Radical Notes
Journal
Archive for April, 2007
Posted by Radical Notes April 26, 2007 at 9:24 am in Women's oppression, India
Anant Maringanti, Viren Lobo, Rajesh Ramakrishnan, Pradeep Narayanan, Vanita Suneja, Cynthia Stephen, Vinod K. Jose & Soma K. Parthasarathy
As horrific tales of sexual violence against women and girls in Nandigram allegedly by CPI(M) cadres and the West Bengal police emerged in the media, we have been asking ourselves the simple question, “Why?” This is not the first time that this question is being asked: why has violence against women in most unspeakable forms become part and parcel of political conflicts? The violence in Nandigram was after all a political contest, essentially between the CPI(M) and local people, many of them former supporters of the CPI(M) itself, who were apprehensive of their lands being taken over by the Government to set up SEZs.
In fact this question arises again and again in the recent history of political violence in India. The Committee against Violence on Women (CAVOW) reported the rape of 8 women from Kandkipura village of Bastar by uniformed police personnel. The provocation for this was the people protesting against forcible land acquisition for industry. The CAVOW fact-finding report highlights many atrocities perpetrated on women by Salwa Judum goons and the state security forces. In Kalinganagar, in the wake of police firing against an unarmed crowd protesting against the forcible take-over of their land for industry, corpses of women with breasts cut off were handed over to their relatives. While mainstream media rarely takes notice of the violence against civilians indulged in by the Indian Army in the North East, the recent outpouring of extreme resentment at the military forces shook both the media and the state as forty Manipuri women –twelve of them naked– stormed the Army headquarters in Imphal, holding signs that read “Indian Army, Rape Us!” Thanglam Manorama’s brutal murder by Army personnel was the source of anger for the protesters. Manorama’s murder is far from being an exceptional case in Manipur where rape, abuse and murder are everyday realities. In their brave protest, Manipuri women shamed the Indian army by parading the very female body that brought humiliation and death to their sisters. With their raw anger and amazing mobilization, these women refused to get knocked down by the ‘rape culture’ that enables the ‘victor’ to demoralize their victim. And about the violence against women in Gujarat in 2002, it was reported, “…The pattern of cruelty suggests three things. One, the woman’s body was a site of almost inexhaustible violence, with infinitely plural and innovative forms of torture. Second, their sexual and reproductive organs were attacked with a special savagery. Third, their children, born and unborn, shared the attacks and were killed before their eyes…”.
The question “Why?” can be asked and answered in varieties of ways using many different frameworks of analysis. What is clear is that these instances of violence against women are occurring in the context of an aggressive expansive thrust of Indian capitalism, seeking hegemonic status in the global arena. Nandigram is clearly tied to the aspirations of investors like the Salim group of Indonesia and the CPI(M)’s vision of industrialisation through national and trans-national capital. Kalinganagar and Dantewada (Bastar) are similarly the product of a political clash between the same vision of industrialisation and resistance to it. The violence in Gujarat happened at a time when the State Government was aggressively marketing it as an attractive destination for global investments. The North-East has been afire due to the conflicts between the oppressed sub-nationalities of that region and the dominant nationalities of peninsular India, who now see it as a hub for investment and trade.
While these are the most egregious examples of violence against women in political conflicts, there are also other forms of violence against women, which are widespread and invisible. Familial violence or domestic violence includes, for example, the violence of traditional practices and foeticide, infanticide, forced/early marriage, forced sex-work, wife battering, and violence against widows. Violence at the community level includes caste-based violence, body mutilation, honour-killings, abduction, rape and other forms of sexual violence, sexual harassment and workplace violence, and trafficking. The beating, rape and mutilation of sexual organs of women of a dalit family at Khairlanji in full view of the public is a recent example. All forms of gender-based violence against women and also children (girls and boys) violate their human rights and are political, involving power and patriarchal domination. The common thread in these diverse forms of violence is social and gender-based domination which makes violence against women acceptable in familial and community contexts.
After economic liberalisation, the focus on women is increasingly as a cheap labour force. Despite apparently positive indicators of progress, particularly in education and paid employment, little has changed in the position of women. Studies suggest that while there is an increase in low-wage employment and self-employment, gender discrimination is being reinforced. While micro-credit is a necessary but altogether insufficient condition to address poverty, evidence suggests that the burden of its access, utilisation, and repayment fall entirely on the shoulders of women. Notions of `family honour’ are being re-worked such that women must bear the brunt of family survival strategies through credit and increased workload, while financial players reap the benefits of reduced transaction costs. Even more worrying are the increasingly reported instances of sexual harassment and assault at workplaces where women are essentially unorganised. In this context, the liberating and empowering effect of the workplace has only partially materialised.
Without losing sight of its intrinsic links with all forms of gender-based violence, we would like to focus attention on the violence against women indulged in by State agencies and political actors. All politics, regardless of ideology, is ostensibly about making a better world. Political activity draws upon the thoughts and aspirations of the people for a better life. Violence against women can never be countenanced by the political imagination as a means to a noble end. Yet such violence persists because of the patriarchal view of women as chattel, as `territory’ to be conquered, as `honour’ to be saved or violated. This is closely tied to the practice of male control of women’s sexuality and reproduction. In general, the cultural construction of masculinity and femininity reify women’s roles in reproducing community and nation, and men’s roles in their defence.
What seems to emerge clearly from the examples we have cited is that whether it is politics of the Right or of the Left, of the hegemonic or of oppressed groups, of neoliberalism or of the resistance, certain essentialist notions of masculine and feminine with their roots in patriarchy seem to regularly result in sexual violence against women as a `legitimate’ form of conflict. As neoliberal economies take root, whether in the form of industrialisation in Bengal or irrigation projects in Andhra Pradesh or in the form of urban renewal missions, we fear that gross physical violence against women will only increase and escape the conventional institutional solutions available to us. As persons who believe in and participate in progressive politics, this is a matter of grave concern to us. We believe that this clandestine indulgence towards violence against women is intolerable. We therefore call upon fellow citizens to declare that there is no place in politics for this assault on the bodies and minds of women. This is a precondition for achieving any vision for a better world.
Anant Maringanti, Research Scholar, University of Minnesota
Viren Lobo, Development Professional, Udaipur
Rajesh Ramakrishnan, Researcher and Consultant, New Delhi
Pradeep Narayanan, Development Researcher, New Delhi
Vanita Suneja, Development Professional, Faridabad
Cynthia Stephen, Independent Researcher, Bangalore
Vinod K. Jose, Foreign Correspondent-India, Radio Pacifica Network
Soma K. Parthasarathy, Researcher and Consultant, New Delhi
Posted by Pratyush Chandra April 7, 2007 at 9:27 am in Europe, Imperialism, International Relations, Economy
Pratyush Chandra
Joseph Stiglitz is counted as one of a few dissenting economists in mainstream academia, and for some time now his dissent has been attracting quite a number of activists. He is officially invited by the “Another World is Possible” people to their meetings. Naturally he will think himself authorised to tell people how another world is possible, and what will be that world. He precisely does this job in his March column, “The EU’s Global Mission” distributed through Project-Syndicate:
“Another world is possible. But it is up to Europe to take the lead in achieving it.”
So the revolutionary project already has a vanguard, the only job left for the foot soldiers is to convince him/her/it to lead. How insightful! Any pessimism in this regard is ill-founded as
“the European project has been an enormous success, not only for Europe, but also for the world.”
Of course, like our Indian monkey-god Hanuman, Europe lacks ready self-confidence and needs a bear bard for encouragement. Stiglitz’s article does that job. Questioning the economistic common sense, he tells Europeans not to feel unconfident before the warlords in the US, as their competitors’ supremacy is baseless and phoney -
“…while GDP per capita has been rising in the US, most Americans are worse off today than they were five years ago. An economy that, year after year, leaves most of its citizens worse off is not a success.”
Moreover, the European Union’s mission is distinct, which are not laws, regulation, or phoney prosperity, but “long-lasting peace”, “greater understanding, underpinned by the myriad interactions that inevitably flow from commerce”. And “The EU has realized that dream” - “neighbors live together more peacefully”, “people move more freely and with greater security”. Stringent immigrant laws for and policing of the people from the South (this identity is very broad since it includes Black and Arab French, Muslim Europeans…) etc are perhaps aberrations, or may be the Southerners are racially ‘uncountable’ “within a new European identity that is not bound to national citizenship”.
Furthermore, Europe has mastered the competitive art of giving, and has surpassed the US -
“Europe has led the way, providing more assistance to developing countries than anyone else (and at a markedly higher fraction of its GDP than the US).”
Do we need to tell our Nobel laureate the economics of Aid, even AIDS?
Stiglitz too feels (not unlike Bush) that the world has changed during the past six years. However, he finds “democratic multilateralism” being challenged, human rights abrogated. Obviously he ignores all the contributions in grounding Bushism that earlier US governments made, especially Clinton’s, of which Stiglitz himself was a part. What if NATO was not less active earlier, Iraq too was continuously bombarded…
Stiglitz feels the need for multipolarity, and that Europe
“must become one of the central pillars of such a world by projecting what has come to be called “soft power” - the power and influence of ideas and example. Indeed, Europe’s success is due in part to its promotion of a set of values that, while quintessentially European, are at the same time global.”
Does it really matter if this whole discourse of “a set of [quintessentially European, but universal] values” seems hardly any different from Bush’s? Moreover, what are these values? First is “Democracy” - not just elections, “but also active and meaningful participation in decision making, which requires an engaged civil society, strong freedom of information norms, and a vibrant and diversified media that are not controlled by the state or a few oligarchs.”
Which formally democratic country officially denies these, and how many countries, including the EU members, provide safeguards against corporate-state monopoly over information and media? Further, the whole logic of the European monetary integration was to insulate strategic financial and economic institutions from any “active and meaningful” democratic influence, as it was considered external and an economic nuisance.
“The second value is social justice”, which is just individualism, however realized “only if we live in harmony with each other”. Does Bush deny this? The issue is rather who will establish the rules for that “harmony”.
What else?
In Stiglitz’s dream, the White Man’s burden definitely changes shoulders, but it remains the white man’s burden all the same -
“For the sake of all of us, Europe must continue to speak out - even more forcibly than it has in the past.”
Back to the old world - while the “world” remains the same - a white man’s world.
Posted by Radical Notes April 1, 2007 at 7:24 am in Reservations, India
Sukla Sen
The desirability and efficacy of affirmative actions in the form of caste-based reservations, in (higher) educational institutions, and by implications at various other levels including job opportunities, has again been pushed to the fore of our social discourse jostling with many other burning issues of the day for due space and attention by the recent Supreme Court stay order on a Central government decision in this regard.
On the first reading, the purported hesitations of the two-judge bench of the Court to allow the government to make and implement social policies with huge implications based on plainly antiquated data, in the event those available from the 1931 census, makes a hell lot of sense. But on a closer reading, when we find that even more important social measures - viz. reservations in government jobs, are for long in practice based on essentially the same/similar set of data, which anyway in the present case go well beyond the 1931 census and include inter alia various sample surveys carried out from time to time; one can hardly be blamed if it is considered just a nasty stalling tactic by the concerned judges putting their somewhat tyrannical powers and privileges to maximum use.
So far as the government of India is concerned, two moves are underway for a while. One, extend reservation to the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) even in the portals of higher education including the “institutes of excellence”. While this is partly a new initiative, it is partly also to offset the earlier Supreme Court verdict drastically curtailing the scope for such caste-based reservations, by doing away with the same in the private institutions, and upholding/promoting money-power based reservations - just not implicitly, but also explicitly by validating management/NRI quota. There was also another move, now somewhat subdued, to extend job reservations to the organised private sectors.
So far as the reservation in the field of education is concerned, South Indian states are already having systems in place, which are far more radical than the one now proposed by the Ministry of Human Resource Development. Interestingly the virulent student agitations led almost exclusively by the medical students against the government move had failed to cause any significant impact in the southern states, except in the then Bangalore.
The aim of the agitation, even if it appears to lie beyond the realm of feasibility, is just not to scuttle the new move granting the OBCs special quota in the domain of higher, or tertiary, education but to reverse and scrap the present system as well catering principally to the SCs and STs. The agitating (upper caste) students must also be having the contemplated job reservation in the private sectors on their minds.
The anti-reservationists in the main put forward the argument of ‘merit’ over ‘equity’. They also challenge that reservation promotes equity. Now in so far as the ‘merit’ argument is concerned, the anti-reservationists are evidently on a sticky wicket. These self-styled champions of ‘merit’ have nothing to say against various quotas, in the (mainly private) educational institutions, explicitly linked to payment of (much) larger than usual amount of money - in terms of capitation fess, higher tuition fees etc. (There is no murmur against the continually rising cost of education at all levels. In fact, it is even welcomed as a system which would help filtering out the ‘non-meritorious’. Money, in this case, is considered coterminous with ‘merit’.) That ‘reservation’ goes against the very logic of the ‘market’, presupposing and calling for direct State intervention in determination of access to and allocation of resources in an era when “market fundamentalism” is the fad of the day, must have had its impact just not on our media and the so-called “elite” drumbeating on the side of the aggrieved upper-caste students, but the judges in question as well. The fact that acquiring of ‘merit’, to be established through various competitive exams, also calls for expensive tutorials - not excluding purchase of question papers etc., apart from education in premier institutes entailing heavy expenses is simply brushed aside. Likewise, the highly non-level playing field that a student from the disadvantaged and discriminated against castes, or communities, is compelled to face in terms of highly asymmetrical distribution of accumulated cultural capital, apart from economic conditions etc., is hardly ever acknowledged.
The affirmative actions, on the other hand, apart from promoting social equity and integration, actively facilitate enlarging the social base/pool of the ‘meritorious’ by providing opportunities to come up in life to the members of those disadvantaged and traditionally marginalised ‘majorities’, at the lower/lowest rungs of the social ladder, who’d have been otherwise excluded. Hence the affirmative actions, quite contrary to the shrill claims made, actually help to raise the level of the ‘merit’ of the society taken as a whole.
But the question how, or rather to what extent, reservations actualise its intended objectives and whether it effectively preempts, by acting as palliatives with high emotional pulls, other positive measures, arguably far more fundamental, imperative for radical restructuring of the social hierarchy and democratisation of all spheres of life, of course, is a much trickier one and calls for a far closer and dispassionate look into the whole set of related issues. But this is hardly possible in an atmosphere charged with irrational and hypocritical hypes where the narrow self-interest of a rather thin slice of the incumbent elite is tried to be blatantly and aggressively sold and foisted upon the rest of the society in the name of ‘merit’ and all that.
