Field Notes, Part One: Chhattisgarh

I am finally here! The trip I have dreaded making after my longish stint in the northeast. Back to the underground, back to the brass tacks of dissertation writing. The process of not sitting in country capitals, but getting messed up and dirty, tromping in the back of beyond. Where people go to find stories and glamour and come away with a dissertation committee pronouncing them ‘experts’ on something.

I woke up in Delhi at 3 am on Oct 11 after two hours of sleep, to take a 6:40 am Jetlite flight to Raipur, read some troubling emails on the way to the airport, sobbed a bit at the ironies of life and my newfound lack of faith in people. Got a 6 am text from a friend who said the world could be so much worse. She was worried that I was not going into the field with the right composure and peace of mind.

She was right. I wasn’t.

And here I am without the composure and peace of mind.

Yesterday I got a glimpse of a Chhattisgarhi jungle, while driving to Border Security Force (BSF) encampments outside Raipur (that I cannot disclose publicly), the state capital. It was green, dense (like most forests) with trees, bushes, shrubs; tangled and snarled in a manner reminiscent of elaborate traps. These are not ordered redwood forests, or the type you see in Bollywood movies, where one can run and dodge around trees in elaborate clothing. This is a forest. Period.

What I saw was a patch of forest by the side of a highway. Now imagine vast expanses of such forests, populated in small cleared patches by tribal peoples. Also imagine thin, small trails where little vegetation exists because Maoists and tribals have walked there silently for many years. Many such trails are still undiscovered by the state forces because the enterprise of the coercive state apparatus, which privileges a ‘boots on the ground’ approach, is loud, noisy, unwieldy, unsympathetic to the importance of small trails, focusing on where large roads and trails exist. Yes there is a fight between the Maoists and the state and right now the Maoists are more adept at seeking the state out.

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We finally arrive at the Border Security Force (BSF) HQ at Bhilai. The BSF has temporarily set up office in the Bhilai Steel Plant. The white Innova with a ‘lal batti’, with tinted glasses and the amusing license number ‘0007’ (yes I may be one zero cooler than James Bond) drives into the dusty compound. Constable L opens the door, grabs my bag and ushers me into the offices of the BSF. I am taken hurriedly to one of the senior BSF officers. I have to wait five minutes before he can see me.

Officer D is pleasant and dressed in a light blue shirt and navy blue blazer; a uniform popular with many ‘faujis’ in India. His eyes are light and he has a warm smile as he greets me. I greet him and take a seat across the desk. Officer D is one of the officers in charge of BSF’s counterinsurgency (COIN) operations in Chhattisgarh. During our hour-long meeting, he transmits several bits of information to the CGO complex in New Delhi that houses the BSF headquarters. This is important. Home Minister, Chidambaram is being briefed by the BSF and local cops today in New Delhi. CGO needs to have the latest information on the Maoists. The Home Minister wants 32 more companies to be deployed to tackle the Maoists.

Officer D rings a bell to summon an orderly. He orders tea and biscuits to be brought in. I briefly outline why I am here and what I am doing.

“They eat grass, you know.”

“The tribals?” I inquire.

He nods his head.

“Grass and forest items. They have no money to survive. Everyone looks at the problem differently. This is not an insurgency.” He pauses. “This is a revolution.”

“The problem is this. In this area there are mines and forests. The economy is solely extraction based. Tribals have a totally different way of life than this. They have no education, no money. Even though schooling is cheap, they have no money to eat. So forget about schooling. Schooling costs money. You need to buy uniforms, shoes, books. Also they don’t want to disrupt their way of life. If any development takes place, it is dominated by outsiders. All these industrialists are outsiders. There is tons of machinery but there is need for labor. Consequently, because of the lack of education, the only job available for tribals is labor intensive. Digging. Extracting. The mines at Raoghat, 30 kilometers from Durg are exhausted. So now the mining is shifting to the interiors. Maoists also operate there. Now they allow the mining to occur after they have collected some money from the mining organizations.”

He pauses as the tea is brought in. There is a Tetley teabag in the porcelain cup. We add milk and sugar.

“We (the BSF) have been providing security for about one year. In this one year there has been no development work. State government has not undertaken one project. So now the BSF is doing civic action. We are providing resources. Tribes have no medicines. Their average survival age is 40 years at the maximum. They still go to local “jhad-pooch” wallahs (witch doctors). We have been distributing medicines, clothes, essentials, food, blankets, seeds for farming, utensils, sports items to children, school supplies. We have even given local panchayats and tribal leaders TV sets and DTH facilities. They need to have some information about the outside world.”

“ We have been providing security to the contractors, saying now get the work done. But no development has happened. We provide security, but no one carries out the job. This is the problem with our system. The Naxals are fighting this system. Their final target is the politician.”

I have been thinking about the larger implications of what is being said. First, it is evidently clear to me that there is a consensus around the ‘development fix’. Think tanks, politicians, bureaucrats, common citizens and even the security forces believe that fundamentally, development, of the large industrial variety, can save India from the Maoists. Dissenting voices against this point of view in the establishment are few. But even the dissenting voices have advocated ‘buying off’ the Maoists to impose a shaky peace.

Second, there seems to be consensus in Delhi and Raipur that Maoists also fund their operations through marketplace extortion and extortion from mining companies. In what may soon closely resemble the activities of the NSCN (I-M) in Nagaland, the extortion, or ‘tax-collection’ may soon be a widely acknowledged and routinized affair.

Third, one of the crucial points that emerged from this conversation is the idea that local economies dominated by ‘outsiders’, are bound to exacerbate locally rooted grievances and resentment. Coupled with this is the type of economic development, which is extraction-based, surely disruptive of local economic traditions, resources and ways of life. The tribes are not skilled enough to be integrated into this economy in any long-term, lucrative way. In fact the manner of their integration, through labor contractors, adds to their exploitation and dislocation.

Finally, what the BSF officer describes as apathy at the level of the state government, could easily also be seen as an absence of basic state institutions that can carry out this development. This has created a situation where the only avatar of the state that appears before locals is uniformed and weaponized. Gone are the local bureaucrats, contractors and smaller clerks and peons that actually push the paperwork and implement development projects. The uniformed and weaponized avatar of the state, tries to perform its security keeping role to enable the other parties to perform their tasks, but in the absence of the other local state institutions, this wing of the state now certainly wears its uniforms, carries its weapons, but also hands out public goods.

I am still thinking about the various levels of cognitive dissonance this process must create in the minds of the locals.

The BSF here was given 90 lakhs by the Home Ministry to distribute public goods to local tribals. 45 lakhs has been promised over and above this amount. Officer D believes the BSF has been more efficient in allocating these resources to the locals. If the state government and bureaucrats had done it, at least 20 per cent, he thinks, would have been skimmed off.

Initially the Maoists used country made, front-loading rifles called “bharmars”. Now with their consistently aggressive attacks on the CRPF, the BSF and the state police; they have amassed sufficiently advanced and efficient assault weapons that are a step up from the “bharmars”. These country-made rifles are, however, still routinely recovered from forests; sometimes found abandoned in sacks.

Officer D has served in seven sensitive, insurgent-ridden zones of India, including the northeast.

I quiz him about the Salwa Judum. The Salwa Judum (purification hunt) was the supposed brainchild of Mahendra Karma, a local MLA, who organized local tribal villagers to fight against Maoist ‘terror’. The state decided that the Judum would be trained at the Kanker Counterinsurgency School and a special rank of officers called “Special Police Officers” were created and trained and released into society. Over time, the Judum clashed with the Maoists on several occasions, but also indulged in various indiscriminate acts of killing. The Maoist response to the Judum was equally brutal and hostile. In one incident in 2008, a bus containing SPO’s was ambushed by the Maoists. SPO’s died, but so did over 32 civilians. The Salwa Judum was officially disbanded after it was seen that it was not being adequately controlled by the state police. Today, the SPO’s are loosely called the ‘judum’ and continue their policing duties.

The Officer shrugs. He does not think the Judum experiment was unique to Chhattisgarh.

“Several such things have been floated in Jammu and Kashmir and in the northeast to fight insurgent groups. In Manipur, the PLA was raised with state support to fight the NSCN (I-M). This is not new. The PLA, however, is now also against the state and collects illegal taxes from Marwaris and others. The Salwa Judum no longer exists, but the Special Police Officers trained for it are still around.”

He cannot be pressed anymore on the matter.

Officer D says that there is no administration in most regions where Maoists operate. He offers the case of Maliguda as an example. A small stretch of land loosely connected to the mainland by a thin strip of land, it is technically on Andhra Pradesh’s border, but Orissa has overlapping jurisdiction over it too. This blurring of administrative lines leads to a situation where no state exercises local civic authority. It is this precise area that, according to Officer D, that is completely controlled by Naxals (Maoists).

In 2009, about 35 Greyhound commandos died in an attack in the Balimela reservoir in Maliguda. On a routine, Maoist hunting operation, they were crossing the reservoir by boat and were ambushed. Most died by drowning, some swam away. The BSF has now established a presence at Chitrakorda and is loosely deployed at Janbai and Maliguda.

Malkangiri is the most affected area in Orissa and making inroads as a COIN force is proving to be challenging. The Naxals have been around for 20-25 years in these areas. They have a clear head start.

“This is a revolution that started with bows and arrows, then “bharmars” and now assault weapons.”, Officer D says.

It is believed that the BSF’s civic action is paying off. The CRPF and the BSF, which have suffered because of the lack of human intelligence and have found it extremely difficult to gather such intelligence, are now being informed by villagers who say, “aaj gadbad hai, bachke jaana.”

There is something wrong today. Go carefully.

Several BSF officers agree that the Maoist problem in India is deprivation related and this is made acute by “increasing class distances”, as one officer commented in Delhi. While they buy into the logic of the ‘development fix’ and are quick to empathize with the condition of the tribals, they are yet unable to comment on their paradoxical role as individual sympathizers, but collective quashers of the rebellion.

They say they are simply doing what they are ordered to. It is highly interesting to me that the same officer can empathize with the condition of the tribals and understand why they would choose to pick up weapons, critique the state; and in the next breath also say he has to follow orders.

In my mind the Naxals are displaying a degree of stateness.

My interviewees tell me that the tribals go to the Naxals for justice, pay taxes and that the Naxals also offer protection and policing. The Naxals also grant licenses and legalize pattas with the signature of one Naxal Commander. They are, in this manner, also establishing property rights.

These are functions that states typically undertake. The Naxals are creating institutions, where state institutions are weak, absent or lack legitimacy.

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I am told the tribal mind here is very different. When a tribal is arrested for a crime or felony, he/she readily accepts the action and owns up to it. The idea that there is punishment attached to this action is not completely understood. They own up and cannot understand why then they have to pay bail, or be in jail for lengths of time.

This simplification of the ‘tribal mind’, the absolute reductionism of their undifferentiated manner of thinking is problematic and at this point I cannot know if this is credible.

On the other hand, the Naxals offer collective, swift, immediate justice. Someone steals something and he is thrashed in public. There is no comment forthcoming, or perhaps little information on the gender dynamics of such mechanisms of justice.

To the BSF the bigger issue seems to be the enforcement of law, which is still a civil affair. The security forces apprehend a Maoist, but he has to be handed over to the local police. Since Chhattisgarh is technically not been declared as a ‘disturbed area’ the controversial Armed Forces Special Powers Act is not applicable. This may be a blessing in disguise, given the problematic history of military action in zones where this Act has been used, like in Kashmir and the northeast.

There is some indication that the Maoist map of control would have looked a bit different had the BSF been called in many years earlier. In its training, functioning, the BSF is more like the army than any other paramilitary force in the country. And it seems to be definitely more efficient than the CRPF.

The anti-Maoist operations began with a badly funded, equipped and trained state police. When the police and the Salwa Judum seemed incapable of handling the Maoists, the Central Reserve Police Force was called in. It didn’t fare any better. The CRPF did have better weapons (which the Maoists needed) and became routine targets since their deployment was always linear and along one road/highway/path, at intervals of 15-20 kms. One local journalist claims this made the CRPF easy targets, because all the Maoists needed to do was place two IEDs, cutting off one pack of CRPF men from its closest reinforcements on both sides.

The BSF deployment operates on the basis of grids and sectors. In case of an ambush, reinforcements can come in from several sources at once.

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The constable L., who is now my protector and shadow, has begun to talk a bit more openly about the Maoists. They are well trained and sharp, he tells me. The leaders are from Andhra. He wants to know why I study them. I tell him about research and he asks me if I am scared being a woman in this territory. I have been asked this question by some senior officers too. I think about all I have been through in the last two years. I tell him I am scared but if my time comes to die, I must embrace it. It is kismet. He is pleased with my answer. He understands kismet.

In one of our very long drives in the interiors, he talks about going on leave in a few days and how he has to buy a jacket for his son. He is from Aligarh.

I still have a tenuous relationship with his AK-47. He doesn’t even notice it. It just rattles at his feet as we drive.

Tomorrow I will be driven in a vehicle with fake license plates to Kanker to meet Brigadier Ponwar at the Counterinsurgency and Jungle Warfare College. This is the man Arundhati Roy dubbed “Rumplestiltskin”. I will then also go to another deeply located BSF camp and talk to the commandant there, who has graciously asked me to lunch with him.

I’ll keep the notes coming.

Why Should We Cast 'er Away!

The facts are these.

Caster Semenya, a South African Middle-distance runner, won the gold medal in the 800 meters race at the Commonwealth Championship in athletics held in Berlin recently, with a time of 1:55:45 in the final. Her record time raised suspicions about her sexual identity. If Ms. Semenya was indeed a woman at all? If not she would be restrospectively disqualified from the race for not being a woman.

Hidden in this question is the assumption that if a woman is too good at what she does, she may in fact not be a woman at all. In organized sport, which today remains one of the most gender-insensitive domains in the world, this discrimination against women has felled several victims. If its not performance-enhancing drugs, it is the fact that a woman has some masculine attributes that contribute to her extraordinary success.

The IAAF recently made public Ms. Semenya's test results which illustrated that she had no ovaries, uterus and possessed internal testes. This the IAAF did to handle the accusation leveled against it that the body was rascist and was violating the privacy of an African runner.

It is bad enough that Ms. Semenya has had to deal with the loss of her sexuality as an individual, it is a hundred times worse that this has happened in public with several thousand people viewing her 'intersex' condition as tragic, pitiable, freakish, unwomanly. In short the world has robbed Ms. Semenya of her sexual identity.

This entire case has made me think very very hard about what it means to be a woman. Author of The Second Sex, Simone deBeauvoir, famously wrote that she was not born a woman, she became one. That is to say, the condition of womanhood goes beyond being born with a certain set of biological parts. It is conferred upon a girl, or she is shoved into womanhood (whichever way you want to look at it) by a broad set of social constructs that condition behavior, dress, and role in society.

Ms. Semenya's birth certificate states she is 'female'. She grew up as a girl, she probably played with dolls, dressed as a woman, was featured on the cover of Vogue magazine (in a rather pathetic attempt to reclaim her femininity), competed as a woman, was probably subjected to routine humiliations that women across the world suffer, probably was expected to do womanly things (cook, clean, iron, etc). Her career was based on athletics. Her downfall was that she wasn't bad at it.

It is quite possible that many 'women' are born with this abnormality. They are not to be blamed for it. The entire debate about Ms. Semenya has centered on her biology. Almost as if biology alone makes you a woman. There are several thousand women on earth who lose their breasts to breast cancer, their uterus to hysterectomies and are unable to bear children for a variety of other reasons. All of them face a crisis of womanhood for sure, because ingrained in us is this idea that a woman is somehow never more than the sum total of her body parts. This is true for most men as well, who face a crisis of masculinity upon losing a testicle (remember the debate about Lance Armstrong?).

Given that Ms. Semenya has endured the life-experiences of being a woman, I say she be allowed to hold on to her womanhood instead of being disqualified from the cult of femininity. Her experiences make her more of a woman than her biology ever did.

In the same way, I find her appearance on the cover of Vogue a poor sop to the strong argument that can be made in her favor. A ton of make-up, lipstick and rouge do not make one a woman. The ability to stuff yourself into very tight, lacy lingerie or a tight black dress does not make one a woman. The ability to walk for miles in insanely high heels does not make anyone a woman (are the transvestites listening?). If the idea was to make Ms. Semenya appear just frail enough, it failed. She is not frail and she need not be. Women need not be frail and weak in order to be considered women. Their strength need not be emotional and internal, on display only in crisis situations. Most women on earth today do back-breaking work on the fields, in the house, much beyond their physical capacities. Yet they do it.

When Santhi Soundarajan was 25 years old she won the silver medal in the 800m at the 2006 Asian Games. A similar gender test was administered to this Tamil track star from humble beginnings. She failed the test and lost her medal, and the ability to ever compete in women's athletics. Apparently she had androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS) in which a person is genetically male, but because of insensitivity to male sex hormones, the body appears feminine. Soundarajan's personal life was affected, her mental health disturbed (there were rumors of suicide attempts) and now she runs a, athletics coaching institute in Tamil Nadu. Plans of returning to competitive athletics have long been abandoned.

She has something to say to Ms. Semenya, "You are a woman, full stop. A gender test cannot take away from you who you are." (quoted in TIME).

Globalization and the Commodification of the Female Form

Lecture/Discussion at the Goldman School

Transcript of whatever I said

“Factory owners want to hire women because they are docile and submissive. This is how they have become the largest pool of cheap labor in the world.”

These lines are spoken by an observer in China in the controversial documentary China Blue, which documents the lives of a few female workers in a denim-based sweatshop. We screened China Blue in a class today on Chinese political economy and here is some of what we learned. Today China is witnessing the largest human migration in history. 130 million peasants are moving to urban areas – most of them are women. Working long hours which stretch up to 20 hours a day, being paid on a piecemeal wage rate and having to pay for their dorms and hot water to wash with, these Chinese women start work at a very early age and earn 6 cents an hour all of which goes into subsidizing the family, the cost of a brother's education, their marriages and day to day spending in their rural family. They deal with the disappointment of their parents on being given a girl child and stretch themselves to their natural physical limits to earn money. Their work, their bodies, their lives have been commodified and chained to the shop floor where they work as thread cutters, zip-stitchers, seamstresses and other forms of manufacturing which require delicate hands and nimble fingers.

Good evening. I am Vasundhara Sirnate and I hope you watched the documentaries this evening with as much rapt attention as I have.

Recently, I encountered a very interesting cab driver. In our fifteen-minute drive together he asked me where I was from, why I had a strange accent and then had a business proposition. Why, he said, don’t we have more Indian women coming over to the US and becoming wives? Why, I asked him, would people want an Indian wife? He said, well they don’t argue and nag and they are very gentle and well.. nice.

In many ways the cabdriver echoed the same view that the observer in China Blue had.

I must confess I was not exactly gobsmacked upon hearing what the cab driver said about Indian women. There are many popular stereotypes of women from South Asia, Thailand, Vietnam, Korea, China and Russia which tend to construct these women as exotic and beautiful for sure, but also submissive in personal and economic relations. But what did strike me was his business model. He clearly saw this as a way of making money. And the product being sold was the Indian woman. But what skills/services did this woman provide – housework, sexual services, subsidizing a man’s lifestyle and enabling him to be a productive person in the economic set up. At a psychological level this woman would apparently not challenge the man, destabilize the relationship or interrogate the structure of patriarchy.

Today’s discussion is going to be focused more on the South Asian context and more specifically the Indian context. By starting out with China Blue I did however, want to place women’s commodification in a slightly more comparative perspective.

The cab driver’s monologue coupled with the observation of the speaker in China Blue has made me think a little harder about the economic worth of a woman’s body, a woman’s work – in short, its commodification. My previous work has concentrated on the visible impact of religious fundamentalism on the roles women played in the home and outside. I tried to understand why gender never emerged as a significant political identity as opposed to race, ethnicity and religion in India. What the cab driver said made me rethink most of the theory I had read about gender. I began situating theories of gender produced in the West in more local and regional contexts and found many theories lacking. For instance, the very idea of patriarchy has never been adequately disaggregated. In India moving from one region to another women slip in and slide out of different structures of patriarchy. In many regions women themselves are carriers and perpetuators of patriarchal values, best evinced in the saas-bahu or mother-in-law/daughter-in-law dialectic.

When I shared the cab driver’s proposition with my American colleague here at Berkeley, she was somewhat incensed. She felt the cab-driver had insulted American women by assuming that because women in America were more career oriented, they did not believe in the structure of the family or values linked to the family. The range of reactions which the cab-driver's proposition evoked from people actually helped me think about commodification, what its scope is and how it is applied in a variety of contexts to mean a variety of things.

Before I proceed with a discussion of the two documentaries on India, I want to disaggregate the very notion of commodification and in doing so enhance our own understanding of the term. Commodification occurs when something, which previously did not have an economic value, gets assigned some such value. Recently, many services industries have arisen centered around the female body – mail-order brides, surrogate motherhood and of course prostitution, strip clubs etc. Women’s work, however, is a classic example of a phenomenon that is curiously absent from National Income Accounting. There are various arguments for and against commodification, which I am sure you have been exposed to in the earlier parts of this series, so I will skip that for the moment. Also, I wish to flag that in the South Asian context both men and women have been commodified in varying degrees. However, since we are really talking about women here, I will restrict myself to women’s commodification.

I propose to think of commodification in terms of the following sub-types.

1. Legal versus illegal commodification: Legalized prostitution which function as recognized industries and are governed by rules enforced by the state would come under legal commodification. This is different from illegal commodification where women are often trafficked and sold across international borders and forced into prostitution or pornography. In the absence of rules and their enforcement the economic and human rights of such women and children cannot be secured.

2. Public versus private commodification: Public commodification involves placing an economic value on women’s bodies in the public sphere. For instance, commodification through advertising or glamour magazines, beauty contests, strip clubs, etc. On the other hand, private commodification takes place within the confines of the family. For instance, there is more value attached in South Asia to a woman who bears a son. The indirect logic being that a son will be an economic agent in the future.

In the Indian state of Haryana the rise of the cult of Paro has become another example of private commodification. A cultural preference for sons over daughters has led to an adverse sex ratio in many Indian states. In Haryana the ratio is 861 females per thousand males, well below the national average of 927 females per thousand males. Paros are women who are sold into marriage for about 200-300 dollars to men in women-deficient states like Haryana. Mostly, these women are tribal or tend to be from lower caste families. A recent estimate which found its ways into a BBC news report, stated that about 45000 women from the Eastern state of Jharkhand had found their way as bought-brides in Haryana. Sadly, the emergence of this ‘bride-price’ has come about in India because of the scarcity of women and not because people hold them in high regard. Paro’s are required to work on farms in rural areas, produce more labor for the household run farm and take care of the extended family. In many cases, poorer families who cannot afford to buy more than one ‘Paro’ often marry the girl off to two or three brothers, each of whom exercises his conjugal rights over her.

3. Commodification during war or in peacetime: Commodification during wartime is often a response to exacerbated economic conditions. It can also be forced like in the case of the comfort women used by the Japanese army during the Second World War. Commodification during war is inherently problematic. Why is that? First, war situations are imbued with much uncertainty about economic and political outcomes. Second, there is a huge psychological dimension to war as well. One in which sexual domination over the women of one community or country is a sign of victory or assertion of one paradigm over another. Similarly, in situations of ethnic conflict and communal strife women’s bodies often become the site of violence or the battleground on which the battle between the two communities is fought. It is not surprising therefore that the woman-object and the manner of her dress, her role in society and family is often constructed and reconstructed by different fundamentalisms and nationalisms.

4. Voluntary versus involuntary commodification: There is a strong involuntary aspect to commodifictaion of women. This however, is a very thorny issue. On the one hand, many women supposedly enter fields of commodification ‘voluntarily’. For instance the increase in levels of prostitution in the Post-Soviet world has led many people to recognize the importance of ‘choice’, ie, women enter the trade knowingly. Other women enter the trade ‘involuntarily’, i.e, they are forced into prostitution, trafficked across international borders etc. However, in the Russian case for instance, sex work is emerging as a recognized economic activity, but this may have less to do with ‘choice’ and more to do with the structure of the economy, where it is harder for lesser skilled women to find jobs. Given that there may also operate a strong male-preference in job allocations, even skilled women may find themselevs out of the job-market. So my question really is, if what you’re doing is in some way conditioned by structure, does it remain a choice at all? Many left leaning feminists also adopt this stance. But I reiterate this is a very very hard thing to measure.

We can locate the two documentaries we saw somewhere within this schematic. I will however, advance a more critical perspective on the documentaries rather than recapitulate what the documentaries are saying.

I wish to advance the dialectic between public and private commodification of women. Both the documentaries which we have seen deal with a separate aspect of my two pronged classification. The documentary about Punjabi brides talks about the aspirations of these women. They want to be independent, they want to be economic agents and basically escape what some of them perceive to be an oppressive, patriarchal structure. However, they find themselves stranded between two patriarchies – the Punjabi one and the Western one. Those who cross over have often just crossed over to a different system of patriarchy. The interesting thing is that often moving out of one patriarchal structure is termed liberation, but in fact women are simply moving to another perhaps less evident system of domination. These systems of domination occur and are reproduced within the realm of the diasporic family. A classic case study conducted by Sunita Puri found that there was a history of sex selection amongst South Asian families in the Bay Area. Also, women who came over here from South Asia and then had girl children were often abused by their in-laws and husbands. This somehow begs the question of how these women were viewed – as incubators, which would produce a male heir? While this is a harder question to answer, what is in fact increasingly common is the crossing over of South Asian women to work as wives (and notice I say work as wives, not ‘be’ wives) for service professionals here or even as wives for illegal immigrants. The dynamics of the two groups of women are substantially different. The women who come here on an H-4 visa are better off than their illegally brought in or those who are wives of blue collar workers. In the H-4 case, the husband has a respectable income and the women are mostly upper caste Hindus, who are educated and in worst case scenarios are able to access the state for immediate redressal. This is not common though. Mostly, women rely on their informal social and same-caste networks to address any family problems. This informal, social, same-caste network basically replaces the extended family in say the Indian setting for instance.

In the illegal immigrant/blue-collar workers case, it is my instinct that the women are worse off. A friend of mine who works with abused women at the Red Cross here once mentioned to me that not only do these women have a problem with speaking in English, they are also thoroughly dependent on their husbands and less skilled than their upper-caste contemporaries and often through counseling my friend unfortunately finds she has to send them back into the same abusive structure, because returning to India is not an option. She finds the case to be similar for many Mexican women who have crossed over illegally. In this case, such women cannot even access the state’s legal apparatus for redressal because they run the risk of being caught and deported along with their husbands.

The documentary on Punjabi brides does not explore these aspects, which is why I chose to raise them here.

But here’s the real question before us? Hasn’t commodification always been there? Arguably, yes! SO what is so new about it? I think that with the rise of new technology for the dissemination of information commodification has infact increased and is taking place on a scale never before seen. Processes of economic internationalization, defined as an exogenous easing of international trade, have led to the rise of new economies, sectors and industries. This has been coupled with a rapid increase in communication technology and shifts in processes of production and forming links with the international economy. All of this has affected social relations at local levels and has changed gender dynamics and given rise to what is called in India 'competing masculinities' which have caste and religious dimensions. I would be happy to go into some cases to establish this during the question and answer session.

But is commodification really taking place on a globalized scale? I wish to introduce you to some statistics collected by the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women to establish the global proportions of a certain kind of commodification, i.e., commodification in the sex trade.

(Reads from a report)

“Global trafficking is a $7 Billion industry (UNICRI) ? According to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, human trafficking generates an estimated $9.5 billion in annual revenue. In Thailand, trafficking is a 500 billion Baht annual business (equivalent to approximately 124 million U.S. dollars), which represents a value equal to around 60 per cent of the government budget (CATW). ? In Korea, sex industry profits reached 24.0712 trillion won, which is equivalent to 4.4% of 578.8 trillion national GDP and was the same as the profits from agriculture and fishery industry. ? Pornography/Cybersex industry generates approximately $ 1B annually and is expected to grow to 55-7B over the next 5 years”

Let me assault you with some more statistics.

“Each week 60,000 Victorian men spend $7M on prostitution, with the legalized industry turning over more than $360M a year and drawing on some 4500 prostituted women and girls (Jeffreys) Italy: 1 of 6 (or almost 17%) Italian men uses women in prostitution. Differently stated, this means that in Italy, 9 million men use an estimated 50,000 women in prostitution (International Conference, 2004). Germany: 18% of German men regularly pay for sex Adolf Gallwitz,” 2003). One million prostitute-users buy women daily in Germany for sexual activities (Herz, 2003). UK: 10% of London’s male population buys women for the sex of prostitution (Brown, 2000) USA: Estimated one half of the adult male population are frequent prostitute-users, and that 69% of the same population had purchased women for sexual activities at least once (Brown, 2000). o Thailand : 5.1 million sexual tourists a year, 450,000 local customers buy sex every day (Barry). 75% of Thai men were prostitution buyers, almost 50% had their first sexual intercourse with women in prostitution (Brown, 2000) Vietnam: 70% of those caught in brothels are reported to be state officials, 60% to 70% of men in Cambodia have purchased women for sexual activities”

And these are just statistics about trafficking and the sex industry. With this we can club other forms of commodification which are public – strip clubs, the beauty industry and cross-border private commodification such as in the case of the Punjabi brides.

SO there is indeed a global and an economic element to commodification. Another aspect of commodification which I have not found highlighted in many theoretical articles is the idea of replacement. So technically an object is commodified if it can also be replaced easily. Can the Punjabi brides be replaced as well? Apparently yes. First, in foreign lands the geographic distance that separates the husband and wife from their extended family and insulates them from social pressures, also makes it easier for divorces to occur. Simply, because society does not frown upon divorces as much. Second, in some Punjabi villages (not covered by the documentary) grooms sometimes return whenever they run out of money abroad. They marry a girl, collect a hefty dowry and move back promising to file for immigration. Of course, marrying an NRI comes at a price!!

The documentary about call centers in India is somewhat tangential to these broader ideas of commodification. While it is unclear if women’s work in a call center can be considered commodification, there is no doubt that the rise of call centers has in fact led to a fundamental reordering of women’s roles in the family. In Indian call centers women often work all night, something that would probably have shocked an Indian upper-caste family twenty years ago.
It is now more commonplace to see women outside in the wee hours of the morning. One of the reasons for this change in attitude is the hefty pay packets that call-center employees earn. This is sometimes substantially generous and even equals the money earned by a girls’ parents. Girls are encouraged to use their English language skills and hospitable upbringing and use that to earn money. In return parents overlook the long hours, the nights spent in a call center and the out-station trips taken in the company of male colleagues. Like I said, twenty years ago this would have raised eyebrows.

A consequence of this increased visibility of women as Prem Chowdhry’s study of the National Capital Region and Haryana reveals, is a dramatic rise in the number of rapes reported in Delhi. Not all are linked to call-centers of course. But is a function of more women working outside of the house more generally and more women actually reporting rapes. A couple of years ago, The Haryana govt., which is where most call –centers are located tried to protect women by saying they could not work night shifts. The logic was this would somehow “protect” them from violence and aggression. However, this did not come into effect. Interestingly, the way you rise through the ranks of a call center is by servicing more and more customers. While every call center has a separate incentive structure most do involve answering as many phone calls as you can and finishing your quotas set by your team leader. It is during the night-shifts that Indian call centers are ringing off the hooks because of the time difference. If women were prohibited from working the night shifts it would take them substantially longer to live up to the incentive structure laid down and they would climb the ranks much more slowly.

Recently call centers have imposed a dress code on women. They could wear Indian outfits and Western outfits, but no sleeveless outfits, short skirts or something uncomfortably tight. Cleavages were meant to be hidden and no mid-riff could peep out. Apparently, bare arms lead to more aggression and violence against women, or so the flawed logic stated. This is a common assumption that has led to the imposition of dress codes across the country. Women who reveal their bodies are more likely to be victims of sexual aggression. While there is simply no empirical evidence to back this, such ideas permeate the patriarchal wisdom.

I will conclude by highlighting once more by looking at possible areas of investigation for future research.

1. We need to take a closer look at commodification and break it up or disaggregate it perhaps along the lines of my suggestion
2. We need to disaggregate patriarchy as this monolithic overarching concept and look at how structures of patriarchy differ with respect to culture and region. We also need to understand that women slip into and slide out of different structures of patriarchy and that this needs to be drawn out more in theory.
3. As I have tried to show commodification has a deep impact on the rights of women as citizens and individuals and economic actors. We need this debate to be reflected in a more strident manner at domestic and international levels.
4. We need to problematize models of development, as they exist – neo-liberal economics, which have engendered a certain sexual division of labor in developing countries. Terms like feminization of the labor force conceal more than they reveal. Although I do not talk about this aspect at length, I would be happy to address questions related to this during the question and answer session.

Right Price, Rice Price: Competitive Populism in the 2009 Election

The Congress and the BJP have learned much from NT Rama Rao. In the early 1980’s Rao decided to cheapen the price of a kg of rice to Rs 2 after discovering that the state of Andhra Pradesh, one of the leading producers of rice in India, also housed an agricultural labor population that could not access rice due to inefficiencies and corruption in the public distribution system of the state. In the current election the Congress (I) has promised 25 kg of rice or wheat at Rs 3 per kg for all families below the poverty line. It also pledged to abolish all central and state level indirect taxes and introduce a moderate goods and services tax (GST). Not be left behind, the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) has promised 35 kg of rice or wheat at Rs 2 per kg to BPL families along with income tax exemptions of up to Rs 3 lakhs for the salaried class, complete exemption from income tax for jawans plus one rank, one pension for ex-servicemen, waiving of agricultural loans interest ceiling on the same at 4 per cent. In short, our national parties have been promising populist policy measures to win the electoral affections of the voting population.

Populism, as a term, has been used very loosely to apply to all brands of “catch all” politics. It has often been seen as a concept that addresses the need for an assertion of those groups who have limited access to certain spheres of state and society. Populism is not a one-dimensional phenomenon and has been found to be quite compatible with various brands of politics and regime types including fascism and socialism. It involves political, economic and socio-cultural posturing aimed at influencing or capturing the imagination and loyalties of voters either by envisioning a new national or political order and/or by offering broad incentives to groups. In recent years many have come to associate populism with economic policies, tax breaks, etc.

In the last century in India, Mahatma Gandhi is often referred to as a populist leader whose articulation of the nation as an agglomeration of non-hierarchical groups did capture the imagination of erstwhile untouchables, middle-classes, peasants, workers, upper-middle classes and also cut across religious and regional divides. After Independence the Congress forged a history of populism with Indira Gandhi launching her ‘Garibi Hatao’ campaign in 1970-71 in the aftermath of her bid to break free from the “Syndicate” within the party. Mrs. Gandhi attempted to centralize power within her hands; she nationalized banks in 1969 (which also led to a split within the Indian National Congress) for the end result of providing micro-credit to the nation’s agricultural poor living in rural India. Her various piecemeal anti-poverty programs did help a narrow section of the poor and the resonance that the Twenty Point Economic Program had with the electorate, made successive governments extremely wary of getting rid of the agenda completely. Since then quick-fix poverty alleviation programs targeted to briefly ease suffering caused by structural poverty have been a strategy employed by the central government in many states. Several regional parties in India that became increasingly strident in the decade of the 80’s and 90’s have also engineered populist agendas – the DMK, AIADMK, BSP, Telugu Desam, Asom Gana Parishad, Janta Dal, Samajwadi Janta Party, Rashtriya Janta Dal.

In the literature on populism correlations have been made between populist policies and inward looking protectionist economies during early phases of import substitution industrialization. Following the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, the costs of sustaining such industrialization strategies rose phenomenally plunging many African and Latin American countries into borrowing and debt. The 1980’s came to be known as Latin America’s ‘lost decade’. In Mexico, Brazil and Argentina while populist leaders were credited with delivering on their promises, many also blamed these very policies for plunging the countries deeper into debt after a vicious cycle of hyperinflation leading to low growth and high interest rates culminating in a debt crisis. The implementation of Structural Adjustment Programs across Latin American countries ushered in a new phase of export-led growth and economic internationalization. Yet it seemed that populism never went away and found ways and means to coexist alongside the market. Kurt Weyland found that often times populist leaders and market-reform strategists had common ground. Both were opposed to pre-existing vested interests – business, lobbies and organized labor.

The implementation of the Washington Consensus across several Less Developed Countries (LDC’s) in the late 1980’s and in India in the 1990’s has also resulted in increasing polarization of incomes reflected in larger Ginis in the short-term. Alongside these troubling economic indicators, the growing relevance of populism as an electoral strategy during periods of unconsolidated market-oriented reforms has also been highlighted. Economic reforms are fundamentally destabilizing because they overturn and challenge existing economic and political coalitions that undergird the status quo. As new political and economic actors begin to take center stage, incumbent governments are hard pressed to respond to newer demands of this emergent middle-class and deal with large-scale migration to urban areas as well. Many demands made by an increasingly vocal middle-class are at odds with the demands of those groups that are excluded from market-reform strategies.

There is ample evidence from around the globe to indicate that populism and market-reform policies have often gone together – Carlos Menem in Argentina, Alberto Fujimori in Peru and Fernando Collor in Brazil won elections on populist strategies, as did Boris Yeltsin in Russia and Lech Walesa in Poland. The difference between the Latin American cases and India, however, is that often leaders like Menem and Fujimori tended to announce populist agendas without the support of party structures, when party structures were weak (as indicated by high electoral volatility) and leaders found themselves at odds with party organizations.

While India ostensibly boasts of a middle class last approximated at about 350 million, majority of our citizens still hover in low-income brackets or plainly live below the poverty line. As many have commented, it is also this group that is most likely to show up and vote in an election, clearly seeing the act of voting as perhaps the only right or claim they are allowed to make on the state. The challenge before our political parties is therefore clear. While ostensibly articulating middle-class anxieties about security, infrastructural development and good old fashioned rising GDP, our parties have also introduced populist policies to carry in their chariots or palms those for whom cheaper rice and repayment of agricultural loans are more important than a safe, non-proliferating nuclear program.

Currently in India the two national parties, Congress (I) and the BJP have adopted populist manifestos in a bid to outdo each other. Often the lack of a clear ideology, or an ideology in crisis (like the BJP’s) prompts adoption of populist measures to lend some measure of coherence to an otherwise crumbling political ideal. Such policies are clear, leave no room for negotiation or doubt and have much resonance with an electorate that is exhausted with political rhetoric and intangible results. These policies offer the electorate individual gains – be it cheaper prices of essential commodities. tax breaks or loan waivers. Populist policies have often worked alongside market-reform strategies also because they help dissipate widespread resentment against uncomfortable liberalization measures.

The BJP has had to compete with the Congress this time around since the vastly popular NREGS scheme and Bharat Nirman project of the incumbent UPA government combined with higher Minimum Support Prices for agricultural crops had allowed purchasing power to rise in rural areas, all of which, says Pranab Mukherjee, contributed to the maintenance of 6.5 per cent growth rate as compared to zero growth in countries in Europe, Latin America. Further, the Indian electorate has not shown much patience for Hindutva rhetoric this time around, except as an entertaining sideshow. The predictable rabble-rousing and threatening speeches against the Indian Muslim community by BJP candidates like Varun Gandhi, have generated some controversy, but quick action by an alert Election Commission against such blatant violations of the Model Code of Conduct and the Representation of People’s Act, 1951, have resulted in a structured and measured response both by political parties and the electorate.

Populism is never a good long-term strategy. It drains the state of income and places heavy financial burdens on the state along with severely constraining the government’s ability to mobilize financial resources. This has happened once in 1982 in Andhra Pradesh. The Mid-Day Meal Scheme which was supposed to cover 60 lakh children across the state ended up costing the state 82 crores. Further, once elected the representatives often roll back some of their policies and cannot be held to account. Finally, populism is also better at alleviating symptoms of poverty rather than its entrenched structural nature moored in lop-sided development practices and semi-feudal modes of production in rural areas. In short, populist policies address symptoms, not causes of poverty and inequality.

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.