Gladly Beyond Any Distance

Friends, including those online (like the artist Raghu Menon), have been asking me about the silence on this blog. Again, as always, not because I haven’t had things to feel and words to say, but because there have been too many of those moments. And not enough time for the words…

Events have lurched between the sweeping landscapes of the political - Nandigram. Fake Encounters. Gujarat. Freedom for Art. Art for Freedom. More Gujarat. All anger-making, distress-filling. Amitabh Bachchan for President? Elections in UP. Definitely not Amitabh Bachchan for Prez. Cynical amusement. - and the small but significant mappings of the personal - Moving. When? Soon. Where? Berkeley. Why? Hmm… that’s Ashwin’s story to tell first, and he’ll tell it soon.

But in the meantime, I’ve also been working slowly, and not very steadily, at the blog for the Gender Sensitisation and People-friendly Police Project. Someone wrote in recently:

I am a victim of domestic violence where I‘ve been slapped by my brother-in law which resulted to the fracture of my jaw-bone and 11 long months of traumatic separation from my husband due to my husband’s inability and inefficiency in taking his own decisions.

Till date, I did not register a complaint against my brother-in-law for the domestic assault on me hoping, that my husband would some day realise his mistake and get separated with me from him. But to my utter grief till date neither did he gave me any financial assistance nor any mental support for his own brother’s behaviour and further did not take any step to prevent his behaviour.
Now I repent for my trust on my husband and wish to file a complaint in hope to get justice to me. what should I do? I am still yet to be operated on my broken Jaw-bone.

PLEASE HELP ME IMMEDIATELY…I DESPERATELY NEED UR HELP!!!

I replied, on behalf of the team:

We are terribly sorry to hear of your present situation, but would like to congratulate you for your courage in standing up against it. Breaking the silence around domestic violence is the first, and most difficult, step any woman can take.

What you need to do next:

1. Decide whether you would like to book a *criminal case* against your husband and brother in order to punish them for the violence inflicted on you, or whether you want to book a *civil case* against your husband and brother-in-law seeking compensation for the trauma you have undergone. You can also book both a civil and a criminal case in parallel, i.e. simultaneously.

2. If you decide to book a criminal case, please go to your local police station (PS) and register a complaint against your husband and brother-in-law. The IPC sections they would normally use would be sections for assault and grievous injury (319-327) as well as Section 498(A). Please be aware that 498(A) is about any kind of cruelty - physical and mental - inflicted upon a married woman by her husband or his relatives. This is not only in the case of dowry harassment, as is commonly (mis)understood.

3. Please make sure you keep copies of the complaint you file, and that you get an acknowledgment of this complaint, and a copy of the FIR filed at the police station. That is your right.

4. If you decide to file a civil case, under the newly enacted Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act (2005), you can go either to your local PS or your local Protection Officer (the Dept. of Women and Child Development will be able to help you with details). Under this Act, you can make sure you are given protection within the marital home, as well as ask for compensation for the violence (physical and emotional) inflicted on you.

While doing all this, try and get as many family and friends to support you through the process, as well as contact a counselling centre or a women’s organisation near you, who can help you with the process and the procedures. You can also contact your State Women’s Commission or the National Women’s Commission.

We are not sure whether you live in Karnataka or not, so we can’t give you details of organisations close to you who might be able to help. However, one of our team members will contact you separately, and try and help further if you are from Karnataka.

All the best, more strength to you.

I think to myself: someone who can surf the net. Finds our blog. Needs our help. To know what every citizen in this country should know.

Breaking the silence is also about what words you then fill it with; those of us who live on the other side, who are there in support, need to make those words easy to find and easy to understand. Then comes the hard part.

Divya, my young cousin, is convinced that I prefer the ‘real’ world to the ‘virtual’ one. Gasp. She also imagines that I can provide her with her periodic intellectual fix. Gasp and chuckle. The last couple of weeks have been hot, grimy, dusty, and extremely real. Not very intellectual perhaps (in the sense of Parisian cafes and languid philosophy), but certainly hot, grimy, dusty, and extremely thought-provoking. My team and I have been spending time in Raichur - the north Karnataka district with the dubious distinction of having the lowest Human Development Index (HDI) in Karnataka - looking at how we might better create an environment of safety and protection for its women and children. As with all else in our country, it will take will to change. And the attitude to match. An attitude that will value women and children over cheap labour, easy sex and coerced money making.

Sattva, an online magazine for ‘realising equilibrium in social change’ asked me to write about the Gender Sensitisation and People-friendly Police Project, for their March (’Women’s Day Special’) issue of the magazine. Having just watched an infuriating episode of ‘We the People’ on NDTV, with Barkha Dutt asking whether we ’still need feminism’, I was provoked enough to write the following piece:

Policing Change: A Personal Perspective on Violence against Women and Children

A well known TV news channel in English had a Women’s Day special recently, asking the question ‘Do we still need feminism?’ As someone who has worked with the Karnataka police for the past few years on issues of violence against women and children (and is a feminist), I found it startling and disturbing, that so many participants on that talk show – including a senior woman police officer from Punjab – had no sense of the extraordinary moment of crisis we are in, as a country, as a ‘civilisation’, as a community of human beings.

India is missing from its population, over 50 million women and girl children (Census of India, 2001). ‘Missing’ because they are either killed (before birth, immediately after birth, or during their lifetime; one estimate says that 5 women die every day over dowry disputes) or trafficked (for commercial sexual exploitation, labour and other activities). 50 million is 5 crores, i.e. approximately the population of Karnataka; as I tell the police officers who participate in our workshops, there would be unimaginable world-wide horror if a bomb wiped out Karnataka tomorrow, but this ‘bomb’ of gender-based violence has been quietly exploding all over our country, in our homes or in a home near us, and there are very few who hear or see it. There is another ‘bomb’ that also exists: of those who are not killed, but who die many deaths in their every day living.

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In the continuing spirit of Women (and Men who Care about Women)’s Day, an announcement. The Gender Sensitisation and People-friendly Police Project - a joint partnership of the Karnataka State Police and UNICEF - has now got a web log of its own: http://www.peoplefriendlypolice.wordpress.com/

The site is still very much under construction, but please do drop by, give us your suggestions, and pass the message on. We hope that it will be a comprehensive resource on violence against women and children, as well as a platform for sharing opinions on the experiences that women, young people and children - in particular - have, when dealing with the police. The police need to be continually challenged as well as supported in their efforts to become more ‘people friendly’: we encourage you to share your positive as well as not-so-positive stories, as the experiences of pro-active, sensitive policing (they do exist) rarely make it to the front pages of our newspapers.

The Blank Noise Project asked for a blog-a-thon on March 8th; a way of celebrating the strengths of those who resist, in some way, street level harassment. A great idea. Yet the words ‘Action Hero’ somehow constrain me: what is Action, and who is a Hero? This March 8th, I was in the middle of a workshop with a group of police officers from States across South India and reiterating - many times over, in different ways - that women are *not* women’s worst enemies (yes, a treatise on that soon). Was that being an Action Hero? I work with men, with law enforcers, with some of the most patriarchal structures in the world, and I do not abuse, I do not indignify, I do not violate. Perhaps more honestly, I do my best not to (there are times when I bite my tongue, hard. It hurts). But certainly I describe, I analyse, I provoke, I persuade. I challenge. Is that being an Action Hero?

Whatever the ways in which Jasmeen, Mangs, Chinmayee and Annie conceived of it, philosophical flimsies are not going to cut it. So let me remind myself - and tell others - of a couple of lessons I learnt early. One was when I was in college in Delhi. Being in the hostel, any kind of travel involved painful hours in a sweaty bus or painfully expensive moments in an auto. The choice was simple, and I learnt more about harassment on DTC (Delhi Transport Corporation) buses than any hi-falutin’ economics. Perhaps (says the philosopher), I did get somewhere after all.

I learnt that anger is not always strategic. It’s a peculiar Delhi phenomenon - and I find it slowly spreading to other cities, including Bangalore - that if you raise your voice in anger against someone who’s harassing you, very few people are likely to support you. However obvious the harassment, however gruesome the details. Someone who’s not just touching you, but who’s conveniently using the lack of interstitial space to slam against every bit of you and rub himself up in perverse joy. What works? Shame. And humour. Humour, you ask in horror? Was it funny, what he was doing? No, it wasn’t. Far from. But what worked was this: I would say loudly, so that as many people around could hear me, in as bored a clarion call as possible, ‘Kya bhaiya, yeh sab aap ghar me nahi kar sakthe, kya? [Why, brother, can’t you do all this at home?]’. There would be titters, some loud guffaws and the slammer-against-body (whose face I couldn’t even see, considering the position I was in) would suddenly ease himself up, and leave the bus at the next convenient moment. Or at least move himself from the parking spot that was my body.

Another moment of self-preservation epiphany. I was travelling from Karwar to Raichur via Hubli (all in north Karnataka). I ended up being in a bus that landed up in Raichur at 2 in the morning [Note to self: try not to travel alone to unknown destinations at odd hours of the night. As far as possible]. On the bus, I had made ample and effective use of a loaded water bottle to preserve my bums from groping fingers and toes belonging to the person sitting in the seat behind me. When I got down at the bus stop, I found the place strewn with sleeping bodies and bags. Luckily for single women, very few public places in India are ‘deserted’. The trouble is, those who are temporarily inhabiting that space may not (as mentioned before) support you in a moment of crisis. Anyhow, no one was awake at the Raichur bus stop; it was deathly quiet and with only one tube light that cast a pool of light over a limited area. Some instinctual common sense made me clamber over the bodies and bags, shift a few of those around gently, and settle into a position right in the middle of the light. Not a moment too soon. A burly man, probably in his mid thirties, came up out of the shadows, and watched me for a while. He circled around the bus stop, over and over again, waiting, I feel with hindsight, for me to move out of the light. I didn’t. I was terrified, but I wasn’t going to run. So lesson number 2: running isn’t always the solution. Stay in the light, and be prepared to scream.

After about what felt like a few hours (but was probably closer to 45 minutes), he realised I wasn’t going to budge. And he left. I stayed awake, clutching my bag, clutching myself, thanking my surprisingly sharp instincts that I hadn’t done something unbearably foolish. Lesson number 3: trust that gut of yours. It is seldom wrong. ‘Rationality’ is judged by outcome.

So it’s been over a month and a half of silence. Online. A whole lot of words and work and wrath offline. Beyond the holidays and the happy happy, there were the days of listening to stories of women raging, of women exhausted of raging, the nights of waking up thinking about them. Of P who spoke to me only two days ago, from a tiny village a few hours from Bangalore, at the end of her taut and stretched tether, because her husband and his family, not content with abusing her for a mere 2 lakh rupees in dowry, had pushed her into sex work. She is now safe at home with her parents, and a case has been registered against her husband and his family. Of M, who had to suffer being married at 14, beaten and bruised by her husband for the next 14 years, and then finally had the courage to walk out of the marriage, taking her children with her. M is also a poet and a police woman. Hers is a story worth writing about, but not today.

Today’s post is for N. For being the right kind of strong. P, M and N - and all the other women whose stories I hear on an almost daily basis - made me ashamed of my awkwardness around writing about what I know and do most: working with the police (and women’s and children’s organisations) trying to make the system as responsive to violence against women and children as possible. In an earlier post, I spoke about this strange awkwardness, but enough is ’nuff. Diffidence is sometimes stupid, and sometimes it can be downright dangerous. ‘Changing the system’ is as much about changes within, as it is about making us - those without - responsive to, and informed by, these changes.

N’s story is not unusual: she worked in a multi-national corporate, well-known in its sphere. She became progressively more unhappy at work, considering that the General Manager (GM) - and therefore, but naturally, many of the staff - seemed to think that work satisfaction equated with an environment of ‘humour’, of sexual or racist jokes, not even generally directed, but specifically targeted against colleagues. Finally, when the jokes were directed against her, with the GM repeatedly offending and upsetting her, she had enough; she didn’t want to return to the office, she didn’t want to see her GM’s face ever again, she went home in a tumult of rage and disbelief at what was happening to her. What she did next is unusual: she protested.

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In today’s Times of India, an article on an innocent man who spent 11 years in jail for allegedly raping and murdering a six year old girl.

Kounder was released from the Yerawada prison on the directives of the Bombay High Court which took cognisance of a suicide note left by police inspector Iqbal Bargir in 2000 who said that Kounder was not guilty of the crime he was charged with.

The court order said that Kounder, who at the time of his arrest in 1995 was employed as an illiterate sweeper with the Brihan Mumbai Municipal Corporation, was suspected to have been wrongly implicated in the crime.

And what if Kounder had been given capital punishment? Surely raping and murdering a six year old girl justifies it (after all, the last time a Manila rope was made at Buxar jail was in 2004, for Dhananjay Chatterjee)? The next time I rise in righteous anger against rapists and murderers and shout ‘off with their heads’ in a grotesque imitation of the Red Queen, I will have to remember Armogam Munnaswami Kounder. A poor man, from a family of casual labourers in Tamil Nadu. A family he had lost all contact with in the past eleven years. As I write this, he is on a train - somewhere between Pune and Vellore - wondering whether his wife and son will recognise him.

In the midst of the on/off line (in more ways than one) debate around the death penalty, I think Shivam said it simply and effectively. Dilip quotes Nandita Haksar, the civil rights activist representing Mohammed Afzal Guru:

Can the collective conscience of our people be satisfied if a fellow citizen is hanged without having a chance to defend himself? We have not even had a chance to hear Afzal’s story. Hanging Mohammad Afzal will only be a blot on our democracy.

However, Rahul Mahajan gets into the act, saying he will sit on dharna to register his protest against those seeking pardon for Afzal. Perhaps he feels the Delhi police will then help him get elected.

Collective conscience? I leave you with an excerpt from Seamus Heaney’s extraordinary poem, that asks from us the greatest and deepest responsibility of all time: to be an ambassador of conscience, beyond the platitudes, beyond the politics of expedience. Please read the whole poem on the Art for Amnesty site.

When I landed in the republic of conscience
it was so noiseless when the engines stopped
I could hear a curlew high above the runway

At immigration, the clerk was an old man
who produced a wallet from his homespun coat
and showed me a photograph of my grandfather

The woman in customs asked me to declare
the words of our traditional cures and charms
to heal dumbness and avert the evil eye

No porters. No interpreter. No taxi.
You carried your own burden and very soon
your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared

[…]

I came back from that frugal republic
with my two arms the one length, the customs woman
having insisted my allowance was myself

The old man rose and gazed into my face
and said that was official recognition
that I was now a dual citizen

He therefore desired me when I got home
to consider myself a representative
and to speak on their behalf in my own tongue

Their embassies, he said, were everywhere
but operated independently
and no ambassador would ever be relieved

My apologies. Between bouts of flu and flying (well, a euphemism for travel that included slow buses, never-available autos, cockroach-flicked trains and a couple of cloud-jumping flights), I’ve been off-line. Some of the travel was for pleasure - like my news de-addiction drive, austerely followed in Goa (visual proof attached), and abandoned immediately on return to Bangalore - but most of it on work. Fulfilling, but not necessarily pleasurable.

Ashwin was saying the other day that it was interesting that I hardly - if ever - write about my work. I think my fear is that if I begin, I will never stop… the moving finger writes and what if, having writ, none of my tears will wash out a word of it (despite WordPress’ excellent editing tools)?

Why the awkwardness? Because the work I do is not necessarily seen in the feminist/social justice world as being radical enough; it might even be called - brace yourselves - co-option. And yet I do it: because real life is hard to classify, and allies and enemies so often merge into one another, that it seems more honest to dare to dance on the margins, in the interstices of spaces and communities, searching for allies in an enemy or watchful for enemies in an ally.

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