Women in India: Gender and Hindu Nationalism

This is one of the most insanely passionate lectures I ever gave... :) about 4 years ago...

Recent literature on the rise of the Hindu nationalist movement in India suggests two strands of academic work that bring forth two different kinds of theories about the ascendancy of this movement. One set of theories explains this phenomenon as the result of decades of systematic, painstaking, organizational work and imaginative political strategies ; while the second strand interprets Hindu Nationalism in more cultural and historical terms, arguing that the Hindu nationalists could be successful because they were drawing on older reserves of “religious nationalism” that were always central to most forms of Indian nationalism. A third and much contested argument explains the resurgence of this movement in terms of a larger transformation taking place within the practice of democratic politics in India . TB Hansen terms this the strategy of ‘conservative populism’ and argues that Hindu nationalism is successful due to its ability to successfully ‘articulate fractured desires and anxieties in both urban and rural India.’ The use of post-modern notions of Lacanian ‘lack’ and ‘theft of jouissance’, experienced by the Hindu community, enables Hansen to describe the process whereby Hindu nationalists treat the ‘outsider as enemy’ and focus on the process of ‘othering’ Muslims that is especially crucial to the project of Hindu nationalism. Jaffrelot on the other hand, argues that the Hindu nationalists have used the universalistic language of democracy to further their own particularistic ends and their adherence to democracy does not validate their democratic and secular credentials.

In this session, we will dwell on some issues about the description of gender in Hindu nationalism.

To begin with, there is no singular or one-dimensional understanding of the women’s movement in India. Feminist scholars have motioned towards four phases of what can be called the Indian women’s movement. In the first phase, women were called upon to join hands with the nationalist leaders and fight the colonial empire. The second phase describes the post-1947 scenario where women’s rights took a back-seat to the development of the Nehruvian state that they hoped would address issues of gender inequality. In the third phase, the disbanded women’s movement came together to express a common critique of what they called the benevolent-patriarchal state. The fourth phase includes the decades from the 80’s onwards that have seen grassroots women’s activism against immediate concerns like domestic violence and alcoholism.

Yet Indian feminists are divided about how to classify women’s movement(s) in India – is there one women’s movement or are there a multitude of such movements? Instinct favors the elaboration of women’s activism in India as a collection of many movements – national and subaltern, pervading different spheres of activism and spanning various issues from environmentalism to representation, violence to class structure. There are women from the Indian elite that have aligned themselves with the Western women’s movement and then there are the subaltern women’s movements that are not connected to the elite movement. But here we are more concerned with the place accorded to women in the ideology of the Hindu right.
Undoubtedly, women are crucial to the project of Hindu nationalism. Women are also viewed by scholars as being positioned in two ways in the Hindutva framework. First, they are seen as helpless victims of a discourse that has shaped who women are and what they should be doing. Second, many Hindu women are seen as active participants in the Right’s ideology.

In this lecture we will try and recover lost ground between both these positions. We will argue that the Hindu right constructs Hindu women differently from the manner in which it constructs women from minority communities, like Muslims. We will focus on the Hindu woman/Muslim woman antagonism which has found its most rabid expression in 2002 in the Indian state of Gujarat. In a state-supported pogrom against Muslims, most of the casualties were women and children. The assertion of Hindu masculine superiority over the entire Muslim community was done by treating Muslim women as the site where this superiority could be demonstrated through their sexual violation, humiliation and ultimate murder.

But for now, let us focus on our two main readings for this session. Sikata Banerjee seeks to explain women’s involvement with the Hindu right as the result of an incentive framework. She says that the Shiv Sena intricately constructs an incentive structure by combining emotional with economic incentives to attract women’s support for the. This framework places Hindu women in the position of followers of male Shiv Sainiks. However, in doing so Banerjee conceives of such women as incapable of controlling their own decisions and sees them as pawns in a broad discourse of Hindutva or as individuals exercising rational choice. While this is probably not an incorrect argument, we must treat it with some caution.

Explaining women’s rational choice in terms of ‘emotions and economics’ is a rigid framework and ignores the interplay of political events with ideology which also structure ‘choice’. If women respond only to economics and emotion, it seems they lack the capacity to make political judgments based on factors like governmental performance, policies etc - in short, the factors that are used to explain men’s decision making. Banerjee’s argument also fails to give a clear explanation of how women mobilized by the Shiv Sena exercise their power as ‘workers, wives and warriors’ (pp 1221). Further, even after it is clear that women can never exercise actual power in the domain of masculine politics, why do women still continue to support the Shiv Sena?

Differing from Banerjee’s argument is Paola Bacchetta’s argument which does not view women in the Hindu right as mere tools in the hands of the masculine leaders. Instead, Bacchetta treats right-wing women as individuals who participate in this ideology willingly.

Paola Bacchetta brings out the role Hindu women of the Rashtriya Sevika Samiti play in the right’s ideology and sees women’s involvement in the hindutva project as an active choice exercised by Hindu women (Bacchetta, 2004). Problematically, we are only going to deal with women’s role in the Hindu right vis-à-vis two right-wing organizations – the RSS and the Shiv Sena. A third group called the Durga Vahini (women’s wing of the VHP) has practically no scholarship that could lend itself for our discussion purposes. So not only, is academic resource on gender and hindutva scarce, what exists is probably insufficient to enable us to understand women’s involvement in a notoriously anti-woman ideology.

Bacchetta notes the manner in which the Sevika Samiti constructs itself in opposition to its masculine counterpart by emphasizing both the masculine and feminine principles. The feminine principle is of course absent in the elaboration of the Rashtriyia Swayamsewak Sangh. Further, she notes how the ‘Swayam’ or ‘self’ is absent from the Sevika Samiti – a crucial signal that women do not see themselves as individuals. Individualism is the preserve of men. Women can only exist as parts of communities and in opposition to the male within these communities.
Perhaps the starting point on any discussion on gender and the Hindu right must necessarily focus on how the Hindu right sees the nation- state. For VD Savarkar and other ideologues of the RSS, the nation is a ‘mother’ , a female entity that must be protected from invaders (Muslims) who are placed in the role of rapists. The inclusion of warring female Goddesses in the Hindu pantheon is again symbolic of the power of the female. But, the female only exists as part of or in opposition to the male. Therefore, a woman can be powerful as a mother, sister and sometimes as a wife; but this power is circumscribed by the masculine domain.

A Hindu woman is portrayed as a reservoir of moral virtue and all things pure. She is systematically desexualized and her sexual role as a wife is underplayed while her role as a mother is deemed sacred due to the procreative process, which is considered divine. This is nothing new. Even during the national movement women were placed in the role of the keepers (never rulers) of the ‘inner domain’ of the family, while men were ‘forced’ to negotiate the ‘world outside this sacred space’. As is revealed by Tagore’s Ghare Bahire (The Home and the World) and Char Adhyay (Four Chapters) women essentially were involved in the national movement as focal points around which the cult of the Mother Goddess was resurrected and yet the women in his novels remained under the overarching control of the male nationalist.

Therefore, when questions of women being empowered are broached the more important issue is to consider in which domain women are looking for empowerment. Even in the family women exercise their power only in terms of rituals and symbols. For instance, they are the executors of auspicious rituals. But when it comes to women’s assertion in the political domain, they are left out due to a number of binding traditional and institutional factors (internal party female representation, etc). The problem then, it seems is twofold – do women join Hindu nationalist groups as an alternative means of entering the political domain; or do they rationalize their choices ‘economically and emotionally’ thinking that this is the closest they can get to empowerment (as Banerjee suggests), without challenging masculine domination over politics?

Going along with Bacchetta’s argument there is little room for doubting the fact that women constitute an extremely conscious and active group in the Hindu right. This assertion gains a political dimension when Hindu women are placed in opposition to Muslim women and the latter are hypersexualised in response to the former’s desexualization. So, Muslim women are presented as baby-factories, prostitutes, suppressed, craving attention from the Hindu male . Hindu women are both chaste and pure and are equated with the nation-state. They constitute an inviolable domain. Muslim virility is to be controlled and one way to emasculate the Muslim is to attack Muslim women. The Muslim woman’s body then becomes the site of violence in a battle between Hindu men against Muslim men. Sexual domination over Muslim women becomes political domination over the Muslim community.

The point this lecture is trying to impress is that the Hindu Nationalists in India have resurrected a sacred feminine myth and inserted it into the overarching patriarchal myth of the nation. So women are not essentially reduced to appendages of men and their ideologies, but in fact do have their own space within the discourse of the Hindu nation. What results, in our view, is the strengthening of Hindu women as carriers and perpetuators of patriarchy. This movement of Hindu women is in some senses posited against the Western feminist movement led by elite Indian women.

So the overarching problem that women in India seem to be grappling with is not whether there is need for reform (there is an agreement that there is), but where should this reform take place? Should the reform take place within the existing religion/culture/tradition? Should the process of reform and empowerment align itself with Western notions of reform and then launch an offensive against parochial ideologies? This process of interrogation has produced diverse responses ranging from Hindu women seeking to empower themselves in abstract notions of purity and finding a ritualistic voice that is sought only in times of communal crisis and solely for purposes of jingoism and incitement; to grassroots mobilization and finally the elite-led liberal and left traditions.

For instance, Tanika Sarkar points us to the ‘voice of Sadhvi Rithambara’. The Sadhvi is a female holy-woman involved with the right’s political parties and organizations. She is most known for delivering hateful speeches where she decries the Muslim community. In doing so Sadhvi Rithambara also legitimizes all acts of violence carried out against the Muslim community, especially women. Her ‘voice’ is a proxy for voices of Hindu women who incite their husbands, brothers etc to go ahead and battle Muslims. More importantly as one writer puts it, women in the Hindu right are ‘ideological pallbearers’. They drag the right-wing patriarchal ideology along with them into the arenas of family, politics and state. To reaffirm a point made earlier - in doing so they are carriers and perpetuators of patriarchy.

The appropriation of gender by the Hindu right in India posits a serious challenge to notions of gender equality based on universal principles of liberty and equality. Again, appropriating gender is crucial to the Hindu right since without the inclusion of women, they can never portray the Hindu community as an un-fractured, collective whole. The Hindu right’s appropriation of the feminist agenda is a grave setback to Indian women’s movement(s) as a whole. Within this agenda, Hindu women cannot interrogate Hinduism and patriarchy; Muslim women are targets of communal hatred and violence, and liberal feminists cannot talk in terms of equality, entitlements and a uniform civil code for fear of unwittingly aligning themselves with the Hindu right. To conclude, women in the Hindu right can be mothers, sisters, wives, sages, – but never queens (in the political sense)!

Women in India: Gender and Personal Laws

From a lecture I delivered two years ago...

The Indian state has at times adopted progressive legislation for Indian women. Recently, a new Domestic Violence Act was passed by the Indian Parliament which is a welcome addition to the existing repertoire of laws. Although it has taken ten long years for Parliament to pass this Act, it breaks precedence by covering women even in live-in relationships to seek redress under the law. This suggests a remarkable change in opinion at the highest levels of the state in a country where non-marital relationships between men and women are frowned upon. The Act also specifies that women in live-in relationships and under married conditions cannot be evicted from the premises they occupy. They have been identified as co-owners even though such women may not possess title or deeds to the property in their name.

We need to qualify this optimism by looking at the previous record of the Indian state with respect to legislation on women’s issues. This record is a mixed bag. In the past the Indian state has implemented legislation which on the surface seems progressive, yet militates against women in ways we will discuss in this session. There are two points that we will make in this session. First, citizenship in India is granted to groups and not individuals. This has unique repercussions for the Indian women’s movement. Second, law itself furthers the fragmentation of the movement in two ways – at local levels law interacts with the socially dominant group and its version of patriarchy and, law furthers the fragmentation of the ‘female’ since law itself is not independent of moral visions that guide ideas of justice. Finally, we will argue that the women’s movement in India is fragmented because the subject of the movement – the ‘woman’ – is fragmented.

This fragmented woman has become the subject of law making in India leading to laws which privilege equality over difference. This has unique consequences for Indian women. The principle of equality privileges ‘sameness’ under law, i.e., women should be treated the same as men by law. However, this ignores the fact that gender is a socially constructed category and women’s lives are diverse and affected by the various communal spaces they occupy. Therefore, treating women equally under law can end up reinforcing or even worsening their differences (Kapur and Crossman, 2001).

Since most laws do not address the varying experiences of women from different communities, they end up perpetuating the fragmentation of the female identity.
First, we will attempt to situate gender-specific laws in India in a historical context. Second, we will then focus on specific issues/judgments - abortion, the Shah Bano controversy and the Bhanwari Devi rape judgment to argue that one of the main problems the women’s movement faces in India is the fact that citizenship rights have been granted to groups not individuals. What follows from this understanding is the idea that a woman is first Hindu or Muslim, i.e., her membership in a community is prior and more important than her existence as an individual. Indian laws have internalized this conception and have been guided by an Anglo-Brahminical idea of justice.

The existing framework of laws related to women has a particular historical trajectory which pre-dates colonialism. Flavia Agnes describes this trajectory and claims that what we see in India today is a culmination of Brahminical Hindu law, Shari’ah based Muslim law and finally the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition (Agnes, 1999).

For Agnes, existing laws have been framed by a unique legal experience. The British attempted to simplify existing laws in society but also tried to achieve this by not disturbing existing legal traditions. They called on pandits and qazis to interpret traditional laws. The clerics on their part offered a selective interpretation of traditional law under which women’s rights were slowly, but surely, taken away. For instance, Hindu women had the right to their ‘stridhana’ (all possessions given to them at the time of their marriage). Through this process of filtering law, by 1949 Hindu women had lost this right. As another example, Islam (being a trade specific religion) treated marriage as a contract with rights for both men and women. This contractual nature of marriage turned into a morally binding one by 1949 with disproportionately more rights for men. Finally, Hindu women’s limited right to share in the family’s property was taken away (Agnes, 1999).

It must be emphasized here that the British were operating under the moral vision of the Anglo-Saxon tradition which saw women as commodities and less-than-equal beings. British women did not have the right to property on marriage. The post-Independence Indian state adopted a synthesized legal framework which stripped women of many economic and social rights.

The overarching vision of law that dominates India is one that has been filtered through the colonial experience. As Partha Chatterjee notes the prime task of the nationalist movement and its leaders was to first and foremost present the indigenous community as un-fragmented. One way by which this was achieved was by making a difference between the ‘inner realm’ and ‘outer realm’ of society. The inner realm was the realm of tradition and family which the woman guaranteed in her role as the reservoir of all virtue. The outer realm was the public realm of politics and the Raj. While the Raj could dominate the outer realm, the inner realm had to be kept uncontaminated. This purity of the inner realm was to be maintained at all costs through many tactics. Perhaps one of these tactics was the standardization of laws for the community. In this process women were relegated to an inferior position. Their demands were seen as subversions of the unity of the community. This notion of community and women’s subversion has played out in modern day politics in India.

We will now turn to specific controversial issues and legislation.

Many observers have commented on the fact that India has progressive legislation with respect to women. One of the arguments invoked to support this observation is the fact that India has made abortions legal. However, abortions in India are not legal because of any protracted movement that pressurized the state into making them legal. Instead, the simple reason given is that abortions are legal in India since they are linked to the success of family planning as a state policy.

In 1994 the Supreme Court implemented the Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Act. Under this Act, state governments were issued directives to take steps to ensure that gender determination through ultrasound and amniocentesis did not occur. Amniocentesis was being used to determine the sex of and selectively abort female fetuses. The catch in the ruling was that this law applied only to government run clinics and hospitals. In 2002, the Supreme Court hauled up the governments of Punjab, Haryana, UP, Bihar, Gujarat, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Kerala, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh and inquired about the steps taken to curb female feticide. The petitioner was CEHAT which claimed that these governments had actually been giving licenses to ultrasound clinics and so had undermined the Supreme Court’s judgment.

This sequence of events reveals a few points. First, legal abortions in India were being used against future women through the ‘femicide of foetuses’ (Menon 2005). Second, the state demonstrated that it could only curb the activities of state-run clinics. Third, implementation at the local level was never carried out in accordance with the decree of the Supreme Court. Fourth, provisions in the law did not recognize that women in India do not control their own sexuality. Decisions about abortion are not taken by individual women but are taken by the husband and his family. The abortion law laid out conditions under which abortion was legal, but also stated that if it could be proved that the abortion was unnecessary and had been done by the woman without any pressure, she would be held liable and would be punished. The burden of proof was placed on the woman who would undergo an abortion. (Menon 2005). Fifth, the Prenatal Diagnostic Techniques law demonstrates the interaction of local patriarchies with the state.

Our second case moves away from the realm of female sexuality into the sphere of civil rights and citizenship. The Shah Bano controversy is a well known one in India. She was a 68 year old Muslim woman whose husband divorced her by uttering the word ‘talaq’ thrice. According to shari’ah law, the husband is supposed to maintain his wife for the duration of the ‘iddat’ – three months from the date of the divorce. Shah Bano approached the courts to claim alimony from her husband beyond that period. Therefore, she asked to be treated the same as other Indian women who could claim alimony/maintenance from their husbands. The Supreme Court in a piece of progressive legislation upheld Shah Bano’s status as an Indian citizen. She was entitled to her maintenance. Justice Chandrachud’s ruling also called into question the logic of existing community-based personal laws in as much as they militated against specific individuals within the community. He expressed a desire for implementing the Uniform Civil Code. Matters were complicated when in 1986 the Rajiv Gandhi government in overturned the Court’s ruling by adopting legislation in Parliament which reinstated the primacy of the Shari’ah based Muslim Personal Law in governing the rights of Muslim women. This step was taken after the Congress (a political party) suffered in by-elections in a couple of states and interpreted that as a loss of Muslim support (Hasan 2000).

The Shah Bano controversy highlighted the following. First, the Court in this case tried to follow the norm of equality but was scuttled in its endeavor by the government, who capitulated under pressure from the Muslim Personal Law Board and individual clerics. Second, the issue also demonstrated the will of the government to preserve harmony between communities at the cost of the ‘minority within the minority’ (Hasan 2000). Third, the debate surrounding Muslim women was construed as a debate about communities not women, much less Muslim women. Fourth, Muslim women were not granted access to legislation under Section 125 of the CrPC which could be accessed by other women. This emphasized their difference. Finally, the government and community leaders obfuscated the issue by treating women as members of a community first and citizens of the country later.

Bhanwari Devi Rape Case

Bhanwari Devi was a saathin with the Women’s Development Program in the state Rajasthan who was working against child marriage. Upper caste men from a community which supported the practice raped her in an attempt to discipline her. When the matter went to court, following the intervention of women’s groups, the verdict stunned everyone. The local court ruled that since Bhanwari Devi was a low caste (SC) woman it was unthinkable to allege that anyone from the upper-caste community could rape her (Menon 2001).

The above discussion reveals that women are treated in India as members of a community before they are treated as citizens of the state. While abortion laws militate against individual women on the basis of their membership in the female community, the Shah Bano controversy demonstrates how rights are conferred upon communities to the detriment of individual women within the community. The Bhanwari Devi case examines the manner in which Bhanwari Devi was disprivileged for being a low caste woman who could not benefit from the state’s legal apparatus. The state apparatus viewed Bhanwari Devi’s underprivileged social status as grounds to refute the charges she leveled.

What we have hoped to demonstrate is that the implementation of law is indeed divorced from the spirit of the law at the local levels. But more importantly we have argued that law and justice are separate concepts. Justice is more of a moral vision of the common and individual good; while law is derived from justice and therefore from moral visions that prevail in society at any given point in time (Menon 2005). In India, maintaining harmony between communities has remained high on the state’s agenda to the detriment of women. The state interacts with community-based structures of patriarchy at all levels to produce competing versions of the Indian woman. So the Indian woman is not a single identity.

This difficulty in pinning down the ‘woman’ has resulted in a general incoherence in the Indian women’s movement. There can be no singular movement if the subject of that movement is amorphous. In fact, as of today, there are many separate women’s movements across the country which articulate particular anxieties framed by different ‘fields of protest’ (Ray 1999). Indeed, the gender identity is fragmented. But this is precisely because gender is a socially constructed category which defines particular roles for both men and women. What fragments the ‘woman’ further are laws which seek to universalize women’s experiences in the name of equality (Kapur and Crossman, 2001). Therefore, law itself must be scrutinized to reveal what it enshrines as its guiding principles.

Women in India: The Missing Girl Child

A few years ago Manish Jha’s first feature film Matrubhoomi shocked a nation which had been touted as one the world’s emerging economic giants. In Matrubhoomi a village girl Kalki is married off to five men because the dearth of women in the village helps rewrite the rules of marriage and conjugality. Matrubhoomi is a futuristic vision of India, albeit a bleak one. The sex ratio in this bleak future is adverse to the extent that reenactments of the Pandavas conquest of Draupadi are almost commonplace. Matrubhoomi’s India is not an economic giant. It is instead an India where the perpetuation of a regressive mindset has destroyed the sanctity of the feminine. It is in this future that Kalki seeks to find her identity as a human first, an individual, a woman and a mother. Kalki's story is heartbreaking. It breathes and seethes at the intersection of family, caste, religion, class and gender. As each of her husbands exercises his conjugal rights over her in turn she is likened to cattle, she is repeatedly raped and becomes a sub-human being, stripped off her rights, her clothes, her dignity.

In 1994 the Supreme Court implemented the Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Act. Under this Act, state governments were issued directives to take steps to ensure that gender determination through ultrasound and amniocentesis did not occur. In 2002, the Supreme Court hauled up the governments of Punjab, Haryana, UP, Bihar, Gujarat, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Kerala, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh and inquired about the steps taken to curb female feticide. CEHAT, the petitioner, claimed that these governments had actually been giving licenses to ultrasound clinics and so had undermined the Supreme Court’s judgment. With the introduction of portable ultrasound machines doctors visit villages in India and offer gender selection services.

Last year a first year medical student from UCSF-Berkeley, Sunita Puri, outlined the extent of sex-selection among the Bay Area’s South Asian families (mostly Indians). The birth of a female child led to the ill-treatment of the mother at the hands of her in-laws and husband in the Bay Area. Many Indian wives across the region suffer under abusive husbands, whose only claim to fame is their job profile which more often than not boasts of an impressive engineering degree from reputed institutions across India and the world.

Gen-Select is a small American firm that specializes in medical kits that help determine the sex of a fetus. Women can program their fetuses simply by taking some “nutriceuticals” and sticking to a certain diet plan and conjugal schedule. GenSelect placed an innocuous advertisement in an Indian newspaper and according to the management it received an overwhelming response form its Indian market. Priced at about 200 to 450 dollars, a customer can get this FDA approved kit and have a baby of either sex. In India the kit was offered for about 6000 INR. The company also assures customers of a 96% success rate with the gender selection process and even offers a money back guarantee if the procedure fails.

The above information is an attempt by me to contextualize the magnitude of the problem confronting the missing girl child in India. Matrubhoomi shocked audiences throughout the country, but many did not bother to look at the present day situation in the country where sex-selective abortions, although deemed illegal, continue to occur. A British medical journal recently reported that over the last decade or so oven 10 million female fetuses have been aborted in India by families and individuals keen on begetting a male heir. The sex ratio according to the 2001 census on an average for India is 933:1000. Northern Indian states have lower sex ratios as compared to their southern counterparts. However, since 1986, southern Indian states with the exception of Kerala have not done too well either on the sex ratio front. Arnold and Roy claim that the sex ratios at birth for children whose mothers had ultrasound or amniocentesis “about 5 per cent of female foetuses in India are aborted among women who have these tests. In Haryana, it is estimated that 43 per cent of the female foetuses are likely to have been aborted for these same women. Another indication of the use of sex selective abortions in India is the very low sex ratios of births to women with no living sons, particularly in states with strong parental preferences for sons.”

We can invoke countless figures that testify to the magnitude of the problem before the country. The problem stated simply is this – we are a nation that kills off our girl children. The girl child is ‘missing’, because she is not allowed to live.

In India abortion is not illegal. Indeed the very foundation of population control in India rests on the existence of legal abortion. In fact if abortion were illegal, abortion related deaths in India would increase amongst the category of young fertile women since they would be conducted by unskilled doctors and quacks under unhygienic conditions using questionable practices.

On the surface there is really nothing amiss about detecting the state of a fetus. Ultrasounds help detect deformities in a fetus and may help in overcoming obstacles during childbirth. However, there is really no way of stopping a doctor from determining the sex of a fetus. Many families in turn when given this information choose to abort a female fetus. Why does this happen? It is not big mystery that in India sons are preferred over daughters. Daughters are seen as liabilities and any expenditure on daughters is done reluctantly since the only possible life path open to a daughter is that of a wife. Sons on the other hand are seen as assets who will turn into bread winners later on in life and take care of aged parents. Be it discrimination in employment, education, capability enhancement, or even religious practice, Indian women have lived under the bell-jar like oppression of this mindset for centuries.

Dreze and Sen in their study of female education in India revealed the low enrollment rates and high dropout rates in female primary school enrollment in north Indian states and concluded that one of the factors that contributed to this was a traditional mindset that saw expenditure on female education as wasteful.

There is a pressing need to highlight the overall impact of a conservative and militant mindset on the life chances of the girl child. The reason I choose to write about this is because this mindset is not endemic only to India, but has in fact migrated to foreign shores. Puri’s account of the disturbing trends amongst South Asian families in the Bay Areas leads me to a larger issue about the migration of ideas. It is obvious then that level and extent of education and economic security has very little to do with the destruction of certain notions. The danger really arises from men and women who perpetuate such beliefs and notions in the process delivering a shattering blow to any notion of progress we may take pride in.

Products like GenSelect are another weapon for the anti-girl child individuals and families in India. Less torturous than methods like selective abortion, the product nevertheless contributes to the growing problem of missing women in India.

Even though the 2001 Census recorded an increase in the sex ratio for the second time in five decades, the troubling figure is not the average sex ratio, but is in fact the sex ratio in the 0-6 age group. The 2001 Census reveals that the child sex ration dropped from 945 in 1991 to 927 in 2002. Each state also registered a decline with the exceptions of Kerala, Sikkim, Mizoram and Tripura where an increase was recorded. In Punjab the ratio fell 82 points to 793, by 59 points in Haryana, 54 points in Himachal Pradesh and Chandigarh, 50 points in Gujarat and Delhi and 42 points in Uttaranchal. Many people have explained the vicissitudes of the sex ratio in India as a result of migrations across the country or problems in census data collection. However, the consistency of certain figures like that of the child sex ratio is disconcerting to the extent that the repeated patters across the same states testify to the fact that there may indeed be a deeper problem.

There are a number of reasons that I can identify that contribute to the adverse sex ratio. First, the son-preference maxim is still strong across India and even more deeply entrenched in north Indian states. Second, the lack of concerted pressure from society as a whole translates into sex selection as a legally unacceptable but socially sanctioned practice. Third, the failure of the legal system at various levels compounds the problem. While acts are fine in letter and spirit, the lack of political will to enforce them and mete out punishment to people indulging in sex selection is absent. Fourth, the awareness of the missing girl child as a problem confronting the country exists only in a very elite circle of activists, academicians, and professionals. The vast majority of the country is not concerned with indicators like the sex ratio and the general apathy of people results in little popular activism against the problem.

The Grave Outside Aizawl

The first time I saw Sai was in a photograph pinned to the inside wall of a closet in Delhi. She was standing in a pink frock, looking sullenly into the camera like a petulant child forced to stand still when she would rather have been doing something else, like tossing a ball and chasing puppies. I remember this photograph and I remember her sister, Marie, describing the whole family to me. For a year every time that closet was opened, Sai peeped out at me. Eleven years later I met Sai for the first time on 19th April 2009, buried in the hills outside of Aizawl, six-feet under. I swallowed a lump in my throat and cried myself to sleep that night. I was grieving for a child I had never known, a person whose voice I had never heard. All that kept coming back to me was her face from inside the closet, her body in the pink frock, her body under the earth. It all seemed like such a waste.

I stood staring at Sai’s grave, prayed for a while as Marie stood beside me and bowed her head. The sun turned orange and sank behind the hills and after a while Sai’s grave winked out of sight. I do not know how long the two of us stood there in silence. There was nothing else both of us could do. We drove back to my hotel and talked about how our lives had changed in eleven years. I was Marie’s first ‘mainland’ Indian friend to ever visit Mizoram. But I was bitter and angrier than I had been for a long time. I knew even without being told that Sai had died violently. Marie just wasn’t telling me how.

“So what happened to her?” I finally asked Marie.

“We got a call one night from the Delhi police. They asked us if she was our family. They told us she had died at AIIMS.”

“Was she sick?”

“No they found her by the side of the road in May 2007. One inspector Khan found her and they took her to AIIMS. She was there for a few days and must have given our information to the authorities. The cop himself was a minority. He did his best to help us.”

“What did the doctors say?”

‘Two liters of blood in her stomach. She had been hemorrhaging for some time.”

“Then she was obviously physically abused.” I hesitated, but I needed to know. “Was she sexually abused as well?”

“Yes, it was clear she had been beaten up. But we don’t know about rape.”

“What else did the police find?”

“They tried to pursue it. It seemed she had an African boyfriend and was into drugs.”

This was the third story I had come across of supposedly organized groups of ‘African’ students, who would indulge college going Indian women and involve them in drug-peddling rackets. While it was unclear to the police what Sai’s level of involvement was in the racket, there was no doubt she was also a drug user.

In her last days at the hospital twenty-year-old Sai had shown withdrawal symptoms, been abusive and shivered uncontrollably as the hospital staff had tried to calm her down. Somewhere in that phase she had been coherent enough to provide an address and a phone number in Aizawl. Even while her siblings were booking their tickets to Delhi, the police had called to say she had not survived the night. Marie had identified Sai’s body in the morgue and made arrangements to bring her back to Mizoram. She had also tried to follow the case up with police. There were no leads. Sai was a recluse. Her Mizo friends did not know who her boyfriend was and they did not include her in their activities. The so-called ‘boyfriend’ had disappeared somewhere into the gullies and by lanes of Delhi and would probably not be tracked down.

“What was Sai anyway to anyone in Delhi?” said Marie taking a drag of her cigarette. “Just another northeastern girl found by the side of the road.”

Marie’s cynicism was not lost on me. The category of the ‘northeast’ as a cluster of similar states has been reified in the imagination of ‘mainland’ India. Most north Indians do not know the difference between a Khasi and a Mizo, and quite truthfully, neither did I till I began studying the region. However, the essentialization of the northeast and its people has been complete and constructed over decades. In discussions with women in the northeast they say that they are more likely to be socially and sexually preyed upon in Delhi, than women of other ethnicities, because of a stereotype that has defined them as sexually promiscuous and ‘available’. They struggle with the consequences of this stereotype. They are forced to be more aggressive than usual in their dealings with people, and, many feel their natural dressing habits are curbed because they have to deal with the manner in which north Indians have a tendency to censure ‘inappropriate’ dressing with their gaze.

Northeastern people are blacklisted amongst certain communities of landlords for their non-vegetarian, treyf food habits. They are often pejoratively referred to as “chinkis” or “kanchas”. Whether we want to admit it or not the fact is there is widespread racism against the northeastern people in the rest of India. Racism! There I said it! Racism is not a fully developed debate in our country, for, the logic goes, how can a country of brown-skinned people be racist? Is that not something endemic to Western countries? It is about time that we began talking about levels of racism within our own country. Whether it is forcing dark-skinned women to be fair by artificial cosmetic products, or referring to Black people as “kallus” or “negroes”, or expressing racism in the form of excluding certain groups of people like northeasterners and Kashmiri’s from renting places; the fact remains we Indians are an extremely bigoted lot.

The problem really gets complicated when we impute some qualities to certain races and ethnic groups. The associations in the mind become permanent. For instance, say “Muslim” and many would automatically think “terrorist”. “Mizo girl” would mean “easy” for many simply because she belonged to a certain ethnic stock where the women had been unnaturally and incorrectly defined as sexually promiscuous. There is tyranny, which comes with such categorizations, and these are not imagined word associations or categories.

We can only speculate what happened to Sai. She may have been the victim of a hate-crime, abuse by her boyfriend, or like many other women in Delhi, another statistic in the crime graph against women of all ethnicities. We will not know. But what we do know is that the police did not pursue the case possibly because Sai was Mizo. It did not seem important enough to pursue when other more high profile cases were probably around waiting to be flashed on our news networks. Everyone forgot about Sai because she was a minority from a state that commands a grand total of one seat in the Lok Sabha.

This is at one level a story about representation. In the US there is a term to describe the importance given to cases of violence against white women or their disappearance as compared to how much coverage similarly treated black women get. It is called the Missing White Woman Syndrome (MWWS). Some stories are just more newsworthy. People would rather consume a story about a white Natalee Holloway than a black Natalee Holloway. Similarly, urban young women in India are more likely to make headlines once felled by violence than a similarly placed woman from a minority community.

Sai came from a broken home and from a society that was uniquely ordered and controlled by the Presbyterian Church.

The extremely strict norms of permissible behavior, social interaction and the structuring of life around the Church, its looming presence in politics and society had created, said Marie, youth that “went crazy” when they went to other cities. A second interviewee, who wished to stay anonymous, said Mizo youth did everything in extremes in Bangalore and Delhi. Many could not cope with curriculum requirements and switched streams often jumping from sciences to arts.

Sai had fought to go study in Delhi. She lasted all of two years there. Her family said she was conscious of her differentness in Delhi, never an introvert she turned into one. She became a loner, grew quieter and got into a relationship that no one seemed to know anything about. The drug use started with the relationship and possibly ended with it too and her death.

Did the big city do her in? Or was it her own society that had curtailed her to the extent that she could not adjust to the pressures of urban living and contestation. Or was it just a lousy boyfriend? The blame game could possibly go on forever but her family thinks it was a little bit of all. And, as Marie stated, there was lack of a social network of Mizos that could present a united front and take care of their own in Delhi by recreating a social geometry of the displaced. Others disagreed. They said such networks were in place in Delhi University. The Mizos did have Church services every week in Green Park. It seemed Sai had just not known how to tap into one of these support systems.

Twenty-year-old Sai had been incapable of dealing with urban adult life. The tragic and violent end that she faced alone, inconsolable, angry, depressed and despondent reveals the extent of her mental trauma. To fit in, be part of a social scene where she could be included and seen as popular, her sister commented, she caved into social pressure about substance abuse and its “coolness” quotient. But the unraveling, I think, began long ago. It began with coming from a uniquely ordered society, transitioning to a city that can only function at a frenzied pace, being exposed to the rigors of urban living, competition and lacking the skills to cope with upheavals, and being marked as different.

The awareness of being the “other” is a unique one and can be psychologically crippling. I am an “other” in the US, an “other” in the northeast. Sai was an “other” amongst many in Delhi. She was probably conscious of her disempowerment, of her status as being part of the lot that didn’t count as much, the lot that could easily be excluded. Her loss of control over her social dynamics, her failure to deal with peer pressure and stresses of urban living compounded the choices before her. Not surprisingly, in the absence of a mature support system the choices she made were self-destructive, but probably seemed rational to her at the time because in many ways they empowered her temporarily, however false that empowerment may sound to our ears.

Sai simply ceased in May 2007. But like her many young men and women from Mizoram, from the northeast struggle to come to terms with their identities, face discrimination in various ways and ultimately find themselves ghettoized into small communities in urban India. Politically, the consequences of this process are translated into a macro-level distrust between the central Indian state and the entire region, and its disparate units.

Sai’s story is intensely personal for me. She was someone I knew and didn’t know. I knew about her childhood and her family, yet I never spoke to her. I knew who she was through her sister, yet I never once thought of her as the unknown Mizo girl by the side of the road. In writing about her death, trying to reconstruct her life through the eyes of those who knew her, by piecing together a story, a narrative of what became of her and how it all ended for her; I hope to resurrect her.

So I stood looking at her grave and thought about what I would say. This was it!