Not that bad... (much worse, really)

The week after I watched Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's testimony on television, I purchased an anthology of essays edited by Roxane Gay, Not That Bad (Harper 2018). The subtitle of this book is 'Dispatches from Rape Culture,' and I thought I would find more ideas, insights and words that I could then bring to the everyday work I get to do with Prajnya on gender-based violence.

It has taken me more than two months to make my way through this powerful book. In small part, this is a function of my life, but largely, it is because the essays are so powerful, so disturbing, so heart-breaking that you really cannot binge-read. They are also inspiring in their courage and exactly as I hoped, have left me with insights and words that I think will find their way to things I say and do in training sessions and workshops.

The essays--and I am using this word to describe what are mostly first-person testimonies, because they are written in the spectrum of styles that 'essay' covers--are almost all by survivors, of all genders, and include a couple of essays where the writers reflect on whether or not they gave consent. Through almost all the essays, the deeply internalised stigma attached to the experience of violence is expressed and sometimes rejected.

I am going to share some excerpts here, for several reasons. First, I don't think I can summarise. Second, I want you to experience the power of the words, and maybe go read this book. Third, there are people out there who cannot afford this book and will not have a library from where they can borrow it. This is not meant to undermine copyright or sales, and I do hope lots of people will read this. Women should read this because it will resonate so strongly, as most of us live with the experience and all of us with the fear of sexual violence. Men should read it to know what that really means in our heads and in our days. And yes, the book is full of potential triggers, so if you think you will be sensitive to them, tread cautiously (these excerpts are for you too).

The idea that what happens to us, is not so bad, is so deeply ingrained that it stops survivors from seeking help. If you survived, that's already not so bad, is it?

"At least you weren't killed. At least you have access to medical care. At least you have insurance. At least you have wonderful friends. Because the ones who tell me this are my friends and my teachers and the social worker and the doctor, I hold their words and outstretched hands even though my anger is mounting and I want not to be touched. 

These days, I speak few words, and I certainly don't have the vocabulary to dismantle what's been forced on me by people called safe. I don't have the breath to say: No, I will not be grateful for my rights. I will stand with two feet on this earth and I will always say thank you when somoene does something kind and sorrt when I've done something wrong and never outside of that. And, yes, I am furious that I am pulled between poles of gratitude and apology--both of which are violent erasures. 

Thank goodness I wasn't killed. 

I'm sorry I'm so inarticulate. 

I can't name it then, but I feel the words at least eroding my voice. I sense that "at least" marks an end to the story I'm supposed to tell, that I'm supposed to say something gracious in response--"thank goodness"--or else nothing more at all. "At least" curbs my telling too much truth. It's a blunt instrument wielded to club a reckless retelling into submission. The story ends here. But the truth is, I have no story--nothing I can corral into a coherent narrative." (Claire Schwartz, pages 35-36)

I found this extremely powerful: "pulled between poles of gratitude and apology--both of which are violent erasures." The week I bought this book and even when I picked it up to read in December 2018, in India we were witnessing a cascade of #MeToo revelations, that began with women in media and then spread to some other fields. Most of the women encountered the stock responses: Why now? Why not earlier? Why did you continue to work with this person? Many of the experience reported were not rape as traditionally defined (vaginal penetration without consent), so really, they should have been grateful, people seemed to be saying. Gratitude for that, and apology for upsetting the apple-cart.

Ally Sheedy in her essay mentions Hollywood's #MeToo moment in 2017. She writes:

"This isn't about naming names. I don't have enough for a lawsuit, but I do have enough for a broken heart/ spirit. Nothing will change in Hollywood. Some men will get careful. Some men will pretend they never behaved like predators and wait this out. What's so disheartening is knowing Harvey Weinstein's sick actions will be addressed (finally) and yet the entire culture and context for his sick shit will remain in place." (pages 112-113)

Just four months after India's season of revelations, hardly anyone has been punished, and some are already being gently rehabilitated into public life. The defamation cases filed against the women who made the charges--those remain.

How commonplace sexual violence is, is something women at least know intuitively. This exchange in Stacey May Fowles' essay underlines that, but also makes me wish we could so sensitize doctors, counsellors and nurses in India so that they would respond to survivors with sensitivity.

"When I finally managed to splutter out "something bad happened to me," she just knew. 

Without saying a word, she slipped a small square of yellow paper across the desk toward me. It was printed with information about the rape-counseling clinic.  

I was struck by the ease with which she provided me with the contact, as if she'd done it hundreds of times before." (page 279-280) 

A counselor says to Fowles, "Every one believes there is suffering worse than her own, that they should be strong enough to cope without me." It's not that bad, why seek help? And if it were that bad, how come you are alive to seek help? How many Indian, Southasian girls can go to a doctor or a hospital and get help, leave alone expect sensitivity? We have tried in a small way to change this, but there is such a long way to go.

So Mayer writes about words, enjoyed and deployed as weapons of control (page 136). She titles her chapter Floccinaucinihilipilification and quotes the Oxford English Dictionary definition: "The action or habit of estimating something as worthless." Gaslighting, sealioning, lollipopping, Cordelia-ing and mansplaining--she gathers all these words into this suitably long one (page 137).

So Mayer's essay compares rape to colonialism, calls them "kin" (page 140). She writes:

"...I learned the blazing insight that rape was not an act between an individual and an individual, hidden in a dark room... Rape was and is a cultural and political act: it attempts to remove a person with agency, autonomy, and belonging from their community, to secrete them and separate them, to depoliticize their body by rendering it detachable, violable, nothing. (page 140) 

...When we talk about sexual violnce as feminists, we are--we have to be--talking about its use to subjugate entire peoples and cultures, the annihilation that is its empty heart. Rape is that bad because it is an ideological weapon. Rape is that bad because it is a structure: not an excess, not monstrous, but the logical conclusion of heteropatriarchal capitalism. It is what that ugly polysyllabic euphemism for state power does." (pages 140-141)

Michelle Chen also writes about the politics of sexual violence in her essay on the violence experienced by women who are displaced or in flight. "The place where sexual violence is most readily weaponized is the one where other social instruments have become unhinged: the interface between two societies. Sexual domination, a familiar pillar of every nation-state's culture, fills the liminal spaces opened by mass displacement." (page 191) As Warsan Shire wrote in her poem, Home: "and one prison guard/ in the night/ is better than a truckload/ of men who look like your father."

In the final essay in the book, Elissa Bassist lists all the reasons why she stayed in a violent relationship and did not think of it as 'violence.' This is one of the most heart-breaking essays in the book.  She says, in more powerful words than I could summarise that she stayed because she and her boyfriend were both a product of their milieu, which is misogynistic and violent. She closes the book by saying:

"Because worst-case scenario is murder.

Oh, because it wasn't that bad." (page 339) 

We become accustomed to the language of violence, the culture of rape. It is us, as we know ourselves. 

"Violence in a family comes down through generations: long before my father (finally) left my mother, her father left her mother, and her father's father left my great-grandmother... 

Sometimes by mother tells me stories about her father, or stories about my father. They are not mine to repeat. "I want you to know," she tells me, as if she feels guilty for explaining our history to me. I am amazed at how much violence we can contain--internalize, suppress, hold on to, narrate. How much we can swallow and still survive." (So Mayer, pages 132-133) 

Women who speak about the violence they experience, who name their assailants or harassers and who express anger are accused of making trouble. Speaking about their experience of violence, several of the survivors writing in this book talk about how this feels.

"Forgive the abuser. The only solution for female anger is for her to stop being angry. 

And yet, when Jesus flipped tables in the temple, his rage was lauded. King David railing to the heavens to rain fire on his enemies is lauded as a man after God's own heart. An angry man in cinema is Batman. An angry male musician is a member of Metallica. An angry male writer is Chekhov. An angry male politician is passionate, a revolutionary. He is a Donald Trump or a Bernie Sanders. The anger of men is a powerful enough tide to swing an election. But the anger of women? That has no place in government, so it has to flood the streets." (Lyz Lenz, page 164)

Amy Jo Burns writes: "The truth no one told you is that, in order for a good girl to survive, she must make some things disappear." (page 167)

This includes the memory of violence, the name of your harasser, the resultant trauma and every one of those inconsequential details from that consequential moment--what you were wearing, the colour of that vase, the food on the table, the light in the room. As Dr. Ford said, “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter. The uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.” We never forget, but we must. It wasn't that bad, after all. 

Violence against women and security

Violence against women and security

Published in InfochangeIndia.org on November 25, 2008

As the Violence Against Women fortnight kicks off internationally on November 25,Swarna Rajagopalan analyses why women’s physical survival and safety must be viewed as a security issue and why violence against women is as much a social concern as war, famine or terrorism

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, there is consensus that something important has shifted in the real world that necessitates a shift in security thinking.  

It is now acknowledged that more wars take place within States than across them. State-building has been identified as a leading source of insecurity (for States by some, for everyone by others). Famine on a large scale challenges the survival of societies; as do disasters that can disrupt the fabric of social relationships. Climate change threatens small island-states like the Maldives, whose new president is now shopping for land to resettle his people in anticipation that the atoll-state will be consumed by rising sea-levels.  

Those who write on non-traditional security admit migration and trafficking into their research agendas, understanding that these challenge the very foundations of the nation-state system. Struggles over land, livelihood and food are also now recognised as admissible into this agenda in the same way as militancy is.  The reconstruction of society after a conflict, somewhere at the conjunction of the old nation-building and development agendas, is also accepted as a security subject. 

This catholic embrace stops short of women’s bodies. Violence against women is still not quite a security issue, unless it occurs in the context of one of the above situations or a traditional security crisis. Common, garden variety threats to the physical survival and safety of women are where the line is drawn, either out of an ingrained sense that home and person are not appropriate objects of interest for this field or as a compromise in the face of the protest that no field can include everything.  

As a prelude to analysing this discourse that excludes women’s physical survival and safety, let us take a quick look at some of the things we include under the ‘violence against women’ (henceforth, VAW) rubric. Women experience physical insecurity both by virtue of their position within a given socio-economic structure and by virtue of where they find themselves physically.  

Patriarchal societies value women first and foremost as mothers. Maternal health is therefore a useful point of departure for this review. A Unicef report states that one woman dies every five minutes of a pregnancy-related complication.(1) One in every 70 women is at risk of dying from pregnancy-related causes and the risk is even greater for women below 24.(2) The Maternal Mortality Ratio for Indian women is estimated at anywhere between 300 and 500 per 100,000 live births, depending on the source you consult.  

Debates over the woman’s right to choose versus the foetus’s right to be born are entering Indian discourse, obscuring the continuum between a prenatal death sentence by virtue of sex and the woman’s lack of reproductive autonomy. In India, statistics about sex selective abortions begin with the dramatic figure of about 10 million such abortions being performed over the last quarter-century and end with the horrific count of 3 million female foetuses being aborted annually. Both the right of the girl-child to be born and the long-term consequences for women and society are the issue here.  

Discrimination in matters of nutrition, healthcare and schooling apart, girls in situations of poverty are at risk of trafficking and early marriage. A majority of girls become victims of trafficking at a very early age, and about 35% of them blamed their families for their fate. Families are also responsible for forcing girls into early marriages. More than half of India’s girls marry before 18, and experience much greater risk of pregnancy-related complications as well as domestic violence. Add to this the threat of child sexual abuse, mostly at the hands of family members, and Indian girls do not seem to lead very secure lives. 

A serious impediment to simple improvements in a girl’s life is the threat of street sexual harassment. Being followed on the way to school, cat-calls at the bus-stop, being groped or pinched on a bus or being stalked foreshadow sexual violence. The threat of being harassed intimidates girls and, in a society that places a premium on virginity, persuades parents to stop their schooling at puberty. Lacking education, confidence or self-esteem, the girl has no inner defences against exploitation and society provides no external protections either.  

Marriage is seen as a solution to the problem of protecting a girl from the dangers of the public arena. Dowry, however, is one of the core causes of male-child preference. The practice of demanding and giving dowries has been spreading to communities where it was hitherto unknown. Dissatisfaction and avarice have combined to create social conditions where over 6,000 girls lose their lives annually in dowry-related deaths, according to the NCRB.(3) Strict laws do not seem to deter families from demanding nor from feeling like their prestige is attached to giving. 

A shamefully large percentage of Indian women experience domestic violence. Nearly 37% of married women have experienced violence at some point and, perhaps more alarming, 54% of Indian women believe husbands have the right to beat their wives, according to the National Family Health Survey.(4)  Social and economic compulsions keep women in abusive marriages and, given the magnitude of the problem, there are still too few helplines and shelters.  

Infamous advice from India’s mythical lawgiver, Manu, enjoins women to seek the protection of their fathers, husbands and sons. Where fathers and husbands fail women, sons often do so as well. The abandoned widows of Brindavan and Varanasi are only the most dramatic instance of the cruelty of Indian society towards its elders. In homes around the country, senior citizens, particularly elderly, widowed women, are often subject to neglect and emotional abuse. Where cultural mores still constrain many from actually abandoning their ageing parents, what seniors surveyed described as ‘disrespect’ in fact borders on physical abuse.  

This random review illustrates how unsafe women are in a variety of settings and roles. Considering that they constitute almost half a population of 1 billion, why does the survival and well-being of nearly 500 million citizens not find a place in security agendas?  

One reason is the binary view of the public and private spheres which security as a field inherits from traditional political philosophy. On the contrary, feminists argue that the personal is political. The contemporary exercise (reflected in this series of articles) of redefining security is the search for a middle ground between these positions. Somewhere between a social perspective that will not cross the threshold of a home or a relationship and one that would dismiss the distance between the two sides of the threshold, is an older political debate relating to personal freedom and privacy. How do we define where the limits lie in the relationship between the individual and the collective? Once crossed, what is an appropriate issue for intervention and what is off-limits?  

New security thinking has added a plethora of new referents for ‘security’ (a confounding plethora, traditionalists might say). That is, when we ask the question ‘whose security,’ we now answer with a much longer list than ‘State’ or ‘nation-state.’ Moreover, when we ask who creates insecurity, security scholars or policymakers shy away less from adding the State itself to the list. However, our view of who should create security still somehow ends up being State-centric.  

This blindsides us. Where we will not let the State step in, whether from a minimalist State perspective or otherwise, we still challenge its inaction (and its inability to act). Can the State enter kitchens in an anticipatory exercise to prevent kerosene from being poured over new brides? Can the State be a presence in the bedroom when a wife is repeatedly raped by her husband? Should the State uphold the mother’s right to choose to have a child or should it allow her to decide not to have a girl-child?  

Some of these questions have been resolved in practice. The Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Act, 1994 is an example, as is the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2006. But their failure to completely stop the practices they condemn suggests that even a State with tremendous reach, awesome enforcement capability and reasonable political will cannot stop individuals from perpetrating violent acts sanguinely. Neighbours, extended family and alert local civil society organisations can go much further than a battery of laws and a police force. Social pressure and ostracism are greater deterrents than the likelihood that the victim or her supporters will term their experience as ‘abuse’ and report it to the police. Those who mistreat women must take comfort in the lack of social support options available to them, so that they must return to the site of abuse sooner or later.  

The next frontier in this exercise of re-imagining security then is to explore the role of civil society in creating security (and insecurity). Citizen-driven initiatives are the order of the day with regard to most other issues, be it mohalla committees to preserve communal harmony or neighbourhood environmental groups like EXNORA. What is the scope for citizen action to create security for women within and outside the home? What ethical and political issues are involved with initiating such action? Realistic assessments of what can be achieved are also needed, for which documentation of existing civil society efforts is important.  

There is another factor: cultural relativism and the reluctance of contemporary State and society in an age of political correctness. Patriarchal politics makes of women’s bodies easy shorthand for the politics of group identity. Women then carry the burden of socialisation, cultural preservation and physically standing for the community’s integrity and survival. If attacks on women are an easy way of expressing hostility towards a community, restrictions on women are a way for the community to articulate its borders—“We are X-Y-Z and therefore we require this or that of our women.” The rationale is ‘protection’—of the women, ergo, the community. A strange liberal inhibition prevents us from completely challenging these for fear of offending others or limiting the right of each community to define itself uniquely. Eggshell-walking and dogma are both inimical to an idea of security that is equitable as well as liberal.  

Why would we want to include violence against women in the security agenda? The most obvious reason is a political argument that anything that affects the survival of such a large part of society belongs in any discussion about survival and well-being. Second, using the term ‘security’ adds political leverage to any issue—visibility is greater, resources flow more easily and a sense of urgency is generated that may otherwise be lacking. Third, where violence is involved, collective attention and consideration are a must, and whether it is the State or society, it is imperative that one kind of violence merits the same attention as another. We cannot choose to which category of violence we will pay attention on the basis of motivation or victim identity.  

Arguments can also be made that link violence against women to larger consequences for society and State. Unbalanced sex ratios increase the likelihood of violence in society. Violence against women has epidemic qualities that place a large burden on the public health system. Fewer adults able to work optimally and children desensitised to violence are other consequences. However, these instrumental arguments—take care of this so you can move on and do other things—are less persuasive than the argument that the security of female citizens is intrinsically a good thing and as much a social concern as war, famine or terrorism.  

From intellectual and political standpoints, a discussion about violence against women as insecurity raises very interesting questions. Are there drawbacks to ‘securitising’ violence against women? Who will act to assure their security? What can we say about the relationship between State, society and female citizens based on the level of willingness to take action on this issue? Violence against women and women’s security also provides another instance for debating the freedom versus security, private versus public, universal versus relativist and minimalist versus pro-active State binaries that are actually among the oldest questions in politics. Thus, what we have been calling an exercise of redefinition or re-imagining ‘security’ is in fact also an exercise of remembering those fundamental political questions revisiting which is a pre-requisite to alert, vigilant citizenship.  

Endnotes

1. Roopa Bakshi, Maternal Mortality – a woman dies every 5 minutes in childbirth in India, UNICEF India, http://www.unicef.org/india/health_1341.htm.
2. UNICEF. India. Statistics. accessed athttp://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/india_statistics.html, on November 3, 2008.
3. Sample Registration System, Maternal Mortality In India: 1997-2003: Trends, Causes And Risk Factors, Registrar General, India, New Delhi, 2006. Accessed athttp://ideas.repec.org/p/ess/wpaper/id753.html on November 3, 2008. UNICEF. India. Statistics. accessed at http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/india_statistics.html, on November 3, 2008.
4. P M Kulkarni, Estimation Of Missing Girls At Birth And Juvenile Ages In India, UNFPA, September 2007, Page 16. Accessed atHttp://Www.Unfpa.Org/Gender/Docs/Studies/Missingirlsatbirth_India.Pdf  on November 3, 2008.
5. P M Nair, A Report on Trafficking in Women and Children in India 2002-2003, Volume 1, NHRC-UNIFEM-ISS, 2004, page 104, Accessed athttp://nhrc.nic.in/Documents/ReportonTrafficking.pdf on November 16, 2008.
6. Centre for Social Research, Child Marriage Prohibition Act openly flouted, as the practice continues unabated, Press Release, February 1, 2008, Accessed athttp://www.csrindia.org/Child%20Marriage%20Prohibition%2
   0Act%20openly%20flouted,%20as%20the% 20practice%20continues%20unabated
   %20,New%20Delhi,%2001%20February%202008.htm on November 16, 2008.
7. National Crime Records Bureau 2006.
8. National Family Health Survey 3, 2005-2006,National Fact Sheet India, Accessed athttp://www.nfhsindia.org/pdf/IN.pdf, on November 16, 2008.   

(Swarna Rajagopalan is a Chennai-based political scientist specialising in security, broadly defined. She is the founder of Prajnya Initiatives for Peace, Justice and Security, a new Chennai non-profit (http://www.prajnya.in))

How to punish the victim, again and again and again

Opt for marriage or get jail term: Court to rape accused, Indian Express, February 1, 2008.

For the second time in the last couple of years, a court has regarded marriage between a rapist and his victim a suitable conclusion for charges of rape.

There are so many things so very wrong with this point of view.

1. Rape is not a crime of passion; it is an act of violence perpetrated on the body of the victim. Such a judgment completely fails to recognize rape as violence. The victim by its reckoning is to live with the person who traumatized her once, for the rest of her life.

2. What makes rape heinous is its violence, not its violation of patriarchal codes of chastity.
If the latter were in fact the problem, then marrying the rapist and the victim would make sense because in the eyes of patriarchal societies, the victim is then soiled and spoiled for other men. So the rapist must atone by taking on the goods he has soiled, sparing other men and saving the honour of the family of the soiled.
Tamil usage reflects this view: karppu adaippu for rape (effacement of chastity) and the use of 'kedututaan' (he has spoiled) or 'kettu poitta' (she has been spoiled) to describe rape in the course of conversation.
The victim here is patriarchal society and it is thus compensated for the crime committed.

3. Who is punished by such court judgments, the rapist or the victim?
It seems the court regards marrying the victim to be a punishment for the rapist, man to man. After all, notwithstanding his part in creating the situation, the rapist must live with spoilt goods all his life.
It must also consider the victim compensated because the greatest part of the crime was not the traumatic act of violence she suffered but the fact that no one else will marry her.

If this is justice, the original act of violence seems benign!

When will acts of violence against women be recognized as acts of violence and when will all of us, in equal measure, see that justice does not further punish the victim?

Do Indian women feel safe?

If you need to think about that answer, here is some information you could use.

Yogendra Yadav and Sanjay Kumar, Outside home, Indian woman unsafe; inside, she needs luck, Indian Express, January 24, 2007.

See also their box with data 1 and box with data 2.

Beyond comment

Jatin Gandhi, Shame: Rape is India’s fastest growing crime, Hindustan Times, January 13, 2008.

DON'T celebrate Women's Day....

...unless you understand WHAT you are celebrating?

Several years ago, when my Russianist sister would describe the Soviet celebration of International Women's Day with flowers and cards, I laughed in scorn. Then, in the US, I saw the day turn into what Americans call a 'Hallmark Holiday.' Now living in India, the laugh's on me: movies starring leading actresses on TV, fatuous statements about mothers and wives, getting a break from cooking and cleaning... and sales! Now I have nothing against TV, movies, food and shopping, but what happened to the original reason we began to observe--not celebrate--this day?

International Women's Day is a marker in the worldwide struggle for women's rights and equality. It is a day where we remind ourselves of how much remains to be done in our quest to stop this very patronizing and trivializing way that society has of treating us and our struggles.

What have these struggles been? In India, I would say it has been and remains first and foremost, a struggle for survival. Some of the liberal struggles waged elsewhere--suffrage, for instance--have come more easily than the right to life and the right to livelihood.

The struggle for an equal right to life goes back to the campaign against sati, followed by the pioneering efforts of other nineteenth century reformers against child marriage, for widow remarriage (as opposed to sati or a long life in poverty and vulnerability in one of India's pilgrimage centres), and for the education of women. The nationalist movement mobilized women, both in its Gandhian and in its violent, revolutionary streams. From there to the granting of suffrage and equal rights was a small but insufficient step.

Insufficient, because the advent of a consumerist modernity has brought new travails to women's lives. The practice of demanding dowry has now spread throughout the country, and the killing or other abuse of young brides whose dowry is deemed inadequate is known around the country. This is true of female infanticide and its terrible new technology-enabled version, female foeticide (or sex-selective abortion, which sounds euphemistic to me sometimes). Women and girls face many other kinds of sexual abuse, from incestuous rape to sexual harrassment in the workplace to what we quaintly term 'eve-teasing'. All this, plus the residuary category of domestic violence (meaning the battery and torture of wives)--not much reason to celebrate, is there?

We are still splitting hairs over the right of women to participate in politics and be represented in numbers more closely approximating their presence in society. Scarily, even as we do so, the child sex ratio drops, and I wonder where that meeting point will be between equal access and the sex ratio: will the former rise to meet the latter as it is presently, or the latter fall to meet the former as it is presently.

I grew up a feminist because I did not know there was another way for an intelligent, spirited young woman to grow up. As Cheris Kramarae and Dale Spender wrote, to me, feminism is the 'radical notion' that women are human. I did not learn feminism in women's studies classes (they did not exist when I was growing up). I learnt it from strong women and men in my family and from my gut response to inequities I witnessed around me. So much has changed in the last few decades, but so little of it for the lives of women--who may now buy washing machines, but not political access or security. So much remains to be done. Yes, I will look at the glass as half-empty because it prevents me from settling in a sanguine fashion into my own comfortable middle class life. It reminds me of how intertwined my fate is with those of other women.

Don't 'celebrate' Women's Day, observe it! If you cannot be part of our struggle with us and support it, ignore or challenge us, but do not reduce this life-and-death battle we wage to a greeting card or a posy or worse, discounts for the very things that shackle us to stereotypes and limits.

***********
An off-the-cuff, point of departure list for reading further:
Radha Kumar, The History of Doing, Kali for Women, 1993.
Sakuntala Narasimhan, Sati - Widow Burning in India, Anchor, 1992.
Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India, University of California, 1998.
Raka Ray, Fields of Protest: Women's Movements in India, Minnesota, 1999.
Veena Talwar Oldenburg, Dowry Murder: The Imperial Origins of a Cultural Crime, OUP, 2002.
Mala Sen, Death by Fire: Sati, Dowry Death, and Female Infanticide in Modern India, Rutgers, 2002.
Flavia Agnes, Law and Gender Inequality: The Politics of Women's Rights in India, OUP, 2001.
Manushi remains, to my mind, an important resource. It may be accessed here and also here.
and if you will excuse a little self-promotion (hey, it's my blog and I'll write what I want to!):
Farah Faizal and Swarna Rajagopalan, Women, Security, South Asia: A Clearing in the Thicket, Sage, 2005.

Base-ic Concerns

This morning, the Indian Express reported the setting up of India’s base at Ayni in Tajikistan: India’s first footprint in strategic Central Asia, the reporter wrote. Bases leave more than one kind of footprint in the communities where they are located.


In her 1989 book, “Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics,” Cynthia Enloe describes the relationship between a military base and the local community. The base depends on the community’s acceptance which serves as camouflage and in turn, the community comes to depend on the base for jobs and a ready market. Writing primarily about American bases around the world, she identified the interaction between soldiers and local women as particularly controversial. During the Second World War, it was social interaction between Black American soldiers and white British women leading to interracial romance and marriage that provoked concern. Elsewhere however, it was a different equation that obtained between armies of occupation and women in occupied countries, most infamously, Japanese soldiers and Korean “comfort women” and after the war, American soldiers in Okinawa and Japanese women.

The relationship between soldiers and sex workers resembles a contractual or consensual arrangement; however, as Enloe shows in this book and again in “Maneuvers” (2000), they are deeply embedded in and enabled by an unequal power relationship. Enloe’s work provides examples from British policy regarding overseas cantonments, and asks whether we only see this in the context of settings where those stationed on the base are from a different race than local community members. AIDS has added an extra dimension to this multilayered issue; for instance, the part played by UN peacekeepers in spreading the infection in parts of Africa and the part played by US soldiers in doing the same in parts of Asia where there are US bases has been documented and protested.

There are all kinds of military bases; armies step outside their original homebase in a variety of contexts. The Indian base in Tajikistan, like US bases in so many parts of the world, will serve as an observer mission of sorts, also providing a rapid deployment facility if needed. There are bases set up by armies of occupation, a contentious term that is used to refer both to invading armies and armies fighting insurgencies over a long-term. The Indian army presence in Kashmir and northeastern India and the US army in Vietnam are examples, as is the advancing and retreating Sri Lankan army in northeastern Sri Lanka. Finally, there are peacekeeping forces, whether their presence is mandated by the UN Security Council or bilateral treaties like the Indian Army in Sri Lanka. Accusations of sexual violence are common to all these contexts, and until recently, it was possible to brush them aside as ‘the spoils of war’ which are to be expected when soldiers are stationed away from families for a long time. In 2001, the Sri Lankan army was even reported to have prescribed the impotence drug, Viagra, to injured soldiers to raise their morale.

In the last decade, feminist mobilization has resulted in the acceptance of the idea that rape is a weapon of war. Apologies have been made by the Japanese government for their wartime excesses in the first part of the twentieth century and Pakistani feminists apologized to Bangladeshi women for the actions of the Pakistani army in 1971.

Feminists, but also any other Indians who care that those who act in our name should act in a righteous fashion, must draw attention to these experiences and beyond challenging the rationale for establishing bases abroad, must advocate the adoption and strict implementation of behavioural codes that prevent soldiers from acting in an exploitative way. Human rights advocacy has done that, especially in Kashmir and northeastern India, but beyond redress, punishment of individual offenders and removal of particular laws, we need to press for a renewed appraisal of

(1) how we understand base-civilian relations;
(2) how the establishment defines, investigates and punishes sexual violence;
(3) the degree of transparency brought to such proceedings, and finally,
(4) our own willingness and ability to monitor base conduct in the interests of the community in which Indian bases are located.

***

Of related interest, a handful of links:

• Rubina Saigol, Militarisation, Nation and Gender:Women's Bodies as Arenas of Violent Conflict, South Asia Citizens' Web.
• Patricia Mukhim, Women and insurgency, The Telegraph, November 29, 2005.
• Jeanne Ward and Mendy Marsh, Sexual Violence Against Women and Girls in War and Its Aftermath: Realities, Responses, and Required Resources, UNFPA, June 2006. See also here.
• A report on Cynthia Enloe's lecture, How Can You Tell If You're Becoming Militarized? Some Feminist Clues, WHRNet.org, March 29, 2006.
• Kalpana Sharma, Kashmir's steel magnolias, Hindu, September 8, 2002.
• UNAIDS, Peacekeepers. And in Laurie Garrett, HIV and National Security: Where Are the Links? Council on Foreign Relations, July 18, 2005.
• Michael Richardson, War Apology Likely to Ease Tension in Asia : Japan Vows to Pursue Conciliatory Course, International Herald Tribune, August 24, 1993.
• Suvendrini Kakuchi, 'Respect Women Before Setting Up Military Bases' IPS News, January 31, 2007.
• Chalmers Johnson, America's Empire of Bases, CommonDreams.org, January 15, 2004.