Fearless Freedom Page 7

  At a court hearing a couple of days after her marriage, Kausalya was assaulted by her family members: ‘They requested the police’s permission to meet me for five minutes and surrounded me and said, “Aren’t you ashamed to bear the thali (mangalsutra) tied by a Pallar guy? You better come with us or we will kill you.” I turned away quietly. This angered them, and my grandmothers and my aunts got hold of my hair and started raining blows on my cheeks, on my breasts, on my back. I lost my balance and fell down.’21

  After the court dismissed Kausalya’s father’s petition, she and Shankar remained afraid of her family. They slept in a different relative’s house each night, avoiding his house.

  Her grandfather came over as a decoy. Pretending to be on Kausalya’s side, he claimed to be unwell and asked her to come with him to the hospital. Once she sat on his scooter, he abducted her and took her to her parents. They took her to four godmen and a godwoman, all of whom performed rituals to free her from a ‘spell’ they claimed had been cast on her. One godman prescribed potions, which her parents forced her to consume. Her aunt and parents called her a whore, beat her and burnt her thali, metti (toe ring) and clothes.

  The police, meanwhile, cooperated with Kausalya’s father. She overheard a call by a policeman to her father on the speakerphone. The cop said:

  The boy who eloped and married your daughter, and his father have lodged a complaint. Things are getting serious. Please bring your daughter. But don’t worry; things will only happen according to your wishes. Come with Rs 20,000 for the inspector. Also, pressurize your daughter to say that she doesn’t want to go with the boy and that she wants to return to her parents’ place.22

  Is it any surprise if many women lose their spirit and will when subjected to such abduction, imprisonment and torture at the hands of her own parents, and when betrayed by the police? What should shock us—as Hadiya’s story also showed us—is that our policing and judicial mechanisms tacitly allow and participate in such torture. If such torture succeeds in producing obedience to parental and caste authority, if women relinquish their lovers or husbands as a result, our institutions seem to breathe a sigh of relief.

  But Kausalya did not give up. When she kept insisting on her wish to return to Shankar, her family members said they would give her poison and kill her. She was taken to the police station. At the request of an advocate, she did not accuse her parents of kidnapping, she simply said she wanted to return with Shankar, who was at the police station waiting for her.

  Next, her grandmother played the same game—pretended to be on their side, won their confidence, but then led them into a trap for her parents to abduct her again. This time, bystanders on the street helped them escape.

  Next, her parents tried bribery. They came to Shankar’s and Kausalya’s home, and offered Shankar Rs 10 lakh to let Kausalya come home with them. Shankar, of course, refused the money, and Kausalya, too, snubbed her father, saying nothing would induce her to leave Shankar. Her father left, warning Kausalya that she and Shankar would be killed.

  The day Shankar was killed, she recalls the assailants saying, ‘How dare you love, you Pallar son-of-a-bitch!’23 Kausalya, recovering from her injuries and the trauma of seeing Shankar hacked to death, struggled with grief and anger. She attempted suicide. But supported by Left, feminist and Dalit activists, she began to make sense of her world anew. She read Periyar and Ambedkar. Haunted by the fact that her parents used her grandparents to try and trap her, that they hired mercenaries to kill their daughter and son-in-law, she arrived at a profound realization: ‘I thought what my parents had for me was love. I realize today that it was love for the caste.’24 This is why Kausalya now refers to her parents by their names, Chinnasamy and Annalakshmi, refusing to acknowledge them as her father and mother.

  Kausalya pursued justice for Shankar in court. Her father, Chinnasamy, and five others were sentenced to death, one to a life term and another to five years’ imprisonment. Her pain and her struggle transformed her. She knows her life is still in danger. But she refuses to live in fear, and rides her Royal Enfield motorbike boldly, her hair cropped short. She sees herself as a freedom fighter against caste, saying, ‘Our country got independence but we don’t even have the freedom to love.’25 She has dedicated her life to annihilating caste. She works with Dalit children, educating them, and teaching herself and them to play the parai drum, associated with the Dalits. She also fell in love with and married Sakthi, a fellow parai drummer and anti-caste activist, in a self-respect marriage of the kind popularized by Periyar. They wrote their own marriage vows—in which they vowed to support each other’s work, to work to annihilate caste and liberate women, and to make sure the doors of their home would always be open to young couples facing societal opposition.

  On Ambedkar Jayanti (14 April) in 2017, Kausalya met Divya, who had lost her husband Ilavarasan and her father to the scourge of caste. Kausalya’s account of this meeting, in a Facebook post, is deeply moving. Kausalya wrote:

  My respect for her [Divya] grew after the meeting. She does go to college and come back, but otherwise she still cannot step out of her home. Even if Divya sports a simple bindi and steps out, there are people who taunt her for forgetting the past. I couldn’t converse with her for long, her mother was around. But when I could, I asked how she was coping with it. ‘How can I so easily forget someone with whom I was so deeply in love?’ Divya asked me. Confined within her house, she has no space to fight . . . Divya’s mother kept insisting that her daughter was happy—that they did not want people to come only because they kept talking about the past. We actually did not want to speak about the past. All I wanted was to meet her and speak to her. I really want to keep meeting her as often as possible so I hardly spoke about the past. Only when we were leaving, I told her my own story. Divya was not aware of it.26

  What needs to be underlined here is the utter failure of Central and state governments to support women like Kausalya. In September 2017, the office of the inspector general of registration, Tamil Nadu, issued an ‘internal circular’ requiring parental consent for the registration of marriages under the Hindu Marriage Act!27 This means that inter-caste couples getting married and then wanting to register their marriages will not be able to do so if the wife’s parents refused consent. Such a circular shows that the government of Tamil Nadu—a state where ruling parties pay lip service to Periyar while enforcing ideas he fought all his life—is complicit in honour crimes and anti-Dalit violence.

  Daughters Will Fight!

  In the ‘Beti Bachao’ narrative, the daughter is passive, and it is for benign patriarchs—her parents, the government—to rescue her. The active verb ‘bachao’ (rescue) is not for the daughter: it can be appropriated by the government and by the violent caste and communal outfits alike.

  When I think of daughters like Shalu, Hadiya and Kausalya, I think the slogan we need to nurture is ‘Ladegi Beti’—daughters will fight! We need to support and nurture the active courage of our daughters.

  Neelam Katara, whose son Nitish was killed by brothers of his girlfriend Bharti Yadav, spoke once of her disappointment in Bharti’s ‘weakness’. After the murder, Bharti had immediately reached out to Nitish’s brother to tell him that she feared her brothers had killed Nitish, but later recanted. In court, she denied being in love with Nitish—though she did betray emotion when faced with the letters and cards she admitted sending him. Neelam was saddened by Bharti’s conduct:

  She couldn’t deny the relationship at that point of time but she said that whatever was there between Nitish and her was just friendship. The brothers didn’t know about it. She also said that her brothers were very loving and caring people who could never have done anything like that.28

  I believe that every woman has both a Divya and a Kausalya, a Bharti and a Hadiya inside her. What can we, as a society, do to strengthen the courage and autonomy of our daughters and sisters? What can we do to encourage parents to feel pride rather than shame in such courageous daughte
rs? Divya’s and Kausalya’s parents were taunted by casteists for having ‘lost’ runaway daughters to Dalit men—to acknowledge this is not to absolve parents of honour crimes, but to ask what we can do to create a supportive community for parents whose daughters defy caste and patriarchy. What can we do to resist the political forces who bake their political rotis by fanning up the fire of caste patriarchy?

  We need to do more than respond after an ‘honour killing’—wherever we live, we need to create networks to support inter-caste, interfaith and same-sex relationships. We need to hold our governments accountable to defending the freedom of women and the safety of couples in such relationships. We need the quiet people—even if this is a quiet minority—who are anti-caste and anti-patriarchy to stand up, shout out to each other and be counted.

  4

  ‘Empowering’

  Women?

  Most of us imagine that the Government of India is spending taxpayers’ money and designing policies that are intended to empower women. We assume that this empowerment has not happened yet because Indian society and culture is just too set in its ways. So, ‘society’ and ‘culture’ get the blame, while our rulers say, ‘Hey, we’re trying, you should support us in our efforts!’ The same goes for campaigns run by various international funding agencies.

  In this chapter, I invite you to take a closer look at the feel-good slogans of campaigns by governments and contrast them with the slogans and goals of feminist campaigns and movements.

  Beti Bachao: with Conditions Attached

  In January 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (Save and Educate Daughters) scheme. The main goal of this scheme was to counter sex-selective abortions and improve the child sex ratio.

  On 3 April 2018, replying to a question in the Rajya Sabha, the then minister of state for health and family welfare Anupriya Patel presented data showing that the sex ratio at birth, which was 906 in 2012–14, had dropped to 900 in 2013–15 and further to 898 in 2014–16.

  There are, of course, many reasons for why a campaign might be ineffective: not least being the lack of political will of the governments to enforce the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PCPNDT) Act 1994. The then women and child development minister Maneka Gandhi had courted controversy by suggesting that child sex determination during pregnancy be made compulsory, so that it is not doctors but the pregnant women who are surveilled and held responsible for the safety of female foetuses.1 This, of course, is a travesty of women’s rights over their own bodies and choices. Indian law recognizes that women have a right to abortion, which is why sex determination of the foetus by doctors is criminalized, to make sure that abortions are not sex-selective. The abysmal sex ratio in India is testimony to the fact that criminal doctors have continued with the business of prenatal sex determination. Maneka Gandhi’s proposal is one that the medical lobby has been pushing for a long time. And if it were ever implemented, it would result in a dystopia in which pregnant women are treated as baby-producing machines that are the property of the state, subjected to state surveillance and prevented from having abortions unless approved by the state!2

  What should also concern us is that the message of the Beti Bachao campaign itself is steeped in the same patriarchy that it claims to be fighting. And patriarchy is one area where ‘using fire to fight fire’ does not work.

  In June 2018, the Indian social media saw a photograph of a mural against sex selection on a wall in Haryana. The image showed a little girl, with her head covered, rolling out rotis, with the slogan ‘Kaise khaoge unke haath ki rotiya, jab paida hone nahi doge betiyan?’ (Who will make rotis for you if you won’t let daughters be born?). The Haryana government got considerable criticism online for this mural. Other similar slogans abound in the Beti Bachao campaign, such as ‘Beti nahin bachaoge to bahu kahan se laoge’ (If you don’t save daughters, where will you get daughters-in-law?) and ‘Ma chahiye; behen chahiye; patni chahiye; to beti kyon nahin chahiye?’ (You want mothers, sisters, wives, then why don’t you want daughters?). This sounds like an appeal to common sense, but perhaps it is not effective in curbing sex selection because it is an appeal to a patriarchal common sense. Should we be asked to appreciate daughters only as performers of domestic chores? Is a daughter’s right to be born and cherished dependent on her role as a future mother/daughter/sister/daughter-in-law/wife to men?

  In support of Beti Bachao, the prime minister famously endorsed the Selfie with Daughter campaign—launched by Sunil Jaglan, who was, in July 2015, the sarpanch of the Bibipur panchayat in Haryana—on his Mann Ki Baat radio show, urging fathers to show pride in their daughters by sharing selfies with their daughters on social media.

  Selfie with Daughter began with Jaglan’s involvement in the Avivahit Purush Sangathan (the Unmarried Men’s Organization) in Haryana.3 A woman must justify her birth by making herself available as a willing wife/daughter-in-law, who will cook, clean, give birth to and care for children. But men feel entitled to wives who will serve them and bear them kids.

  Nothing drives home the utter arrogance of such patriarchal entitlement more starkly than the phenomenon of bride purchase. Jaglan complained that the men of Haryana, faced with a drought of daughters, are forced to buy wives from other states: ‘A couple of months ago, a family had purchased a bride from Uttarakhand. She ran away. They bought another one, she too ran away.’4 Jaglan implies that wives born and trained in the correct caste in Haryana and acquired in the traditional way rather than by cash purchase will not have the option of running away. After all, where would Haryana’s ‘own’ women run to?

  The Avivahit Purush Sangathan had demanded that politicians take steps to remedy the situation and ensure a supply of brides, raising the slogan ‘Bahu dilao, vote pao’ (Give us brides, get our votes). In response to such campaigns, BJP leader O.P. Dhankar had promised good brides from Bihar:

  Making the BJP strong also means that those youths in many villages who are roaming without brides will get one . . . I told them that Sushil Modi [senior BJP leader in Bihar] is a good friend of mine. We will ensure a compatible match and do away with the practice of bringing brides from any other place.5

  Many defend such campaigns, arguing for pragmatism. People are going to continue to be patriarchal, they say so one has to appeal to their patriarchal interests to allow girls to be born. If individual patriarchal families want to avoid girls, perhaps they can be induced to allowing girls to be born in the collective interest of patriarchal society, or so the argument goes. The problem is that as long as women are devalued and denied personhood and equality, patriarchy is not particularly insecure. Brides are ‘in short supply’ in Haryana, but this shortage can be made good by importing from other states. As long as daughters in, say, Bihar, continue to be treated as commodities rather than persons, families will sell daughters to their counterparts in Haryana. Just as migrant labour goes from poorer to richer regions, purchased wives, too, tend to go from poorer to richer states.6 From a pragmatic perspective, it could well be argued that a shortage of women in Haryana turns a daughter from liability to asset in Bihar, since she goes from being a ‘burden’ to an asset that can be sold. Is that really true? Are daughters accorded more respect when they become a saleable commodity rather than a burden that one can be rid of only by paying dowry?

  The problem with many of the campaigns against sex selection is that they buy into the patriarchal excuse that families see daughters as a burden (because of dowry) and so wish to avoid having them. The thing is, families do not need to be reminded of the ‘uses’ of women as wives, mothers, daughters-in-law and so on—they already know this full well. The state and families both recognize the ‘worth’ and ‘value’ of women as providers of domestic services and care work. There is no one who would fail to pay lip service to the nurturing roles of women—why does sex selection persist nevertheless? Why does the state go soft on sex determination by the medical industry?

  At its core, t
he question is, can we fight sex-selective abortion or any other form of gender discrimination and violence by appeasing patriarchy? By pandering to men’s sense of patriarchal entitlement to wives and their domestic and sexual services? Or can change come only by boldly asserting the rights, equality and personhood of women and sexual and gender minorities, and fighting patriarchy lock, stock and barrel?

  Remember, Jaglan’s Haryana is where ‘honour killings’ are rampant. Nakul Sawhney’s documentary Izzatnagari ki Asabhya Betiyan (Immoral Daughters in the Land of Honour) speaks to leaders of the dominant Jat khaps, who defend their right to violently or coercively regulate sexuality and marriage, saying: ‘Some daughters who are immoral/uncivilized, like animals, try to corrupt the rest by demanding that they should be allowed to live their life without restrictions.’ Does Beti Bachao really challenge such forces? Or are the khaps and the Beti Bachao campaign united in their paternalism that can be alternatively benign and violent, depending on the daughters’ obedience or disobedience? Both the khaps and the Beti Bachao campaign assume that parents have a right to decide, based on their assessment of a daughter’s moral worth and potential role as mother/wife/daughter-in-law, whether or not she has the right to exist. Such paternalism asks fathers/parents to take pride in daughters, recognizing that these are the future daughters-in-law, wives and mothers. But the very same paternalism wields the power to order the killing of disobedient daughters: those who decide to break caste or community barriers to marry, who are therefore unavailable to serve as wives for the ‘avivahit purush’ (unmarried men) of the caste and community of their birth.