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  Swachhata or Sexism?

  The Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India Campaign) and its predecessor, the United Progressive Alliance’s (UPA’s) Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan against open defecation, rely heavily on shaming tactics accompanied by emotional appeals to protect women’s ‘honour’, ‘modesty’ and ‘safety’. Women and girls, we are told, are especially invested in building toilets at home, even selling mangalsutras and jewellery to do so, to protect them from the ‘shame’ and danger of open defecation. Swachh Bharat has even been described as India’s ‘biggest women’s movement at the moment’.7

  In his Independence Day speech in 2014, Prime Minister Modi said, ‘Has it ever pained us that our mothers and sisters have to defecate in the open? Isn’t the dignity of women our collective responsibility?’ A Swachh Bharat advertisement prepared in collaboration with Astral Pipes shows women publicly shaming men of the village who are defecating in the open, saying that open defecation puts their honour and safety at risk.8

  A wall graffiti in UP says ‘Bahu betiyan door na jayen, ghar mein hi shauchalay banvayen’ (Daughters-in-law, daughters should not go far, construct a toilet in your house). A Swachh Bharat banner in Rajasthan has a daughter asking her mother, ‘Ma, ghar mein ghoonghat tera saathi, phir kyon shauch khule mein jaati?’ (Mother, your veil is your companion in your home, so why do you defecate in the open?).9 The Swachh Bharat campaign with Amitabh Bachchan as its brand ambassador has an advertisement10 with an image of women accompanied by the messages: ‘Inki izzat ke liye darwaza bandh’ (Close the door for their honour) and ‘Jab ghar mein shauchalay banvayenge, tab ghar ki auraton ko door nahin jana padega, unhen takleef nahin hogi aur aapka man bhi halka hoga’ (When you make a toilet in your home, the women of your home won’t have to go far, they won’t face any trouble and your mind, too, will be lighter).

  In one promotional video, Nirmal Bharat brand ambassador actress Vidya Balan is seen at a wedding where a mother-in-law is shown to be disapproving of the bride who raises her veil to take a sip of water. Soon after, the bride whispers to Balan that she needs to go to the toilet. When Balan asks where the toilet is, the mother-in-law replies there isn’t one, everyone goes to the field. Balan then tells the bride, ‘Bahu, phir to tum ghoonghat khol hi do’ (Daughter-in-law, then you might as well take off your veil), adding to the mother-in-law, ‘You don’t like your daughter-in-law to remove her veil even for a moment, and at the same time you want her to go in the open?’11

  The Madhya Pradesh government in 2013 titled its campaign to end open defecation ‘Maryada Abhiyan’.12 The word ‘maryada’ in Hindi signifies women’s sense of dignity and/or womanly shame, and a campaign booklet issued by the state government harps on the theme of how open defecation threatens women’s dignity and puts women in danger of sexual harassment.

  A Swachh Bharat poster13 in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, has an image of a man presenting a woman he has abducted to a villainous dacoit chief, saying, ‘Here boss, I’ve brought this beautiful lote-wali (bearer of a mug of water) from the field for you’, while the chief replies that today will be a day for rape.

  There are four serious problems with the projection of such a message: first, it targets women alone instead of educating the whole community to give up open defecation; second, it claims to promote women’s safety while, in fact, the campaign makes women less safe; third, it promotes patriarchal values of ‘honour’; and fourth, it implicitly promotes victim-blaming for sexual violence. Let us take a closer look at these four problems.

  First: open defecation is a life-threatening public-health crisis, that can’t be solved by women alone giving it up. Pegging the campaign on toilets for women carries the message that toilets are for women alone and not for men. If men continue to defecate in the open, the life-threatening health problem, of course, remains.

  Second, the Swachh Bharat campaign itself makes women vulnerable to sexual violence, and makes women, children, the elderly and the poor unsafe. It promotes tactics of public shaming by vigilante groups set up by the district administration. These vigilantes use whistling or clapping, naming and shaming, as tactics to publicly humiliate open defecators. Groups of women follow men and groups of men follow women when they are on their way to the fields. They grab the lotas and shout slogans. They take photos and videos of people defecating and threaten to make their names and their images/videos public. The problem is, such acts themselves constitute violence.

  Section 354 of the Indian Penal Code defines the crime of voyeurism clearly. A man watching or capturing the image of a woman while she is engaging in a private act, and sharing or threatening to share such images publicly is voyeurism—a sexual crime against women. It’s ironical that the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan tries to instil fear in women that open defecation will expose them to voyeurism and sexual violence—and then unleashes government-sponsored voyeurism and violence on them! The Maryada Abhiyan booklet asks people to imagine a young woman defecating in the open and being watched by voyeuristic men. It even carries a voyeuristic drawing to this effect. It asks ‘sanitation monitoring committees’ (which are basically vigilante mobs) to patrol villages, whistle at people defecating in the open, and take photographs and videos of open defecators ‘with the threat and possibility that the photos might be displayed or the videos shown’. The district administration of then Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje’s own constituency of Jhalawar in June 2016 asked teachers to conduct similar patrols and take photos and videos of open defecators.14 The consequence of such patrols can be frightening.

  When vigilante groups are emboldened to indulge in violence publicly, they can easily metamorphose into lynch mobs—especially in a political climate of impunity15 for mobs that lynch Muslims. In July 2017, in Pratapgarh, Rajasthan, women of the Bagwasa basti were out in the open in the early morning when male government officials arrived to photograph and videograph them. Comrade Zafar Hussein, an activist of the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist)—CPI(ML)—tried to stop them. He pointed out that the women, and he himself, had submitted memorandums and led delegations seeking funds from the government to build individual and community toilets, and ensure proper water and cleaning facilities for such toilets. When he received these memoranda, the elected chairman of the municipality—a BJP leader—tore up their memorandum and told them not to bother getting toilets made because the local administration was planning to evict the entire colony. There is a single community toilet with ten commodes in Bagwasa basti—which houses 3000 residents—which has no water, where the flushes do not work and, consequently, the commodes are clogged and unusable.16

  Comrade Zafar paid with his life for his intervention. The Swachh campaigners lynched him to death. This is not the only instance of violence by the ‘sanitation-monitoring’ mobs.

  An elderly man in Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh, in December 2016, for example, was beaten by civic body authorities and forced to clean his faeces with his hands, and a video of the whole degrading scene was shared by Ujjain Municipal Corporation (UMC) deputy commissioner Sunil Shah in a WhatsApp group.17

  In Maharajpur village in Rajnandgaon district of Chhattisgarh in October 2016, Vipin Sahu was dragged out of his home, beaten and stabbed to death by a mob in front of the whole village because he had delayed construction of a toilet in his home and sought more time to do so.18

  In August 2017, two children fleeing an early-morning Swachh Bharat patrol in Chenari village of Rohtas district, Bihar, jumped into a flooded river, Kudra, to escape. They were presumed drowned. But they survived, holding on to reeds for a couple of hours before being found and rescued by villagers. Little children from the poorest and most deprived communities are being subjected to such terror and danger by a government-backed patrol, in the name of curbing open defecation!19

  Such tactics prevailed in the UPA-era Nirmal Bharat campaign too. A report in the Guardian details the coercive tactics adopted by government officials in Karnataka to curb open defecation:

  A local of
ficial proudly testified to the extremes of the coercion. He had personally locked up houses when people were out defecating, forcing them to come to his office and sign a contract to build a toilet before he would give them the keys. Another time, he had collected a woman’s faeces and dumped them on her kitchen table.20

  But the Modi government’s Swachh Bharat mission differs from the UPA-era campaign in that it depends on neighbourhood vigilante groups at least as much as, if not more than, on government officials. The mission has been described approvingly as a success story for ‘nudge economics’, i.e. policies that ‘nudge’ people gently towards behavioural change.21 The NITI Aayog (a government think tank) along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, had set up a ‘nudge unit’ to push campaigns such as Beti Bachao and Swachh Bharat.22 The Gates Foundation even awarded Narendra Modi for the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. Critics raising human rights violations have pointed out that access to a clean toilet cannot ‘outweigh the violence and persecution (people) may face in the rest of their lives’.23 Moreover, as we have seen in the instances cited above, the campaign did not gently ‘nudge’ people to change their practices: it deployed patriarchal, communal and class- or caste-based violence and persecution to shame and coerce people.

  The third problem with the Swachh Bharat messaging is that it ties toilets to patriarchal notions of ‘ghoonghat’ (veil) and ‘honour’. We saw in the first chapter how women’s confinement in the four walls of the home is itself a form of violence and discrimination. Swachh Bharat, in the name of linking toilets to women’s ‘empowerment’ and ‘dignity’, actually does exactly the opposite, suggesting that toilets in the home are needed to confine women inside homes. The Amitabh Bachchan ‘Shut the Door’ advertisement, for instance, seeks to tell men that they can feel reassured if their womenfolk do not have to ‘go far’ to defecate! So it is addressing an anxiety men feel about womenfolk ‘going far’. Is this anxiety shared by women? At a meeting of my organization, the All India Progressive Women’s Association (AIPWA), a comrade from Patna told us about her experience at a village in rural Bihar. As women got ready in the early mornings and late evenings to go out en masse to relieve themselves, she asked them if they wouldn’t prefer to have toilets in their homes. They scoffed: ‘Didi, why give them (our men and in-laws) another reason to keep us captive indoors?! This is our only excuse to get some fresh air, take a walk together and speak to friends without someone overhearing us! We make the most of it, dragging out the outings as long as possible.’

  The Sanitation Quality Use Access and Trends (or SQUAT) survey 2014 found that many women, in fact, cherished open defecation because it offered an opportunity to go out of the house: ‘A young daughter-in-law in Haryana, whose household owns a latrine, explained that: the reason that [I and my sisters-in-law] go outside [to defecate] is that we get to wander a bit . . . you know, we live cooped up inside.’24

  The fourth problem is that the campaign’s patriarchal messaging implicitly legitimizes victim-blaming. The survey found that it was a myth that open defecation increases the danger of sexual violence, noting that:

  Of 1046 women interviewed by the SQUAT survey, 4.3 per cent told us that while going to defecate, they had been the victim of someone attempting to molest them. Of the same group, 7.6 per cent reported that this had happened to them while going to the market . . . The point is that it is not a serious policy response to these facts to suggest that women should stop going to markets.25

  In the light of these facts, take a fresh look at the poster from Muzaffarpur, Bihar, that used scaremongering about rape as an argument for toilets. With such posters, victim-blaming gets a ‘Swachh’ disguise, since it is women’s presence in public spaces outside the home that is being blamed for rape and crime. Even if women stop defecating in the fields and start using toilets, can’t they even go safely for a walk in the fresh air? If they are molested or raped, will the government blame them for going out walking?

  Shilpa Phadke, one of the authors of the influential book Why Loiter?,26 which is about the need for campaigns against sexual violence to assert women’s right to ‘loiter’ in public spaces without reason, writes of the Swachh Bharat campaign:

  That isn’t to say that the call for toilets inside the home isn’t a good thing. It will certainly make women significantly more comfortable. But the movement conveniently dovetails with ideologies that equate honour and dignity with women not being seen outside. Keeping women in the home also prevents their meeting ‘unsuitable’ men of different castes . . . My collaborative research based in Mumbai has focused on the value of public toilets as a means of enhancing women’s access to public space. A number of recent reports mentioned that girls use toilets at school during terms but that those facilities are closed during vacations, hence their need to use the fields. School toilets hold the key to some transformation: The provision of public toilets (or community toilets, as they are often called) rather than private ones might solve the problems of health without restricting women to the home.27

  How willing is the government to take on board feminist criticisms of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan messaging? The Swachh Bharat Mission (Gramin) of the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation issued a circular in April 2017, titled ‘Guidelines on Gender Issues in Sanitation’. This circular noted that:

  Behaviour-change messaging in SBM-G often includes subjects like ‘shame and dignity of women’. While these may be useful for entry-point messaging, they carry risks of lack of ownership by men and the reinforcing of gender-stereotypes (like women should not step out of the house, men as custodians of women’s dignity, etc). The . . . messaging should, therefore, be gender-sensitive and targeted at both men and women, particularly focusing on men who are often the primary decision-makers in rural households where household expenditure is involved.

  This circular is no doubt a step in the right direction. But what is conspicuously absent from the guidelines is any prohibition of the use of gendered shaming and bullying tactics and voyeuristic violence by early-morning patrols. The Bagwasa incident, where Comrade Zafar was killed for trying to stop patrols from taking photos and videos of women in Rajasthan, happened in July 2017, months after this circular was issued. It did nothing to deter the use of sexual violence to shame women for defecating in the open. All over rural India, the patriarchal messaging continues to abound. The Bihar poster using the bogey of rape, for instance, was seen in December 2017—long after these guidelines were issued by the Central government to all states. Perhaps this is because the circular itself suggests that the patriarchal messaging appealing to notions of feminine ‘shame and honour’ are ‘useful for entry-point messaging’ and not harmful in themselves. They are critiqued primarily for excluding men from the messages against open defecation, not for harming the freedom and autonomy of women.

  The most important question is, why does the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan refuse to address the elephant in the room: caste? The SQUAT survey found that caste prejudices and taboos, not poverty, was the main factor deterring Indians from using small-pit toilets. Its researchers observe that 70 per cent of rural households in India do not have a toilet or a latrine, while ‘in rural sub-Saharan Africa, where people are, on average, poorer, less educated, and less likely to have access to an improved water source than people in rural India, only about 35 per cent of people defecate in the open without a toilet or latrine. In rural Bangladesh, only 5 per cent of people defecate in the open.’28

  Indians across social sections do not like using the small twin-pit latrines that have helped eradicate open defecation in poor countries the world over, because these latrines require periodic manual pit-emptying—a practice associated with manual scavenging, associated with Dalits and consequently considered degrading and polluting. Non-Dalits will not empty the pits, and Dalits no longer want to be employed to do such labour. If affordable twin-pit latrines are constructed, one of the pits can be allowed to decompose into compost while the other is in use—emptying de
composed waste is not manual scavenging. But the SQUAT survey found that it still carried the social stigma associated with degrading labour, and was thus shunned.

  Remember, caste prejudices related to sanitation are by no means limited to rural, ‘backward’ Indians. People who are privileged enough to have flush toilets in their homes also share those prejudices, as displayed in the fact that most of them would not allow workers from oppressed castes who clean their toilets to eat or drink out of their utensils.29

  The big, unspoken question with regard to community toilets and individual pit latrines alike is, who will clean the toilets? Campaigns like the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan do not address this question because the answer will require them to confront the reality of manual scavenging that Dalit sanitation workers are forced to perform.

  If the Swachh Bharat campaigns ditched their obsession with patriarchal notions and coercive vigilante or lynch-mob tactics, and instead concentrated on democratic dialogue with people about caste, sanitation and health, they might have generated better results.

  Population Control

  In his Independence Day speech in 2019, Prime Minister Modi announced a ‘population control’ campaign projecting small families as ‘patriotic’. Like the Beti Bachao and Swachh Bharat campaigns, this campaign, too, is ostensibly aimed at ‘nudging’ people to modify their social behaviour.

  In his speech, Modi called for a campaign against what he called ‘uncontrolled population growth’. The campaign, he said, would focus on projecting parents with small families as responsible and patriotic. He said, ‘Before a child arrives in our family, we should think—have I prepared myself to fulfil the needs of the child? Or will I leave it dependent on society?’30 This rhetoric shifts responsibility for the care (education, health, food and shelter) of children from the State and government to the parents. Deprivation is framed as parental neglect and irresponsibility. The ideology of ‘population control’ has always implied that it is poor families and poor nations that are expected to reproduce less. The fact is that population is not responsible for poverty. Wealth is not innocent of poverty. Poverty is produced by a system that exploits the poor to reward the rich. Poverty of nations is linked to a violent history of colonialism, where these nations were plundered and impoverished.