Fearless Freedom Read online

  KAVITA KRISHNAN

  FEARLESS

  FREEDOM

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: If You Want to Be Safe, Why Do You Demand Freedom?

  1. Raksha Bandhan: Loving Bondage

  2. Organized Crimes against Women’s Freedom

  3. Profiles in Courage

  4. ‘Empowering’ Women?

  5. Factories as ‘Families’

  6. Constructing a Fascist Patriarchy

  7. Where Women Are Worshipped, Can Women Roam?

  8. Mothers and Motherlands

  Conclusion: Towards Fearless Freedom

  Afterword

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  FEARLESS FREEDOM

  Kavita Krishnan is a communist feminist activist. She is a politburo member of the CPI(ML) Liberation, and secretary of the All India Progressive Women’s Association (AIPWA).

  Advance Praise For The Book

  ‘A book that serves up a whopper dose of truth, in an eminently readable style. Uncompromisingly feminist, what this book says about India, women, violence, control and autonomy—in private, pubic, social and political spaces—will touch a nerve in everyone. It walks the reader through real stories that made headlines, exposing the social subterfuge that masquerades as conventional wisdom, to tell us why, for our collective futures, there is no choice but to radically transform the way society understands women’s freedom’—Farah Naqvi, gender and minority rights activist and author

  ‘Kavita Krishnan gives us a chilling, unflinching account of what it means to be a woman in India. Through numerous stories of violence against women and the unbridled courage with which they continue to resist and fight back, Kavita analyses the ugly social norms that masquerade as culture. If this book does not force us to reimagine our oppressive patriarchal society, nothing will’—T.M. Krishna, author and social reform activist

  ‘Like her essays and speeches, Kavita Krishnan’s book is steeped in compassion and courage, bolstered by extensive research. Even when you disagree with her, you cannot doubt her commitment to her words. Fearless Freedom is a timely reminder that all oppressive systems feed off each other, and especially off the subjugation of women. It is a sharp, passionately argued critique of patriarchy in contemporary India, written in an easily readable style’—Anna M.M. Vetticad, Indian journalist and film critic

  For Daddy

  How I wish you could hold this book in your hands

  Introduction

  If You Want to Be Safe, Why Do You Demand Freedom?

  In October 2017, when women students at the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) demanded safety and freedom from the discriminatory rules that apply to the women’s hostel, the then vice chancellor, Girish Chandra Tripathi, said that, after all, it was girls who got raped, not boys, and so ‘girls require more security than boys’. By demanding freedom to ‘roam’, he said, ‘girls first put themselves in danger and then start complaining’.1 Tripathi knew his framing of the issue would resonate with the widely held common sense in India, which accepts the notion that it is more important for women to be safe than to be free; and that freedom invites danger. ‘If you want to be safe, why do you demand freedom?’ is a familiar question faced by Indian women.

  What Tripathi underestimated, however, is the determination of young women students of BHU, and women all over India, whose movements have been striving to create a new common sense that refuses to separate the goals of ‘safety’ and ‘freedom’ for women.

  On 19 December 2012, just days after the woman we now know as Jyoti Singh was gang-raped on a Delhi bus and left to die, we were demonstrating at the then Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit’s house. There were angry young women around us, holding handmade placards that said, ‘We live in a society that teaches women not to get raped instead of teaching men not to rape.’ A journalist came up to me just then and asked, ‘Some politicians and police officers are advising women not to go out at night as a precaution. But some women, such as nurses and journalists, have to work at night—what are they supposed to do?’ Something about the question made me feel a red-hot, searing rage—and in my mind, its flames illuminated the problem with stark clarity. Here we were, again, asking women for alibis and defensive explanations and justifications for their movements, their timings, their clothes, instead of holding rapists accountable for their conduct and their disrespect for women’s sovereign ownership of their own bodies.

  In a speech I made a few minutes after I was asked that question, I said:

  Why should women provide justifications if they want to walk out on streets alone, even if it is late at night? Why do we need reasons such as ‘she has to work late’ or ‘she was coming home from a BPO job or a media job’ to bolster such decisions? Is it a crime for women to want to go out at night, buy a cigarette or go for a walk? We do not want to hear the defensive argument that women only leave their homes to go to work . . . We believe that regardless of whether she is indoors or outdoors, whether it is day or night, for whatever reason, whatever she is wearing, a woman has a right to freedom. And it is that fearless freedom that we need to save and protect, that we need to safeguard. The word ‘safety’ is overused and tired. Each of us women knows what ‘safety’ means, we hear it from our parents, from our hostel wardens, from our communities. It means that as a woman, you must behave yourself. You should stay at home, not dress in a particular manner, it means that you’re safe if you don’t live with freedom! A huge pile of patriarchal laws and institutions are served up to us as ‘safety’ and we reject this plate of protection. We don’t want it . . . Whenever anybody speaks of women’s safety—the government machinery, the police, the judiciary, the political parties (barring the women’s movement and the left movement)—they’re talking of a patriarchal definition of ‘safety’ and ‘protection’. They’re not talking of protecting or defending women’s fearless, unqualified freedom. We need to tell them: if you want to ‘protect’ anything, protect our fearless freedom, our bekhauf azaadi!

  In that speech I had also asked if advertisement campaigns by governments against sexual violence, which asked men to be ‘real men’ and ‘protect their sisters’, were really a solution, or part of the problem. I asked how it was helpful to ask men to be manly and brotherly towards women, when society saw violence by brothers against sisters as ‘honourable’, ‘manly’ and ‘brotherly’?

  A friend and comrade, Vijay, had videotaped and uploaded the speeches made at that protest. And in the next couple of days, I slowly woke up to the fact that my speech had gone viral. The messages from unknown women, and several men, flooding my Facebook inbox showed me that the speech had touched a chord with many. I realized that what I had said about ‘safety’ was felt very deeply by many—and that these people were frustrated at the fact that their concerns were made to ‘disappear’ in the dominant discourse around women’s rights, which coded ‘women’s safety’ as curtailment of women’s mobility and autonomy, confinement of women to homes or hostels, and subjection of women to a relentless regime of surveillance and control.

  In the years since 2012, movements asserting women’s rights to autonomy and questioning the packaging of restrictions on autonomy as ‘women’s safety’ have grown, especially among women students and young women in cities and towns. At the same time, the organized ideological and physical offensive against women’s autonomy has grown bolder, basking in political approval and patronage. This aggressive patriarchal politics threatens, over and over, to submerge and overwhelm the issue of women’s autonomy, to drown out or discredit the voices of women asserting and demanding autonomy.


  In our minds, in India, violent attacks on women’s autonomy tend to hide in plain sight, shaped by the social structures we inhabit, our own minds supplying the disguise for them, helping them seem like harmless and innocuous ways to ‘keep women safe’. Violence against women’s autonomy, seen through the coloured lenses of our minds, looks like ‘our culture’, or like ‘protection from violence’. Such violence looks normal, homely, acceptable and even protective of women.

  This book is an invitation to take off the lenses and disguises, and take a fresh look at the familiar, intimate ways in which households, communities, cultures, the state and the economy work together to rationalize, and even celebrate, the curtailment of women’s autonomy.

  A statutory warning: the process of re-examining and challenging our comfort zones is injurious to close-mindedness, complacency and false pride. But our ability and will to change ourselves and our societies for the better is perhaps our best feature as human beings.

  1

  Raksha Bandhan:

  Loving Bondage

  Raksha Bandhan—or rakhi, as it is commonly known—is the festival celebrating the bond between brothers and sisters. But the very name signals the way in which our society views that relationship.

  From childhood, we are taught that this is the occasion for sisters to tie the ‘rakhi’ (the ‘raksha bandhan’, or the thread/bond of protection) around the wrists of their brothers to remind them of their duty of protecting them.

  My sister and I had no brothers. But I grew up tying rakhis on the wrists of a couple of boys who were close friends. The rakhis were pretty and I liked to have one of my own, so it became our habit to have the boys tie rakhis to us as well. In our families, no one spoke much about the boys’ duty to protect us girls: we were friends and playmates, and this was just another game. My father had sisters and my mother had brothers—however, in my world, I saw the sisters being protective of brothers as much as the other way around; and ‘protectiveness’ was not associated with masculinity or with control and restrictions.

  My first brush with frighteningly macho ‘brotherly protectiveness’ occurred when I was about sixteen and in high school. My friends and I had befriended a bunch of teenage boys from another school. These boys appointed themselves as our ‘brothers’. Initially, we found this amusing and humoured it. But then, one day, one of my best friends came to me in a state of panic. She said the self-appointed ‘brothers’ were threatening to beat up another boy who was her friend, having decided that he wasn’t a suitable friend for her to have! I had trouble accepting that this kind of role-playing existed outside of Hindi movies—but it did fall to me, eventually, to let the ‘brothers’ know they had no business being our keepers. It was my first experience of realizing that ‘brothers’ were schooled in our society to police their sisters—that’s what teenage boys thought ‘being a brother’ to a girl meant. I made a private resolve never to allow any boy to appoint himself my ‘brother’ again, and decided I was doing very well for myself without any brothers!

  We may take Raksha Bandhan as a metaphor for the controlling familial embrace of women: for the fact that loving and ‘protective’ family bonds are also coercive and violent towards women. Bandhan in Hindi means ‘bond’ but also ‘bondage’—and this, in a nutshell, expresses the contradiction at the heart of Indian families. Loving bonds are also constricting and constraining, and women struggle with the question of how to keep the love and also break the shackling bonds. Raksha Bandhan is not just a ritual or a festival—it is a living symbol of the ideology of guardianship, which refuses to respect women’s autonomy. This ideology expects adult women in universities and hostels to name their ‘guardians’—whether they are parents, brothers, husbands or other persons approved as guardians by the parents.

  ‘Haven’ of the Home?

  To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space.

  —John Berger, Ways of Seeing1

  One of the most widely held beliefs is that the home is a ‘haven’ for girls and women, that the risks and violence lurk in wait outside the home, that women can be safe as long as they leave home only ‘when needed’.

  In February 2017, former Andhra Pradesh speaker Kodela Shiva Prasad of the Telugu Desam Party addressed a press conference ahead of a ‘National Women’s Parliament’ hosted at Amaravati. He said, helpfully, that women were safe as long as they were parked at home like cars.

  Let’s say you buy a vehicle. When it is parked in the garage at home, accidents can be avoided, right? When it is taken to a bazaar or to the road, accidents are likely to happen . . . Similarly, in older times, when women were housewives, they were safe from all kinds of atrocities, except discrimination. Today, they are studying, working, and doing business. They are exposed to the society. When they are exposed to the society, they are more prone to eve-teasing, harassment, atrocities, rape and kidnap. Is it not? If they do not leave home, it doesn’t happen.2

  Shiva Prasad’s analogy might be especially ridiculous and crude, however, every woman has probably heard milder, less obviously outrageous versions of the same idea. The facts, of course, belie these notions. A Delhi High Court bench, commenting on the large number of murders of women in their matrimonial homes, with the husband as the prime accused, said, ‘It appears that the married women in India are safer on the streets than in their matrimonial homes.’3 This is true, though you wouldn’t know it for the disproportionate focus on stranger rapes in the media. Nor is this situation unique to India, with its ‘tradition’ of dowry extortion and dowry killings.

  In 2012, Jyoti Singh was gang-raped and killed on a Delhi bus, and stranger rape dominated conversations about gender violence in India and the world. The same year, a United Nations study showed that of all women who were the victims of homicide globally, almost half were killed by intimate partners or family members, compared to less than 6 per cent of men killed similarly.4 A study in Ireland found that 87 per cent of women who were murdered in Ireland over the last twenty years were killed by a man they knew; and 63 per cent were killed in their own homes.5 The world over, then, streets are safer than their own homes for women, and homes are the places where women face the most dangerous violence, at the hands of those they know intimately. In India, however, confinement to the home itself is a form of violence that is not even acknowledged.

  Prison Walls at Home

  In his Hindi poem, ‘Band Khidkiyon Se Takra Kar’ (Crashing against Closed Windows), Gorakh Pandey, a revolutionary poet, strips away the many layers of pompous chants about women’s ‘greatness’ to point out the obvious: the fact that women are imprisoned in the four walls of their homes—and the locked walls and windows make the home a suffocating prison, not a haven, for women.

  घर-घर में दीवारें हैं

  दीवारों में बंद खिड़कियाँ हैं

  बंद खिड़कियों से टकराकर अपना सर

  लहूलुहान गिर पड़ी है वह

  नई बहू है, घर की लक्ष्मी है

  इनके सपनों की रानी है

  कुल की इज्ज़ ़त है

  आधी दुनिया है

  जहाँ अर्चना होती उसकी

  वहाँ देवता रमते हैं

  वह सीता है, सावित्रा है

  वह जननी है

  स्वर्गादपि गरीयसी है

  लेकिन बंद खिड़कियों से टकराकर

  अपना सर

  लहूलुहान गिर पड़ी है वह

  कानूनन
समान है

  वह स्वतंत्रा भी है

  बड़े-बड़ों की नज़ रों में तो

  धन का एक यन्त्रा भी है

  भूल रहे हैं वे

  सबके ऊपर वह मनुष्य है

  उसे चाहिए प्यार

  चाहिए खुली हवा

  लेकिन बंद खिड़कियों से टकराकर

  अपना सर

  लहूलुहान गिर पड़ी है वह

  In every home there are walls

  Walls with barred windows,

  Crashing against the closed windows

  Bloodstained, she falls.

  New bride, ‘Lakshmi’ of our home

  Queen of his dreams

  Honour of the community

  Half the world

  Where she’s worshipped, the gods roam

  She’s Sita, Savitri

  She’s mother

  She’s motherland, greater than heaven

  But crashing against the walls

  Her head bloody

  She falls.

  In the eyes of the law

  She’s an equal

  She’s even free

  In the eyes of great people

  She’s even a means of wealth

  They forget

  Above all she’s human.

  She needs love

  She needs fresh air

  But crashing against the closed windows

  Her head bloody

  She falls.

  चाह रही है वह जीना