty International wrote in a 2005 report6 that "For women in Iraq, the stigma frequently attached to the victims instead of the perpetrators of sexual crimes makes reporting such abuses especially daunting."

No war against this terror

The response to the terror strikes in Mumbai has oscillated between caution and defiance; “It can’t stop us from living our lives,” said the common man in umpteen television bytes, “We can’t let it affect our everyday lives or else we will go out of our minds.” How many times have we as women said this to ourselves, even as family, relatives and society try to impose new restrictions – don’t wear this, don’t do that, don’t go here, don’t come home late…? Women live, love, work, laugh, in spite of the terror.

The crucial difference between sexual and political terrorism, as academics like Sheffield have pointed out, is that in the case of political terrorism, the terrorist is usually targeted as a criminal and the victim empathised with. But in the case of the sexual terrorism, the victims themselves are blamed and the ‘terrorist’ actions justified: “he must have been a sick man”, “men need to release themselves”, “it’s only natural” are common refrains as is the clincher: “boys will be boys”.

What does security mean for women? Is it more budgets for defence spending, new anti-terror legislation, a new taskforce, or is it taking these other kinds of acts of terror seriously? Crimes against women are hardly taken seriously. In Swapnika’s case, her father claimed to have alerted the police a month before the attack that they were being harassed. A Times of India report informed us on the eve of 2009 that data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) for the last three years shows that “crimes against the fairer sex are steadily increasing, and less and less number of the accused are getting convicted”7. Shocking statistics followed. More than 1.85 lakh cases of crimes against women were registered in the country in 2007; only 27,612 cases led to a conviction (14.9%). Some states reported dismal convictions: Delhi had 13.4% convictions, Maharashtra had 4% conviction while West Bengal had only 2.8% convictions.

Rape, violence, sexual threats, the threat of violence and harassment -- these have always been the face of terrorism that women have faced, survived and continue to silently battle. But no government ever called for a war against this kind of terror.

InfoChange News & Features, from the column THIRD WAVE January 2009

A tale of two speeches

2008-12-16T03:52:00.000-08:00

When a black woman with empathy and a single mother who writes about magic speak about empathy, service and compassion on graduation day at Stanford and Harvard, does it finally signify that values once rejected as ‘feminine’ and invalid are finding a voice and a space, asks Manjima Bhattacharjya as she flags off a new column on feminism’s Third Wave

This summer was special. Two of the premier educational institutions in the world, Stanford and Harvard, invited two unusual candidates to make the commencement speech at their graduation ceremonies. A black woman with empathy, who took a long time to put in her last credit and actually graduate, and a single mother who writes about magic. Before you think this was just any other black woman or single woman, let me quickly clarify: I speak of Oprah Winfrey who spoke at the Stanford Commencement, while JK Rowling spoke at the Harvard ceremony, although not without controversy.

Unlike graduation in India which is most unceremonious (even a compulsive degree-hunter like me has never been to one) American graduation ceremonies are a big deal, with much made of the ‘commencement speaker’ for the year – usually a symbol of success, wisdom and inspiration, who can give direction to the coming years of the graduating class. As I sat amongst the crowd at Stanford’s stadium listening to what Oprah had to say to the 4,000-strong graduating class, I wondered what this could mean. A few weeks later as I read the text of the JK Rowling speech doing the rounds on the Internet, I was struck by the coincidence of another woman candidate for the honour. Did it indicate that women have entered a certain mainstream when they are invited to address such gatherings? What did they say, and what could it symbolise?

Given that they are both wealthier than one can imagine (Oprah tops the Forbes list with an estimated $1.5 billion while JK Rowling comes second with $1 billion), it is perhaps not such a surprise that they be singled out for having something to say. But for a university like Harvard renowned for being the pinnacle of snobbery (where a previous commencement speech is rumoured to have been entirely in Latin), this was a truly radical departure. Rowling was the fifth woman since 1950 ever invited to speak at Harvard, others having been accorded the honour including Madeline Albright and Mary Robinson. Even though Harvard got its historic first woman president, Drew Gilpin Faust, in 2007, the university has often courted controversy with its position on women and gender. The previous dean Lawrence Summers, for instance, caused an international embarrassment with his suggestion that boys are bound to be better at math and science than girls because of biological differences.

The announcement of Rowling’s selection was not received particularly well at Harvard. Giving the rationale for her selection, the Dean emphasised while introducing the author, “No one in our time has done more to inspire young people to… read”. Some wondered if she wasn’t too lightweight, given the stature of previous speakers (Nobel Prize winners, former presidents, Bill Gates, Kofi Annan), a student ranted in the university newspaper that she was just a “petty pop culture personality”, another complained that “they should have picked a leader… Not a children’s writer” asking “Are we the joke class?” A graduating senior reportedly said, “You know, we're Harvard. We're like the most prominent national institution. And I think we should be entitled to … we should be able to get anyone. And in my opinion, we're settling here.”(1) But there were others too, especially alumni (who selected her), who noted that perhaps Harvard graduates still had more to learn about the meaning of success and the many different ways of contributing to the world.

On the other hand, the selection of Oprah was without event, barring a few odd voices. Oprah is in fact one of the most demanded commencement speakers on the university circuit (along with Jimmy Carter and Bill Cosby). Commencement speakers in the USA have traditionally come from the world of politics, academics (especially scholars from the sciences) or business, but today increasingly people from fields of ‘mass culture’ and ‘celebrities’ are being included. Other than who the speaker is, what speakers say is also keenly observed. In the past, speakers have “made history” with momentous statements about global issues at that time, like John F Kennedy, who called for an end to the arms race and the Cold War in a famous 1963 commencement speech at the American University.

Universities in the USA have been discussing for a while the pressures of finding the ‘right’ speaker, hinting at the politics of such selections. Colleges try to balance high expectations of students of someone famous who can inspire and entertain them (actor/comedian Bill Cosby apparently had Rice University students rolling in the aisles one year), a game of one-upmanship between universities, and a given budget. Most commencement speakers charge hefty fees (typically estimated to be between $25-35,000) unless they are in-office politicians who cannot accept a fee or they are famous alumni of the university themselves, in which case they may consider waiving or reducing the fee.

Other than the internal considerations, selection is framed in an external politics as well. A study of ‘the selection of commencement speakers of 32 elite colleges and universities’ (2) revealed that there was a heavy bias towards liberals and Democrat speakers in elite colleges, whereas Republicans or conservatives were poorly represented. Moreover, conservative speakers (including George W Bush) often faced protest rallies at these colleges as a result of which administration avoided such potential conflicts. Some commencement speakers have also been the cause of tension between Catholic colleges and the church, leading to a cardinal-led task force urging colleges not to have abortion rights-supporting politicians as commencement speakers or honorary degree recipients.(3) Recent years have seen Catholic colleges making “concerted efforts” to choose speakers who promote the Catholic identity and mission, and avoid those who publicly challenge the church. (They definitely won’t be asking JK Rowling to speak in a hurry, given her divorced status and promotion of gay wizards.) These anxieties reveal that the selection of the speaker is a political statement, but also – the speech itself is expected to have considerable influence on young minds.

Given their ‘celebrity’ then, the selection of Oprah or Rowling has no great significance for women’s inclusion in the elite lists of commencement speakers. What is radically significant though is what they said.

In her speech, Oprah shared three of the greatest lessons she had learnt in life. Her first lesson: go by your feelings and ask yourself whenever in doubt: “Does it feel right?” She cites the example of her early years in a television station as a news anchor (when she was asked to change her name to Suzie and perm her hair to ‘fit in’) where she knew something was amiss, until she began her talk show. “And how do you know when you're doing something right? How do you know that? It feels so. What I know now is that feelings are really your GPS system for life. When you're supposed to do something or not supposed to do something, your emotional guidance system lets you know,” she said.

Her second lesson: find meaning in your failures by asking “what is this here to teach me?” She cites the example of a school she set up for girls in South Africa, in which she scrutinised every detail of its setting up, yet incidences of sexual abuse by one of the matrons came out in the coming months showing her how she had perhaps been focusing on the wrong things. Her third lesson: find happiness by operating through the paradigm of service and being part of some change, whichever occupation you are in. She says, “I was always happy doing my talk show, but that happiness reached a depth of fulfillment, of joy, that I really can't describe to you or measure when I stopped just being on TV and looking at TV as a job and decided to use television, to use it and not have it use me, to use it as a platform to serve my viewers.”

JK Rowling’s speech on ‘The Fringe Benefits of Failures and the Importance of Imagination’ relived her own days as a failure – jobless, divorced, lone parent and poor, and reflected on what it had taught her: “You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity.” Rowling spoke of the power of imagination as a transformative and revelatory tool. She recalled working as an intern in Amnesty International and seeing how “the power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet”. Her message to the graduates was to reach out and touch other people’s lives: “If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better.”

Look at the themes they picked: feelings, failure, happiness, finding yourself, empathy, service, compassion, what is meaningful in life, what money means (this might sound trite coming from the richest women in entertainment – but both placed great emphasis on their belief that money is still only a means to other ends) and imagining and actively contributing to a better world. Themes like these or a question like “Does it feel right?” would conventionally have been against all norms of objectivity and dismissed as too emotional, illogical, and just too ‘feminine’.

Intuition/ emotion/ feelings versus science/ reason/ rationality. Since the time of Comte’s positivism, these have been cast as binary opposites, as female versus male, heart versus head, fact versus feeling, subjective versus objective. Supported by ‘scientific evidence’ like theories of the right brain (supposedly more active in women) linked to premonitions and left brain (supposedly more active in men) linked to logic, these have sometimes been used to explain why men are better at math and women are good with words. More critically, feminism has pointed out that these binaries have been routinely used through history to perpetuate myths about the legitimacy of gender inequality (and therefore justify gender-based discrimination) and dismiss women’s voices as ‘emotional’, ‘hysterical’ or ‘irrational’, rendering their knowledge and experiences invalid. Valid ‘authentic’ knowledge has always been male, logical, that which can be seen and measured in line with the fundamental tenets of scientific rationality. Are the lines between these binaries finally blurring? Are values/ideas once rejected as ‘feminine’ and invalid finding voice and a space in the times to come? Yes, if the pin-drop silence that both speakers got through their speeches and the two-minute standing ovations are anything to go by.

Oprah and Rowling’s sparkling addresses in the backdrop of institutions built on scientific hegemony brought into the mainstream all that has so far been considered ‘feminine’, unscientific and most undeserving of any import. As I sit writing this, world financial markets are crashing like cards. The instrumental rationality (4) of capital has been unquestionably challenged. Placed in the timeline of events that have been occurring over the last few months, their words seem bathed in a new light. Questions like “What is this here to teach us?”, “What could be the fringe benefits of the failure (of capitalism)?” and “How can we imagine the future?” couldn’t have been more timely. I can’t help but wonder if a new -ism is in the reckoning, something that is being born out of the churning of capitalism, socialism, communism, feminism. A paradigm shift is imminent, where money/knowledge/ profits/values/people will all be considered anew.

This summer was special, but this winter might be even more so.

Endnotes

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91232541
http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/news/1900/liberalbias.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0513/p02s01-ussc.html
A specific form of rationality focusing on the most efficient or cost-effective means to achieve a specific end, but not in itself reflecting on the value of that end. Instrumental rationality tends to focus on the 'hows' of an action, rather than its 'whys'. (Wikipaedia definition)

From THIRD WAVE/ my monthly column at http://infochangeindia.org/Women/Third-Wave/

Sex workers as economic agents

2008-12-16T03:46:00.000-08:00

There are three axes along which sex workers are marginalised -- the criminality associated with their work, the morality that keeps them ostracised, and the informality of their labour which deprives them of bank accounts, insurance, or employment security. Recognition of their labour and economic contribution is one of the first steps in mainstreaming sex workers and according them dignity and rights. The Sangini Women’s Cooperative Bank in Mumbai’s red light area has made a good beginning.

In September 2006, Kolkata saw thousands of women activists converge at the 7th National Conference of Autonomous Women’s Movement in India. As in the six national conferences before this, there were thousands of women from across the nation who had come to share their experiences of struggle, hundreds of banners with catchy slogans on women’s rights, and scores of intense debates. But unlike the previous conferences, this one included groups never actively included before: women with disability, transgenders and hijras, and, most strikingly, sex workers. Over the four days of the conference, sex workers put forward their arguments forcefully and with clarity; sang songs of freedom, rights and the merits of safe sex; danced with abandon along with women’s activists; and one sex worker from Kerala, Nalini Jamila, even spoke at length about her recently released book An Autobiography of a Sex Worker.

Such a presence is particularly remarkable considering that sex workers lack social power in such fundamental ways that they have remained voiceless for hundreds of years and excluded from society, polity and economy in every imaginable way. In the last decade, sex workers’ movements have emerged as strong voices of protest. Their emergence into the public arena, driven by HIV/AIDS-centred activism and their self-organisation into collectives, has enabled them to make their lives visible and work against their age-old legal and social marginalisation.

Demographic studies indicate that sex workers are usually women who are already subsumed by other elements of social marginalisation. They are predominantly illiterate, have limited economic opportunities and lower social status. Women belonging to scheduled castes and scheduled tribes have a higher representation among sex workers (in particular devdasis and women from the Nat and Bedia tribe, communities traditionally excluded from mainstream brahminical society) while a significant proportion of women are those who have been deserted, widowed or victims of violence (1).

The minute they enter sex work however, they are further marginalised along three other axes: the informality of their labour, the dubious legal status of prostitution, and notions of women and immorality.

The axes of marginalisation

The history of economics and the development paradigm is full of predictions that never came true. It was an economic anthropologist named Keith Hart who first used the term ‘informal sector’ in the 1970s to describe economic activities he saw during a study in Ghana -- ways of transacting, he wrote, that his education so far had not equipped him with a word for. Economists assumed that such unregulated and unorganised economic activities would be a transitory stage in a developing country’s evolution to a developed economy, a temporary phenomenon that would gradually fade away. But as the years rolled by, it became evident that the informal sector was no ‘waiting room’ where migrants or the poor stopped by in between their move to a formal regulated employment structure. Academics struggled to make sense of the diverse ways in which people earned their livelihoods and the fact that this rapidly expanding sector (now grudgingly called ‘economy’) was here to stay. In India, 93% of the population work in the informal sector, of which one-third are women. Sex workers too are part of this world.

Cobblers, key-makers, barbers, home-based workers, domestic workers, ragpickers, street vendors, sex workers -- all bound by the unique exclusion that the informality of their labour brings. None of them are likely to have a bank account or PAN card, be protected by any specific legislation, have insurance, pension or any security of employment and any formal recognition that their work contributes not only to the local economy of the area they live in but to the national economy as a whole. Despite the fact that our cities and towns thrive on their labour, they are systematically excluded from the financial systems of the neo-liberal economy.

For the estimated 3 million sex workers in India however, besides the travails of informality,
they are further marginalised along two other axes. One is the cloud of criminality associated with their occupation (2), which gives the law an unnatural power over them and is used brutally by local police to threaten, harass and routinely extort money and sexual favours. This semi-underground status precludes them from accessing the legal system for recourse to the discriminations they live with every single day.

The other is the underlying strain of morality that keeps them outside mainstream limits, keeps them ghettoed in ‘red light areas’ and envelops them in a stifling social stigma that justifies public misbehaviour towards them, social ostracism, eviction from prime properties and exclusion from health services or access to education for their children.

‘We are part of the economy too’

Stigmatisation continues to be the overwhelming and defining experience of being a sex worker. However, for sex workers all over the world, recognition of their labour and economic contribution is one of the first steps in mainstreaming them and according them dignity and rights.

One of the first documents of the new movement of sex workers, the Sex Worker’s Manifesto, released in 1997 in Kolkata, states: “Women take up prostitution for the same reason as they might take up any other livelihood option available to them. Our stories are not fundamentally different from the labourer from Bihar who pulls a rickshaw in Calcutta or the worker from Calcutta who works part-time in a factory in Bombay… Our contribution should be included in the GNP statistics for wage labour. Like the woman in the field, or in the construction site, we work hard (3).”

Increasingly though, globally there is a recognition of the population that sex work directly and indirectly sustains and prevents from falling into abject poverty, or placing an additional burden on the State. Amongst the new patterns of feminised migration that have emerged in the world with globalisation, one of the more prominent ‘global workers’ are ‘nannies, maids and sex workers’ (4), all responsible for crucial economic streams flowing back to their countries. An ILO report on the sex industry in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand noted that in Thailand, close to $ 300 million is transferred annually to rural families by women working in the sex industry in urban areas. The study notes how commercial sex became an important source of survival for thousands after the Asian financial crisis. It also states that several million people earn a living directly and indirectly through the industry, that it indirectly supports many other economies and workers (like hospitality, entertainment, travel and tourism) with an estimate that in these countries, revenue from the sex industry is critically important to people outside the industry as well, amounting to between 2-14% of the national income (5).

New initiatives for financial inclusion

Women enter sex work due to economic reasons, but despite supporting themselves and their families their identity as independent economic agents is often overlooked and in some cases undermined (like the instance of them being categorised as ‘beggars’ in Census 2001). In India, sex workers are excluded from financial security despite being earning individuals in various ways.

Women in prostitution may have an ambiguous relationship with the money they earn, often having to battle the ‘dirty money’ tag that comes with it. They may have to give large portions of their income to third parties like pimps, police or brothel owners, living in a cycle of debt, sometimes even debt bondage (whereby they have to pay back money to the brothel owner who may have ‘bought’ them from traffickers). They rarely have any ways of saving for their future or for their children. Even if they do save, depositing their earnings with brothel owners, local shopkeepers or lovers is not an option, as they are likely to never get it back. How will these women, with no documents and in habitual debt, create a financial base that will enable them to plan for their future, children and old age, say no to clients who are abusive or refuse protection, or even imagine other life opportunities?

Recognising the importance of financial security, last year an international NGO Population Services International supported the setting up of the Sangini Women’s Cooperative Bank in the lanes of Mumbai’s Kamathipura red light area. This special bank targeted at sex workers living and working in the area has had astonishing success very quickly. Its USP is that no residence documents or birth certificates are required to open an account (the only requirement is that the sex worker must belong to the local sex workers collective), minimum deposits can be as low as Rs 10, and collection agents go from house to house not only to collect money but also to counsel, answer queries and deliver account books and photo identity cards once the account is set up. Since it opened last year, the bank has attracted more than 1,700 account holders in Kamathipura with a total of over Rs 2 million in deposits; it recently opened branches in Vashi and Bhiwandi. A few months ago, the bank also started giving loans of up to Rs 15,000.

Other than its clients, the bank staff and collection agents are all drawn from the community. While the bank is an alternative from the mainstream, it is not isolated from mainstream banks. The Sangini bank reportedly invests around Rs 25,000 of the deposits daily in fixed savings schemes with state-run banks at the governing rate of interest.

This is not the only bank of sex workers in the country; the first was set up by sex workers in Kolkata as part of the 1994 Usha Multi-purpose Cooperative Society initiative by Durbar Mahila Samanvyaya Committee (DMSC).

Another milestone has been the country’s biggest insurers, Life Insurance Corporation of India’s (LIC’s) decision early this year to provide insurance to sex workers under a micro-insurance scheme called Jeevan Madhur, created for economically weaker sections. Under this scheme, being a sex worker does not disqualify an applicant (as has been the case so far) although, based on the understanding that the life risks associated with sex work are higher than in other occupations, the applicant is required to undergo a medical check-up. An initiative partnered again with the DMSC in Kolkata, the scheme has been met with enthusiasm: within a few days, 300 sex worker members of DMSC enrolled for the check-up.

Such initiatives -– taken by sex workers themselves -- indicate that financial inclusion, or being part of financial systems and having economic security is one of the priorities of women in prostitution, and something that they themselves perceive as having a far-reaching impact on their lives.

Negotiating exclusion every day

Working for financial inclusion is only part of the bigger struggle. Sex workers live and work in an environment full of risks. Violence, coercion, stigma, HIV are all negotiated by women in prostitution every day.

At the personal level, they try to minimise the impact of their social marginalisation and stigma in various ways -– by cultivating relationships with clients, putting their children in mainstream private schools, maintaining relationships with political parties or leaders to leverage some power in the area, or by playing up certain gender roles that have greater moral authority, such as prioritising their role as mothers. On the political front too, through strategic partnerships, organisation into collectives, alliances with other movements and with the growing confidence and conviction that nothing can keep them outside society limits anymore, many sex workers in India today are well on their way to changing their own destinies.

Endnotes

1 Demography and sex work characteristics of female sex workers in India. Rakhi Dandona, Lalit Dandona, G Anil Kumar, Juan Pablo Gutierrez, Sam McPherson, Fiona Samuels, Stefano M Bertozzi and the ASCI FPP study team. BMC Int Health Hum Rights. 2006; 6: 5. Published online April 14, 2006. doi: 10.1186/1472-698X-6-5.
2 The law around prostitution is ambiguous. The Immoral Trafficking Prostitution Act of 1986 (ITPA) criminalises trafficking and soliciting in public places, but not prostitution per se
3 The statement by the Kolkata-based Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee’s Sex Workers Manifesto, presented at the Sex Workers Conference, October 1997
4 Global Women: Maids, Nannies and Sex Workers in the New Economy, edited by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, Metropolitan Books, 2003
5 Liberating Economics: Feminist Perspectives on Families, Work and Globalisation, by Drucilla K Barker, Susan F Feiner, University of Michigan Press, 2004

From AGENDA issue 'Against exclusion',

InfoChange News & Features, October 2008

http://infochangeindia.org/Agenda/Against-exclusion/Sex-workers-as-economic-agents.html

When Melancholy Strikes

2008-09-19T20:10:00.000-07:00

My cousin Molly had a meltdown last year. After a difficult relationship and constant haranguing by her parents to get hitched to a line-up of green card holding NRIs, she was on an all time low. Even though she went about her techie job in the warm climes of Silicon Valley, inside, things were not alright. One day she woke up trembling and couldn’t stop crying. It was an involuntary sadness, a loss of control over her actions and emotions. “I couldn’t work, I couldn’t do anything that I could normally, make a sandwich, dress myself, work, talk to people, talk on the phone, nothing,” she told me a year later on an international call crackling with static, “I was a wreck. And it was something I just couldn’t control.”

Luckily Molly was in the USA where the solution for such an occurrence was not to find the next suitable boy and get her married off or take her to a baba who would magically cure her of her woes, but to see a doctor and therapist. Molly was diagnosed with clinical depression and put on medication. A year later she decided that she would try to go without it. With knowledge of her doctor she went off her medication. It’s been a few months and she returns to therapy regularly but has maintained her non-medication status. “I think I’m getting better”, she says. “It took a year but it’s better. I can work now, look after myself again, slowly do all the regular things.”

What brought it on do you think, I ask? “Who knows.” She falls silent. I know what’s going through her mind. All this ‘she’s-almost-thirty-and-not-getting-married’ business, fears of loneliness, self doubt, insecurities about whether she could carry through a relationship, being in America, not having too many friends or family around her. It could be any of these, yet none of these. It could be our genetic strands (that gloomy uncle, that moody aunt who now suddenly appeared quite possibly victims of some sort of depression themselves) or it could be a stray incident, a simple ‘nervous breakdown’.

Molly had been struck by what would have been called in the olden days, a case of the melancholy. Today it’s called by many names - schizophrenia, clinical depression, bipolar disorder or manic depression, post trauma syndrome disorder, post partum depression – but what we know about mental illness as a whole is still inadequate to deal with what’s coming next. The World Health Organization says depression will pose the second highest cost to human health by 2010, and women are twice as likely to be affected as men.

Biology or society?

What makes women more vulnerable to some types of mental illness? Is it their biological make-up or is it their social environment? Ten years ago Abha Bhaiya, co-founder of Delhi based women’s group Jagori coordinated a study on women’s mental and emotional health in India. The study found that women’s disadvantaged position in the family system, a deep neglect of their emotional needs and the family and society’s control over their lives, especially their sexuality, was in large part to blame. Bhaiya says, “Women face all kinds of abuse within the family. I remember a case of a woman from a wealthy educated family, a Colonel’s wife. Her husband would throw thalis at her. She stopped talking for two years. She was absolutely sane per se but clearly unable to cope with that kind of abuse.”

Another woman profiled in the study was Mahima, a creative, intelligent young girl who wrote brilliant poetry but needed sustained psychiatric treatment and went in and out of mental health institutions seven or eight times. “I feel I am in a dark hole very often, where I can’t seem to touch anyone,” wrote Mahima of her distress. “Her father was in the army and she was deeply affected by his control. The mother was also a control freak and all three sisters were being sexually abused by her maternal uncle,” recalls Bhaiya .

‘Maybe it’s just a phase’

Yet Jaya, who has been battling schizophrenia for the last twenty years had a happy childhood and was a gregarious, bright and cheerful kid. For her the diagnosis of schizophrenia was in some way inexplicable. Ashima, Jaya’s sister in law can recall when Jaya’s behaviour stood out as strange but remembers that it took a suicide attempt for the family to accept that something was terribly wrong. “I knew there was something horribly wrong with her. She was very angry sometimes, very loving sometimes. She wouldn’t do what was expected of her, not go to work or talk to people but just keep thinking – unusual things. I told my husband that she needed a counselor but nobody listened to me. My in-laws thought they would marry her off and it would get better. Then one day after a fight with the family she suddenly went into the bathroom, bolted the door and consumed bottles of insecticide. We had to break open the door and rush her to the hospital. Only after this did we take her to Sanjeevini (a counseling centre in Delhi) where they told us she needed help. Although the signs were there early on, it was not acknowledged till it came to a point of crisis. For me coming from the outside I could see it objectively. But to actually act on it was a big problem.”

‘Maybe it’s just a phase’ is a common misconception that families have, leading them to overlook even obvious symptoms and not seek professional help until the condition becomes severe. Dr. Renu Addlakha, social anthropologist and author of the book ‘Deconstructing Mental Illness’ (Zubaan, 2007) who spent 15 months observing and interacting with female patients coming to a government hospital in Delhi says, “Families bring these women in to the hospital because they are not able to manage any more. When the woman gets violent, abusive, doesn’t do housework, goes out of control - that is when the family takes her to the hospital.”

Shock therapy to talk therapy

Treatment for mental illness has also moved from electric shock therapy to anti depressants, usually ‘lithium’ pills that can be taken in the privacy of one’s bedroom. Anti depressants have marked a revolution in the way people have begun to access treatment for mental illness, although not without its own share of controversies. Monica Kumar, a clinical psychologist based in Delhi and with the Manas Foundation, an NGO working on mental health care says, “More and more women no longer want to take anti depressants because they are facing problems in their thinking process. They are moving more towards therapy and reaching out to counselors.”

Dr. Anvita Madan-Bahel, Mumbai-based counseling psychologist points out, “Medication may manage some symptoms in some illnesses, but only leads to chemical changes. It doesn’t deal with social triggers that may have set off the ‘attack’. And because it’s not always clear if the mental health problem was caused neurologically or because of the environment, medication should be followed up by therapy.” Therapy, support groups, other ways of healing like meditation and seeking solace in spiritual discourses and gaining more control over ones thoughts and actions are finding favour not only because of the negative side effects of medication, but because these forms of treatment recognize the social context of women’s mental illness and offer ways of resolving these elements too.

The ties that bind

Even this isn’t always in women’s hands. Kumar says, “Today some women are coming independently, but most often it is the family who is the decision maker. They decide when to begin and stop treatment. Even if she wants to continue therapy, if the family doesn’t want it, then it is not possible.”

Most mental illnesses are chronic conditions but as Addlakha says, “There are very few who need life long institutionalization. If the conditions are congenial in their home, family and work, they can maintain a stable life.” Ashima shares Jaya’s experience: “With counseling and medication Jaya recovered from her first episode within twenty days. It was a remarkable recovery and she was raring to go back to the bank where she worked. Later she got married, had two kids, but it was difficult. Even today there are spells of good and bad, huge moments of being unwell. Medicine makes her stable. It clears up the fear, mistrust, anger. If I talk to her and say positive things, I do get through to her sometimes. Nobody really mentions her illness explicitly but with me she refers to it indirectly by complaining about having to take medicines for the rest of her life. I tell her, how does it make it any different from people having high blood pressure?”

Madan-Bahel hits a raw nerve when she stresses that, “In treatment, the family can make a huge difference about accepting the situation by overcoming their shame and ignorance and educating themselves.” In Jaya’s case (in most cases in fact), this is far from the reality. “I still don’t know after twenty years of being schizophrenic if it is discussed openly either in her workplace or family”, says Ashima, “Even her kids may not know it actually in black and white.”

Breaking the silence

Shame, stigma, ignorance and silence – these continue to be the biggest barriers in dealing with mental illness. Even in this day and age in the USA where mental illness is more openly discussed than anywhere else, it took Brooke Shields’ ‘Down Came the Rain’ (Hyperion, 2005) a memoir of her journey through post partum depression, to lift the covers on this difficult illness. "This was sadness of a shockingly different magnitude. It felt as if it would never go away." she wrote. It did in her case with sustained medication and support but Shields’ voice found resonance in millions of new moms (more than one out of ten new mothers experience PPD) who were wracked with guilt about not being able to talk about feeling depressed, even suicidal, in the throes of what society told them should be ‘the happiest moment in their lives’.

‘What society tells us’, especially for women, is clearly part of the problem. The Oscar-winning film on scientist John Nash, ‘A Beautiful Mind’, may have brought schizophrenia into the limelight, but it was ‘The Hours’, drawn from life of writer Virginia Woolf (who suffered from severe bipolar disorder that ultimately took her life) that said the unsaid about women and mental illness. As the three protagonists in different time zones go through the motions in their everyday lives – baking a cake, organizing a party, writing a book – we witness their descent with every tick of the clock into the black hole of depression. As the road-roller of domesticity flattens their spirits and social control over their autonomy, desires, sexuality slowly silences them, it becomes evident that it is truly a complex relationship between the biological and the social that pushes many women, literally, over the edge.

(Published in ELLE, September 2008)

The Cancer Journals: Writing the Unspeakable

2008-09-09T22:22:00.000-07:00

When Audrey Lorde wrote The Cancer Journals in 1979, little did she know she was sparking a revolution. Lorde’s path-breaking personal account of her war against breast cancer opened up a universe of possibilities for other women to speak the unspeakable.

before the storm

Until a series of writings like Lorde’s burst forth thirty years ago, breast cancer hid itself as the ubiquitous “long illness” mentioned in discreet obituaries. Partly this was because of the social and moral discomfort with the sexualized, unnervingly female “breast”. And partly because cancer itself was a less understood, complicated and demonized disease which had its own set of taboos.

It’s been a long journey for breast cancer survivors who have over the decades created not only a community of women giving voice to their experiences and supporting one another but also a new genre of writing – today’s cancer journals, the breast cancer autobiographies.

a space of our own

This is where women with breast cancer can laugh about errant wigs, rage about the medical establishment, fear death, question God, accept fate, or most importantly, speak about things that are lost in the everyday of dealing with the disease.

For example, The Breast Cancer Book of Strength and Courage: Inspiring Stories to See You Through Your Journey edited by Judie Fertig Panneton and Ernie Bodai is a collection of forty six short narratives by survivors who bare their hearts about many things including the fear of being bald, the miracle of each day once death is a possibility and the belief hat cancer doesn’t have to keep a woman down. The book’s cover is special – a stamp specially created by the US Postal Service which raised over $30 million for breast cancer research.

Another anthology but with a twist in the tale is Breast Cancer? Let me Check my Schedule! edited by Peggy Mc Carthy and Jo An Loren, about the experiences of ten professional women busy living life by their appointment books until confronted with the inconvenient diagnosis of breast cancer. From diagnosis to treatment to survivorship the book follows the course of the disease and gently shows how you don’t have to leave your job as soon as you are diagnosed. In these stories, professional women take a leaf out of their workplace ethics in dealing with the unlikely combo of chemotherapy sessions and corporate lunches.

you are not alone

The experience of cancer radically changes the way women look at death, disease, society, family and life itself. Story-telling can be therapeutic in exploring these new facets of the self, and sharing it with the world. In the telling, survivors come to terms with who they have become and discover an extraordinary sense of purpose – teaching others to survive and telling other women that they are not alone.

Can You Come Here Where I Am? The Poetry and Prose of Seven Breast Cancer Survivors by Rita Busch, Judy Thibault Klevins, Daena Kluegel, Jana Morgana, Helen Rash, Katherine Traynham and Lesley Tyson is the product of a writing therapy support group. The writers scratch the surface to dig deeper into the invisible wounds that cancer leaves behind. One of these scars is the loss of identity. Katherine Traynham in the volume says, for example, “I don’t know whose body this is… I wish I were beautiful to me. I wish my breasts looked like they are mine. I don’t care if they don’t match, but I don’t know whose they are.”

for which there is no name

“Who is this person in the mirror? Is it really me?” is one of the most difficult questions that lie at the heart of many narratives. No Less A Woman: Ten Women Shatter the Myths about Breast Cancer by Deborah Kahane answers the need to talk about the intimate fears related to the loss of identity as a woman, sexuality and adjusting to a new body image. In a world that links women’s identity with her attractiveness and femininity to her breasts and body, is the loss of a breast the loss of femininity? As a teenage daughter tells her mother, “You haven’t lost a breast Mom, you’ve lost a cancer.” This book looks at ways in which women redefine femininity to realize that sensuality is something that can’t be surgically removed.

The emotional preparation and coping with mastectomy is beautifully explored in Living on the Margins: Women Writers on Breast Cancer edited by poet and anthologist Hilda Raz. Women authors come together to explore thoughts that are too difficult to say, even to oneself. Alicia Ostriker in Scenes from a Mastectomy says, “As soon as I am able to touch it, I resolve to caress this flatness… letting it know that I am not angry, that it is still my body, that I still love it. I tell a friend that I am doing this, caressing a place where there is no longer a breast, for which there is no name… But if I cannot love my body, I cannot heal.” Elaine Greene wonders aloud what happened to the amputated breast when she asks “Did they put it in a plastic box? A Baggie? Did they put it on a plate, like Saint Agatha’s in Italian martyr paintings?”

finding humour

Humour finds a special place in many of these accounts. Amy Ling, for instance, in Raz’s anthology finds in her baldness an opportunity to fulfill whacky fantasies. Ling buys three wigs, one a standard one, and the other two who she calls “Cher” – a head full of black, loose curls and “Annie” – short, curly and deliciously strawberry blonde!

More funny moments shine through in Cancer Vixen: A True Story by Marisa Acocella Marchetto, a “wine-swilling, pasta-slurping, fashion-fanatic” Manhattan cartoonist working with Glamour magazine who chronicles her encounter with cancer in a witty, Sex and the City comic graphic memoir. Her mantra? “Cancer I’m going to kick your butt. And I’m going to do it in killer five-inch heels.”

storytelling and recovery

Cartoons and anecdotes in the Readers Digest style also litter Cancer Has Its Privileges: Stories of Hope and Laughter by Christine Clifford, whose own journey reflects how storytelling is an integral part of the process of recovery and coping.

Four weeks after surgery, Clifford awakens at 3 am one morning her head bursting with images of all the funny things that the past year has brought to her along with a diagnosis of breast cancer. She goes down to her kitchen and for the next few hours scribbles out all the cartoons playing in her head, realizing that she had found her ‘focus’. Next morning she goes out to search Barnes and Noble bookstore for humorous cancer stories. Finding very little, Clifford realizes that she has found her calling. She goes on to publish her cartoons in the autobiographical Not Now… I’m Having a No Hair Day followed by a special book for children on coping with cancer in the family called Our Family Has Cancer Too! and starts ‘The Cancer Club’, an enterprise that produces humorous merchandise for cancer patients and their friends and families.

That explains why Eugene O’Kelly, Chairman and CEO of KPMG dropped everything he was doing when diagnosed with stage four of brain cancer in May 2005 to write his autobiography Chasing Daylight: How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life in the last three months of his life.

The genre of the breast cancer autobiography has come of age, beyond what Audre Lorde could have imagined. Lorde once said that the most passionate part of her battle against cancer was the one she waged against silence. For women in this generation, perhaps this is one battle less in their own war against breast cancer.

(From ME magazine/DNA, June 2008)

Which lessons do we want to learn?

2008-08-21T22:37:00.001-07:00

A Delhi Commission for Women’s survey of 400 sex workers in Delhi has thrown up some interesting data that could help make the government’s anti-trafficking and anti-HIV policies more effective. But since the data suggests that the state government’s current approach is wrong, will anyone want to learn the lessons it teaches?

"Over the years, we have become 'commercial sex workers' from 'common prostitutes'. Debates are held about us and we are discussed in documents, covenants and declarations. The problem, however, is that when we try to inform the arguments, our stories are disbelieved and we are treated as if we cannot comprehend our own lives. Thus we are romanticized, victimized, or worse. And our reality gets buried and distorted."[1]
Durga Pujari, an activist with Veshya Anyay Mukable Parishad (VAMP)

As Durga Pujari poignantly points out, the growing body of research and documents on sex workers seldom focuses on their immediate realities, tending to cater to specific agendas instead: sometimes highlighting the ‘fallen woman’ angle, sometimes examining HIV prevalence, condom usage, trafficking or the plight of sex workers’ children. Questions about where they come from, what their religious and caste composition is, whether they are BPL or APL or whether they have voter identity cards – questions which are almost spontaneous when researchers look at say, brick layers or agricultural workers - get easily relegated to the background.

But a recent study by the Delhi Commission for Women did pause to look at some of these areas. Claiming to be the ‘first study of its kind’ and aimed at helping the DCW to evolve a more effective anti trafficking and anti HIV programme, it surveyed 400 sex workers in Delhi’s red light area, GB Road, as well as those in the government remand home ‘Nirmal Chhaya’ to generate some insightful data on the status and condition of sex workers there.[2]

The numbers

The statistics that emerged showed that almost all the women surveyed were migrants from outside Delhi, a significant portion being from Andhra Pradesh. All of them had come to ‘escape poverty’. 41% stated that they entered sex work out of poverty, 39% having entered of their own will. More than 85% had identity proof, such as a ration card or voter I-card or a passport. While about 60% of them had children, only 40% of the children went to school.

The study also found that a large part of the women’s income goes to a third party – a kotha malkin or a pimp. As for the income, 72.5% earn between Rs. 3000-5000 a month while about 20% earn over Rs.5000. Disturbing trends were noted with respect to health and sexual behaviour. Only 50% use condoms, while less than 50% even know about STDs although about 46% are infected with STDs. High levels of substance abuse were reported, and over half complained of police harassment and violence.

At the release of the report, State representatives regretted being unable to sufficiently take much action to protect the women or help address the health issues as ‘the law did not recognize their profession’ and stated that women in this occupation could only be helped once in custody at the government homes.

The inferences

To begin with, these statistics do give us a better idea of who women in GB road really are – in fact, it becomes evident that sex workers are really no different from migrant construction workers or domestic workers or the thousands of migrants who come to the city every day to escape poverty and end up doing dangerous, dirty, dismally paid, often illegal work in the informal sector[3].

The difference lies in their specific and magnified vulnerability to HIV and STDs, their ambiguous and violent relationship with law and police, the damaging effects of social stigma and exclusion, and a range of vulnerabilities associated with being in an occupation which is partially underground. The fact that a large part of their income goes to the malkin or the shockingly low levels of condom usage (despite ‘well supplied’ condom vending machines being placed in many houses by the Delhi State AIDS Control Society, according to the State social welfare minister) illustrate that the women do not have control over their own lives, and that they succumb to pressures of pimps, brothel owners or clients.

What can we learn from the study that can help make anti-trafficking and anti-HIV policies of the Delhi government more effective and relevant? Ironically the data from the study strongly suggests that the current approach – raiding brothels, (forcibly) rescuing women in them and putting them in government remand homes on the one hand to address ‘trafficking’[4] and putting up the odd condom vending machine in the area and doing random health checks with a mobile van on the other to address HIV and sexual health needs – are grossly inadequate and misplaced.

Trafficking is not prostitution

Let us begin with the first approach – rescue, rehabilitation and repatriation. Perhaps the most significant finding that should be reiterated is that almost 40% claim to have entered sex work of their own volition, whatever the circumstances of that choice may have been. This is a crucial finding because it upsets the very first premise on which much of our anti trafficking policies operate: that women in prostitution have necessarily been trafficked into it, or that trafficking and sex work/ prostitution are the same thing. By DCW’s own admission this time, this is not true. Women in red light areas are a mix of those who have indeed been trafficked and coerced into prostitution and those who have not, who have come on their own, for whom it has become a means of livelihood and for whom being ‘rescued’ and placed in remand homes is akin to being imprisoned and in violation of their human rights. It is time to accept this reality and reflect it in our policies and laws - that not all women in prostitution have been trafficked and do not want to be ‘rescued’. Different approaches are required for the different groups.

Secondly, it brings into question the implicit assumption that somehow, poverty is a better alternative to sex work. That they were better off ‘back home’ or that within Delhi, sex workers in GB Road have it worse than women in JJ clusters or resettlement colonies like Bawana[5]. If women came into prostitution to escape poverty, the logic of rescue and repatriation only sends them right back to the poverty they were escaping from. And from which without fail, they will escape again to return to similar situations in the city. In fact, this is one of the recurring problems that ‘rescuers’ bemoan: how women invariably find their way back to the brothels once released from a government home or sent back to their State.

In fact the study reports that almost three fourths of the women earn between Rs 3,000-5,000 and a fifth earn more than Rs 5,000; this is significantly higher than the wages that migrant women in Delhi living in slums like Mongolpuri, Okhla or Dakshinpuri earn from home based work, factory work, beading or zari work. Economist Jayati Ghosh details these earnings and finds that most migrant women doing such informal work do not make more than Rs.25 a day[6]. Women in construction work make about Rs.60 on average a day[7] while a domestic worker can make upto Rs.100 a day. This is not to argue that sex work is a better means of livelihood than other forms of informal work, but to place sex work in the larger basket of choices or livelihood options that women migrating to the city to escape poverty have, and to recognize that prostitution has also become a labour and livelihood option. Without a doubt, it has its special risks and vulnerabilities in terms of costs to life, to social identity and to health, but without looking at it in the larger context of poor women migrating in search of livelihoods, it is not possible to get a relative perspective and to acknowledge money as a motivation for entering prostitution.

The entire logic of the rescue and repatriation approach to trafficking is therefore defeated by the data from the DCW study. This is the first lesson to be learnt.

Empowerment first

Next, let us look at what the study indicates about the approaches to HIV prevention in the state. How is it that in the capital city, Delhi, with such a high level of exposure to media, NGOs and state projects, less than half the women do not even know about STDs? The fact that only about 50% reported condom usage brings into question ongoing programmes in the area. What are the gaps? What is it that is missing in the case of Delhi that is preventing the kind of results that have been shown in HIV prevention in for example, the Sonagachi project in Kolkata[8] or in Sangli, Maharashtra where the sex workers supported by SANGRAM have formed the VAMP collective[9]?

In Kolkata’s red light area Sonagachi, between 1992 and 1995, condom use among sex workers rose from 27% to 82%. By 2001, it was 86%[10]. HIV prevalence among sex workers in the area fell from 11% in 2001 to less than 4% by 2004. In Sangli, the district in Maharashtra with the highest prevalence of HIV AIDS, 350,000 condoms are distributed to 5000 sex workers every month thanks to the programmes of the SANGRAM supported VAMP collective of sex workers[11].

Dr. S Jana, who initiated the Songachi Project has said in many forums that only information (about HIV) and technology (condoms) cannot enable sex workers to prevent HIV. What is needed is empowerment, or the ability for women to take control over their own actions and over their own lives. Organizing sex workers into collectives and promoting a self-regulatory, peer-educated approach has been documented as one of the ‘best practices’ in addressing issues of both trafficking and sexual health and HIV.

Women’s activists have found in the past that regressive policies and moralistic approaches coupled with a complicated local politics have prevented the mobilization of sex workers into a collective. While there are a number of NGOs working in the area disparately, the clout of old (and old fashioned) social workers in the area with political backing has thwarted any resistance. Crucially, the ideology behind most of these initiatives is not informed by a feminist understanding and doesn’t place empowerment of the sex workers at their centre.

State initiatives like that of the Delhi State AIDS Control Organization have also been wrought with bureaucracy. For example, in 2002 DSACO was taken to court for asking for asking for utilization certificates in exchange of supply of condoms. The Delhi High Court directed them to resume supply in the red light area without such clauses[12]. Two years later they were again in the news when the Comptroller and Auditor General tabled a report in the Delhi Assembly criticizing its inability to meet targets as well as its way of functioning[13]. The DCW and State representatives need to critically evaluate these areas.

The obstacles

While these statistics from the DCW study do not really say anything different from what women sex workers themselves, women’s rights groups and AIDS health activists have been saying over the last decade, the fact that these have been generated by a government body like the Delhi Commission for Women means that they are likely to be taken more seriously, and can have real consequences in terms of review of existing approaches – depending, of course, on which lessons they choose to learn.

However, the confusion around whether sex workers are ‘legal’ or ‘illegal’ continues to be an obstacle in addressing their rights. The law too is ambiguous about this, and while prostitution is not stated to be illegal (only trafficking and soliciting in public places is), this confusion is conveniently used by State representatives to justify their inability to address the needs of sex workers.

The data from the study reveals that 85% of sex workers surveyed in GB Road have some sort of an identity card. Regardless of where and how these documents have come from (again, the focus somehow tends to be on suspecting the validity of these documents), this shows us that these women are recognized citizens of the country. Regardless of the confusion around the legitimacy of their occupation, their status as citizens with rights cannot be challenged.

Sex workers need to be looked at from the labour and welfare point of view – they are women, often single mothers, heads of households, engaged in a vulnerable form of labour with special healthcare needs which have ramifications for the nation as a whole. Looked at this way, the question of legality cannot be an artificial obstacle in the path of working for their rights.

[1] ‘The Silence Around Sex Work’ by Syeda Hameed, see http://www.boloji.com/wfs5/wfs505.htm

[2] ‘ Grim Reality: A Survey of Sex Workers’ by Abantika Ghosh, in Times of India, 21 July 2008, see http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Cities/Grim_reality_Delhi_sex_workers_survey/articleshow/3256874.cms

[3] See latest issue of Agenda on migration, http://infochangeindia.org/Agenda/On-the-move/

[4] DCW claims on its website to have rescued 261 girls from kothas in GB Road over the ‘reporting period’. See http://dcw.delhigovt.nic.in/trafficking.htm

[5] See ‘Swept Off the Map: Surviving Eviction and Resettlement in Delhi’ by Kalyani Menon-Sen and Gautam Bhan (Yoda Press, 2008, New Delhi)

[6] ‘The Crisis of Home Based Work’ by Jayati Ghosh, see http://www.macroscan.org/cur/may08/cur170508Home_Based%20_Work.htm

[7] ‘Labouring brick by brick: A study of construction workers’, SEWA Ahmedabad, 2000, see www.sewaresearch.org/pdf/researches/labouring_brick_by_brick.pdf

[8] See www.durbar.org. The Sonagachi project started out as an STD HIV prevention programme and snowballed into a collective of 65,000 sex workers in West Bengal.

[9] See www.sangram.org.

[10] Violence against sex workers and HIV prevention, World Health Organization, Information Bulletin no.3, 2005, see http://www.who.int/gender/documents/sexworkers.pdf.

[11]http://infochangeindia.org/20040505149/Women/Features/SANGRAM-A-war-for-all-women.html

[12] http://www.hinduonnet.com/2002/12/06/stories/2002120606710300.htm

[13] http://www.hindu.com/2004/08/05/stories/2004080507450400.htm

(Online at http://infochangeindia.org/hivonline/vulnerable_hiv_7.php)

Chronicles of Death

2008-07-05T22:06:00.000-07:00

Manjima Bhattacharjya on how Iraq obsessively documents its bad memories.

The day we landed in Baghdad, the university professor who doubled as a taxi driver to make ends meet told us we were lucky. An ice-cream parlour—the first to do so—had re-opened after nine years. As we rushed to eat the historical ice-cream as if it might run out any moment or close again for another nine years, we joined a row of cars with cracked windshields and broken headlights at a traffic light.
"Sanctions. No spare parts," shrugged the driver-professor. Other than these minor cosmetic defects, outside was a busy, reconstructed Baghdad, back to life with an uneasy ordinariness. At our hotel later that night, couples laughed and danced in celebration at the 60 weddings being held simultaneously (mass weddings on Thursdays being another practice to economise on resources that were scarce because of the sanctions). It was as if there was no memory of the war and bombings that had changed their world. I couldn't have been further from the truth.

The next morning began with a trip to the Unknown Soldiers' Museum, built in memory of Iraqi soldiers who died in the Iran-Iraq war. At the entrance are inscribed parts of a speech by Saddam Hussein. "This is where the sons of the great Arab Nation and the sons of Iraq lie. Mothers looking for their brave sons will find them here." This still doesn't quite prepare you for what's lying inside: dead soldiers' uniforms, bravery medals, old weapons used during the war and flags laid out in coffins. In the centre of the hall rises a spiral steel structure resembling a date palm. The roots, trunk and branches of the palm are made of swords while black boxes make the dates. "Can you see the swords going right through the black boxes?" our host whispered. Yes, yes, I could, I assured her, beginning to sweat a little. "It symbolises the sword going through the hearts of the enemy."

The Arabs have always enjoyed a bit of drama. Visitors in Baghdad are often embarrassed by the face of George Bush senior mosaic-ed on the floor of a prominent hotel entrance. "It's not possible to get past without stepping on his face," our interpreter winked. There's also the massive statue of Saddam installed with smaller head busts of Bush senior, John Major and strangely Margaret Thatcher (she was on her way out when the first Gulf War began in 1990) at his feet as if lying in defeat, quite at odds with the historical fact that it was actually the other way round.

If the Iran-Iraq war led to one museum, the Gulf War gave birth to a whole crop of them. The Museum of Challenges and Steadfastness (obviously a laboured translation) is a hasty and resource-starved effort to document the first flush of US bombings on the country, particularly the mighty Scud with its propensity for finding civilians. Rows and rows of displays detail the volume and extent of US destruction but I couldn't really go beyond the 'Before And After' section. Now you see this whitewashed house with children playing in the front yard. Now you don't.

This was nothing, I discovered, compared to the tragedy preserved at a site called the Al Amiriya Shelter, originally a shelter for women, children and the aged. Two missiles hit the shelter on February 13, 1991, at 4 am. With the impact of the first missile, the five-ton iron and steel doors sealed shut making escape for those inside impossible and killing 1,186 civilians. The ruins have been converted into a memorial. Photographs of all those who died, messages to them, flowers for them are laid out in rows, along with posters made by children. It is here that you will bump into Umm Ghaida (mother of Ghaida), the 'woman with no name' whose daughter Ghaida was in the shelter when she had gone out to wash clothes. "George Bush killed my name when he killed my daughter," she says. "I only want to be known now in relation to her, so that each time we remember what happened." Umm Ghaida now lives in a caravan on the compound and speaks about the tragedy to those who come.

All memorials thankfully aren't this devastating. The Iraqi Women's Cultural Museum documents the changing status of women in the region—from being worshipped as fertility goddesses in the Sumerian and Assyrian ages in 3rd century BC till the modern period. As only expected, the museum highlights women's role in the many wars that have passed through Iraq's valleys. The Iran-Iraq war period is represented in this museum through women's eyes, not with swords or coffins but with pictures of women working outside the home, doing everything "that men did"—out in the fields, flying planes, learning to shoot. The Gulf War too is documented differently—no models of missiles or charts of strategies used by the American troops, but angry pictures of women's resistance.

That week in Baghdad, it was the museums and memorials that would spring up in the oddest of places that spoke of how the nation worked to document its bad memories. Museum after museum, memorial after memorial made sure nothing was forgotten. For each war, for each significant bombing, for each loss, each historical moment there is something to show for it. Like the new Iraqi flag. The legend goes that in 1991 at the start of the war, an emotionally charged Saddam Hussein wrote 'Allahu Akbar' ('God is great') across the centre of the flag with a pen. This became the new flag until his fall. Flags rarely change overnight. But in Iraq, with its penchant for embalming its Big Moments, anything is possible.

(From Sunday Times of India, 6 July 2008, online at http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Review/Chronicles_of_Death/articleshow/3201824.cms)

Disability Rights: A Long Road Ahead

2008-07-05T21:27:00.000-07:00

This May, after years of lobbying by disability activists around the world, a landmark UN treaty finally came into force: the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. All this time, most nations had argued that the rights of disabled people were usually covered in other statutes but this treaty forces them to acknowledge that people with disabilities experience specific kinds of discrimination that cannot be hidden under other social inequalities. With this treaty (that will also set up a body to monitor its implementation) disability rights has been put on every nation’s international agenda, including India. Dr. Anita Ghai, disability activist and author of the book ‘Disembodied Women: Issues of Disabled Women’ speaks to Manjima Bhattacharjya about the struggle for disability rights in India, the human failings that threaten a united disability rights movement and the long road ahead.

Q. It was only in the late 1980s that discussion about the rights of disabled people really entered the public domain. When did people start coming together across disabilities to demand their rights?

The struggle for disability rights has seen a lot of activism and advocacy around certain legislation or policy, especially around the Persons with Disabilities (Equal Opportunity, Protection of Rights and Full Participation) Act of 1995. I don’t know if one can really call it a ‘movement’ because for cross-disabilities to come together, it has always been a tough job. There are many barriers. It is very difficult for people to get together, even physically because of accessibility issues, communication problems, and the different problem across disabilities. But in spite of these, there have been times when we have all worked together to achieve something. For example, we came together under one umbrella to fight for the inclusion of disabled people in the Census of India. For the inclusion of people with disabilities in the Census of 2001, there was a very big rally in Delhi, a hunger strike was held until there was a commitment to include us in the Census. Isn’t it shocking that until 2001 we were not included? Initially they said the figures are very low, so it doesn’t need to be included. In 1991 they defined disability as those who were “totally incapacitated”. But nobody is “totally incapacitated”! So the numbers you generate depends on how one constructs the category. Of course it is another thing, how it is implemented. Even after we were included as a category in the Census 2001, nobody came to my house and asked if I was disabled or not.

Another time we came together was when we all had a protest because the government had not appointed a commissioner to run the legislation. It took this protest and candlelight vigil where we courted arrest to force the government to finally appoint a commissioner. It was a great feeling, even though it was pouring heavily there was a lot of enthusiasm and excitement and saw participation across disabilities. There have definitely been gains when we have come together.

Q. You’ve been a spokesperson for the specific issues of disabled women. What’s your story? How did you become a disability rights activist?
For a long time I did not identify with my disability which was caused by polio at a young age. I had the fortune of parents who invested a lot in my education. I went to an inclusive school and had to do well because the idea that I had to be independent was very strong. So studies, cricket, movies, my childhood was regular in that sense. My first job (without reservation, that had not been set into motion at that time) was as a lecturer of psychology at Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi (where I still teach). A Women’s Development Cell had been set up there to do gender sensitization and things like this. I used to interact with the girls and began working in that cell. Following the demolition of the Babri Masjid I went to a women’s rally and gradually became an ‘activist’. As I worked more and more on such issues, I realized that much as I would like to disregard my disability, others wouldn’t.

I also had some personal setbacks that made me confront my disability and the politics around it much more. While people were fine with me being in their lives in many other roles – as a friend, sister, colleague, the role of a partner in a heterosexual relationship was not acceptable. So I started questioning why feminists who had spent all their lifetime talking about the body had never discussed the disabled body. A personal incident shook me and I almost took an overdose. When I regained consciousness in the hospital, my father told me ‘you must ask yourself why you have been saved’. I was an activist but had never thought about disability issues so seriously. That became a turning point for me.

Q. You are also known for building bridges with other movements. What propelled you to do this?
Over the years I decided to stay out of the NGO-ization process that was going on in the name of disability rights and do my own kind of work to build bridges with other movements (like the health care movement, education and women’s movement) and create more spaces in mainstream society for the disabled. This was also because the issues of disabled women and the disabled poor had largely been ignored by dominant disability rights groups. I also felt that there was no ideology behind all the advocacy, it was too superficial. For example, people got together to get mostly concessional rights, for reduction in taxes, tickets and so on. I also avail of many of these advantages, and so I am not contesting that many people do need such concessions. But it did not really look at disability as an identity and take that forward.

Q. Do you think the concerns of disability rights groups are misplaced? What is missing?
I think we are somewhat caught in NGO-ization and funding politics where power lies in the hands of one or two individuals. NGOs which have the money power are able to do big programmes like the Disability Day celebrations at India Gate every year. But how much does that really do for disabled people? What does it give us?

One is not contesting that disabled people should vote or participate in all spheres, of course. But for example, there was a move to make monuments more accessible. Monuments are really not as important as schools and colleges! A PIL was lodged in the Supreme Court to get 50% discount for people with 80% disability. OK. But shouldn’t those who really need the discount – poor people, even if they are not 80% disabled – get it? For someone in a slum who is disabled – what have we given that person?
I have a hand driven car, motorized wheel chair and I have a voice. I can fight for my rights. But is that the purpose of a movement? Isn’t it to make a difference for others also?
Most of those who have fought the battles have been elite, middle class, educated so their concerns have been something else. They have also mostly been men. So disabled poor and disabled women’s concerns have been left out. They have never responded to all the shocking incidences, for example, of forced hysterectomies or sexual abuse of female residents that come to light in institutions for disabled people. People who reacted in these cases were the women’s movement. Where is the fight for these disabled people in the movement?

Q. What are the other issues that you feel are keeping us back?
Today there are all kinds of organizations working in this area – rich organizations, genuinely grassroots organizations connected with the community, and a lot of service delivery groups. Even though the Ministry changed its name from Social Welfare to Empowerment and Social Justice, we have still in practice not made this shift in consciousness. We are still in the rehab/ charity mode. We have to look at the deeper issues - beyond disability certificates or tax exemptions.

Q. It’s been some years since the government recognized disabled people as a category in the Census and acknowledged that there are 70 million people in the country living with disabilities. Since then they have also ratified the new UN treaty. Are they more responsive today to disability rights issues?
Disability representation in government committees or in policies is just a token. Often people who know nothing about an issue are included only because they are disabled and hold powerful positions. The government plays to the gallery and appeases powerful people within the disability rights ‘movement’ without seeing that these are not representative of people’s real needs.

Some things which should have been fought for were indeed achieved. In my time for example, we had no opportunity to take the IAS exam. Now they let them take the exam, but if you get through you have to wait years before you get your posting! There are other problems too. For example, I know of a blind woman who took the exam and passed. But a board assessing her disability said she was 38% disabled (the cut off is 40%) so she could not qualify as disabled. Her doctors however said she was 63% and another board said she was 58%. Is it a joke? Is she disabled or not? So on the ground these things do happen.

Even the question of reservation is difficult. At times I feel, without it one can’t get anything. But sometimes I feel it does not resolve anything. There is 3% reservation in my college, but in all my years of teaching I have only seen 4 disabled students. How do disabled children get to school, leave alone college? Obviously the root problem lies elsewhere which is being addressed neither by the government nor by most disability rights groups.

Q. How are our concerns different from the disability rights movement in the West?
Here, we are still fighting for daily survival – get into a building, go to the market, or just go to watch a movie! Can you imagine, in the capital city of Delhi, I cannot go and watch a movie! The West is much ahead. There, accessibility is very different, they are much more aware of nuances, there are personal assistance schemes in which the government pays for escorts for people with disabilities. But they also have their own fights – pre natal selection (the question of if you can prove a foetus is ‘disabled’, you can have an abortion) or euthanasia (whether people with disabilities have the ‘right to die’).

Q. Do you think the media is playing any role in changing the way we look at people with disability?
There have been some sensitive programmes but the media are really not into it. Not interested in talking about or talking to people with disabilities. Even in this, it is concessional. Doordarshan gives one hearing impaired news bulletin once a week, as if they don’t need more than that! There is some representation in soap operas but the representation is so bad! Like a blind woman, who is raped because of her blindness. Or dialogues which say, “better to be dead than be disabled” (“apahij hone se to maut achha hai”). I am not sure they give any message of the strength of people with disabilities. So it is confusing - when we fight for inclusion or representation in media, they do it in such a way that I feel that it would have been better off to not have fought for it at all.

Q. What are the common mistakes non disabled people make when they interact with people with disabilities?
Non disabled people project all their fears about their own mortality onto the disabled people they interact with. To them, disabled people signify all that can go wrong and so somewhere they are fearful. They also tend to label disabled people as ‘poor things’. Once they codify them as that, they are not going to think that disabled people have a right to life like others. They will think that it is enough if they have food to eat and a roof over their heads. What more do they need?! They also don’t understand the need for us to do things by ourself. People ask me, “Why can’t you stay quietly in one place?” Or “Why do you need to go yourself? Just send someone.”

Q. What gives you hope, though? How do you see the road ahead?
The signing of the recent UN Treaty on people with disabilities is in some sense a great victory. There are definitely achievements. There is much greater visibility. I was very impressed with the film Iqbal, although Black and Taare Zameen Par had their problems but even then they gave some more visibility. So hope is there. But the question is where are we going from here? The government report might say “number of ramps built in 2006” and give an impressive number. But try getting onto some of those ramps! People using these facilities have to be part of designing it. Policies and changes designed for us have to include us in the planning. There is a slogan that was very popular once in the USA which I believe is still valid and says a lot: NOTHING FOR US WITHOUT US!

(From ME/DNA, Mumbai, June 2008 issue)

Photo: disability awareness art from www.outside-centre.com/thchair/images/2sandn1.jpg)

The miseducation of the Indian client

2008-06-03T23:45:00.000-07:00

An international study that sought to profile men who buy sex found that of all the countries, Indian clients’ responses stood out for their low level of knowledge of sexual health issues and resistance to condom use.

There is a burgeoning bank of knowledge on sex workers and their role in both spreading and stemming the HIV infection, but too little is known about the other side of the ‘vectors of infection’- the clients of sex workers. Few studies have really attempted to profile men who buy sex. Interventions aimed at only high risk groups (like truck drivers or migrant labourers) have left out those who do not fall into these groups but who nevertheless make up the majority of clients: the ordinary man.

Who are the clients?
An international study conducted in 2002[1] which in part looked at the demand for sex work found that out of the 400 men surveyed across six countries, including India, 185 men had experience of buying sex. The data revealed that buying sex was a fairly common (approximately one out of four men) experience amongst men in all the countries surveyed, and that the profile of clients was surprisingly ordinary, cut across classes, age groups and occupations, from brick layers to bankers.

Some of the findings of the study have special relevance to the HIV discourse, especially in the context of India. The India part of the study conducted by the research team at JAGORI (http://www.jagori.org/), a Delhi based women's group, surveyed about 100 men and undertook interviews with ten men who had experience of buying sex (from women in red light areas as well as call girls) across occupational categories of students, professionals, manual labour and even police. While the numbers in themselves were not sufficient to make generalised observations[2], the findings did point to some trends and shed light on a group of individuals who had experience as clients.

Youth and masculinity
Most men surveyed had their first experience of going to sex workers in their youth. Even though the majority of the men surveyed were middle aged, 78% of them reported that they had first gone to a prostitute at the age of 21 or below. About 18% had been under the age of 18. The younger the men were when they first went to a prostitute, the more likely they were to repeat the experience. Men who had their first experience at an older age were less likely to show a pattern of prostitute-use. Moreover many of these youthful ‘sexual experiments’ had been done in groups, under some level of peer pressure, and formed a part of the culture of masculinity in that society[3]. The circumstances of the first experience show that in India, for 69% of men it was arranged by friends or colleagues. 25% decided independently to buy sex. Only 6% were solicited.

This suggests that young men between the age of 15 and 21 not only form an important group that is sexually active and engaging in high risk behaviour, but are also potential candidates for the category of ‘regular clients’. Young teenage boys and men therefore can be targeted with interventions that could have a long term impact on their sexual behaviour in the future.

Rationalising prostitute-use
Visiting prostitutes, especially in a segregated society like India has its own place in the absence of formal modes of communication and channels of information on sex and sexuality, and the taboos around these issues. “What will happen to boys like us?” asked one of the boys interviewed, at the thought that prostitution might be abolished. What he meant was that in a closed society that he was part of, other than violence, an accessible sexual relationship with a woman was possible only through this medium. While going to prostitutes is not encouraged and usually undertaken in secrecy, there is a level of tolerance and a social understanding of the context of prostitute-use in India. Even though the clients had moral judgments on women in general (and promiscuous women in particular), they did not feel that they themselves were in any way doing anything immoral.

These rationalisations are partly rooted in clients’ belief in certain myths around male sexuality. Most Indian clients spoke of men’s biological ‘need’ for sexual release. They were under various misconceptions, for example, that a man who does not get a sexual outlet can develop very high blood pressure and other complications. They also felt prostitution was a necessary institution that served a social function – it prevented men from attacking ‘good women’ on the streets and in the homes (non sex workers) and kept them safe, and was a safety valve where men could release their excess sexuality.

Myths about male sexuality and STD/HIV prevention
Clients from all countries valued youthfulness in sex workers and preferred younger sex workers especially in their early 20s, but this trend was particularly strong in case of Indian clients. Some 47% of Indian clients preferred women between 19 to 25 years of age, 37% preferred women between 16 to 18 years (although sex with a person below 18 is considered rape) and 8% preferred children between 13 and 15 years of age. Their responses to questions in other parts of the survey and interview pointed to some disturbing reasons for this.
Less than 15% of all the clients stated that one of the precautions they used to guard against STDs and HIV was to go to younger prostitutes. However the majority of these were from India. Another strategy primarily reported by Indian clients, was to seek virgins as a way of reducing the risk of STD and HIV. Moreover, condom usage was shockingly low in India – only 58% of Indian clients stated that they always used a condom when visiting a sex worker as compared to 74% of Thai clients or 96% of Italian clients.

These responses reveal that men (even those who are educated) suffer from ignorance of even basic knowledge around sex and sexuality which puts them at greater risk of STDs and HIV. Of all the countries, Indian clients’ responses stood out for their low level of knowledge of sexual health issues and the resistance to condom use. Some of the men interviewed in fact rued that using condoms was a particularly sensitive issue and fights over this sometimes led to violence against the sex worker. The report notes these concerns in India and suggests in strong terms that there is a ‘need for greater investment in sexual health education…especially in India’.

Criminalising clients and the HIV discourse
Recently proposed amendments in the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act[4] include penalising men who buy sex. What are the implications of this legislation on the HIV discourse? Clearly, any efforts to raise awareness or implement intervention programmes amongst clients are immediately thwarted if such legislation comes into effect. Moreover, as their business comes under threat, sex workers become more vulnerable to agreeing to risky sexual acts and deals for their survival, thereby leading to a break down of various security measures that have been put into place by the last two decades of HIV intervention work. This threat should prompt AIDS activists to evaluate in detail what this legislation will mean for their work.

Some findings from the study turn the two basic assumptions underlying this law on its head. One, that prostitution is about demand and supply, and by cutting off demand (clients), there will be a reduction in supply. Like the flawed understanding that begging can be abolished by preventing people from giving change to beggars at red light areas, this simplistic logic defies the structural imbalances and politics of gender that underlies the institution of prostitution. The experience of countries like Sweden (also profiled in the study), where buying sex is a criminal offence, shows that such actions do not really quash demand but only sends them across the border or underground.

The second assumption is that clients are inherently exploitative or abusive. This is not reflected in data from the study. Instead, a large percentage of clients stated that they would like to inform the police or get help for a sex worker who had been trafficked, or was being coerced into prostitution. Another revelation from the data was that a large number of clients – the highest being in India (50%) – stated that they had experienced sexual abuse themselves as children. This has no correlation with their prostitute use as such, but it points out that clients have often been victims of abuse themselves, something which has been so far ignored and which points to the neglect of issues of male sexual abuse, especially of children.

Clients as allies
This self perception of clients, as allies of the law or social activists who might want to ‘rescue’ trafficked women if there were safe, anonymous channels of communication and information to report these, has so far been unrecognised and needs to be taken into consideration by health activists, anti-trafficking groups and sex workers’ rights groups. Clients also need to be acknowledged as important allies in the fight against HIV/AIDS.

Finally, an international study like this raises a mirror to the (lack of) permeation of sexual health information amongst sexually active men in India. The gross mis-education of Indian men on matters of sex and sexuality, and their reliance on myths and whispered hearsay to build up whatever knowledge they have, indicate that the gaping holes in our sex education remain one of the biggest barriers to sexual health. Instead of concerning itself with criminalising clients, banning bar girls from dancing in beer bars or ‘cleaning up’ red light areas, the State and its institutions would do better to take their ostrich heads out of the sand and get on with the urgent task of mainstreaming sex education.

Endnotes:
1. ‘Is Trafficking in Human Beings Demand Driven? A Multi Country Pilot Study’, published by International Organisation for Migration, Geneva, 2003. Report by Bridget Anderson (University of Oxford) and Julia O’Connell Davidson (University of Nottingham). Study supported by Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Sida and Save the Children Sweden.
The India part of the study was conducted by the research team at JAGORI (http://www.jagori.org/) comprising Manjima Bhattacharjya, Abha Dayal, Seema Singh and Kalpana Viswanath.
2. Other limitations of the study included focus of the sample on a particular city in each of the countries as per the organisation asked to conduct the study and certain difficulties that accompany a cross-country research methodology. Though the questionnaires and interview schedules were the same for all country teams and were evolved together by an international team, these were interpreted differently by respondents. In certain questions therefore, data across countries was not comparable.
3. This differed in extent across societies: for example, in Thailand, going to a prostitute was a rite of passage for young adolescent men; it was less so in India although still linked to masculinity in young men, and only marginally in Scandinavian countries. In India, masculinity in older men was associated with providing for the family, although for younger men sexual exploits were a part of exhibiting their masculinity amongst peers.
4. The Immoral Traffic Prevention Act of 1956 was later named Suppression of Immoral Traffic Act (SITA) 1986. This act does not see prostitution as illegal per se, although soliciting in public places is a crime, and is commonly used by police as a pretext to raid brothels to ‘rescue’ women (whether trafficked or non-trafficked). The proposed amendments to this law include decriminalisation of women in prostitution, but simultaneously criminalisation of clients as well as increased punishments for all third parties who benefit from a commercial sexual transaction such as brothel owners and pimps.

(From www.infochangeindia.org/hivonline )
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Autism

2008-05-18T21:36:00.000-07:00

Different Strokes
Manjima Bhattacharjya learns what it means to parent children with autism.

Merry Barua wears many hats: disability activist, educationist, founder of the pioneering organization ‘Action for Autism’ and the specialist school ‘Open Door’ and mother of a 28 year old son with autism.
It was Shubhangi Vaidya, doing her doctoral research on families of autistic children and a mother of a child with autism herself, who led me to Merry. “We are the lucky second generation mothers,” Shubhangi says, “I got a diagnosis when my son was three. If it wasn’t for the struggles of people like Merry, I’d still be one of those women floating around wondering what the hell was wrong with my child? What an incredible difference she has made to our lives.”

As I spoke to Merry (“as in Christmas”, she charmingly said) later that night in a conversation that extended into double the time I had promised her I would take, I could see what made Merry such as inspiring role model for many parents confounded by a disorder like autism which as Newsweek magazine says, ‘continues to challenge science and unite determined families’.
Merry Barua shares her remarkable journey in her own voice.

The early years
“When my son was young, hardly anyone knew what autism was. For a long time we thought it was the same as mental retardation. I didn’t know how to understand my son’s challenging behaviours. I mean, if he could do A and B it was logical he should be able to do C. But I couldn’t understand why this wouldn’t happen. There was always a little piece of the jigsaw puzzle that did not fit.

Those days – the early 80s - there was no Internet. Information on autism was difficult to find. I got books from abroad and started reading. As I educated myself, I realized what was happening, I saw that the way we had been handling Neeraj was all wrong. For instance, a child throws something out of the window, and we then take his food away as punishment, For a child with autism there is no connection between the two! They cannot relate one to the other. Later, I went abroad and did some trainings which helped me to see how I could help him.

A movement for autism
I started Action for Autism (AFA) in 1991, and later in 1994 I started Open Door, a specialist school for autism, as a model that could be replicated. The reason for starting this was to show the world that people with autism can learn and to develop teaching methodologies to do this. AFA intended to really initiate a movement for autism - to change the situation and bring autism to the attention of society. Policy makers hadn’t heard of autism at the time, doctors had no idea about it, and schools did not know of it. It was to help create a world where our kids would find a place.

For the longest time people in India insisted that autism wasn’t an Indian problem. I could see children who clearly showed the symptoms of being on the spectrum but even health professionals insisted that autism only happens in the West. Another myth was that autism only affects the well-to-do, as earlier it was only well off parents of ‘different’ children who would seek help. Which is not true, autism affects people from all backgrounds. Earlier there was also a strong belief that it was a hopeless case, that nothing could be done about it. But this is beginning to change as people are realizing there are all kinds of help they can seek to help children with autism learn and progress.

Having lived through a period when there was little understanding of autism, I felt that no one should have to go through this. There is no reason for parents to go through a vaccum because today there are therapies and methods that can help their child learn.

A different culture
Autism is like a different culture. Persons with autism have a different understanding of society and of communication from non-autistic people. We have to teach them our modes of communication and understand theirs, and we have to give them tools to navigate our world. Most non-autistic people learn through observation and imitation. But most children with autism have to be taught to learn through imitation. They understand our language very literally. So if the teacher says, ‘its time to pull up your socks’, they will literally think that they have to pull up their socks. Or if the teacher comes and says sarcastically, ‘are you going to do your work or sit there and look out of the window?’ they will think that there really is a choice of sitting and looking out of the window.

With autism simple things, even daily tasks, can become extremely challenging. Most autistic children don’t have a very good sense of space or their own body, and also have strong sensory issues. Take brushing for example, or shampooing. Many can’t tolerate something like brushing their teeth, because the sensation in their gums is too much for them. Which is why many of them have dental problems. If you had heard my son when he was little while I gave him a shampoo, you would have thought I was slaughtering him! I just couldn’t understand why he would be screaming the way he did. Later I realized what was happening. For him the experience was as if I was tearing his hair out. Then the haircut. I would hold him between my knees and snip off whatever came between my fingers. Later I learnt to prepare him for a haircut and got him to sit for it. But the cutting of hair was still acutely painful. So even though he learnt to sit quietly, his expression would be as if someone was slowly slitting his throat!!! It is so hard to explain. You have got to live it to truly understand it.

Special needs in education
Children with autism have their own special needs, especially in education. In the case of autism it’s not as much about financial investment - like putting up a ramp - but more of a mental investment. It’s understanding that this child might need computers rather than pens, or might be able to require a visual timetable rather than a verbal one. These kids look normal – that’s the biggest challenge. They look normal but they have a condition that’s so complex.

Understanding concepts is difficult for children with autism in the current system. It’s not that they can’t learn but the way to teach it has to be different. Math is a wonderful subject but 80% of the people will tell you they hated the subject. That’s because of the way it is taught in our schools. Children with autism need concrete learning in early stages. They have very good focus and an excellent memory, these are their strengths. So they can cope in lower school by rote and seem to do well. But because of archaic teaching methods their foundation often remains shaky, and as a result later in middle school they are forced to drop out. If the teaching in the early stages is experiential, this can be averted.

This is how it is
I love kids but at that time when I did not know what was happening to him I could not enjoy my son the way I would have if I understood him. There was no one to give me the tools to understand my son. I was careening from one situation to the other. But once I began to understand autism, and learnt to understand and accept my son, accepted it and handled things differently, it changed. I began to enjoy him again. I learnt to accept and love him without conditions. Things weren’t – and aren’t - perfect but there was the knowledge that this is how it is. I love him for what he is.

Sometimes as parents we suffer from non acceptance of our child’s condition. Sometimes as parents we try to fulfill our own expectations through our children. So we expend our energies to really try to make the child regular – by exotic treatments, injecting things, giving supplements, rushing them around on a breathless schedule of treatments; anything that we hope might make the condition disappear. It doesn’t happen like that. Parents chase this vision, that somehow the child will suddenly become non autistic, until the child is about 13 or 14; and then they realize that this is how it is, and that it is a life long condition. We have to learn to accept that, while at the same time trying to give them the best education that we can.

In the work we do, what we try to do with families who come to us is help them see that the more we accept the child’s autism, the more significantly can we help the child to learn; the more wonderful will be the experience and the more we can celebrate the changes that come about.

Challenging situations that families face
As parents, we create a lot of challenges ourselves. We get embarrassed about the behaviour of our children, but expect the world to be accepting and understanding of their behaviours. However, if we are accepting, then so will the world..

The transition to adulthood can be more difficult if parents don’t talk to their children about autism or get embarrassed about it. The child knows he is different but doesn’t know why. Knowing I have a condition is very empowering. The lack of disclosure can create many problems. It is far more difficult teaching social skills to a child with whom we have avoided discussing his autism. It is much easier giving a perspective on social rules to a child who is aware that he has autism and therefore understands that his understanding of social rules is different from those of others. There are certain ways of telling them what to do and teaching them appropriate social skills.

In the Indian context there is a strong sense of ‘karma’. That I must have done something terrible for which I deserve this. But it has nothing to do with that! Then there is all the blaming – “it came from your family or my family”. Yes there is a genetic component which we don’t know enough about yet. We do find that there are parents who are on the spectrum and show some symptoms themselves. Sometimes the mother may tell us, ‘yes I also have some symptoms or someone in my family has shown such behaviour but please don’t tell my husband or his family’. Mothers are more vulnerable to blame and critical comments from in laws and society at large.

Mothers and fathers
There is a difference in the way it impacts the father and the mother. Very often the mother gives up her job and stays home. The father immerses himself in his job and the role of the breadwinner. It is such a complex situation. While the father gets away physically, ‘escapes’ from the situation, and finds some outside relief, he also doesn’t really talk about his feelings. Whereas the mother may get an opportunity to talk about it and share her emotions, but is often burdened with caring for the child sometimes without a break. There are also families where fathers are involved too but in most families it is the mother. I know mothers who have no social life and spend 24 hours caring. This kind of burden ultimately doesn’t help the child either. For the child to benefit, the mother has to have a break from constant caring.

It is also usually the mother who goes out and gets herself trained in handling the child. Often the father doesn’t have the training and this becomes a problem, because both work at cross purposes. It’s also very hard to explain to grandparents. On the other hand living in a joint family can give mothers a break, even though there are complicated dynamics involved.
We have a Mother-Child Programme, although we now call it the Parent-Child Programme because there is the occasional father who comes to attend. At the end of the three months these mothers, many of whom come from outside Delhi, change radically, and are empowered and confident of taking care of their child.

Rewarding moments
I’ve learnt a lot from the families who have come to us. Every child is different but even every parent is different. The family knows the child best and come up with amazing and innovative ways to teach them and deal with them. Hats off to the mothers. They lead really complex lives. And most of them do it with a smile and so much love. They are the real experts. Each family has so much to give to the autism community just through their lived experiences.

It’s hard work, raising or working with children with autism, but it’s also fun. There are huge rewards. Mainstream schools don’t realize they will benefit from having ‘different’ kids in the school. The so-called normal kids learn that there are all kinds of different people in the world, and they learn to adapt to all these differences, which is an important lesson to learn.
For me, personally, having Neeraj has taught me to be less self-centred, and more relaxed around people who are different in any way – not just with disabilities. It has helped me become a caring, more gentle, non judgmental person. If more of us could become less judgmental the world would perhaps be a much better place to live in.
(ENDS)

Box: What is autism?
Autism is a spectrum of disabilities (together called the ASD, autistic syndrome disorder) usually visible in children from the age of two onwards that manifests in problems in communication and social skills. Their lack of understanding of social rules leads to behaviour that is seen as unusual. Children with autism might exhibit repetitive behaviour such as continuous stacking objects, playing with water, following lines while walking, repeating themselves, or have communication problems or be unable to learn in the regular manner. Some may also show self-injurious behaviour.

Autism was first recognized in the 1940s as a condition. In the post war years it was seen as a psychological disorder attributed to poor parenting, especially a lack of love from ‘refrigerator mothers’, or women who were beginning to go out of the house to work. Further research in the 1970s suggested it was a neurological condition and only in the 1980s did it become an official clinical diagnosis. While there are no statistics for India yet, studies in the West put the numbers of people with ASD at 1 out of 150. Autism was earlier often misdiagnosed as mental retardation or schizophrenia.

Box : Unstrange Minds
‘Minds of people with autism are sometimes as hard to understand as foreign cultures.’
- social anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker in his bestselling book ‘Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism/ A Father, A Daughter and a Search for New Answers’ (Basic Books, 2007).

(From ME/ DNA, May 2008)

Photo credit: www.adblogarabia.com/wp-content/AutismDubai.jpg

Why Men Buy Sex

2008-04-28T02:12:00.000-07:00

Manjima Bhattacharjya on the forces that send men to brothels.

It was the summer of 2001 and even though it was barely 8 am, the Rajasthan sun already had us breaking out in sweat. That day our team from JAGORI, a Delhi-based women's group, was visiting sex work stations along the national highway as part of a study. At our first host's home, a freshly bathed Hindu priest with bodhi and starched dhoti rode past us on a sputtering Bajaj. "Some puja?" we asked. Not quite, said our hosts, chuckling, just the first client of the day.

That incident taught us two things. One, that sometimes we are so busy staring at sex workers to see what they look like that we forget about those without whom there wouldn't be business—the clients. And two, when it comes to clients, you will always be surprised.

Men across the world buy sex not only because they can, thanks to the power imbalance between men and women but for a host of other unremarkable reasons: wanting to avoid emotional involvement, lack of sex or not enough sex in marriages, wanting to experience power, variety or certain kinds of sexual experiences, shyness, thrills, loneliness or old age. These men are usually ordinary citizens leading ordinary lives. Not convicts, drug dealers or sexual deviants.

At least that's what an international study in 2002 (published by International Organization for Migration and Save the Children Sweden) on the demand for sex work and domestic work found. Of the 400 men surveyed from five countries including India, over 185 men had experienced buying sex. They cut across class, age and occupation, were mostly married or in a long term relationship, with no criminal record.

The study also found that men from different countries justified their prostitute-use on the basis of gender relations and ideas of masculinity that existed in their own social context. In Scandinavia,for instance, where relations between men and women are more equal, men felt their wives or partners had every right to refuse sex and this had to be respected. In such instances going to a sex worker was like a `safety valve' that lessened the strain on their modern relationships. In Denmark, clients stated that it was a private matter, one that they would not share with friends, fearing being called `a loser' who wasn't man enough to get women without paying. On the contrary, in Thailand, you were only `man enough' if you had visited a sex worker. Going to a prostitute was often a rite of passage to mark the onset of manhood, with young boys at the end of their schoolgoing years being taken to brothels by their peers.

The JAGORI team that did the Indian leg of the study found that in India, going to a sex worker had its own special place because of the strict sexual segregation in Indian society and the silence and taboos around sexuality. It was a tolerated practice, especially for young men who saw it as the only possible way of getting close to women without upsetting social norms.For middle aged men within marriages where sex was limited to procreation, lack of communication on sexuality with partners was often cited as the reason for visiting sex workers. Most Indian clients also had their first experience of buying sex with friends, but associated `manhood' primarily with their role as protectors and providers.They displayed an abysmal lack of knowledge on sexual health issues, prompting the study to observe that what India needed urgently was `not more punitive measures to clamp down on sex workers or clients but a sex education programme'.

Indian clients had highly moral positions on women, but did not think it incongruous or immoral for themselves to be buying sex. In their view, prostitution, done by `bad women' (promiscuous women or those who were more Western) acted as another kind of safety valve where men could get rid of their excess sexuality, thus preventing them from attacking `good women' (chaste traditional wives and daughters). Ironically, most didn't want to be reminded of the commercial part of the transaction, wanting to see it as something of a romantic adventure.

Recent legislative amendments in India have proposed that clients be criminalised. The experience of countries like Sweden has shown that criminalising clients does not serve any purpose. It only pushes business underground, take safer clients off the market, put more power in the hands of corrupt police at lower levels and force women in prostitution to enter dangerous deals.

So far, clients have more or less been invisible, being allowed to slink in and out of red light areas, or pick up women in the anonymity of their darkened car windows. Part of what they pay for, always, is discretion.It might be a while, therefore, before thousands of clients (24,000 clients every day is the estimate in Sonagachi, Kolkata's red light area) who will be directly affected by the law come out on thestreets to show us that they are our neighbours, brothers, lovers, friends, shopkeepers or party leaders, who might have double standards but aren't necessarily worthy of being targeted as criminals.

(From the Sunday Times of India, April 20, 2008)
Photo credit: evatt.org.au/news/images/hogarth8.jpg (Writing the history of prostitution)

Gulf of Prejudice

2008-04-28T02:00:00.000-07:00

India is home to 70 million disabled people, a figure equivalent to the population of the UK. A large proportion of this are young people. Yet disabled people have never really had a voice in the mainstream in India; disabled youth, even less so. What are their concerns? What is their experience of globalizing India? What is it like to be a young man or a young woman with disability today surrounded by new technologies, new cityscapes and new job opportunities? Does the India of the future include them? Manjima Bhattacharjya speaks to disability scholar Dr. Renu Addlakha to find out.

Q. How has Indian society has perceived disabled people in the past? Do you think this has changed or is changing?

In India and all over the world, disability has by and large been perceived negatively. In some sparsely positive instances, for example in Christianity it has been seen as the suffering of innocents. But even this has been a patronizing approach, born out of pity, seeing them as poor victims. The overall approach has been of charity.

In India, because of Hinduism, it has often been linked to karma. It is seen to be an outcome of a person’s misdeeds in their previous life so they are blamed for it, as if somehow it must be their own fault. There is also a very close connection in India between the individual and the family, so the stigma that comes with being disabled not only affects the individual but also rubs off onto the family, as a result of which families often conceal disability.

The view that they have other abilities, are ‘differently-abled’, that they too have rights, entitlements and as much stake in society as others is really a very recent phenomenon all over the world.

Q. What is it like to be a young person with a disability of some sort in today’s day and age? What are the main issues they are grappling with?

First of all, ‘people with disabilities’ is a very heterogenous term. It includes such a wide range – from mildly visually challenged to completely blind, or hard of hearing to completely deaf; those with orthopaedic disabilities, who lose a limb or affected by polio; it includes those who have communication disabilities, cognitive disabilities, autism, dyslexia, even mental illness is included in the legal definition. So when we are talking of people with disabilities, we are really using a very wide ranging term. The commonality amongst them all is that all ‘people with disabilities’ are disadvantaged, they are usually considered a burden and perceived to be non-productive - which is not true, they can be if the conditions are provided.

Young people with disabilities experience all the hormonal changes, sexual desires, emotions, anxieties, aspirations as anyone else! They are concerned with the same issues as all other young people – career, education, the future, love, marriage… The only problem is that for them, it is more difficult to deal with these.

Q. Globalizing India is changing; in today’s cities, we have flyovers, highways, high rises, multiplexes… is there any place in our cities for disabled people?

There can be. But I don’t think there is enough motivation. Urban planning – the way highways, flyovers are coming up - is against pedestrians, let alone disabled people. There are provisions in law, in the Disabilities Act of 1995 that buildings have to be disabled-friendly. It is not expensive to put these modifications in place. For example, disabled-friendly toilets. All it requires is some extra space so that a person in a wheelchair can wheel themselves into the toilet and a slightly bigger commode so that a person in a wheelchair can lift themselves onto the commode and back. That’s all! But it is made out to be something so different that people hesitate to invest in it. Building a ramp is so simple – it’s just a plank at an angle! And it will help not only disabled people but also people with sprained ankle, elderly, pregnant women. These are simple architectural modifications which will help society as a whole but there is such mental resistance to it. The potential in cities is extremely vast but preconceived notions, because of historically ingrained negative attitudes and lack of adequate information all prevent any of these things from happening. The Metro in Delhi is quite disabled-friendly but here the problem is that it’s not publicized so even disabled people don’t know about it.

Q. What about new technologies? How have they made a difference?

Technological innovations are an important route for self-reliance and empowerment for persons with disabilities. For instance, in universities nowadays, visually challenged people are using screen reading software like JAWS…

Q. What is that?

It’s a software to enable the visually impaired to use the computer. It reads out what’s on the screen, so when you move your mouse around it reads out what your mouse is on, so that you can click the right option. There are other software too – you can scan books into your computer and it will read it out to you. JAWS also reads out what you are typing in. Similarly there are vision-based software for hearing impaired people.

Because of these technologies, there are many call centres doing outsourcing work who are employing disabled people to work in these places, as they can train them easily. These are not expensive to install in the office or home, but how many know about it? We know about so many kinds of new technologies but not this!

Q. One of the most important things on young people’s minds is their career. With the call centre boom, the media, a range of new kinds of job opportunities are possible today. Do these include people with disabilities?

To some extent, yes, visually challenged people are being employed in some call centres. For example, in the hotel industry, in the laundry or backroom kind of jobs, you would find people with disabilities. Welcom Marriott in Mumbai and Delhi are examples. The hearing-impaired also have quite a lot of job opportunities, because they are not considered ‘troublesome’. As employees, companies have found employing people with disability to be rewarding. They are diligent, loyal, usually dedicated and honest, and the attrition rate is lower. Companies like Infosys, Wipro today are regularly recruiting people with disability who they then train accordingly.

There is legislation that says that companies employing a certain proportion of disabled people will be exempt from some taxes. There is the law, there is technology, but there are still mental blocks. Companies have to get over their negative approach to begin with and realize that it’s not so difficult to employ people with disability. It’s only a little extra that companies have to do, but they think it’s a lot!

Some people will say ‘but there aren’t enough qualified disabled people to fill the proportion’. This is true to some extent because levels of illiteracy and drop out rates are huge - many of them can’t keep up with the normal system. But still, there are a large number of disabled people who are unemployed and need jobs.

Q. Today, being beautiful, having a ‘perfect body’ or how you look has gained importance with the messages and images fed to us by the media. How does it impact young people with disabilities?

Mostly, it impacts them like it impacts everyone else. They want to look beautiful, wear nice clothes, all of that. Visually challenged people of course cannot be part of this visual culture, but rely on other people’s perceptions of themselves. So they will remember comments like “you look good in red” or “jeans are hep”, “skirts are nice” and try to apply that. They are equally impacted by the beauty industry and media as others. I remember a boy with polio once told me how he did a facial! They try to model themselves according to the trends as much as their circumstances may allow. But many feel ashamed of these feelings, and don’t really admit it. If they discuss it in public, people will think ‘who do you think you are?!’ Negative social attitudes make disabled people ashamed of their bodies; many people feel that such preoccupations with beauty looks out of place for them.

Q. What about love and romance and sexuality?

Oh, it’s very desired. Very much a part of life. They have the same desires and aspirations as anyone else. There is a gender dimension to this though. Young men’s ideal is a girl who is not disabled. Whereas for young women this option is almost non existent. They want someone with disability because it makes it more equalizing for them.

Also, we have to remember that many of them stay at home, and the dangers of abuse are higher. So there is not only love, romance but also abuse which is part of their life. People with intellectual disability in fact may not even be able to tell when a relationship is exploitative.

When it comes to sexuality of disabled people, there are two approaches. One is denial - that disabled don’t have sexual desires or should not. This is applied to young girls who are seen as asexual. Then there is the other approach, the hypersexual image - that they are full of sex and need to be controlled, which is usually applied to young men with disability. These have a negative impact on their self perception. As it is sexuality is taboo anyway, for young people with disability it is a more difficult experience. Society doesn’t give them permission to be sexual or have desires so the frustration is higher.

Q. Do young women have a different experience from young men?

Very much so. The same patriarchal notions that make normal young women’s lives more difficult than men’s operate for them also, only it’s a bit harder. One critical difference is that even though they have the same socialized desires as women – to be married, have children – society doesn’t give them the space to be mothers, homemakers. Women with disabilities are considered incapable of giving sexual pleasure, unfit to be mothers, or of producing healthy children. These are roles in society that put women on a pedestal. So women with disability face all the hardships that come with being women but are denied the small social rewards or in some cases personal fulfillment that come with these roles.

Q. We rarely see disabled people represented in our films, television, popular culture… one of the more celebrated instances was the film ‘Black’. How do you think young people with disabilities responded to this representation?

The unique feature of that film was that it brought up sexuality, although fleetingly (the kiss between the protagonists). But overall I think people with disability perceived it in a very dark, somber way. Here was a disabled person being tamed, beaten, facing such violence. It was a picture of reality they did not like. At the same time, somewhere they could identify with it also. It captured some amount of violence which is very much part of a disabled person’s life. So it was an ambivalent, emotionally charged reaction. But I didn’t actually come across many people endorsing it or saying they really liked it.

Q. What are the pros and cons of ‘mainstreaming’, putting people with disability with non disabled persons in the same school for example?

Unfortunately the way mainstreaming is carried out, it ends up doing more harm than good. Ok, you put a disabled child in a normal school, very good idea. But that school doesn’t have the right architectural modification, the teachers are not trained to deal with disabled children, they are not sensitized, other children also have a warped idea of people with disability. Then there is the question of proportion. You will find one disabled person in the whole class. So that person finds himself or herself in a hostile environment that doesn’t really let them realize their full potential.

The advantage of a special school is that they find others like them, there is a comfort level, the teachers are trained and all that. The problem here is that twelve years later, they come out and face problems when they have to join an integrated setting.

Mainstreaming is a good idea but you have to create the environment before mainstreaming otherwise it may prove to be detrimental. I would say put them in special schools, build them up and then prepare them to join the mainstream. Similarly, prepare the mainstream to accept and understand the needs of disabled people. Both sides need preparation to be able to come together and coexist side by side.

Q. You’ve been interacting with young people with disabilities for a long time now. What do you feel were your biggest learnings?

I’ve learnt so many things... But perhaps the biggest has been the realization that the power of social attitudes and the power of social prejudices far far outweighs the limitations posed by their actual disability. I’m not undermining that a disability does impose a limitation in the physical or medical way. But actually in the end, it’s the negative social attitude that creates the gulf that separates people with disability from mainstream society.

Dr. Renu Addlakha is a sociologist and feminist disability researcher who is currently Senior Fellow at the Centre for Women's Development Studies, New Delhi.

(Published in ME/ DNA Mumbai, April 2008)

Zarina: ‘We need more than information’

2008-01-11T03:12:00.000-08:00

Zarina is just one of thousands of HIV-positive people caught between a government that cannot provide care and treatment to all, a private sector that is expensive and swarming with quacks, and NGOs that are driven by their own agendas.

Zarina is one amongst the thousands around us who are silently living with HIV. One of the many milling around us in malls window-shopping on a day out, rushing past us in railway stations to get home in time to cook for the family, or bargaining with the vegetable vendor while buying supplies for the week. Ordinary people living ordinary lives, and taking their HIV-positive status in their stride.

Twenty-five-year-old Zarina’s story is however a little more than ordinary. At the age of 15, Mallika, as she was then called, ran away from her village in the hills of Nepal -- away from a negligent father, stepmother and backbreaking hours of work in the fields -- with a distant relative to take her chances with the world out there. Like many other girls before and after her, she ended up in Kamathipura, Mumbai’s red-light district, after being smuggled across the border. She remembers that night vividly: “I was given two pills that knocked me out. When I woke up I saw an incredible sight. A big monument and what I thought was a huge river. It was Haji Ali.”

After a few days in imprisonment in a room in Walkeshwar and a frightening encounter with police, goons, gharwalis and all sorts of characters, a shivering Mallika, who knew neither where she was nor understood the language around her, was taken to a new place that was to be her home for the next few years. A kothi (brothel) in Kamathipura. And thus began her new life, complete with a new name given by the gharwali. Zarina.

Life in Red
It took time for this sudden turn of events to sink in. Moreover, the red-light area wasn’t quite what she expected it to be. She says: “I saw a young girl cutting vegetables and another blowing a chulha. No gaudily dressed ladies of the night, no garish make-up. I could not believe it.”
“I tried to run away many times, I really did,” she remembers. “The gharwali told me I would have to pay her Rs 40,000 if I wanted to leave. Or I could work there for three years in which time my debt to her would be repaid. I had no choice. I didn’t see any sunlight for two years. That became my life.”

Ek chhoti si love story
The next dramatic turn in Zarina’s life came when she fell in love with a young man from the neighbourhood. They shared a love for the silver screen, and as the young man began to take the beauteous Zarina for many matinees, their own love story began. It was accelerated by a chance discovery, after Zarina fell ill, that she was HIV-positive.

The doctor, who was personally known to the young man, told him that Zarina would not survive for more than a month if she continued in the brothel. The young man pulled all the strings he had -- a contact with a hotel owner in the area who had contacts in the media, a photographer, and a social worker -- and made a plan to run away with Zarina and marry her.

To make sure that there would be no immediate backlash in the form of a police complaint by the gharwali, his contacts got the deputy commissioner of police himself to call the local police and ask them to ignore any such complaints. Had things gone according to plan, Zarina and the young man would have been married on Valentine’s Day. But romance took a backseat to paperwork, and it was only on February 17 that a nikaah was performed. Soon after, not wanting to invite trouble by staying in the same area, Zarina and her husband moved to Navi Mumbai. They sold a gold chain to pay for a deposit to rent a small room in which they set up their new home.

Living with HIV
Meanwhile, Zarina’s illness was beginning to take its toll. Every month during her period she crumbled under a bodyache that reduced her to tears, a swollen abdomen and inexplicable white discharge. Often, it would be as frequent as once a week.

It was when she had to undergo an operation in the third month of an ectopic pregnancy a while ago that she encountered in some way the real meaning of her HIV status. Doctors at the hospital were hesitant to operate upon her when they found out her HIV status but had to do the operation. Various tests were done at this stage, including the CD4 and CD8. This was a government hospital where they considered enrolling for free treatment for HIV. However, they found that Zarina was not eligible for free treatment. According to the fine print, only patients with a CD4 count below 200 are eligible for free treatment; those with a count above 200 have to pay for their treatment, the cost of which is about Rs 35,000 for six months. Why this differentiation amongst HIV patients? Just government policy, said the hospital. Those in the worse stages are given first preference for medicines.

With no way to challenge this logic, the couple turned to the private sector. An ayurvedic hospital in Worli was offering free medical treatment. But ‘free’ once again did not really mean they could afford it. Even though they were giving the medicines free, they were required to go twice a week. Going from Navi Mumbai to Worli twice a week was not sustainable for the couple, and was not always possible given the young man’s job. The medicines also seemed to have little or no effect. Instead, Zarina felt her body heated up, and she felt nauseous. After two weeks, the hospital wrote a prescription for the medication, saying that they had run out of stocks at the hospital and the patient would have to buy the medication from elsewhere with the prescription, the cost of which was Rs 600-Rs700. When this was repeated, they stopped going.

Misplaced priorities
Disillusioned with the government and then the private hospital, Zarina approached a big NGO to help her with the treatment. That one time that Zarina approached an organisation, she realised that they were after something else altogether and did not see her real requirement.
Instead, the director of the NGO was more interested in finding out who had trafficked her 10 years ago. She told Zarina: “Let’s find the trafficker and put him behind bars.” How will that help me, wondered Zarina. “Why should I go back to my village after all these years? My family thinks I am dead anyway; they will say, why has she come back to give us a bad name?”
Her husband is suspicious of what NGOs do with the millions of dollars worth of aid entering the country for HIV work. He says: “They get so many donations from abroad but they spend it on advertisements and travel. These NGOs will only give you information, nothing else. Only if you know them personally or are a relative they might help you with treatment.”

The 60-rupee shot: The last resort
Zarina always wanted to have a family, a home, happiness. She says she enjoys being a housewife and waiting for her husband to come home from work, to cook for him. Today her dream is to have a small house of her own. She continues living her new life with a joy and innocence that belies her difficult past, and indeed her painful HIV condition.

Zarina and her husband feel that there is really nowhere else to go in search of treatment. They do fall for the odd herbal treatment here and there. Recently, for example, Zarina tried a bottle of a ‘herbal treatment’ sold to her by a lady from Nerul. Someone in the area had recommended the treatment to her, another lady who was very thin and not putting on weight. With this medicine, the appetite improved as well as sleep, leading to an overall improvement in health. Through this distributor they bought a bottle for Rs 2,500. It was a powder that had to be mixed with milk or water. Zarina tried it for a month and it did make her feel better, she says. But it was too expensive at Rs 2,500 a month and so she did not pursue it.

As of now, Zarina is not following any treatment for HIV. Instead she pays about Rs 60 to get an injection to deal with the bodyache and white discharge. She has to do this at least twice a month. Even though the doctor constantly warns her that this will harm her in the long run, and often refuses to give her the shot, she breaks down in tears and is in such visible pain that the doctor has to relent. She says that it is impossible without the injection; the pain and the swelling in her abdomen are unbearable.

Zarina is caught between a government that nit-picks about who will and will not be treated, a private sector that is expensive and swarming with quacks and alternative practitioners claiming to have found a cure for AIDS, NGOs that are more concerned about “catching the traffickers” than helping the HIV-positive. Until the system critically evaluates the imbalance towards AIDS awareness in the media as opposed to care for people living with HIV, and re-examines its policies towards HIV treatment, people like Zarina will continue to fall through the cracks and be excluded from the HIV treatment that is being made available in the country. Till then, Zarina and thousands like her will have to continue depending on dangerous 60-rupee quick-fixes for fleeting moments of relief.

(Published in January 2008 issue of Agenda magazine, also available online at www.infochangeindia.org/agenda10)

Is premarital HIV testing feasible – or desirable?

2008-01-11T02:58:00.000-08:00

For checking out this issue of Agenda and more,

go to www.infochangeindia.org/agenda10)

Three states are considering legislation on compulsory HIV testing before registration of marriage. Public health activists, however, point out that premarital counselling and life skills education, not compulsory testing, are more likely to ensure behavioural change. Such a law might end up increasing the social ostracisation of the HIV-positive, adversely affecting women, the very group the law sets out to protect.

If you’re getting married in Andhra Pradesh, Goa or Karnataka some time soon, don’t be surprised if you’re asked for your HIV test results at the registrar’s office. These three states have proposed that HIV tests be made mandatory for couples before registration of marriage, opening up a Pandora’s box of controversies around the limits of individual privacy, women’s rights and how far the State can go in dictating or monitoring personal choices such as marriage.
Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister YS Rajasekhara Reddy defended the logic of initiating this legislation by stating at a public function: “It may be infringing (the) human rights of victims to go for compulsory testing. But the rights of the partner and rights of future generations must be defended. The human rights of innocent young women married off to HIV-positive men who hide their status should be given higher priority.”
Such “compulsory testing” is contrary to National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) policy which encourages voluntary testing as the most suitable public health policy for HIV.

A matter of public health
Public health expert Dr Ritu Priya from the Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, says: “There are two aspects to this debate from the public health perspective. One, is it feasible? Are our public health systems up to it? Is it implementable at all? And second, does it have real value in terms of prevention? This is the real question mark, because such measures have not worked in the past.”

Dr Jasmine Gogia, Director, HIV programme, of the international non-governmental organisation Project Concern International that runs programmes in communities in five states with the goal of improving the quality of life of people living with HIV/AIDS, asks: “Where are the infrastructure and resources for this? Test kits are not enough, there are not enough counsellors, a whole chain of service delivery systems needs to be put in place to implement such a law. We are not ready to cater to those who voluntarily want to test – in fact, tests are not easily accessible in many places; imagine what will happen if we have to cater to compulsory testing for the million or billion marriages that happen in one state.”

Dr Gogia feels that the proposed legislation itself is based on a flawed understanding of the behavioural aspects of HIV/AIDS. She says: “If legislation was an answer and could prevent the spread of the disease, we could have controlled it early on in the epidemic. Legislation has not brought about behavioural change in anything, let alone HIV/AIDS.”

Ground realities
Meena Seshu, Director of SANGRAM, an HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment, and support organisation working with socially marginalised populations in Maharashtra, says: “Forget the human rights aspect of it. At a practical level, it doesn’t work. This is what we keep arguing with women on the ground. Premarital testing is okay, but what happens post-marriage? The assumption is that after marriage people have only one sexual partner, which is not the truth. On the ground it sounds like a good idea. Young women first believe this is the best thing to do. Slowly, when you start bringing out these points, they realise that this is not so. That you can’t control people by this method and you can’t predict their behaviour. What is important is to educate people about safe sex, and empower women and encourage them to prevent themselves from getting infected.”

Asha Ramaiah, National Women’s Coordinator of the 15,000 member-strong Indian Network of Positive People (INP+), seconds this: “What we need is counselling and information centres. Counselling can be made compulsory and information given to the couple. If they opt for testing, then it is fine. But instead of increasing awareness, the government is scrapping most sexual health and HIV programmes in schools, saying that it is vulgarity and will lead to young people indulging in these immoral activities.”

P Kousalya, Director of the Chennai-based Positive Women’s Network, admits that “women are hearing and saying ‘good’, but actually it is not good”. Coming from Kousalya, this is worth listening to. Kousalya was 19 when she was infected by her newly-wed husband, who knew he was HIV-positive when he married her. Despite having been cheated by him and his family – her husband’s father was also aware of this – Kousalya feels that even if such a law had already been in place, it would not have helped the situation. “I didn’t have the capacity to ask,” she says. “I did not even know anything about it.”

Inherent flaws
The Lawyers Collective HIV/AIDS Unit, which drafted the HIV/AIDS Bill 2006 to be tabled in parliament this year, sent letters to the chief ministers of the three states proposing mandatory premarital testing. The organisation opposes such legislation and has initiated a series of public debates on the proposal. It has also pointed out that technically such a proposal is based on a misunderstanding of HIV and AIDS. The ‘window period’ between the time HIV is contracted and the time it begins to show up in a test is around three months, and any test conducted within this period will show negative results even if the person tested is HIV-positive.

Other flaws are that such laws can easily be bypassed – whether by marrying in other states which do not have such legislation, or by generating false certificates in the black market or by simply not registering marriage with the State at all, which is a common practice across the country. There is also the possibility of results known as ‘false positives’ and ‘false negatives’ which run the risk of stigmatising for life persons with invalid results. It is this aspect of HIV, however – the stigma and social ostracisation – that makes flirting with this law akin to playing with fire, and magnifies the possible negative impact on women, the very group the law sets out to protect. Like various other legislations that aim to ‘protect’ women (such as the law that proposed women should not be working night shift, ostensibly for their own safety), this too is a double-edged sword. “Here, more people obey culture than law,” says Asha Ramaiah. “If a girl is found positive through compulsory testing, the stigma is very high, much higher than if a man is found positive. We don’t know how her family will react, or the community. If she has sisters, they will not get married, the whole family is stigmatised. There is not enough education or awareness about HIV for people to support anyone testing positive.”

Activists are also not confident that the call for legislation will be sympathetic to individuals who test positive, providing them confidentiality and encouraging them to begin treatment immediately. The legislation appears to be more focused on the uninfected potential spouse who has to be ‘saved’. The outcome of this would be the identification and isolation of persons testing positive, adding to the AIDS stigma and paranoia.

Also of concern and reminiscent of debates around eugenics is what the government will do with the information of those tested. In the wrong hands, this information could be grossly misused. States trying to engineer their populations and cleanse HIV through coercive measures are latent possibilities. Where does this sort of testing end? Kousalya asks: “Then why only HIV? Tests should be there for everything, all diseases, the ability to reproduce and so on. So many women are targeted as being infertile if they cannot bear children, when it is the man who is in fact to blame.”

Seshu’s biggest concern, however, is that “a law like this lulls women into a false sense of security, which actually harms them in the long run. People stop practising safe behaviour.”

A real dilemma
While most AIDS health workers are toeing the NACO line, women’s groups admit that there is a dilemma. It is a gendered phenomenon, and there are certainly examples of men hiding their HIV status and marrying women so that there will be someone to cook, clean and care for them -- work that is considered ‘women’s work’.

A report from the Planning Commission in preparation for the Eleventh Plan notes that there is a growing feminisation of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. NACO estimates that one in three persons living with HIV in India is a woman, and that nearly 60% of HIV-positive widows are less than 30 years of age and live with their natal families as 91% of them receive no financial support from their marital homes.

Moreover, both AIDS activists and women’s groups accede that young women in the arranged marriage set-up, especially in rural areas, are hardly empowered or informed enough to ensure the use of condoms in their newly-married lives. So wouldn’t the law help women make this demand of their prospective spouses?

But Kousalya points out the impracticality of such a clause in the law: “Even though it may be the law, how many can actually demand this from their would-be husbands? We have lots of laws – against dowry, child marriage, under-18 marriage – but how many people are using the law? In an arranged marriage the family decides everything, not young people, and definitely not the young woman.” Instead, Kousalya suggests that the pattern be changed. “First, make marriage registration compulsory. Then counselling must be undertaken, after which testing should be done if both parties agree.”

Seeking alternatives
Dr Ritu Priya feels there are other ways to address the central problem. She says: “From the woman’s angle one can’t say no to (the law) so easily because there is a problem. But to address that, one can take up an individual case and interpret it as a criminal act. It is possible under present criminal law to prosecute men who marry and infect their partners knowingly without informing them. If a few cases like that are dealt with by law, it may be a deterrent.” This does not take away from the fact that a woman, or any prospective spouse, has the right to ask her partner for an HIV test. Sandhya Gokhale of the Forum Against Oppression of Women (FAOW), a feminist group in Mumbai, feels that although a law is unwarranted and gives too many powers to the State, some measures should be taken to enable women to exercise their right to know the HIV status of a prospective spouse. She says: “It is true that women are particularly vulnerable and there are cases of such cheating. The question is, how do women take control of the situation.”

FAOW’s alternative suggestion is that a disclosure agreement be part of the marriage registration form and rules itself. A question along the lines of: ‘Have you revealed your HIV status to your prospective spouse?’ must be compulsorily answered in the form. “The marriage registrar does not need to know, but the person should have communicated his/her HIV status with the to-be spouse. Nobody needs to lose their privacy vis-à-vis other members of society or the State, but husband and wife must tell each other.” Elaborates Gokhale: “We all know that none of this is foolproof, and rules can be circumvented in various ways. But the idea is to make women aware through this question that it is something they should think about and demand from their spouse.”

Women’s vulnerabilities
Clearly, one cannot discount the issues that the proposed legislation brings up. Women’s vulnerabilities must be kept in mind when reviewing alternatives for such legislation, and long-term measures sought rather than knee-jerk, quick-fix solutions which only provide a false sense of security to both individuals and the State.

Many will remember the 1985 Oscar-winning film Out Of Africa in which actor Meryl Streep plays out the true story of Danish baroness Karen Blixen who contracts syphilis from her philandering husband at the end of her first year of marriage. Even though, after World War II, a syphilis outbreak led to compulsory premarital blood testing in many countries and safeguards existed on paper, as women like Karen Blixen realised, there were no guarantees in real life.

(Published in January 2008 issue of Agenda, a magazine also available online at www.infochangeindia.org/agenda)

Blue Gold

2008-01-11T02:47:00.000-08:00

“The wars of the next century will be about water,” Ismail Serageldin, the 1995 World Bank Vice President once famously said. Regardless of whether he will be proved right or not, one thing is clear. Water certainly isn’t what it used to be - available in plenty, taken for granted, a public good, and usually free.

As more and more spotlights are trained on the problem of water scarcity, there are some new developments in response. An exploding bottled water industry, the entry of private companies, a new understanding of whose business it is anyway, and finally the return of traditional systems of water harvesting. Here’s a brief look at these trends.

A New Market
It is ironic that Americans can, in fact, drink the water that comes out of the tap in their homes and offices, but more than half of all Americans still drink bottled mineral water. Even Japan, proud of its water heritage and endowed with abundant and sparkling water sources, shows a three-fold increase in sales of bottled water over the last decade. The global consumption of bottled water reportedly reached 154 billion litres in 2004, up 57 percent from the 98 billion litres consumed five years earlier.

Deemed a marketing success, this demand for bottled water has no logic and is not necessarily linked to whether a country has a real need or not. It is part of the “business of water”, which includes not only the bottled water segment but also water purifiers, powders, and private water operators. Water in its new avatar is today a newly emerging consumer good, and the water sector a lucrative market for private operators.

Blue Gold
“I for one will never forget the beaming smiles on the faces of people in a shanty town near Manila the day they saw drinking water flowing to their homes for the first time,” stated Gerard Payen, President of Acqua Fed, an international federation of private water operators. Payen is also the senior executive vice president of Suez, one of the biggest private water operators in the world.

Altruistic though Payen may sound, the project in Manila was really a matter of business rather than philanthropy. A highly profitable business at that. The private water sector is a rapidly growing industry. In 1990 private operations in drinking water existed in 12 countries. By 2002 it had increased to 56 countries. In the world of business, water has transformed from a low return utility to a source of “blue gold”, or “the petroleum of the 21st century”. Three water companies, known as the “Water Barons”, dominate the private water industry of the world: Vivendi and Suez of France, and Thames Water of England.

Major Fears
Privatization, or getting private companies to fill in and provide services where governments have failed, is a complicated issue. On the one hand, governments have failed their people in delivering quality services in many parts of the world. On the other, allowing private corporations, for whom profits are the bottom line, to take control of such an arterial part of public services is not without its dangers. Does it really matter whether it’s public or private as long as someone delivers the goods? Many believe that, when it comes to something as much of a life-force as water, it certainly does.

Those against privatization have three major fears. One, that it leads to rising costs of accessing water. Two that there will inevitably be cut-offs for poor people. And three that companies may pull out of contracts when they can’t make enough profit. In South Africa, for example, water services were cut off from 10 million people because they couldn’t pay the market rates. The privatization of water has also caused riots in Bolivia.

Ironically, the same reason why it makes for profitable business is why it should NOT be a private business – that it creates a category of captive clients. “You can switch from Coke to Pepsi but you can’t switch from water to … what?” says anti-privatization activist David Boys.

Everybody’s Business
While the actual business of water grows controversially in leaps and bounds, at another level, a new kind of wisdom is in the air. That water is now everybody’s business, whether one is growing rice, exporting flowers or manufacturing iron and steel.

In the latest trend, many companies are extending their mission beyond their core business and re-examining the way they look at and treat water. Using water efficiently or promoting values of conservation are becoming important benchmarks of progressive industries. In some cases, research and development on these lines are becoming corollary businesses which companies might commercially exploit at will, knowing that there is indeed a lucrative market for water-saving or purifying devices. Unilever, for example, specially promotes Surf Excel designed to save two buckets of water per wash. Procter and Gamble have a Children’s Safe Drinking Water programme where they distribute PUR, powdered water purifier. Shell’s global solutions division developed a water purification technology based on a membrane filter system.

Conservation activists are forcing producers and governments to look beyond the obvious and evaluate the amount of water that goes into everything. So a quintal of rice to be exported also needs to take into account the amount of water that goes into growing that rice. The next time you are in a perfectly landscaped garden at a beachfront hotel or hear about the booming golf course market, think about how much water that cost.

Return to Tradition
In between the government and private water operators lies another option, fast catching on globally as the only sustainable solution. To help yourself.

A study commissioned by "Charkha" and the National Foundation for India called "Paani Ghano Amol" (water is too priceless) recounts some extraordinary stories of rural communities devising their own methods of conserving water in villages of Rajasthan and Gujarat, thereby managing to survive drought. By collecting rain water in dried up ponds, recharging old village wells and lining ponds with plastic to effectively hold water without salination, villagers were able to sustain themselves without relying on government water supplies or begging private water tankers who at a premium cost would only supply to those with ration cards.
Traditional systems of water harvesting from rain water, monsoon run offs or flooded rivers are being researched and revived in all corners of the country. Even urban areas show a deepened interest in harvesting rainwater for groundwater recharge or local use.

Ultimately for the world at large, there is the increasing realization of the importance of those three little words we have heard so many times but did not see the magnitude of. Every Drop Counts.

(Published in ME, DNA Mumbai, January 2008. Last part of a four-part series on water.)

Three Sisters and an Amma

2008-01-09T04:20:00.000-08:00

If Jayalalitha, Mayawati, Uma Bharati and Mamata Banerjee were to meet up for a ladies lunch, chances are they would have incredible tales to tell. These four power ladies of Indian politics share many remarkable things – they have all in their own ways made it to the top without using the ‘widows, wives and wards’ fast-track to political stardom, they are all from humble backgrounds with similar trajectories of struggle, and they have all held portfolios usually reserved for men (three Chief Ministers between the four of them). They are also, by choice or design, single.

Being single is often a personal matter but in politics, whether it was Mrs. Gandhi or Queen Elizabeth I, it has been part of a long standing political strategy. There are the obvious practical advantages. Single women politicians are usually able to meet the demands of the job without the distractions of managing husband, home, children and in laws, or having to depend heavily of support structures. Being single also reduces the chances of suffering the ‘Pati Sarpanch’ syndrome (where the husbands of female heads of local panchayats are actually the ones in control), and becoming a puppet in the hands of a significant other. Symbolically too, maintaining a sanitized ‘single woman’ profile has always reaped rewards for women in Indian politics.

To begin with, the single status is perfectly in sync with some of the readymade images up for grabs that have both cultural appeal and popular sanction – such as ‘Mother India’, Shakti or Durga incarnate in culture or the Iron Lady in politics. But the image that is the chosen one in the case of our four ladies is much closer to home - that of the sacrificing elder sister. It is hardly another happy coincidence that Mayawati is known by her followers as “Bahenji”, Uma Bharati “didi” and Mamata Banerjee? “Didi”. Jaya is Amma in name but also qualifies in tone to be the stern elder sister – the one who sacrifices having her own family so that her siblings can get through college and build their lives, the one who stays single to devote their life to service or to the people.

For this image to succeed, the single woman politician must stick by some rules. Women in politics can neither be footloose nor fancy free. Instead they must work at maintaining a persona that is out of reach, asexual, almost celibate. This is not surprising considering that in mythology (Hanuman, Bhishma), politics (Mahatma Gandhi) and religion (nuns, popes, sadhus) celibacy or sexual abstinence has been associated with power and given unquestioned moral authority.

Considering Jayalalitha started her film career in a vampish role and maintained much of that image through her film career, the fact that much of our generation have never as much as seen her neck tells us something. It’s clear which role demands what. One demands a hyper-sexualized persona, the other, a desexualized one. While the married ladies of the Sabha are allowed some vanity – Renuka, Sushma, Sonia, Supriya – the single ones have to keep it simple. An unspoken moratorium is placed on loud colours, lipsticks, flowers in the hair or any conspicuous signs of playfulness or sensuality. Uma, the only official sanyasin out of the four, has her saffron robes. Mayawati’s cream outfits are uniformly devoid of frills. You could drag Mamata Banerjee kicking her heels (like the West Bengal police often do) for a makeover but she is unlikely to surrender her plain sarees and rubber chappals. As for Jaya usually shrouded in her voluminous capes, one wonders where she wore the 10,000 sarees, 750 shoes and 64 pounds of diamond studded gold jewellery that were raided from her home following corruption charges.

The next step, after erasing all signs of availability, is to quash all possibilities of romance. A few years back, when two Bangla TV serials thinly disguised as biographies of Mamata Banerjee were being made, the lead actress expressed worries that the script of one had a touch of romance that could make her vulnerable to angry mobs who would not accept this kind of allusion to the politician as being romantically inclined. Bannerjee’s colleagues justified, “People like to see her in a certain light only. There’s no harm in pandering to that.”

Being single also adds to the creation of a myth around a person that enables them to rise above the ordinary. The ‘single woman’ is a lesser known and mysterious entity in herself, much more so than the stereotype of a belan-wielding housewife. Add to this the eccentricities of individuals, and the result is personal intrigue that makes for excellent political PR. Jayalalitha’s stories of excess and extravagance are widely reported and rarely clarified. The media, Western media in particular, love to report on her 48 suitcases sent ahead before a 3 day visit to Delhi, or how she has her five star hotel suite decorated just the way she likes it. Like a rock star or film star, she fits their eccentric diva persona that is literally (like her life-size cutouts that once dominated the Chennai skyline) larger than life. Similarly Uma’s dramatic journey from Babri to Bhopal and back to the pavillion, Maya’s fascinating return to power or penchant for diamond earrings and birthday parties or Mamata’s angry-young-woman of Indian politics routine. These are the stuff of legends. Marriage would only make them ordinary.

Despite being masters of the game of identity politics, the four ladies are yet to discover the political value of their identity as ‘single women’. Mayawati, chosen by Newsweek as one of the world’s top eight women leaders, does make a fleeting reference to it when she says, “As a single woman and a Dalit I faced slurs, neglect, insults, even physical threats… I had to struggle very hard for every inch of political space I occupy today.” Yet a proper understanding or articulation of the political identity of single women – the specific discrimination, social exclusion and other issues that confront single women in India (gender sensitive workplaces, adoption, equal pay, sexual harassment, healthcare, right to property, social-cultural rights or right to housing) – is still to come.

For that, single women – or even women, for that matter – have to be recognized as a valuable vote bank, as is happening in other parts of the world. In the US Presidential Elections 2008, single women voters are being wooed by both parties as the next ‘power brokers’. 20 million out of the 47 million single women did not vote in the 2004 elections, making them the nation’s largest bloc of non voters. Constituting almost one fourth of the population of USA, they may just make or break the next President of the United States.
Single women in India do have the potential to become a force to reckon with. According to the Census of India 2001, the number of ‘never married’ women in India who are eligible to vote come to almost 15 million. This is excluding other single women groups outside the institution of marriage - the 2.2 million divorced or separated women and the 32.2 million widows. Together, the category of ‘single women’ come to about 50 million. That’s equivalent to the population of South Korea or South Africa, double the population of Australia and only ten million less than the population of the UK. That should give Jaya, Uma, Maya and Mamata something to think about.

(Published in The Sunday Times of India, 13 December 2007)

Flow Chart

2008-01-09T04:18:00.000-08:00

‘Bathing’ in India is more than just a matter of hygiene, and water more than H2O. It’s as if your soul is cleansed and your sins washed away by the power of water’s inherent properties. Even today, in many households, entry to the kitchen is banned without taking a bath, bathing after attending funerals or after an eclipse is imperative, as is sprinkling the courtyard with water after the visit of people from lower caste or other religious groups.

In Vedic literature, special odes are sung to water imbuing it with spiritual and purifying powers. The Rg Veda, for example, says
“… Whatever sin is found in me, whatever wrong I may have done,
if I have lied or falsely sworn, Waters remove it far from me…”
This irrational premium given to water would be harmless enough if the other side of the coin wasn’t so ugly.

The Other Side
It is through water that India’s “hidden apartheid” comes to the surface.
Sample this. A report by Human Rights Watch quotes a Dalit labourer as saying, “When we are working, (upper castes) ask us not to come near them. At tea canteens, they have separate tea tumblers and they make us clean them ourselves and make us put the dishes away ourselves. We cannot use upper-caste water taps. We have to go one kilometer away to get water... When we ask for our rights from the government, the municipality officials threaten to fire us. So we don’t say anything.” Dalit children in many schools are not allowed to drink from common taps. In towns Dalit women must wait for all others to finish filling water in buckets from local taps or handpumps before being allowed to make their own queue.

This is the tip of the iceberg. Fourteen Dalits were massacred in 1985 in a village in Andhra Pradesh for drawing water from an upper caste water tank. The Karamchedu incident, as it was called, pulled the curtain on the violence and abuse that lower caste communities risk every day of their lives in order to access safe water.

The fear that water will be polluted by the touch of an “untouchable” or Dalit (literally meaning “broken people”) is a daily practice not only in villages and towns across India but also in educated city households.

Whose Water?
The Telegraph UK reported that about 5000 survivors of the tsunami who were from lower castes were kept away from aid agency water tanks in relief camps south of Chennai by upper caste groups who said it was “not for them”. They may have survived the tsunami but could they survive caste-ism?

In practice, water sources across villages are often divided into “our water” and “their water”, with separate wells for lower caste or scheduled caste and tribe communities. Invariably “our water” is cleaner, safer and sweeter. “Their water” is more likely to cause disease and more polluted. Sometimes by malicious intent. For example, to punish a Dalit community for putting forth a Dalit candidate in the local elections and challenging their authority, upper caste members of the Panchayat dumped excreta in “their well” to foul their water. However, in times of extreme water shortage these notions of what is touchable and untouchable are conveniently forgotten and Dalit taps or tanks are taken over by the dominant caste groups.

“Ask Us What Is Water Scarcity…”
What it is like to have a public well in front of you and still not be able to reach out and touch it? To hear the sounds of water and see it glimmer in the sunlight and still be thirsty?

A poignant example is given by Deepa Joshi and Ben Fawcett who studied water relations in Chuni village in the Kumaon hills. While upper caste women in some parts of the village say, ‘We are water lords here’, Dalit women in the same village said: ‘Ask us what water scarcity is? It is not to bathe in the summer heat after toiling in the fields. It is to reuse water used in cooking for washing utensils, to use this water again for washing clothes and finally to feed the soapy water to buffaloes. It is to sit up the whole night filling water glass by glass as it trickles into our Naula. It is to wait for someone from the Khanka (upper caste) household to give us water from their Naula. It is to walk up and down their path, calling a little, waiting a little, hearing them say they are too busy and helplessly remembering our own tasks at home. It is to steal water stealthily, taking care not to spill water on the concrete floor for fear of being suspected, of feeling the guilt of stealing. It is all this and much more, of being obliged physically, socially and morally for the water they give us from their Naula.”

Between You And Your Water
Ever wondered how people in the United States or Europe can drink tap water, but people in Africa need to boil water even to brush their teeth? There are many things that come between you and the water that should be your right. Caste politics, gender politics, class, technology, where we live, which part of the world we are in, tanker mafias, money, power, Panchayats and also the ability to organize and demand our right to water.

Statistics say that people in rural areas are four times more likely than those in cities to have no safe supply of water. The poor are less likely than the well-off to be connected to mains water supplies and pay on average 12 times more per litre. In Jakarta, Indonesia the poor pay water vendors 60 times the price of water from a standard connection; in Karachi, Pakistan, 83 times.

Clearly, it will take more than laying more taps and pipes to bridge the social gaps between people and their water. At the larger level, it will take political will and social change. But at the heart of it, this journey could begin with a little bit of soul searching.

(Published in ME, DNA Mumbai, December 2007. Part three of a four-part series on water.)

Global Cooling

2008-01-09T04:17:00.000-08:00

I think it was the snowfall in Saudi Arabia that sealed it. Hotter winters, longer summers, freak weather – we were all getting used to global warming as a way of life, routinely watching the world melt in Hollywood blockbusters.

But some amongst us paused in the midst of flipping TV channels or mall-ratting to allow our jaws to drop as news came in of snowflakes settling on puzzled Arab eyebrows in the middle of summer. Unless this was a reality TV show, it was not funny. Maybe Warner Brothers knew more than they had let on? Maybe the global meltdown wasn’t an overdone Hollywood formula. Perhaps it was even, horror of horrors, true?

Welcome to the Future
It’s almost 2008 and global warming is making its presence felt like never before. And an increasing number of people (in the role they know best, as consumers) are doing what they can to actively reduce their carbon footprints on the earth’s atmosphere. The “ethical consumer” today is no longer a pseudonym for “hippie” but a group that is expanding steadily and demanding serious attention. Producers and manufacturers too are sitting up and taking note. The search for alternatives – whether it is for cleaner fuel, fabrics, foods, pet food or toys - is on.

What will a clean, green future look like? What car will we be driving, what are the fabrics we’ll be twirling in, what will we be bringing our grocery home in, what will be the (eco-friendly) return gift at Baby’s Birthday Bash?

The Old Good Girls are the New Bad Boys
Up there in the rogues’ gallery of ecological miscreants are the usual suspects – plastic, petroleum, polyester. But this century nothing gets by without scrutiny. Things once considered “natural” are in the dock. The humble cotton is now courting controversy, as are wood and silk.

Cotton is the world’s most heavily sprayed field crop, using 24% of the world’s chemical pesticides and fertilizers. It takes about 700g of agricultural chemicals to produce cotton for a single set of queen size sheets. In addition to this, cotton is often treated with chlorine, chemical finishes or dyes that add to its toxicity. The alternative? Cotton that is either “organic” - produced without pesticides, chemical fertilizers, untreated with toxic and other chemical surface finishes, bleaches or dyes, or “green” - conventionally grown cotton but with no additional chemicals used in processing or final treatment.

It is also the process - of producing silk or cutting and treating wood – that is in question. How has the silk been made? Where has it been made? How were the silkworms used to make it treated? Ahimsa Silk for example, claims that the silk is made without boiling silkworms in hot water, as has been the standard practice.

Or what happens to the waste, as in the case of wood treatment. IKEA has developed a range of sleek kitchen cabinets made of scrap wood – wood that “nobody else wants but is still good hard wood”. Cork is seeing a rebirth, outside its wine-bottle stopper avatar. Made from the bark of a tree it is sound-absorbing, hypo-allergenic and resistant to mould – making it an ideal alternative to wood for interiors.

Coming Soon to a Store Near You - The Bamboo LBD?
It’s difficult to get the image of bamboo as tall spindly reeds out of our minds, and think of it as a smooth flowing fabric. But it is! Bamboo and hemp are set to be the fabrics of the future. China might be notorious currently as a source of toxic paints, but is also doing amazing things with bamboo - one of the worlds most prolific and fastest-growing plants. Bamboo yarn has been used successfully to make robes, towels, sheets and other fabric.

Hemp is also being explored as an option to cotton, without the polluting side-effects. Hemp crowds out weeds, improves soil quality, grows fast and requires little if any chemical input because of natural pest resistance. It is illegal in many countries including USA and India (having the marijuana leaf as its base) but France, Russia and Canada have been successfully making various products with hemp for the last decade.

Hydrogen Has a Change of Heart
In a special edition on ‘Best Inventions 2006’ TIME magazine highlights Shanghai-based Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies decision “to design and market the H-racer, a 6-inch-long toy car that…runs on hydrogen extracted from plain tap water, using the solar-powered hydrogen station.”

Hydrogen is no longer about the notorious H-bomb but has another identity in the making. It is touted to be the fuel of the future, and not just for dinky toy cars. More than 500 cars are reportedly on the roads already and hydrogen powered engines being designed and bettered by BMW, Mazda, Ford, Honda and GM.

It’s Not the Products But the Ideas
There are many brands out there, from our Khadi Gramudyog Bhavan to Herr Natur of Germany or H&M Organic (an organic line by retail giant H&M) or Tencel, that have made being clean and green their USP or an important part of their future strategy. But more than the products, there are some good ideas out there that can be adapted wherever you are in the world.

So for those of you horrified at the toxic plastic zone that is the toy shop, the idea of wooden toys, alphabet blocks, or fabric toys has a certain appeal. Other great ideas that really do make a difference - recycled fabric lunch bags, good old steel lunch boxes, aluminum water bottles, bamboo yoga mats, hemp slippers, hemp dog collars, copper sinks, solar street lights that charge through the day and discharge through the night, eco paints to name a few. Oh, did I mention soy crayons? Yes. You heard right. Soy crayons. Crumble and toss up in oyster sauce for a healthy stir fry when you’re done colouring? Not yet but who knows. Convergence is the buzzword these days.

The Times We Live In
There’s a story that Anita Roddick, the founder of The Body Shop loves to tell. It’s about how the core values of The Body Shop were born. Not out of lofty ideals, but out of circumstances and a natural reaction to the times. While the bottle green colour that the brand is associated with came about because that was the only colour that would adequately cover the damp, mouldy walls of the first modest shop in Brighton, the other values – of conserving, recycling and stringency – were imbibed from Roddick’s own mother’s values during the Second World War.

As Roddick said, “The frugality that my mother exercised during the war years made me question retail conventions. Why waste a container when you can refill it? And why buy more of something than you can use? We behaved as she did in the Second World War, we reused everything, we refilled everything and we recycled all we could. The foundation of The Body Shop's environmental activism was born out of ideas like these.”

Perhaps it’s not such a bad idea. If we imagined there is a war out there – and global warming activists will remind you that there certainly is - it might do the earth a little bit of good.

(Published in ELLE India, December 2007)

(Image from www.celsias.com)

Why the bikini is badnaam

2008-01-09T02:43:00.000-08:00

25Nov 2007, 0031 hrs IST,Manjima Bhattacharjya,TNN

The bikini has never had it easy in these parts. When the Miss World contest was held in Bangalore in 1996, the city erupted in protests. Women’s groups objected to the commodification of women’s bodies, fundamentalist groups raged that it was against Indian culture while Left groups accused the Karnataka government of selling out. To avoid further conflict, the organisers shifted what they suspected to be the root of the problem to the Seychelles - the bikini round.

A Miss World contest today is unlikely to be mobbed by picketing crowds, but the anxieties around the bikini continue. The organisers of a Miss India Bikini 2007 contest were recently surprised when three Bollywood celebrities one after the other turned down their lucrative offer to walk the runway in a bikini at the contest. Next, a young actress announced that she would never wear a bikini like her mother, also an actor, who had made “the biggest mistake” by wearing one in a film forty years ago. Now this young lady hardly qualifies as a prude having recently done some remarkably explicit scenes in a regional film. So should we be surprised to hear such regressive comments? Not really.

When in Bollywood, do as Bollywood does. Such clichés are the staple of Bollywood. The bikini in some form or the other has become an acceptable part of Bollywood’s grammar, but the bikini-wearer herself is still a pariah. Women in the glamour industry won’t bat an eyelid while shooting in bikinis for international assignments, but will valiantly resist in India—or at least state their reservations loudly in public - acutely aware that such an act will amount to transgressing some unspoken cultural boundaries. In the eyes of the public, the bikini-wearer is often seen as having crossed the final frontier of Indian values and traditions, and becoming one of “those women” - sexually aggressive, “characterless”, out of control and endowed with all the qualities of Western female sexuality that the bikini symbolises. As many young women in the glamour industry have found out the hard way, those who accept a bikini assignment are often singled out for all such work in the future - condom ads, swimsuit calendars, item numbers - and spend much of their time fire-fighting the consequences of the act or warding off dodgy offers.

Given this ground reality, it is no wonder that women in the industry have to repeatedly state their essential goodness and Indianness by periodically denouncing the bikini. This does not, of course, mean that Indian actresses or models don’t shoot in such garments. Indeed where would Bollywood and the world of beauty pageants be without them? Either the garment itself must be a disguised version of the bikini - a bikini blouse with a sari or a modern choli, something that can be justified back home as “in India only”. Or it must be couched in some language other than that of freedom and choice. Even if they spent months pursuing the Yashraj item number or bikini shoot, they must underplay their eagerness or willingness and dramatise the trauma and difficulties they had in doing it, or tom-tom the aesthetics of the maker. “It was an exam, I had to do it. No choice,” beauty pageant contestants will shrug. “I only did it because I knew they would make it classy not vulgar,” the item girl will say. “The role demanded it. It had to be done,” the actress will insist. “I was fooled into it by the photographer,” a young turk might genuinely rue. (All this before they visit Tirupati, wear a multitude of gems to ward off planetary obstructions, walk to Sidhhivinayak barefoot, marry a tree if they are manglik, observe karvachauth or do whatever it takes to demonstrate their love for tradition and culture.)

The problem with such denouncements is that they only add to the arsenal of the moral police who believes that women’s “character” has everything to do with what they wear. The message is that “only bad women wear bikinis”. The implication is that women who wear such clothes get sexually harassed, and have no one to blame but themselves. They ‘asked for it’. A bikini has nothing to do with being good or bad and statistics on crimes against women show that what women wear has no bearing on sexual harassment faced by them. Yet the fear of being associated with bikinis only compounds these dangerous misconceptions, adding a greater burden to women to take responsibility for their own safety.

Ultimately though, it is impossible to not sympathise with the realities women in the industry live with and the stigma they constantly struggle to keep at bay. Who knows what Sharmila Tagore or Dimple Kapadia went through in their personal lives after wearing their famed two-pieces? How many blank calls they got, stalkers they had to encounter, sleazy grins from co-actors they had to endure or sullen silences from lovers, accusing looks from elders and no-eye-contact from male relatives? Wearing a bikini is part of the performance alright. But at the end of the day, after pack up, they go back to real lives with real relationships built on the damning sexual moralities of Indian society in which women are always up for trial.

(Published in The Sunday Times of India, 25 Nov 2007)

XX and H20

2008-01-09T02:40:00.000-08:00

You might be forgiven for thinking that the only relationship that women have with water is the one promoted by Bollywood: a special proclivity to bathe under waterfalls or break into a dance in the rain. But you would still be wrong.

In most societies women have always had a different relationship with water than men. To begin with water lies at the centre of most of the domestic chores prescribed as ‘women’s work’ in most cultures such as cooking, cleaning and caring for the family. Women are also usually responsible for the invisible, unrecognized, and often difficult task of collecting and storing water.

The implications of this are not very romantic, certainly not as appealing as the folklore of Radha and her friends’ playful escapades by the banks of the Yamuna with their earthen pots in tow. Women in rural India spend enormous amounts of time, sometimes up to five hours a day, traveling to get a bucket of water. If not the women, often it is the young girls of the household who are given this task. In the tribal communities around Udaipur, for example, girls are considered to be ‘grown up’ once they are able to fetch water from a distant well with the pot on their head. This is a rite of passage, and once they are able to do this, they are marked as having entered adulthood and seen as economically productive members of the family.

The Cost to Women and the Nation
A UNIFEM report estimates that women and girls in Asia use more than 8 hours a day traveling 10 to 15 kilometres to transport between 20 to 15 litres of water in each trip. The costs of this are unparalleled. Besides the physical pains related to carrying such load, there is the incredible opportunity cost of their time. This is premium time in the prime of their lives – time they could have used to earn wages, be educated, take care of their own health and contribute to a better life for themselves. Or be part of politics, community life or creative enterprises.

Often girls cannot be spared for education as they are required to make the distance to collect water as this is essential for survival of the family. Who would have ever thought that the low literacy rate for the girl child was so directly linked to the lack of access in many areas to water resources?

A report by the National Commission for Women and Navdanya calculate the opportunity cost of this time spent by women and girls in fetching water to be almost equivalent to 150 million women-days each year, translating into a loss of 10 billion rupees per year to the nation.

Urban Woes
In urban areas also, vicious fights at 3 a.m queues near the lone water tap in slum areas are a common occurrence. In middle class neighbourhoods too, it is the women of the household usually left with the task of calling up water tankers, getting up early to do housework in the stipulated ‘water time’, switch on pumps or fill plastic bucket after bucket of ‘fresh’ water for the day’s needs. Working women juggle much of their schedules around water collection. Much of the mental tension and stress of water scarcity in urban life is borne by women, who are the ones who must manage in the worst circumstances and keep things going – get the dishes done, keep the household clean, and the kitchen running.

In Times of Calamities
Even in the case of natural disasters related to water, women are differently affected. In the tsunami, for example, workers in relief camps in Sri Lanka reported that a disproportionate number of women drowned because they did not know how to swim – a common thing for women in the region because of the shame associated with wearing swimming costumes or bathing in public spaces. Further, women’s clothing such as the sari in many cases restricted their movement and led to greater difficulties in escaping the deadly tidal waves. Water borne illnesses also impact women more acutely, being the primary caretakers and invariably given the responsibility of tending to the ill.

Why Make an Issue of It?
In a recent episode of Koffee with Karan, Shah Rukh Khan commented with his characteristic charm on how he would like to make women’s toilets everywhere if he was made President of the country. Whether it was of noble intent or a failed attempt at toilet humour, his comment raises an important point. It is true, the absence of women’s toilets in public spaces, rural areas or urban slums, all contribute to increased instances of violence against women and an acute sense of woman-unfriendly public spaces. Women walk long distances to use facilities at the risk of their personal safety. Statistics show an increased incidence of sexual and physical assault when toilets are in remote locations.

The point is that things we sometimes take for granted or consider to be neutral can have a hidden ‘gendered’ face. They affect or relate to men and women differently. Like water.

Women experience any water crisis more intimately, tied so deeply as it is to their everyday lives. But how much say do women really have in deciding how it should be stored, managed or distributed? Or even in how far up it should be on a community’s priority list? Till recently, very little.

Women in urban areas need to take a leaf out of the book of their rural counterparts, who are now getting organized and taking it upon themselves to build check dams, revive old ponds and traditional systems of water conservation, and get things done with the help of local NGOs. In some places, the move to claim control over such decisions has already started. An unlikely story doing the rounds in a water-starved posh South Delhi colony, for example, is how a newly elected all-women resident’s welfare association radically decided that water storage was their priority and not petty colony politics that the earlier associations had focused on. They came up with a novel method of water-harvesting after consulting an environmental NGO that became a model for the other colonies in the neighbourhood.

Water is a necessity no doubt for all. Yet to recognize and acknowledge that women experience ‘water’ differently is the first step in valuing the invisible work they put in to keep our heads, ironically, above water.

(Published in ME, DNA Mumbai, November 2007: Part Two of a four-part series on water.)

Book Review: Gender and Censorship

2008-01-09T02:38:00.000-08:00

Gender and Censorship
Edited by Brinda Bose
Women Unlimited (Kali for Women) New Delhi
332 pages
Rs. 495

This is the fourth in the series by Women Unlimited on “Issues in Contemporary Indian Feminism”. Each volume so far, other than providing a range of excellent writing on key issues, has tried to explode the myth of a singular feminist position on an issue by bringing out the nuances of divergent positions within the women’s movement.

In this comprehensive hold-all, Brinda Bose (whose last edited volume Translating Desire was a beautifully produced set of essays on the representation of female desire in popular culture) collects censorship-related memorabilia primarily from the 1980s and ’90s and packages it chronologically to present us with a remarkable compendium. It’s an exhaustive haul; from the odd thought-piece to legal reviews to statements by NGO-combines to theory to government policy papers, Bose just about covers everything. Across the fields of law, political science, women’s studies, activism and media studies, this is a truly inter-disciplinary selection.

Brinda Bose begins her Introduction by looking at two important events in 2004 which according to her created the conditions for a reformulation of debates around censorship. The first is the fall of the Hindu right wing government, following which artists and activists realized that the clamp-down on freedom of speech and expression had not ended, but only changed form. The second is the series of scandals, ‘MMS scandal’ in particular, that ignited a new set of anxieties about sex and new technologies. The changing media-scape in which censorship of film (the traditional purview of the Censor Board) is inadequate to cover the multitude of outlets available today, whether the DVD or TV or mobile platforms, prompts Bose to ask very pertinently if it is “not time… to re-conceptualize the contours of the battle, and re-identify the antagonists as well as the arrangements?”

With that, Bose cuts to a flashback. The first section, on laws, structures and guidelines, begins with an extract from the Report of the Working Group on National Film Policy 1980. The chapter articulates the historical logic of censorship in the Indian state and throws light on the procedures and powers of the government in setting up a Censor Board, calling for an open, dynamic and liberal approach to censorship over time. If in theory it sounds ideal, Manjunath Pendakur then looks at the practice by examining the actual interpretation and implementation of censorship policies through examples such as films Bombay and Bandit Queen. His verdict is that censorship is all about politics, exercise of arbitrary power by the State and is a muzzle for dissenting views. VR Krishna Iyer ruminates over the meaning of “obscenity” in jurisprudence, showing the inherent problems in law with such subjective concepts.

The second section shifts from the legal terrain to the responses of feminists and the women’s movement to the representation of women in the media. Shahnaz Anklesaria pokes holes in the interpretation of “obscenity” and raises the problematic of media’s representation of women on the whole. Vimal Balasubrahmanyam provides activist insights in her review of media monitoring by women’s groups, giving examples of campaigns against sexism in the media. Sonia Bathla probes the consensus between media and Indian culture that keeps actual issues of women’s problems (such as domestic violence or rape) out of the mainstream newspapers, reminding us that a free press in itself does not guarantee representation of concerns of marginalized groups. Akhila Sivadas discusses TV programming in the age of satellite media that presents to us a picture of Indian womanhood that is ‘an uneasy mix of social reality and a problematic construct’. Shohini Ghosh and Ratna Kapur critique a report by other women’s groups and National Commission for Women supportive of the State’s intent to make film censorship more stringent, questioning the link between onscreen sex/violence and its impact on the viewer. Two basic positions of women’s groups emerge – one tending to be pro-censorship in a specific way that sees excessive sex/violence in the media causing increased violence against women on the streets. The other refutes this cause-and-effect theory and believes in no form of censorship whatsoever.

In the third section based on the Indecent Representation of Women Act 1986 more disagreements amongst women’s groups surface. This Act was one that a section of women’s groups fought to institute amidst internal debate and opposition. Madhu Kishwar and Ruth Vanita point out how the Act will only be used as a pretext for repression. Indira Jaisingh illustrates this through the example of the Illustrated Weekly case in 1986, in which Chief Minister of Orissa J.B. Patnaik called back an issue of the magazine citing the law for carrying a picture of a semi-nude woman. Coincidentally this very issue also carried an expose on him, which was the real reason for the confiscation of the magazine. Jaisingh and Andrea Wolfe also look at the concept of “ignoble servility” by examining legal debates around the film Pati Parmeshwar. Flavia Agnes uses the same two cases to highlight how individual judges interpret the law and contradict one another, to no service to womankind.

Also in this section is Monica Juneja analyzing M.F. Husain’s portrayal of Saraswati and Draupadi, contextualizing it in the present historical moment of Hindutva and heightened communal tensions. Shohini Ghosh examines the hype around an incident of morphing of a photo of a film actress, stating that restriction of free speech on the internet is not the solution. Monika Mehta traces the landmark debate around the song “Choli ke peeche kya hai” from the film Khalnayak while Meera Kosambi outlines the problems with the film Bandit Queen, raising ethical and legal concerns as well as some critical issues of privacy of living persons being represented on screen. Ashwini Sukthankar relives the organizing of lesbian feminists and their dialogue with other women’s groups during the controversy after the film Fire, while the statement from the Bharosa incident (in which staff members of the organization working on HIV/AIDS awareness were arrested under Section 377 of the IPC) reminds us that perceptions of deviant sexuality continues to be the core of much of censorship anxieties. All of these reflect the moral panic around sexuality, especially female sexual agency and its representation, that laces censorship.

In the last section on new directions for debates on censorship, Ratna Kapur reflects on the distinction between hate speech and sexual speech and State’s problematic responses to these. M. Madhava Prasad sheds light on State’s perception of public and private, pointing out that the unspoken ban on kissing is really a metaphor for censorship of public representation of the private. Shohini Ghosh calls for caution within feminist responses, attempting to find what distinguishes them from the right wing traditionalist positions. Tejaswini Niranjana looks at continuities and discontinuities in feminist film criticism over the decades, giving a fresh perspective on what future concerns should be. In an important contribution Ammu Joseph reports on a women writers’ conference, bringing out how women often censor themselves in the fear of the implications and fallout of hurting those they love, or their family. The section closes with a public debate from the Times of India on the archaic, meaningless acts of censorship executed by the Censor Board and calling for a liberal approach, and Rohit Gupta articulating the paradox of the right of pornography to exist.

Some of the drawbacks of the volume are that all the twenty-six pieces are previously published (some few times over in fact), that there is a repetition of writers and the inconsistent styles make for difficult reading sometimes. There are also too few articles from this decade, so much of the issues that Bose teases us with in the beginning, such as that of new technologies, are not sufficiently explored or taken forward.

Evidently, religion and sex lie at the centre of most censorship huddles in India, implicating women in an inescapable grasp. Censorship as a concept is part of the sexual politics of the region played out on (the representation of) women’s bodies. The book covers the usual grounds such as, who can decide what is “obscene”, “vulgar”, or socially acceptable? Can artistic freedom be compromised for public good? What is public good? It also raises some new questions, especially in relation to women and sexual moralities. What makes this book special, though, is something else. Sometimes it is only when a compilation like this comes along that one realizes how rich and consistent our engagement with the issue has been. By piecing together different parts of the puzzle, the bigger picture emerges. A large mural of public debate is unveiled before us.

The reading of the book coincided with this reviewer’s viewing of a film on HBO, The People vs. Larry Flynt, a biopic of Larry Flynt, who started a porn magazine called Hustler in the 1970s and entered a life-long legal battle with the US State and community leaders. The film is extremely simplistic in its anti-State and pro-Freedom of Speech argument. More than the caricaturized role of the State or the glaring absence of women’s voices, what was disturbing was how fundamentally Flynt and the Freedom of Speech movement were interconnected in an uneasy relationship. It is this coming together of unlikely bedfellows, whether it is the feminists and fundamentalists who find themselves on the same side against a beauty pageant or a porn magnate and the freedom of speech movement, that is one of the tricky aspects of an issue like censorship, and needs more introspection by feminists. As Flynt makes the shocking revelation in one scene that he was the one funding the movement, a quote from one of the pieces in this volume rang in my head. “If you’re dancing with the devil, you should know who your friends are.”

(Review by Manjima Bhattacharjya)

(Published in The Book Review, South Asia Special Issue, October 2007)

Can A River Belong To Anyone?

2008-01-09T02:34:00.000-08:00

(Image from rivers.thamesfestival.org. Illustration by Birla High School (Girls), Kolkata)

The river Indus may have given India her name but the Ganga is in her soul. Sacred, serene, romantic, and mythical, the river Ganges traverses 29 cities, 70 towns and thousands of villages before pouring itself into the Bay of Bengal. Anyone who has seen the banks of Benaras set alight by the flames of a thousand diyas will vouch for its capacity to move even the most stubborn atheist into grudging submission of Ganga mayya’s special brand of mysticism. By night of course. By day, the river is another story.

A dip in this holy river is not for the faint hearted. There is a strong chance that your efforts at cleansing your sins will be interrupted by a dead body popping up next to you. If you decided to take a breezy boat-ride instead, that sickly thud your oars just made was contact with a half-burnt corpse. (Why “half-burnt” is another story. Apparently there has been a shortage of firewood because of the depleting forests.) Continued cremations at its banks, waste from nearby industries, untreated sewage, the effect of damming the flow at various points and the rising population dependent on it have all contributed to giving the Ganga a spot amongst the ‘World’s Top Rivers at Risk’ in a report published by the World Wildlife Fund.

Our Dying Rivers
India’s 14 major and 55 minor rivers, and several hundred small rivers are the main source of water for drinking, irrigation and industrial use in India. This is terrifying considering the fact that all our rivers are choked with millions of litres of sewage, industrial and agricultural waste that are flushed into them every day.

The Ganga itself is the lifeline for the 350 million Indians who live on its banks. Fifty-seven million people depend on the Yamuna for their daily water needs. A study by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), Delhi finds however that the Yamuna does not meet minimum standards for bathing, leave alone other usage, even after treatment. According to the Central Pollution Control Board, less than 3% of the sewage generated in urban India is treated before it flows back into the rivers. Among other rivers, the Damodar has the dubious distinction of being the most polluted river in the country, because of the coal-based, mining, cement, leather and other factories with obsolete technologies, inadequate monitoring and corrupt management that line the valley. The Adyar river in Chennai is number one in emitting methane, a greenhouse gas, beating major rivers such as the Amazon, Hudson, Rhine, Thames and McKenzie.
Sounds scary? It is.

Who’s To Blame?
This crisis point has been reached for many reasons. It’s not just the usual suspects – apathetic government bodies or industries that use rivers as dumping grounds, it is also agricultural fields using pesticides and insecticides that most waterworks treatment plants can’t even detect, forget treat. These leach into rivers flowing through these fields and carry them to cities and towns, where this water is used as drinking water. Cities add to this burden; they suck out the usable water from the river and give back tonnes of untreated and untreatable garbage. The Centre for Science and Environment states that while Yamuna’s stretch in Delhi is barely 2% of the length of the river, it contributes over 70% of the pollution load. Towns further downstream then receive even more polluted water. The rate at which the pollution takes place is staggeringly greater than the rate at which the river can regenerate itself by flowing through cleaner areas.

The Indian government has so far spent Rs.1500 crore on cleaning up the Yamuna, but the river has only become dirtier. Clearly something is seriously wrong. Experts attribute this to a complete non understanding of pollution control boards about the connections between sewage and river pollution, and an over-estimation of India’s capacity to use high end technologies to clean the rivers. One of the failures of the expensive treatment plant set up as part of protecting the Ganga, for example, was that it required uninterrupted electricity to run it, which was just not possible. Instead, experts say, focus should be shifted to re-examining the approach and attitude we have to our rivers.

A Forgotten Relationship
Water means different things to different communities. Ask a person in Rajasthan and she will know the harsh cruelty of having too little water. Ask someone in Cherapunjee, and they will have another understanding of the unpredictable terror of too much water. For fishing communities, sailors, wives of sailors, it is a both a means to live and a call to death. Water is a necessity, but also has a range of emotions attached to it.

The reality of Ganga’s pollution, after all, still does not prevent millions of pilgrims taking a dip in the river everyday. Neither does the knowledge of environmental damage stop people from immersing Ganpati idols in the sea and rivers on Ganesh Chaturthi or Durga idols on Vijaya Dashami year after year. Our heads might tell us otherwise, but our hearts listen to centuries of cultural memory. Folk songs and popular lore conjure images of undulating rivers, sparkling, and invariably sacred. Many cultural rituals revolve around water.

Yet, in our everyday actions, there is little evidence that we really care for our water-bodies. Despite the city’s total dependence on rivers for their needs, this relationship between the city and its dwellers and the river is invisibilized. Not many of us feel any emotional ties to the river today. Only when we leave town for a weekend jaunt do we actually notice a stream or attune our ears to its gurgle. Urban life does have an uncanny knack of distancing us from nature and numbs us to the neglect and decay that our rivers and seas are facing. This is all the more unfortunate because city dwellers are not only part of the problem of dying rivers, but also an integral part of the solution.

Remembering, Revival
Part one, then, of reviving our rivers is to see ourselves as part of the solution. Whether it is the detergent we use, the kind of flushes we have in our toilets, just plain littering on the beach or how we separate our garbage into biodegradable or non-biodegradable waste, each action has an impact on our water-bodies.

Part two is to see it differently. When you see a river do you see it as a resource? As something that can be exploited, used, harnessed, overpowered? Or an asset. A thing of beauty. Something that can be nurtured, romanced, saved, a friend that will soothe frayed nerves as you sit by its banks and watch its ripples cast their calm over you. Something that will inspire confidences and charming verse in its praise. A cultural heritage.

Part three is perhaps the most difficult. Finding a balance between the heart and the mind, and bravely re-interpreting culture, religion or even superstitions so that it doesn’t add to the burden on our rivers. This means, for example, using biodegradable earth to make idols instead of Plaster of Paris, or re-usable idols of brass, immersing idols symbolically in community tanks instead of in the sea or river, or using paints on the idols that do not have high quantities of chemicals like mercury and cadmium. It is a fact that the day after the Ganesh Chaturti festival, shoals of dead fish are found floating on the water or washed up on shore because of the sudden rise in levels of these toxic chemicals in the water.

Finally, reviving our rivers means reviving our sense of collective ownership towards our water-bodies. “Can a river belong to anyone,” a wisened old lady from the Narmada movement once asked me. She was referring to the many disputes around rivers. It was, I thought, an important question. Whose river is the Kauvery? Karnataka or Tamil Nadu? Whose river is the Narmada? The people who live around it, worship it and sing songs about it for generations or the State? Or the new players in the game, industrial corporate powers? If privatization of a river seems far-fetched look no further than the National Water Policy 2002, which proposed the privatization of four water bodies. We need to re-establish our collective ownership and stake in our water-bodies, so that a multi-national doesn’t get to keep it and dump in it with no questions asked, or bottle it and sell it at a premium, because it is now its private property.

Can a river belong to anyone? Yes, to us.

(Published in Me, magazine supplement of DNA newspaper, Mumbai, October 2007)

The New Feminist

2008-01-09T01:53:00.000-08:00

When women in a North Indian village strike housework to protest against domestic violence, you know that feminism has percolated down to the weakest section of society. Yet, only a few years ago, Time magazine declared the movement dead. Manjima Bhattacharjya tries to make sense of what lies between these extremes

There have been many bonfire-lit evenings under the Delhi night sky, wine glasses tinkling and jazz playing, where I have been asked by the person at my side, what it is I do. It’s never an easy one to answer. Not because I don’t work in a bank or BPO, but because what I do will invariably reflect on what I think, or even who I am. So I often have to think of a dozen different ways not to say that I work with a feminist group. A women’s group, I offer. An NGO. Or just, I work on women’s issues. Why spoil a perfectly good evening by using the ‘F’ word?

It’s not like I haven’t tried. “Oh. You don’t look like one,” said one. “But you’re married,” said another. And just “Oh,” said a third, quickly moving on, casting a sorry look in the direction of my husband.

The odd thing is that the first of the three was a single mother who had bravely walked out of a difficult marriage and was raising a five year old son. The second was single, a strong and ambitious corporate executive living alone in a suburban high-rise, battling a slew of slurs and questioning eyes everyday about her lifestyle and single status. The third was an engineer in a multinational, who once confided in me how difficult it was to be a woman in her workplace and how there were no ladies toilets in the factories she had to visit. All classic representatives of what feminism had opened the doors for women to be. A generation ago, they would have been the ‘feminists’.

Look up ‘feminism’ in the dictionary and the definition is:
A belief in the social, political and economic equality of women.
A movement built around these beliefs.
You could be on the wrong side of the law if you actively objected to that, forget being unpopular with the ladies. Yet the term itself continues to raise hackles. What does ‘feminism’ mean today, when many of us can’t even imagine what it was like to live in an unequal world?

the awakening
In 1998, a controversial Time magazine cover story declared feminism dead. To the contrary, the success of the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s in the West, and later through the 1980s in India, has been that it has awakened the feminist that exists within each of us. Look around you and the spirit of feminism is everywhere. In our own way, we try to actively change the way our children will experience the world. We try to make our boys more sensitive, our girls stronger. We don’t save for a daughter’s marriage and a son’s education. We reject the premise that our daughters are not meant for math or science, or our sons are not meant to cook. It is the feminist in us that reminds us, if we are sexually harassed, that we did not ‘ask for it’. Every day we act out many little feminist victories.

When Time made its declaration, it was clearly looking in all the wrong places. No longer can feminism be captured in a tired old stereotype of the jhola-bearing, khadi-wearing, placard-waving plain Jane. It is, whether we like it or not, all around us.

the personal is political
One finds feminism in the unlikeliest of places. Forget the Bhanwri Devis, the hundreds of women’s collectives changing the face of their villages across India, the SEWA movement, or women in panchayats. Whether it’s the ladies bogie of a Mumbai local or the ladies loo of a downtown disco, women bond over simple home truths. Ergo feminism’s first principle: “The personal is political.” Once women begin to share their troubles, they realise they are not alone -- what they thought was their own problem, is a wider political issue. Or the case of a village in North India where all the women went ‘on strike’ and decided that they would not cook or do household work for a day to protest the rising incidence of domestic violence. As the village crumbled under this act of resistance, it brought to life feminism’s pet peeve. That women’s work is not only unpaid or underpaid, it is also invisible.

When singer Alanis Morrisette says, “I see my body as an instrument, not as an ornament,” she is battling the powerful media lobby that pushes young women to obsess about their bodies and base their self esteem on how they look, just to sell its products. When actors Julia Roberts or Nicole Kidman have to struggle to demand to be paid on par with male co-actors, they remind us that women are still paid 76 cents for every dollar paid to men, and that it’s alright to make these demands. Bend It Like Beckham or Billy Elliot become critical successes not because they are cinematic masterpieces, but because their basic premise – that we are not prisoners of gender, that girls can play football and boys can dance – appeals to us at a basic level. It’s something we have always known in our hearts, but somewhere we didn’t follow through with the fight.

new role models
Popular culture bubbles over with the celebration of ‘girl-power’ in a version of commercially viable feminism. Beyonce, JLo, Xena the Princess Warrior and the Power Puff Girls create a heady pink cocktail that cocks a snook at the notion that girls are weaker than boys. Closer home, new role models emerge. Whether it is journalist Barkha Dutt who rarely steps back from calling a spade a spade, or the poster girl of single motherhood, Sushmita Sen, or the girl-next-door, Nisha Sharma, who sends her groom-to-be packing for demanding dowry -- these women make resistance seem possible, acceptable and even laudable. Not to mention, lucrative.

Then there is the working-girl feminism. The one who enjoys her Sex and the City, Ally McBeal and Bridget Jones. It’s not always the Manolo Blahniks, the neuroses, or the obsession with food, fat or men. It’s also about female friendships, the celebration of single-dom, a shaking free of the sexual politics of shame and honour that afflicts our region in particular, and a professional toughness that is paving the way for generations to come.

And for all the retrograde rubbish on the K-serials, even the news that Balaji Telefilms provides legal support to one of its actors to help her fight a divorce case against her violent, abusive husband, is a feminist glimmer in that stable.

times are a’ changing
While I have yet to meet a ‘working father’ (similar to that superhuman species, the ‘working mother’) burdened with guilt or mind-managing household, family, birthday parties, vaccination schedules, PTA meetings and the next big M&A, the new age father isn’t always sitting on the couch. He’s doing the diaper and formula routine, and often has to tear himself away from those innocent eyes and cute lisps to get to work on time, and would rather play with Junior on Saturday night than go out with the boys. (No I was kidding about the last bit.) Metro-sexual, retro-sexual, and so on have battered a dent in masculinity’s tough exterior. Imagine. There’s more to being a man than… being a Man? It’s masculinity’s summer of discontent. Jocular references to the need to create a field of study called ‘men’s studies’ parallel to ‘women’s studies’ indicate that men are beginning to introspect and question their own prescribed gender roles.

And finally, the icing on the cake. The year is 2000 and it’s the International Women’s Day march on a lovely spring day in Geneva. As I walk amongst thousands of women of all shapes and sizes, buzzed by the palpable energy and enthusiasm, I’m struck by the changing demographics of the marching minions. Men of as many shapes and sizes mill in the crowd, pushing strollers, taking off from work to show their solidarity, holding up their baby girls, wearing the odd ‘I’m a feminist’ T-shirt, standing proud amidst the ‘feminists’. Today, many more men are part of the fight for women’s rights. And that, perhaps, is its biggest victory.

As for the usual suspects, those who are in the ‘profession’ of gender, or working for women’s rights, there have been some changes there as well. The new age activist is a product of her time. For her, shopping for shoes or a healthy interest in lip gloss is not mutually exclusive from No Logo or campaigning against violence against women. “You can ban the bomb in a feather boa,” she’ll quote at you. A new generation of activists globalises its activism through the internet, builds coalitions, blogs, shares strategies, embraces technology and imbibes management wisdom to shape their anger into strategic, institutionalised action. The goal is the same, their tools are different.

word play
Feminist values have been embodied and internalised in some measure in our generation. Yet there is a schizophrenic reaction to the term itself. “It’s still too radical,” is the general feeling. What is ‘radical’, of course, has also changed with time.

In 1890s New York, there was an uproar when women from respectable homes started riding bicycles. Editorials, cartoons and columns in daily papers panicked that with women from good homes showing off their ankles as they rode around Central Park, there would be little difference between them and the prostitutes. Similar alarm marked the entry of women onto the stage in Bengali theatre. Vidyasagar, who on the one hand championed the cause of widow remarriage, once walked out of a meeting protesting the entry of women on the stage. Bharatanatyam once faced a possible ban, as it was considered to be of ill repute being performed by women of the devadasi tradition. Today, from Mylapore to Milwaukee, it may be difficult to find a Tam-Bram who has not trained their daughter in it.

It’s not the word, but the act of a woman standing up for herself or challenging social norms, that is radical. “People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat,” Rebecca West famously said. In the early 1900s ‘women’s liberationist’ was abandoned in favour of ‘feminism’ as it had acquired disrepute. (And we know what happened to that.) Any other word reflecting the same spirit would meet the same fate. Bitch, slut, witch, tart – there’s a whole lexicon of terms used to offend women who step out of the invisible line-of-control. Pop-star Madonna once said, “I'm tough, I'm ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, okay.”
Words however can be wicked. They have the power to wound in insidious ways. The fear of being called a feminist dims in comparison to the fear of being called a slut. The problem with letting labels have this much power over us is that it limits our lives and allows tyranny to silently close in on us. The stigma surrounding feminism in particular, has silenced a part of many of us. As a result, women routinely keep shut, deny or disguise opinions that run the risk of being termed feminist, in the end, doing a great disservice to womankind.
The project of feminism is far from complete. Everyday women negotiate, bargain, hustle to live life on their terms. Sudden dictats from moral police declaring what women can or cannot wear, do or say, remind us that the past victories are still fragile. For all these reasons, and many more, feminism still matters.

out of the closet
A few months back I went to a rare public talk in Delhi by well known feminist Gloria Steinem. As she stood, beautiful and elegant, speaking softly with wit and warm humour, something she said summed up for me the impact of feminism. “When we were growing up, we didn’t want to be like our mothers. Our mothers didn’t want us to be like them, have to live their lives. But for many in my generation, our daughters want to be like us.”

Being a feminist means different things to different people. To me, it means having an intellectual commitment to women’s rights and the guts to sometimes speak out for them or act for them, even at the risk of being unpopular. The irony is that feminism’s biggest lesson has been hijacked by a beauty product. “Because you’re worth it,” it tells me. Feminism taught me that years ago.

I’m not a closet feminist. I out-ed a couple of years ago. My mum, at 57, is showing all the signs of coming out soon. I hope my daughter won’t have to wait that long.

(Published in ELLE India, October 2007)