Now before you assume I speak of the sexual, let me assure you I am merely referring  to the way she sat. Her wide thighs spread apart, printed cotton dresses hiked up beyond the knees, tapping her finger to keep time with the keys, Miss Printer cared a whit for the proprieties of womanhood. If one was writing their lessons at ground level, her mammoth bloomers would greet anyone who bothered to stare (and I was witness to many a curious young boy who did). Back home, lessons in ‘ladylike behavior’ weren’t complete without a reference to the disgrace that was Miss Printer and how a future of single misery awaited me if I didn’t rein in my knees.

Miss Printer has been dead 16 years. A new century has rolled in. At 31, I’m a girl no more and the ‘lady’ tag my grandma worked so zealously on is a grey area. I don whatever garb I please, jeans and pants taking preference over traditional wear. My legs are long and take up space and I don’t usually give a thought to how I sit (I’m sure a star called Nana is cringing somewhere up in the heavens) but occasionally, those words come back to chant in my ears and I find myself hurriedly clicking knees together, adjusting my skirt and feeling just the tiniest bit guilty for letting my ‘good girl’ guard down.

Such is conditioning. And I’m sure it’s been inflicted on many of you too. Do share. I’m curious to know how many women experienced something similar and whether men were at the receiving end of something comparable. Good girl or otherwise, this is one legacy I hope not to perpetuate. The world can do with one less pair of knees posing as Siamese twins.

IF YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY devoured every one of the three books in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, you have at least heard of it: the story of the girl with the dragon tattoo who plays with fire or kicks the hornet’s nest. She is Lisbeth Salander, abused child, accused adult and unlikely crusader along with Mikael Blomkvist of the magazine, Millennium.

Over three books, the story is one of a giant cover-up to protect a secret organisation within Swedish intelligence. It is about the blind eye that is turned upon a mafia dealing in, among other things, human trafficking; the involvement of those in power and the denial of a woman’s human rights just so that a long-forgotten secret can remain buried. The sub-text of the series – made clear through telling epigraphs to each section – is of violent crimes committed against women in the name of national security or in the interests of keeping up appearances. It is a tale in which the silence surrounding the crimes makes society complicit in them.

The Millennium Trilogy is fiction. There are protagonists whose lives align with the investigations they conduct with varying degrees of commitment and interest. They can stand against the State because it is in their interest to have the truth brought out into the light and written about. And because it is fiction, people will listen and are capable of examining their society afresh in light of the new facts they are shown. Justice is possible in crime fiction as it is often not in real life.

Consider now a story closer to home: Two women leave one morning and do not return. The older of the two is marr

ied to the brother of the younger. Because they live in a place where it is not safe to be out after dark, the man – husband of one and brother of another – calls up a search party to look for them. With the police, they search every place theyknow to until well after midnight but they don’t find the two women. The police promise to resume early in the morning. At 5.30 the family begins to search again and, an hour later, are joined by the police. Almost immediately,a policeman finds the bodies of the two women in a shallow naala – one woman’s body has drifted further downstream

, but they are both there. The naala is in a well-guarded area, surrounded by manned and alert checkposts of various kinds. Nobody saw these women pass the previous day, and yet there their bodies are this morning, in a place the search party had checked earlier.

The police do what they do well: ruin the scene of crime by fishing the bodies out before photographing them as found, without cordoning the place off or collecting evidence from the surrounding area. The bodies are sent for two kinds of post-mortem: in one, a lung flotation test shows that death was not caused by drowning; the other post-mortem shows injuries and contusions to the faces; it also includes vaginal swabs that could have shown that the women had been raped.

Why the doubt? Either they had been raped or they had not. Surely forensic science has advanced even in India to prove rape without the shadow of a doubt?

In the days and months that follow, the doctors who did the post-mortem are either discredited or go back on their earlier testimonies; witnesses who say they heard women shouting from inside an army vehicle retract their statements. The family and elders of the place form an association to protest the course of the investigation.

Policemen are suspended; there are commissions and investigating teams; bails are applied for and granted; the bodies of the women are buried, exhumed months later and buried again. There is a lot of press, a lot of uproar. There are bandhs. Finally the investigation is handed over to the CBI.

Yes, this is Shopian. On the 14th of December the CBI filed its report in the J&K High Court, and not surprisingly, it said the women drowned to death in the naala they were found in. If their report contains answers to all the questions that people have been asking since May this year, we do not know it.

Independently of the CBI, in the knowledge that its report will say what it does, a group of women called the Independent Women’s Initiative for Justice went to Shopian to talk to the people concerned and came back with their own report, which they released days before the CBI report came out. Download the full report from here.

I was sent the report by a friend, with whom I was discussing this a few days ago, after reading a news report in the Hindu. He said, “There was a word used to sum it up: impunity. It’s not in the article.”

No, it’s not a word newspapers use, but it is one we are getting used to inferring in the context of any conflict.

In the first book of the Millennium Trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Blomkvist explains to Salander why Harriet Vanger ran away to Australia. Salander is angry and says, “If she had done something in 1966, Martin Vanger couldn’t have kept killing and raping for thirty-seven years.”

Among all the other troubles that have beset Kashmir for the last two decades, the ones that are least spoken about are the ones that the women have to bear: a proxy war that is fought through them and their bodies and the consequent loss of their liberty, their right to education, work and free movement when and where they please; their right, in fact, to a life lived without fear.

Inaction allows criminals to continue committing crimes with impunity: we know this; but we accept it more readily in fiction than in real life. This could be because in fiction we know someone else will take up the mantle of crusader on our behalf and justice will be done. Outside the pages of a book, it is never clear how an individual is to proceed and what, if anything, the outcome of any action will be.

Shopian is not Mangalore – we can achieve nothing, especially not ridicule, by sending anyone pink chaddis. What it could be is a test of our empathy and imagination, our ability to see ourselves in the women of Shopian and take action upon it because to remain silent would be to allow more such crimes to take place.

***

Sridala Swami’s poetry has appeared in various journals including Chandrabhaga, The Little Magazine, New Quest, Wasafiri, Asian Cha and the Creative Writing Issue of The South Asian Review (28:3, 2007). Her work also features in The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (ed. Jeet Thayil, UK: Bloodaxe, 2008) and in Not A Muse Anthology (ed. Katie Rogers and Viki Holmes, Hong Kong: Haven Books, 2009). Her first collection of poems, A Reluctant Survivor, published by The Sahitya Akademi in June 2007 and reprinted in 2008, was short-listed for The Shakti Bhatt First Book Award in 2008. She has written three books for very young children, which were published by Pratham in 2009. Swami’s photographs, Posting the Light: Dispatches from Hamburg, was exhibited at Kalakriti Art Gallery, Hyderabad, in November 2009. She lives in Hyderabad, India. She blogs at Spaniard in the Works.

EARLIER THIS MONTH, the ‘Staying Alive: Third Monitoring and Evaluation Report 09’ on the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 (PWDVA) was released in Delhi. The report tracks the implementation of the Act for the third year in a row and has become a way to document jurisprudential development of the law and create a monitoring system. Findings are shared at a national conference annually at which civil society organisations can question state officials and examine progress. This has inadvertently come to operate as a social audit. The naming and shaming as well as applauding and deriding of state departments in a public forum fosters accountability and drives state governments to take necessary action. For example, this year, Minister for Law and Justice M. Veerappa Moily recognised the need for fast-track courts to deal with cases of violence against women, easy availability of free legal aid and prioritisation of women’s cases in courts.

This annual report is authored by Lawyers Collective – Women’s Rights Initiative (LWCRI) and the International Centre for Research on Women (ICRW) in collaboration with the National Commission for Women (NCW) and supported by the UN Trust Fund to End Violence Against Women. Three states were studied this year: Delhi, Maharashtra and Rajasthan. A survey conducted in Delhi and Rajasthan with police and protection officers (POs) assessed their knowledge of the law, the practices they followed and attitudes towards the PWDVA and women. Data was gathered from the judiciary and women who had used the law were contacted to understand their experiences and expectations.

Questions centered around some of the key provisions of the PWDVA such as: categories of women the law protects (i.e. the applicant), who can the woman file the case against (i.e. the respondent), what acts qualify as domestic violence, what is the objective of counseling under the PWDVA, and the right to residence. For attitudinal assessment, several questions and statements were posed to gauge their attitude and gender bias, such as “Domestic Violence is a family affair”; “Women before filing a complaint of domestic violence should consider how that would affect their children”; “Women deserve to be beaten in certain situations”.

This assessment police exposed possible barriers or facilitators in women’s access to the law. It also tried to evaluate if the law is serving its normative function by transforming societal norms and internalising the unacceptability of violence against women in the private sphere.

The PWDVA in many ways is a path-breaking law, not merely because it is an independent civil law that identifies violence against women in the shared household as ‘domestic violence’, but also because it provides women the right to reside in the shared household and protects women in non-matrimonial relationships. The right to reside in the shared household irrespective of any right, title or interest in the property safeguards women from dispossession. It also challenges the moral assumptions infused in other Indian laws by protecting women in non-marital relationships. The law provides protection, maintenance, residence, compensation and custody orders to the woman who has so far been relegated to the status of a ‘mistress’ with little or no rights, without passing judgment or denying her merely because she falls outside the ‘morally acceptable’ institution of marriage. The PWDVA also goes beyond marital relationships. It protects mothers, sisters, daughters, widows and women who are in relationships in the nature of marriage. The objective of recognising relationships in the nature of marriage was to offer protection to women whose ‘marriages’ are not valid in law or fail to meet the requirements of a legally valid marriage.

The study captured the knowledge and acceptability of some of these key provisions. For instance, a certain percentage of POs in Delhi and Rajasthan felt that women in live-in-relationships, bigamous and fraudulent marriages should not be provided protection under the Act. When their knowledge on what acts come under the definition of domestic violence was tested, they recognised most acts of physical, verbal, emotional and economic violence but there was ambiguity surrounding forced sex in marital relationships.

The report also examined how well participants understand the objective and spirit of the legislation by asking questions about the motive of counseling. The purpose of counseling under the Act is to build the confidence of the woman and counsel the man to stop violence, as opposed to the common, incorrect perception of ‘saving families’. It was found that some percentage of the police in Delhi and Rajasthan saw counseling as a way of striking a compromise between couples. This perception trivialises the severity of domestic violence and reestablishes the need for training and sensitisation of key contact agencies such as the POs and the police. The orders from Gujarat show that in many cases, parties have reached a ‘compromise’ or ‘settled the matter’. Whether this settling happened with the consent of the woman or because she was pressurised ‘to save the family’ is not known.

Similarly, the recognition of sexual abuse as domestic violence in relationships, especially in marriages, still needs to gain acceptance. Sex as a conjugal right of the man is a widely accepted patriarchal view. The study revealed that knowledge on the subject was low among participants and sexual abuse was alleged in few orders. The inclusion of sexual abuse in the Act which includes sex without consent is a breakthrough in Indian law. (Indian law did not recognise marital rape.)

This study will hopefully become an effective model to ensure implementation of the law and determine what areas need attention in sensitisation programs. Regular audit of the law and state functionaries influence states to adopt novel methods for better implementation and promote transparency and accountability through public forums.

Please refer to the report for a detailed discussion on the data gathered this year.

***

Sonal Makhija is a Bangalore-based lawyer and legal consultant. Her areas of interest are gender, human rights and anthropology of law.

The world premiere of Eve Ensler’s ‘I Am An Emotional Creature’ was some things expected and many not. It began regularly enough, with the usual spine-tingling statistics on female abuse, neglect and violations. Essayed as a relentless spiral of separate pieces without an intermission, the portrayals of women from around the world shifted from mediocre to spectacular as the play progressed. Moments of intense pain in “Free Barbie” were interspersed with a more defiant stance in “The Refusers” and stories of prostitution in Eastern Europe, military sex slaves in Ghana, bulimia in North America, child labor in China and forced cosmetic surgery in Iran tumbled out unapologetically, amidst joyous expressions of dance and womanhood. Woman cried, laughed, screamed, spoke, vented, explained, twirled and chanted their right to be emotional creatures and engage in the feminine act of dance as a form of expression.

Which left me wondering if this wasn’t stereotyping my gender just as much as any other descriptor. Are all women truly emotional creatures? More than men? Do we feel more intensely? Need to express more urgently? Or are we as much victim to this erroneous belief as to the acts perpetrated on us worldwide? Do all women desire to dance? Is feminine expression primarily manifested through physical acts? I, for one, certainly feel no need to plunge into a waltz each time I absolutely must say what I feel.  I am born of a mother who clicks her tongue at being “too emotional” and believes it clouds practicality and better judgement. My friends are women who rarely cry, even when they have much reason to. Are performance and feeling necessarily the domain of the XX? Could we not be harming ourselves by tarring all women across the world with the same brush and insinuating that a woman’s natural response to a situation is based on her feelings first and intellect later, if at all?

I could empathize with individual tales but not with the premise. And while I wish women power to overcome their tormentors, human and situational, I also hope that they strive to stand apart from the cluster of characteristics that haphazardly—and often thoughtlessly—define their gender.

~~~

To view a short clip about the play, go here.

Miscarriage

A curtain of rain separates
My verandah from the hospital.
On any other day a hundred
Silent patients would pass through
The OP clinic. Each of them
Allowing us doctors to listen
Feel, touch and question them.
The warmth of their fever would
Make us uncomfortably hot.

Today the air is chilled downpour wet.
Water roars in the stony river.
Five nurses, Gi and I sloshed
Through muddy puddles to witness
Our stream in full spate.
Only one desperate couple managed
To make it on the early bus.
Wanting an abortion.

***

M’s Betrayal

When the skin on the bottom of your feet
Burns. Burns really red hot.
It becomes hard and black. Like
Old cracked leather.
It makes a ‘tok tok tok’
Noise like a coconut shell. Dry.

Inside creamy pus waits patiently.
The doctor will soon quit tapping
the skin with his pen.
He will mumble instructions in Tamil.
Nurses will scurry. The woman will
Starve to avoid vomiting with the anaesthesia.

In the evening Dhanam Akka will
Crack open a beautiful glass ampoule.
With the deftness of experience she will
Pull ketamine into a plastic syringe.
M lies on the steel operating table
Softly moaning under her green blindfold.

Soon cold steel clasped in latex
clad fingers will pare through
dead skin. Patient pus will burst
forth and dribble into a plastic
kidney shaped tray. Raw red
flesh will make a shy debut.

Akka, will you promise not to tell
Anyone. Promise on your heart.
Promise on your head. Promise. Promise.
I didn’t fall into a cooking fire
because I fainted being two months pregnant.

I took some tablets because I didn’t
Want a second child right now.
Ten pills from the local doctor. They
They knocked me out and then
Then my husband came home drunk.

Promise you won’t tell anyone. Promise.
On your heart. Promise on your head.
He was in a murderous rage. He.
He tied me up and then he.
He stuffed a cloth in my mouth.

***

Lalit Narayan is a doctor who graduated from St. John’s Medical College, Bangalore in 2007 and then spent two years working at the Tribal Health Initiative, a unique hospital and community health programme staffed by members of the local Malavasi tribal community in the Dharmapuri district of Tamil Nadu. The poems are based on patients Lalit encountered during his work there. Lalit currently works at the Centre for Public Health and Equity in Bangalore. He blogs at bodypolitics.blogspot.com.

As the day of voting for the Assembly elections approaches, the political parties have been making their achievements and plans known to the voters of Maharashtra through their manifestos. With a lot at stake for the political parties in the fray, they are leaving no stone unturned to convince the electorate that it is their party alone who has the best intentions at heart for every section of society in Maharashtra.

The manifestos of the Congress Party-Nationalist Congress Party and the Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party do state the intentions of the parties to promote the cause of the Girl Child. They have promised to “invest” a certain amount in a fixed deposit for every female child born in Maharashtra, and Rs. 1.25 lakh and Rs. 1 lakh, has been promised by each party respectively, once the girl becomes a major. The parties have also promised free education for girls until graduation level.

The considerations given to the Girl Child are a positive step forward in securing the rightful place of a girl in society. What about the female child that does not even get a chance to be born or the girl child that does not get a chance to survive past the age of six because she is denied her right to nutrition, health and education? Who will speak up for her? She also has the right to be heard.

Census 2001 threw up a startling revelation – it showed an alarmingly skewed Sex Ratio at Birth (SRB) at the national level and in the state of Maharashtra, with Mumbai being one of the biggest offenders. In 2001 there were 927 girls for every 1000 boys in India within the age group of 0–6 and 917 girls for every 1000 boys in Maharashtra. In Mumbai there were 898 girls for every 1000 boys!

An analysis of the SRB data since 2001 to 2007 has been conducted by D. K. Mangal of UNFPA for Maharashtra based on the data published by the Office of the Registrar General of India. The report stated that the SRB in 2006 in India was 901 girls per 1000 boys, 871 girls for every 1000 boys in Maharashtra and 736 girls per 1000 boys in Mumbai. If Census 2001 threw up startling revelations, the data of 2006 shows that those in authority have done nothing to arrest the decreasing sex ratio in our country, state or city!

One of the main reasons for these shocking figures is the availability of technology to determine sex of the child before birth. The proliferation of Ultrasound Clinics and their misuse for determining the sex of the foetus has led to large scale elimination of the girl child. There is a clear co-relation between the number of clinics and the declining sex ratio in the offending Cities and States.

This is happening despite rising prosperity, despite the spread of education and despite a comprehensive law against sex selection. If the leaders of our state are seriously concerned in bringing about gender equality through the projects for the Girl Child they have mentioned in their manifestos, we ask them to start at the very beginning – give HER THE RIGHT TO BE BORN. 27 Lac crimes take place under the PCPNDT Act every year, 10 Lac pre-birth eliminations and the number of convictions – below 100!

For the effective implementation of The Pre-conception and Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act, it is time that the political parties give this commitment to the following action points:

1. Reconstitute the Advisory Boards as per the Law with representation of committed social activists and civil society representatives
2. Conduct social audit of documents received from sonography clinics between 2003-2008
3. Publish on appropriate websites data of USG machines sold by companies
4. Institute a special fast track court for PCPNDT cases at State level
5. Appoint a special prosecutor at state level
6. It is mandatory under Sec 23 of PCPNDT Act to prosecute the clinics found guilty of violating the law. It should be ensured that all such clinics are prosecuted as per the Law.
7. Demand for adequate financial and budgetary allocations for the implementation of the PCPNDT Act.

So far, there has been no political will to enforce the law due to the politician-doctor nexus. Let us hope that the new MLAs tackle this problem with seriousness, sincerity and vigour; and to begin with stop interfering in the strict implementation of the PCPNDT Act.

***

This is posted as a special contribution based on an email from Deborah Herbert. From time to time, we will feature such notices and announcements aimed at creating awareness on important issues.

Population First is an NGO focusing on the serious population and health issues facing India, looking at these from the perspective of women’s rights and social development. Laadli is a Girl Child Campaign initiated by Population First, supported by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), among others. ‘Celebrate her life’, the campaign theme, encapsulates the wider concern of the falling sex ratio, which is violence against women in general. Gender-based violence begins in the womb itself, leading to the elimination of the female foetus.

Population First wishes to highlight the lack of political will in strictly implementing The Pre-conception and Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act, and asks the political parties to give their commitment to tackle the problem of the decreasing sex ratio in Maharashtra.

Yesterday, I chanced upon a Polish/English movie, ‘Your Name is Justine’ that explores this subject using a focuslight on one young Polish woman’s ordeal as she is betrayed by her boyfriend and sold to a ruthless and brutal pimping gang in Germany. Mariola is held in captivity while her captors tell her that she is now “a piece”, and try to break her resistance through rape, beating and starvation. 

I confess I didn’t actually watch the entire movie. I couldn’t. Our Bollywood movies typically present rape scenes almost as a parody of the real act, but here, the physical and mental pain was visible and terrifying. I switched back and forth between channels every two minutes, unable to bear continuous viewing. One can only imagine the unbearable nature of an experience, where even its shadow is so vile.

Mariola is now given a new name, Justine. She can no longer speak her own language but must now negotiate in English and German. The rest of the movie is about the compromises she must make and the desperate attempts to retain her sanity and her sense of self. As if in a dream, she reminds herself that her name is Mariola and that she comes from Poland.

The movie ends unsatisfyingly, without the theatrical revenge or justice that a Hindi movie would have offered; yet, it is probably closer to reality. What was shocking was how many clients refuse to help her, even when they clearly realise that she is not a prostitute of her own volition. I had no idea that such prostitution rings were even present in first world countries. One must credit the film-makers for exploring such a subject and doing it without any gratuitous violence or nudity for the sake of titillation. Anna Ciesiak, a first-time actor gives a fine performance as Mariola – while at times, she appears as if on auto-pilot, the brutality of the experience is one which could numb the senses of the victim – and she succeeds in giving us the impression of a woman whose identity itself is in danger of vanishing.

In the Indian context, clearly everyone is aware of the elephant in the room but the authorities are not willing to do anything about it, or at least not do enough. While we have enough goons around to ‘keep women in line’ and get us to adhere to their version of Indianness, I wonder why such self-proclaimed defenders of Indian culture do not mind that there are hundreds of such women, being violated body and soul. Would prostitution flourish without the demand for it, fueled by a culture of tacit acceptance, that ‘boys will be boys’?

THE PRINT MEDIA has, on many occasions, been a good friend to the women’s movement. By giving space to gender issues, specifically those related to violence against women, it has played a role in the popularizing of a feminist politics. Many sections of the media continue to be at least liberal and sympathetic to the cause of gender equality. What then permits the kind of sensationalist reporting that not just undermines all those progressive values but actually violates, in spirit if not in letter, the law? Does the logic of the market and the imperative to titillate override all ethical and professional norms?

The Mumbai Mirror has been particularly reprehensible and unethical in making public the contents of the entire FIR in the case of the rape of an international student of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) in Mumbai this month violating her right to anonymity and dignity. Such reportage is clearly counterproductive and sends a strong negative message to the survivors of sexual assault. In the future, many would hesitate to come out and complain, for fear of being torn to shreds by the media and in some ways facing a second assault at the hands of the sensation seeking media. Nor despite demands from women’s groups has The Mumbai Mirror adequately apologized for their irresponsible journalism. Apart from a token and wholly inadequate apology for offending their readers’ sentiments, the paper has failed to even acknowledge that it has erred terribly.

Nor have most other papers been very careful in whom they quote or the facts they print without verification. The Times of India, on the first day, chose to put in its headlines, on page 1, “US student raped by batchmates in Mumbai”, despite the fact that later in its report it mentions the police said that they were Tata Institute of Social Sciences students but this was denied by TISS. Interestingly, none of the other English language papers seem to have had access to this police source, as all of them reported that they were students of other colleges. While the TOI corrected its statement the next day, many people still believe that the criminals were students of TISS. This irresponsible, if not malicious reporting has attempted to tarnish the reputation of not just an institution, but also of hundreds of students who study there.

The press has not balked at giving prominent space to the comments made by the accused who seek to slander the survivor or to the parents of the accused who can only moan that their ‘golden boys’ can do no wrong. Oddly enough one of the first comments made by the papers about the accused were that they were all from “good families”, whatever that means, demonstrating not just a lack of ethics but also a lack of journalistic accuracy. The mud slinging has begun and the press shows no signs of exercising restraint in their printing of slanderous comments by the accused questioning the morality of the young woman. ‘Blaming the victim’ is a common social response to violence against women, and the media on its part is doing little to prevent this from happening. If the media continues to report in this vein it could well bias the trial against the young woman seeking justice.

Meanwhile women’s hostels in the city are seeking to tighten rules for their residents and restrict them further. The International Students Hostel, where many of the accused resided, has closed their mess to women without offering any explanations. Some hostels have informed women students that they will have to leave immediately after exams. These repercussions of assault then are already being felt by women whose access to the city is further restricted. Yet one has not seen a single journalistic piece of reporting that focuses on this. In their reportage thus far the media have shown not just a lack of responsibility but also a lack of insight.

What we need now is a reportage that will focus on the larger picture, one that will be able to contextualise this one woman’s quest for justice within the larger question of women’s right to have fun with being constantly threatened with violence and then blamed for it.

Protests and debates on the issue:

Women’s groups and students have protested and demonstrated outside the Mumbai Mirror offices.

Only one newspaper, The Hindu, saw fit to cover this. There has also been some comment generated on the subject and a debate on the loss of ethics of the media is ongoing.

And a blog has been started to debate the issue.

***

Shilpa Phadke is a sociologist, researcher and pedagogue. Anjali Monteiro and KP Jayasankar are documentary film makers and academics; they teach and research in the area of media and cultural studies.

Excerpts:

As one observer, who has been covering the events in Dakshina Kannada, put it, “Today saffron is the colour of power. You just walk around with a big red tilak and see how people treat you. Right from the shop keeper to the bus conductor to the policeman, everybody gives you respect. Without the tilak you are nothing, with the tilak you become a power structure.” Munir Kattipalya of the DYFI echoes this sentiment when he says, “This district is not only communalized but also progressively criminalized.”

What is indicated by such statements is that there is a strong link between communalization and criminalization. It is precisely because the state has chosen not to act when criminal activities are perpetrated under the garb of religion that criminal elements now feel that they have the sanction to perpetrate violence and Cultural Policing in Dakshina Kannada other forms of intimidation by using the garb of religion. This possibly explains the proliferation of vigilante groups in Dakshina Kannada.

And:

Cultural policing in turn leads to forms of ‘social apartheid.’ By ‘social apartheid,’ what we mean is a policing of community boundaries through laying down what manners of dress and what manners of expression are appropriate for each selfenclosed community. The conventional understanding of apartheid as it was practiced in South Africa refers to a structure of segregation of the people of South Africa through law. By social apartheid, we mean a practice of segregating communities on the basis of religion and gender by self-styled vigilante groups as well as prescribing appropriate behaviour and conduct for the separate communities. Social apartheid is successful only because it has the implicit support of the state, and hence enjoys immunity for its patently lawless actions. It is important to stress that social apartheid is not just about segregating communities but it is equally concerned about the culture, dress, and deportment of individuals within the community.

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And here’s an e-poster from the people at Pink Chaddi Campaign. Send to everyone.