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Scissor Sisters
Thiruvananthapuram, after the break in Sri Lanka, was a return to the noise, dirt and mountainous pavements that had become like home. Our newly acquired skills of avoiding dangerous roadside obstacles had diminished whilst away, as Col nearly went flying a couple of times, tripping over steel pipes emerging from the concrete ground. Rallies and agitations continued on in the Marxist state as we prepared to meet with Sakhi, a feminist organisation working in a facilitation role across the Kerala region. We worked with them for about a week.
Despite the fact that Kerala's statistics looked good in terms of gender development indicators, Kerala remained a closed and conservative society in reality with incidences of violence towards women and suicide rate showing alarming increases and, Sakhi's concern that although there has been a tradition of matriliny in some communities women's social status has not been reflected in political participation.
Sakhi, meaning 'woman friend', established in 1996 was a collective of feminists who were working on women's rights in a 'highly patriarchal', albeit deeply political society. Their vision was a society based on economic, political and social justice by integrating class, caste, ecological and gender perspectives in all their programme areas.
They were exceptionally welcoming and made time for us. We talked to the resource library manager, one of the field operational directors and one of the founding members Aleyamma whilst we were working. Our work was to help with the documentation library by cutting every article, from an archive of newspapers, that related to women, to be later sorted by the librarian into topic areas.
The three days we spent reading the English language broadsheets from October to December 2008 led us to conclude that there was a notable absence of concern for women's participation and, like anywhere else, such issues were sometimes highlighted by incidents of acid attacks, rape, murder, vigilantism or rallies. The newspapers rarely afforded such cases a deep analysis, each incident being treated in isolation. There was little by way of governance, accountability and justice... in fact one of the cases of the supposed suicide of a nun who was later found to be murdered by a priest and nun whose affair she had found out about... had been going on for over 15 years... with the original investigating team having held the case for 12 years before it was handed over to the CBI after the state finally succumbed to the pressures placed on them by a journalist who highlighted buried evidence and ignored testimonies.
In discussions with the Sakhi team, we learned that the prolonged beaucracy of the judicial system, along with lack of accountability and transparency was common. The team spoke of the distress this caused many women and how key evidence was often lost, 'misplaced', forgotten or ignored, with the victims not being able to reach a resolution emotionally or legally. Quite often, as in the case highlighted above, powerful institutions like the Church stepped in to protect the perpetrators by influencing the police and the judiciary. The final outcome often being that perpretators were set free on lack of evidence whilst women still bore the scars of social stigma, isolation and the public maligning that went along with discrediting them. For us this once again highlighted how the justice system and powerful institutions functioned to uphold the status quo and by doing so supported and sustained the oppression of women and their continued psychic space in 'victimhood'; the effect was that women were doubly 'victimised' on a personal and political level.
Focusing on justice for women was just one of Sakhi's objectives. The organisation also worked on participation of women in the political sphere to achieve true representation and democracy. They ran training courses and continuous development programmes on empowerment and autonomy to improve women's political status. They facilitate a network of elected women in Kerala. In speaking with Aleyamma, the emphasis of the organisation wasn't just about equipping people with knowledge, but more importantly enabling women through skills development to participate equally as well as addressing the local and national obstacles to participation in all kinds of political decision making.
India has a political system of central and state Government, districts and Panchayats - the latter is what we think of as ward level governance. In 1996 the Panchayat Raj act gave powers to these smaller local bodies that charged them with governing their local area, moving towards a people-centred system for implementation, development and planning. In Kerala, Sakhi has been involved from the outset seeing this as an opportunity to mainstream gender in the political discourse at a grassroots level to enable equal participation and ensure representation of the missing half of the population in politics. Sakhi's work on 'Gendering Governance' has been started to ensure national government and Panchayats are accountable for how their work impacts on women's participation or exclusion from political decision making. Sakhi has also introduced local justice bodies 'Jagratha Samidhis' within the Panchayats where gender based crimes can be dealt with efficiently to ensure women's lives are not overwhelmed by continued injustice and that some resolution enabled their continued participation in local and national democracy.
We were impressed by the work of Sakhi and wanted to make time to talk with Aleyamma, a founder member, on her perspectives of their work and philosphy. She made time for us one morning after we 'bribed' (!) her and the rest of the team with a box of locally bought sweets! A determined woman in her fifties, she had spent her earlier years working with Kerala's marginalised fishing communities, faciliating their development and growth. Many of the fishing industry is formed into co-operatives, and she worked with communities to develop and susatin co-operatives and to unionise workers to ensure a better understanding of their collective rights.
Her earlier work had been influenced by the strong Keralan based Marxist movement. However as she began looking at the issues she saw how women were not equal participants in the struggle and the particular disadvantages and obstacles faced by women in fishing communities. Along with other women she attempted to raise these issues within the Marxist political circles and was often faced with resistance and nonchalance. What was interesting was the ways in which attempts to raise the gender issue were silenced. These included the 'othering' of the women who raised the issues, for example they were educated, urban single women, who knew nothing of the lives of women in fishing communities, through to aspersions of class, religious and caste differences that sought to discredit them.
She left to receive a scholarship with which she set up Sakhi, initially as a library and resource centre. Aleyamma explained that the founder members had shared and developed a clear class based gender analysis which informed their work and to which they have remained faithful over the years.
Having missed out on the feminist movements in the west by a few years due to accident of birth we were much empowered to hear that the global participation of women in democracies beyond their experiences of crime and violence being given primacy (which strengthened discourses on women as the sum total of their body rather than thinking about democracy and participation) were key to feminist politics in India. Interestingly we heard that this difference of emphasis was related to Rural versus Urban feminism... in round table discussions urban feminists had argued that domestic violence and rape were the key issues for a feminist agenda.... whereas Aleyamma described Sakhi has having a rural perspective which meant having an analysis of women, employment and participation. We thought the latter to be more holistic and inclusive ... quite different from the lay concerns of the west where we believe we have achieved equality and gender politics is an interest group rather than mainstream concern. On the other hand, what is missing from the Sakhi perspective is an analysis of sexuality and gender... whilst Aleyamma very much recognised sexuality as an important issue she described how conservative Kerala meant that transgendered and gay people remained hidden or left to go to other states ... what a shame. We were very much of the opinion that women's participation in India was fundamentally curtailed by the control of their sexuality, by reducing them to bodies, through concepts such as 'honour' and 'shame' and how being out alone was one indicator of 'shamelessness'. Gender and sexuality are so intricately linked that it would be difficult to have an analysis of one and to ignore the other. We wondered whether a m
Marxist uprising was reliant on notions of the traditional family and had no space for conceptualising other individuals, communities and families who were excluded from participating because they were transgendered or gay, bisexual or lesbian ... let alone a threatening single woman. As if to confirm our thoughts, recently the Ram Shiv Sena a fundamentalist vigilante Hindu group or group of 'goondas' appointing itself as the moral police, has gone into a pub in Mangalore and attacked a group of women who were there... distressing footage of women being attacked and beaten has led to a media outcry and the police.... once again standing by whilst the law was being broken and once again needing the victims to bring in a complaint... have been reviled for not bringing the perpetrators to justice quickly enough. The state and police have been accused of sanctioning this behaviour covertly whilst overtly superficially condemning it.
Whilst we were hearing about women in Kerala and participation we were reflecting on our own immediate experience. Thiruvananthapuram was the one place where we were overtly harrassed more than any other place on more than one occasion. In one incident whilst walking down a main street, we were followed by a man trying to knock into us, and despite trying tactics like chaging direction, stopping, and crossing the road, he continually came back to us. Then suddenly he wasn't there, and as we walked on, we turned to discover a passer-by had intercepted him and was having harsh words with him. This seemed heartening at the time, but on other occasions when the behaviour was not so overt, it left us wondering how other women dealt with this harassment on a daily basis and how it impacted on their social participation... (The guide book for Sri Lanka, warned of the many incidents of harassment of women, and noted that local women armed themselves with sharpened sari pins to punish and deter!)
We got to find out some things about women and social participation, during our short time with Sakhi when we helped out with a local petition outisde the Town Hall to stop the city authorities felling street trees. The pictures, taken for Sakhi have been included. It was a great way of meeting people from other groups and movements, including sustainability, environmental groups and other womens groups. We spoke to a woman who was involved in sustainable tourism, and was interested in hearing of our experience of travelling as two women across south India. She described how, as a single woman in Thiruvananthapuram, she found it difficult go out alone, let alone travel in other places. She described the subtleties, such as being frowned upon or made to feel uncomfortable when going to a cafe in the evening, (we had felt the exact same numerous times during our travels outsie of the beach tourist areas) and said that many women simply avoided doing such things as a result... but since she'd bought her own two wheeler she felt a lot better travelling around (we have no such luxury... woe be us). We thought 'so much for equal participation'! We tried to encourage her to set up a sustainable cooperative for safe travel for women by women in south India! She seemed to like the idea and we left exchanging email addresses.
Another woman, part of a green group in Kerala, discussed how there is an urgent need to find a Gandhi like figure in India, espically in the rural areas to inspire and empower an Indian-wide sustainable movement. She described how, with big corporations moving into the Indian market and globalisation, there was a real need to empower local people, especially rural communitites, to fight the loss of skills and livelihoods through political action rather than the short-lived and short-sighted marketing techniques of the big corporations convincing people they need everything they don't from plastic bags to bottled water to face whitening creams!
Our time in Thiruvananthapuram, and with Sakhi, was stimulating.... reminding us of the complexities of India, it's social and political history and how this interweaves with global concerns. Next we set off to explore pilgrim state Tamil Nadu... and so we are here now nearly ready to write our next blog... from Kerala to Kanyakumari and beyond.
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