• By: Rebecca Walker http://www.theroot.com/views/egypt-catching-history-nawal-el-saadawi

Nawal El Saadawi — an Egyptian psychiatrist, scholar, novelist, feminist and activist — has been agitating for change in her home country for more than 50 years. An outspoken opponent of female genital mutilation, she was fired from her position as Egypt’s director of health education in 1972. When President Anwar Sadat threw her in prison for her activism in 1981, she penned her memoirs on a roll of toilet paper. A committed secularist, her name appears on fundamentalist death lists.

Now 79, she has lived in exile off and on for the past 15 years, teaching at Duke University and Spelman College. For the past year or so, she’s been back at home in Egypt, writing and organizing young activists. The Root‘s Rebecca Walker caught up with her early this morning as she was heading out into the streets of Cairo — right before President Mubarak stepped down.

The Root: Where are you now?

Nawal El Saadawi: I am home in my apartment in Cairo, and we are preparing to go out into streets.

TR: Are you going to [Tahrir] Square?

NS: The square is full. There is no more room in the square, and so we have decided that we will be everywhere. Egyptians will be in every square, on every street, at the Presidential Palace and at the national television station. We will be in every place. This revolution has unified us. We are not men and women, Christian and Muslim, professional and nonprofessional; we are all Egyptians, and we will not let Egypt burn.

TR: How are you organizing this revolution? Is there leadership among the people?

NS: We are doing it all with Facebook and mobile phone and e-mail.

TR: Are you concerned about who will take Mubarak’s place? What about the Muslim Brotherhood, or other extremist groups?

NS: I am not at all worried about the Brotherhood. There is a lot of exaggeration about this organization, and it is used to frighten women here and Western women, too. The Muslim Brotherhood is a minority. They do not lead the revolution, and many of the men involved in the organization want a secular constitution. Men and women protested in the square and died in the square together.

There was not one single harassment of a woman in the square. And these are covered women, secular women, all women from every background. No, it was not the Muslim Brotherhood who hurt women, it was Mubarak’s people who entered the square and killed. All of this talk about the Brotherhood is an attempt to use religion to divide the people. Do not worry; the Muslim Brotherhood will never rule Egypt.

Why is Mayawati’s UP police jailing a minor girl who is gang rape victim and protecting the accused BSP MLA?

Why are rapists of a minor dalit girl being protected and woman activist jailed in Punjab?

A summary of the cases mentioned above is given below. We need  some urgent corrective measures to protect the rights of rape survivors struggling for justice.

Bihar: Rape victim resorts to stabbing the perpetrator (BJP MLA); is lynched almost to death by BJP supporters and branded an immoral ‘blackmailer’ by Deputy CM

A school teacher who had accused the BJP MLA of Purnea and his PA of rape and molestation some months ago only to withdraw the case on the eve of the elections, stabbed the MLA to death on 4^th January. The woman was then lynched by BJP activists and is at present in a critical condition, fighting for her life in hospital in Katihar.

In the wake of the incident, the Bihar government has chosen to follow the attack on the woman’s life by BJP activists, with a personal assault on her character. While the Chief Minister has spoken of the problems of providing adequate security to legislators, the Deputy CM, Sushil Kr. Modi of the BJP, has accused the woman of being a blackmailer of poor moral character, while hailing the MLA who was killed as a man of great moral stature. In reality, the issue is not so much one of security of legislators but one of security of women in Nitish-ruled Bihar.

The incident raises the most serious questions about the Nitish Kumar Government’s much-touted claims of ‘women’s empowerment.’ Why, when the woman filed charges of rape last May, were the charges not investigated and accused not arrested or questioned by the police? What pressures were brought to bear on the woman to make her withdraw her charges on the eve of the Bihar Assembly polls?

It is likely that the woman was driven to take the extreme step of stabbing the MLA because she despaired of ever securing justice against a legislator from the ruling party, having already experienced first-hand how the police would refuse to investigate and the victim herself would be forced to withdraw her charges. There are reports that another woman had also made rape charges against the MLA which were also withdrawn.

The attitude of the ruling coalition and the government displays the most shameful gender bias and protection towards a rape-accused. Why was the rape accused fielded as a candidate in the Assembly elections? Why has no action been initiated against those in the MLA’s office who lynched the woman nearly to death? In a situation where the Deputy CM has already given his biased character certificates to the woman and the rape accused BJP MLA, can one expect any unbiased truth to emerge from the police enquiry announced by the state government?

A judicial enquiry ought to be held in the entire incident; protection should be ensured for the woman since her life is in danger and she should be shifted to PMCH (Patna) rather than remaining in Purnea; and attempt to murder charges should be filed against those who lynched her.

Uttar Pradesh: Rape Victim Jailed at Rapist MLA’s Behest

In BSP-ruled Uttar Pradesh, a 17-year-old OBC girl who accused the BSP MLA of Naraini (Banda district) Purushottam Narain Dwivedi of rape is in jail on charges of ‘theft.’ The girl was subjected to gang rape for four days (between 8-12 December) when she was in the custody of the MLA, but the matter came to light only recently. To suppress the incident, the MLA accused the girl of stealing his rifle, mobile phone and Rs. 2 lakh cash and had her jailed with the collusion of the police on 15 December. The girl kept telling the police that she had been gang raped but the police ignored it. The girl is a resident of Shahabazpur village of the Naraini Assembly constituency and is now in Banda jail.

It is shameful that no FIR was even registered in the case of this minor girl subjected to gang rape, neither was any medical examination made until several days after the incident in spite of the fact that she was bleeding continuously. The police therefore deliberately destroyed evidence. Instead of jailing the rape accused, the victim herself was jailed. The police blindly took the side of the rapists. Mayawati has belatedly suspended the accused MLA and ordering a CB CID enquiry – but this is eyewash since the victim continues to be in jail and face ‘theft’ charges!

AIPWA leaders of UP visited Banda and tried to meet the rape victim who is still in jail but were denied permission by the Banda Jail administration, suggesting that the state government and jail authorities are seeking to cover up the facts by preventing the victim from meeting a fact-finding team. There are reports that the father and relatives of the victim are receiving threats by the accused MLA and his supporters.

Punjab: Dalit girl raped and woman activist who raised the case jailed!

In mid-December, a 17½ year old girl from a poor Dalit family was lured by a havildar in Mansa to his house on the promise of employment, and subjected to gang rape by him along with three others including a local advocate, a trader, and a financier. When neighbours heard her cries and called the police, however, the police deliberately suppressed the rape case and instead booked both the victim and her rapists on charges of ‘loitering.’ Cases of rape and SC/ST atrocity were registered only two days later, after intervention by AIPWA activists. However, three weeks after the incident, the accused (apart from the havildar) were yet to be arrested, and, being influential locally, were bringing to bear all sorts of pressures and threats on the victim. Two other of the rape accused were arrested only on 4 January, following the protest rally at Mansa and the intervention of the central team of AIKM and AIPWA leaders, while the financier accused of rape is still at large. Worse still, the very same activists including AIPWA National Council member Jasbir Kaur Nat and National President of the All India Kisan Mahasabha Ruldu Singh, who helped book the rape case are now behind bars along with several other peasant leaders, on a patently false charge of ‘attempt to murder.’ The pretext for this was the fact that they along with peasant leaders of other groups like BKU (Dakonda) raised slogans in Court against the main accused in the murder of a popular peasant leader, leading to a minor skirmish when police assaulted them.

In the same area of Punjab some years ago, the dalit activist and singer Bant Singh had his limbs chopped off for supporting his daughter to pursue a rape case. The recent instance of rape of a dalit girl and victimisation of activists who pursued justice highlights the continuing strength of feudal survivals in Punjab and the increasingly repressive response of the Akali Government in Punjab where every mass movement is met with mass arrests of leaders, activists and masses.

http://www.write2kill.in/reports-editorials/women/541.html

When the burqa debate was raging across the world, a young Pakistani women’s rights activist, who doesn’t wear a headscarf as a rule, travelled to Jalalabad in Afghanistan to see for herself what it meant to wear one. This is her story.

Gulali Ismail, a 24-year-old university student in Islamabad, needed to go to Afghanistan in August on an assignment. The consultancy on the evaluation of a gender-based violence project made her fly to Kabul. And then onwards to Jalalabad. For someone who does not wear the burqa, the biotechnology student was curious to know what it was like for Afghan women who are in some regions forced to wear burqas.

“During my stay in Afghanistan, when I was seeing all these women in the blue shuttlecock burqas, the thought that ‘how they feel when enclosed’ triggered me to live the identity of an Afghan woman. Doing this in Afghanistan seemed the best way out,” she recollects.

Gulali, accompanied by Mudassar Shah, a radio journalist, decided to go to a market. Her first reaction was that it was built for men. She found this strange. “Women should buy for themselves because they know what they want to wear and what they need,” she felt.

Determined, she headed for a shop selling burqas.

“I want to buy a burqa to put myself in the identity of Afghan women. I want to know how they feel when they wear burqa. Do they feel suffocating or they feel liberating? So to feel the experience of Afghan woman, I am here to buy a burqa.”

It was obvious to the shopkeeper that the young woman was a first-time buyer. He showed her one of inferior quality and quoted a high price. Just as Gulali demanded to see more, an American aid worker happened to step into the shop. She wanted to try out one as well.

The conversation went like this:
American aid worker: Oh my God.
Gulali: Can you see anything?
American aid worker: Ya ya ya…
Gulali: Is it your first time to wear burqa?
American aid worker: It is my first time.
Gulali: What do you feel?
American aid worker: I feel very hot. It is very confining. I feel like it is wrong for me to be wearing it.

Soon it was Gulali’s turn.

“Oh.. I can’t see anything. Oh, my glasses… my eye sight is weak. How I will walk without glasses. Oh my god… there is no air. Now, you cannot see me but I can see everything. I can see you and people cannot see me. Now I can walk and people cannot see me.”

She paid $11 for the burqa and walked out of the shop with her companion.

Gulali kept muttering, “I feel like someone is giving me a punishment. Punishment of being a woman, I cannot see the floor. It is difficult for me to walk. I don’t think I can be habitual with this. I feel like something is wrong with the burqa. It has made my head heavy. I cannot see the floor either I have to see the downward or either I have to see the front. This is a barrier. You know this burqa is limiting me from seeing the world with freedom. I can’t see the things and I am feeling like people are laughing at me. I am in burqa but still they are looking to me. Look, it does not make a difference. They are still looking and staring at me.”

Five minutes.

That was all that Gulali needed to head back for the shop which bore the legend: “Burqa once sold can’t be returned, but can only be changed.” She took it off and had it packed. “I will gift it to some Afghan woman back in Pakistan.” Gulali’s tryst with the burqa ended there.

That, however, does not mean that the women’s rights activist scoffs at those who wear burqas.

“While I am there (in Islamabad) I don’t wear a headscarf, because I feel more comfortable that way. But on the other hand, I respect the cultures of other people and other regions. I personally belong to a village called Swabi, which I rarely visit. But whenever I do, I even cover my face with the scarf.”

Gulali, the founder of Aware Girls, a young women-led organisation working for the empowerment of young women and peace building, goes on to assert, “I must say here that I would really like to live in a society which has same standard of ‘values’ both for men and women. If men don’t cover their heads, and they are still respectable, the same should be applicable for women. There shouldn’t be double standards.”

At the age of 16, Gulali along with “my peers, established Aware Girls, with the aim of providing young women a platform which gives them the opportunities to work effectively for social change and women empowerment.“ She elaborates about her work, “We are working on HIV/AIDS, political empowerment of young women, peace, advocacy for women’s rights, and safe abortion. We have launched a hotline called Sahailee which gives information to women about safe abortion through misoprostol.”

Gulali’s beliefs begin at home. Her father is himself a human rights activist. “My family is very supportive. They are supporting my cause of women empowerment and social change.”

And what about change in Afghanistan? What about memories of the Jalalabad trip? Gulali winds up, “I stayed in Jalalabad for 10 days, and in Kabul for five. I travelled by air. It was a nice flight. I felt like at home while staying in Afghanistan. It is developing, and I have very positive hopes for the future of Afghanistan. I enjoyed the pure Pashto language, the hospitality of the Afghan people. But the violence against women frightens me!”

Gulali’s story in brief: She doesn’t wear a burqa because she is comfortable that way. She doesn’t gun for those who do because she respects cultures of other people.

http://www.himalmag.com/In-defence-of-symbolism_nw4327.html

Bilash Rai

International Day of the Boy Child, Men’s Day, Global Week of the Brahmin, World King’s Day. Ever heard of those? For obvious reasons, it is only victims who get their day. Politely called ‘subalterns’ or the ‘oppressed’, it is those who have never been allowed into the car who get to sit in the driver’s seat on this one, special day. But there are driving licenses to be got, traffic rules to be followed and, most importantly, hard cash to buy the car and petrol to run it. Not surprisingly, then, the outing is limited to a single drive. Mere symbolism, snort the cynics.

It has been a century since 8 March has come to symbolise women’s fight for equal rights. It was around that date in 1910 that women workers in cities across the US and Europe marched together demanding better working conditions and higher wages. Clara Zetkin, a leader of the German Social Democratic Party, had proposed observing a ‘Women’s Day’ to highlight their demands, and the first such gathering took place on 19 March; but for reasons obscured by the mist of time, 8 March began to be the day dedicated to women. And once the UN system adopted a resolution in 1975 to mark International Women’s Day, the acronym (a reliable sign of institutionalisation) IWD became a fixture. Spotlighting violence on women, reproductive rights, and economic and political rights, 8 March has been not only a rallying cry to mobilise women, but also an occasion on which to direct advocacy efforts towards policymakers around the world, and in Southasia as well.

No one can deny that the lobbying has paid off, with women’s studies, women’s cells, women’s colleges, women’s courts and women’s budgets being increasingly institutionalised. Indeed, the evocative term ‘women’s liberation’ has itself been replaced by the more sanitised notion of ‘gender’, a neutral term that does not acknowledge women’s continued secondary status. Yet while the category of ‘gender’ is doubtless a conceptual leap, it also tends to take away from the reality that women and transgender people bear the brunt of the patriarchal system. Funding has poured in, and consultants have made their livelihoods around ‘gender mainstreaming’. From the time when it was revolutionary merely for women to come out onto the streets till today, when token Women’s Day events elicit jaded sighs, rhetoric and ritual have obscured the raison d’etre of the struggle for women’s liberation.

Old fashions
The single most significant achievement of the women’s movement in Southasia has been visibility for the fact that more women than men are paid lower wages, work harder, are less literate, still have to lurk behind the pillars in the corridors of power, die sooner, and are more liable to get raped and beaten – and apologise for being confident or assertive. The recognition of the need to make structural societal changes in each of these areas has been a core contribution of the women’s movement. Women have progressed, and some sections of women – the educated, English-speaking, able-bodied, heterosexual, urban, upper-caste and -class Hindus – have certainly forged ahead. Women can now be pilots and scientists, police officers and media barons. Almost all job opportunities are open to women, with the exception, perhaps, of being sperm donors. But what of the common woman?

Structural inequalities persist in access to natural resources – land, water, forests – for the vast majority of women in the region. For large numbers of women in rural areas (or even the urban poor), as well as Dalit, Other Backward Classes (the term in use in India), Muslim, Christian, Adivasi, disabled, elderly, widowed or sick women, life has not changed significantly, and the women’s-liberation movement thus still has its task cut out for it. But then again, in any sort of assessment of this movement, which stream of the fragmented women’s movement is actually being assessed? After all, the range is huge, from those talking about land rights for women, to others talking about going ‘beyond’ rights, to some talking about going beyond the category of ‘woman’ itself.

It is being increasingly accepted that the categories of sex and gender are not binary, and forcing individuals into pigeonholes of ‘male’ and ‘female’ is not always useful when articulating and demanding rights. Take the recent controversy over the South African athlete Caster Semenya, the fastest woman in the world. Debates raged – not over whether or not she was the fastest, but whether she was a woman at all. The row made it abundantly clear that there needs to be a discussion not only about the rigid definition of ‘sex’, but whether being outside of this categorisation automatically means denial of entry in competitive international sport, among other forms of exclusion.

An increasingly vocal strand of feminist thought is questioning the notion of ‘woman’ and ‘gender’ itself, stressing the cultural and contextual variations in these terms to the extent that a generalisation becomes meaningless. What, they ask, does an upper-class woman working in an international bank in an Indian metropolis have in common with a Dalit construction worker, who might share more in common with a Dalit landless labourer? Is the clubbing-together of the concerns of these vastly different groups useful at all?

That is perhaps a moot question, even as the notion of universal sisterhood cutting across class, caste, race and sexual orientation has taken a beating in recent decades. The cleavages that render hollow claims to a unique and all-encompassing feminine bonding are asserting themselves in identity movements – of Dalits, Adivasis, religious identities, lesbians or transgender. Traditional feminists, who refuse to abandon the idea of female bonding and view such separate mobilisations as antithetical to the women’s cause, are accused of clinging to antiquated notions that have no contemporary relevance. True, the insistence on the possibilities of solidarity as women, transcending other divisions, continues to ignite the imagination of a small but significant section of feminists. Are these old-fashioned feminist visions totally irrelevant?

Young women raised by enlightened middle-class parents during the 1980s (before sex-selection became almost a norm, and fewer daughters were born) now largely form the post-feminist generation. We don’t need feminism, they say. We are on equal footing to men. Or, We are quite happy being what we are, we have no insecurity about being female. Say others, We celebrate womanhood and have no ‘problems’. This is a generation that has fired the imagination of corporate Southasia, as liberalisation and the market have commoditised ‘women’s lib’ in convenient, chewable packages. Chocolate companies and cosmetic giants cash in by ‘modernising’ rituals such as karva chauth, where bejewelled women fast all day for their husband’s good health; fitness-equipment manufacturers promote the idea of ‘looking good for yourself (and not just to hook a man)’; and the employed woman is the icon of commercials for talcum powder, washing machines and scooters.

And then came the turnaround. Young women began to opt out of the rat race, abandoning promising careers for part-time jobs out of the home, preferring to spend time raising their children. Many embarked on journeys of ‘self-realisation’, from tai-chi to the “Art of Living”. They deemed themselves liberated enough to carve out a space for themselves without giving up their femininity, or their individuality. It was this generation, again, that questioned feminist militancy against symbols such as the sindoor and mangalsutra that denoted a married woman, or unquestioningly adopting the husband’s name after marriage. Few acknowledge that it was the strident campaigns of the early feminists that allow today’s young women to adopt these formerly compulsory symbols out of choice, and not because they have to.

Daughters of the ‘80s
While not arguing in favour of fundamentalism that condemns all women who do not live up to the inflexible standards of doctrinaire feminism, a defence of symbolism is in order. There are those who argue that there is ‘no big deal’ in a name, that one name is as good as another, that their identity is not jeopardised merely because they took on their husband’s name after marriage, and that they are confident enough in their personhood to let a minor matter like a name get in the way of their self-confidence. These young women would also perhaps view, for instance, the years spent over the movement to rename Marathwada University as Ambedkar University – a struggle that cost many lives – as an exercise in futility. They might view with equal derision the self-identification of Dalits over the passive victim term of Harijan and the struggle to gain recognition for this more militant term. The transformative power of symbolism needs to reclaim its edge in a context in which postmodern deconstruction has succeeded in blunting the edge of passionate politics of language.

And it is not language alone. While the stereotype of the short-haired, trouser-clad feminist, who shuns jewellery and make-up still forms the staple of sexist anti-feminist jokes, it must be recognised that it is this very refusal on the part of a few to conform to feminine standards – set by a largely male-run cosmetic industry – that sets other women free to place themselves on a sliding scale. With uber-femininity on the one end, and uncompromising butch on the other, the options available to young women are staggering, thanks to the symbolic creation of an extreme.

The women’s movement, like other movements of marginalised groups, began by identifying, voicing and attempting to overthrow oppression. While loosening the constraints of binary thinking (men-women, heterosexual-homosexual and so forth) is undoubtedly a necessity today, it is still meaningful to talk in terms of specific identities and the specific issues that they face. Indeed, feminism has a particularly compelling lens through which to understand marginalisation, with women having long occupied the margins. It has only been possible to access rights, benefits and privileges by crossing the invisible but powerful border on the margins of existence and demanding to be centre-stage. Just as American feminist writer and poet bell hooks asserts the transformative power of marginality – rendering as it does, the capability of looking both out and in – symbolism can be as transformative, fuelling the power to dream.

http://www.justassociates.org/blog/2009/11/give-me-back-my-movement.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NW0912

“We must involve the bosses. We can not move without them. The bosses are our partners. Many of them are just victims of the system too. Most of the employers mean well. All we need to do is raise their awareness and they will be ok. We did a workshop with some of the most senior bosses last year, just one workshop. And I remember two of them standing up and saying, ‘This workshop has been a real eye opener to the suffering endured by the workers. We did not know that running sweatshops, under paying workers, and sexual harassment of female workers is wrong. We really did not know. We will change from this minute on. You can count on us.’ Since that discussion, we now have so many employers on our shop floor committees. One is even the chairperson of my equal wages sub-committee. Another provides counseling to women who are sexually harassed.”

Can you imagine this testimony coming from the head of any trade union movement? Anywhere in the world? Substitute workers and trade unions for landless people’s associations, or the Dalit movement, or an anti-racism movement: can you imagine them saying this? Why not? Tell me your eyes don’t water at the prospect of workers and exploitative bosses holding hands nicely and singing, “We shall over-come?” Like Martin Luther King, isn’t your “dream” that of landless, half-naked peoples and the few landed, be-suited, corporate bosses sharing leadership roles in one another’s organizations? The landless speaking on behalf of the corporate landowner, the landowner chairing the landless people’s movement?

Sound unlikely? Why not? We have done it in the women’s movement. To paraphrase Idi Amin, “if they did it, we can DID it too.” I know I am not doing the deep analysis and giving the nuanced complexities of so-called “involving men and boys” that has become the overwhelming refrain in “gender work.” I am not an academic. I don’t sit in spaces where I have the luxury – yes, luxury – of going into deep theoretical analysis. I just tells it as I sees it. I live and work in the real world of simplicity and sound bites. This is the world where one word from a donor or the media, and everyone around you turns phrases into a program, and soon enough, into expected practice. Where we hear things said in workshops, and suddenly they become the norm, nay, a requirement. In this world we learn from one another. It is not that we are stupid, it’s just that we don’t have time or space to go into political analysis. More importantly, in this world, labels and naming matter. Inclusion of men and boys equals a good thing done by gender activists; protecting women’s spaces and talking about power equals bad thing done by those awful feminists! Who isn’t afraid of being seen as a bad, strident woman?

My safe space called the women’s movement is going, or even gone. It’s been taken over by men. And I am scared and angry. To paraphrase them racists, let me say it one more time – I love men. Some of the best people I’ve had sex with are men. So there. I believe progressive, non-patriarchal, non-sexist men have a positive role to play in the struggle for women’s human rights. There are a few of them out there. But they are not yet in a majority, and a few good men do not a system make. Patriarchy in all its forms is still alive and doing quite well by my last diagnosis. The majority of men and boys continue to have access to all kinds of power, resources, and privileges, which they don’t hesitate to use to exert their control over women’s and girls’ lives and bodies.

When any marginalized and excluded group creates a safe space for themselves, it is their space. Let me repeat, it is their SAFE space. The notion of safe space is deeply political. To badly translate a wonderful song by Thomas Mapfumo, “There are some stories you don’t tell in the midst of certain listeners, otherwise they take oil and start preparing their hands…” I will not go into all those caveats about how not all men are bad etc. Women’s space is women’s space. It is the one place where I can have a conversation with other women about vaginas. It is the place where women seek unadulterated advice when they have problems in their heterosexual relationships. When we experience violence of any kind, and we turn up for counseling at a women’s center, the last person we expect to find sitting behind that desk is someone who looks exactly like the one I just ran away from. He might be nice, or the sweetest gay man, but do I trust that he will hear my story? Even if it’s a magazine to which I am writing a letter, or a phone-in radio program, I want another woman at the end of the line. I need to feel SAFE.

I work in a mainstream development INGO. I have seen, despite our best intentions, that it is very hard to recruit, retain and support women in the organization. The default is to think of men first. When women’s rights are mentioned in a meeting, everyone still turns to look at me or whoever’s job title is ‘women’s rights.’ We don’t turn to look at the heads of other themes when those are mentioned. Consistently keeping women’s rights on the agenda remains a struggle. And trust me, my organization is one of the best in the INGO stable, if I say so myself. Our language is firmly about women’s rights, and our political rhetoric is up there with the best. But I know this is not a women’s organization and its natural default is not to think of women first. I know the limits of what can be achieved in this space. When I want to have certain conversations and when I expect a particular, firm political direction, I look to the women’s movement.

The women’s movement is still the only place I expect to give women a shot at employment. A women’s organization is the last place I expect to compete with a man for an office messenger post, let alone a directorship. Call it sheltered employment if you must. We still need it because patriarchy and sexism have not been eradicated. Who else is going to give women opportunities if not their own organizations? Yet everywhere I look, women’s organizations are giving jobs to the men, and in large numbers. In some cases, male staff out-numbers female. The range of jobs being given to men is equally frightening. A colleague with a donor agency recently went to Zambia and she reported that a large number of women’s organizations are now directed by men! She also noted that in some organizations men outnumber women in providing psycho-social counseling and support to female survivors of violence. It was the same story in several organizations in Mozambique. In several countries too, government gender machineries are led by men. All in the name of “gender is about men and women….” We shall return to this half sentence later.

Even more frightening is the latest fad, men on the boards of women’s organizations. I will be the first to admit that I am given to hyperbole, but it’s become an epidemic! A seat on the board is about power and leadership. Where are women ever going to get a chance to learn leadership skills and how to exercise power? Are there no other ways to ‘include men’ besides handing over our hard-created organizations to them? At the same time we complain about women being excluded from decision-making positions in the public arena. When we are asked to give names of experienced women to fill leadership positions in the same public arena, we can’t even name five! It would be interesting to take stock of the values, beliefs and behaviors of some of these men on women’s organizations’ boards. Let me just leave it there. Point made.

Over the last few years, I keep wanting to sing my own version of Jacob Zuma’s dreadful song, “mshini wam’, mshini wam’, awu’leth’ u’mshini wam!” (My machine gun, my machine gun; give me my machine gun.) My song would go; “movement yam’, movement yam,’ awu leth’ i – movement yam!” (My movement, my movement; give me (back) my movement.) Where has the notion of safe spaces for women gone? What has happened to the politics that should be the foundation of our movements? Is it that it was never political? Not deep enough? We were fighting this struggle because it sounded like a nice idea, and therefore the strategy was to be nice?

When did we become this depoliticized? Let me go back to where I started. Why is the women’s movement the only space where you expect to hear the kind of depoliticized testimony that I quoted in the first paragraph? Why do we celebrate this kind of stuff in so many ways? As for their eyes being opened after only one workshop, I for one, would love to hear how sustainably open those eyes have remained and what transformation has occurred as a result. I stand to be convinced about the power of the one-workshop-one-pamphlet wonder. To think we have wasted all this energy understanding power when all it takes is a half-day discussion. Ah.

It is time to reclaim women’s spaces and re-politicize our movements with feminist politics. We can only do this if we put back onto the table, the fact that this is about POWER. Repeat after me….Gender is about men and women, and the UNEQUAL power relations between them. It’s back to feminism 001. Sadly.

Everjoice J. Win is a feminist from Zimbabwe, and is currently the Head of Women’s Rights in an International NGO. She writes this in her personal capacity.

The wild hair may have taken on strands of silver and seats may be offered to her on the bus. But ARSHIA SATTAR keeps her sword polished and shining because there’s many a battle to be fought still.

I was asked by a man to write about how feminism was exhausted. I said that was not the case. I was then asked to write about how feminism had exhausted me. But that is not the case either. Finally, he suggested I write about how I had exhausted feminism. I don’t believe I have. I’m sure he was expecting a flippant response, something he and I, both post-modern, post-colonial, metrosexuals could laugh over as we unsheathed our cardboard foils and fenced gently into the good night, smiling with nostalgia for the time when these things really mattered and the foils we fenced with were intended to draw blood.

There are some things that I still take seriously and feminism is one of them. I know this probably justifies the old joke—“How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?” “That’s not funny!” But I am old enough now to not care about that joke and actually, I always did find it funny. Moreover, because I have good manners, I thought I should take the man as seriously as I take feminism and consider his proposition. Perhaps, I am a dinosaur and he, the shining cyberknight of a new post-gender age. Should feminism have exhausted itself? Burnt itself out into a nirvana of self-congratulation ? Or, despair? Like the idea that the ‘true’ Left is dead, so also, many men want to believe that feminism has lived its life, that it’s had its day, that women really need to move on—either because we’ve got all we were asking for or because we’re never really going to get it anyway. This is the 21st century, after all, and has been for nearly a decade now. The ideological shackles that bound us and separated us from each other, that were relevant for the 20th century, surely cannot have meaning any more.

Wrong. They do have meaning, perhaps more so than ever before. They have meaning precisely because so many people consider the revolutionary ‘isms’ of the 20th century dead horses, flogged to death by supporters and critics alike. As a result, they refuse to take on board the critiques that feminism and the Left offer, despite the fact that the system has refused to share its treasures of equality, social justice and dignity with everyone. Meaningful equality is but a tiny speck on the horizon. But thanks to the pitched battles and shouting matches of the last century, at least there is a speck on the horizon. On a clear day, the speck seems so large that everyone can see it. Some run and hide, fearing that it may eclipse the more accustomed sun that shines for the status quo. Others call their children to get a good look at it before it recedes again.

It’s true that many younger women, inheritors of the rights and dreams that their mothers and sisters fought for, are reluctant to call themselves feminists. They sometimes deny their ancestors and the battles they fought—perhaps that is their right. It would be ironic if older feminists were to tell their daughters what to do and how to think. We don’t do that, we have too much pride. And we remember too well what it was like to be told what to do and what to think, to be limited by what others thought was right for you. But whatever younger women, those who have reaped the whirlwind, feel about subscribing to the nomenclature of feminism, the fact remains that much of what they can do now and the ways in which they can do it are the result of all that has gone before.

For all the younger women who are now stronger and more confident in cities across the world, the war for women’s rights is far from over, even though strategic and crucial victories have been won. And for that reason alone, feminism cannot be exhausted. Or exhausting, for those who continue to care about equality and justice. I’m not sure that you can actually separate the fight for the rights of others (even after you have secured your own) from feminism. But that impetus is predicated on another old-fashioned idea, the one called ‘solidarity,’ which also seems to have fallen out of favour, become archaic, quaint, like a tribal exhibit in a museum of (hu)mankind.

Because we are so diverse, feminism can also never be exhaustive. Many men (and some women, too, those who reject it as a place from which to speak) want to think of feminism as a monolith, as a unitary and homogenous way of thinking and being—as something handed down, a set of rules that govern behaviour as well as aspiration. Well, it’s not. And that is also why it cannot be exhausted. I mean ‘exhausted’ in every sense of the word here: it can’t be worn out as an idea or an ideology and its many colours have not yet been counted and placed on a shade card. Nor will they be, any time in the near future. Feminism is dynamic, mutating in order to respond to the circumstances in which it finds itself. Perhaps we should more rightly speak of it in the plural, as feminisms, each relevant to its time and place but organically connected to the same idea: that women should not be denied dignity and the right to choose their lives and destinies.

Feminisms resemble each other, as sisters might, but they are not identical. As needed, they take on race and class and caste and other hierarchies, including those that lie within gender, challenging them all in innovative and creative ways, finding the resources to endure and persist. Fundamentally, feminisms are a response to the world in which women find themselves. They grow and change as the world around us changes, as new arenas of exploitation and oppression become manifest. And as long as the world order (new or otherwise) remains predicated on inequality, feminisms will continue to have a place, they will not be exhausted.

What I find truly amazing is that feminists are still called upon to prove themselves and their relevance. Sometimes, we are asked to write articles like this one, provoked into responding by the sense that we are invisible to certain kinds of people and certain orders of being. We may have grown older and greyer, it may be that we are called ‘aunty’ by random men in stores, it may be that we are offered seats in buses, that advertisements do not address us, that we have faded into the background, pale shadows of our former militant selves. But if you are in the right place at the right time, you will see us in our many colours, kicking up our heels, our hair silvered by the moon, our skirts full and swirling as we dance in celebration of sisterhood and all that it has achieved. And you will also hear the music that we dance to, the song that says it is not over, that we are still here, strong and proud and ready for the next fight.

by Kipp Pietrantonio

http://elder-geek.com/2009/11/playing-with-gender/

By the year 2012 it is estimated that there will be 190 million households worldwide that own video games consoles, with 93% of children playing video games at some time. Many individuals have looked at gender in music or film, but rarely has it been looked at from the perspective of interactive entertainment. One of the significant differences between video games and other forms of media is the participation of the user. In films and movies, the individual has a very passive role: simply observing the stimulus. Individuals who play video games are actually acting out the behavior being prescribed to them. For instance, while someone may listen to a rap song about sexually assaulting and degrading women, that person actually may actually performs these activities artificially in games like Grand Theft Auto, which embodies a much more active role. This allows individuals to play the gender roles that are presented to them and further cement them into the social construct of the individual and society.

Two major games that many people of all ages have had at least some exposure to are Super Mario Brothers and The Legend of Zelda. Both of these games have undersized male heroes going on epic journeys. The more important aspect I am concerned with is whom they are trying to save. In Mario, the character who is trying to be saved is Princess Peach, and in Zelda, it is Princess Zelda. Both characters have been portrayed in very similar gender stereotypes. They are both women who have been kidnapped across the span of over twenty different adventures, and the same formula is played out in each game. The story can be generalized in that the princess keeps getting kidnapped by some sort of monster, somehow calls to the hero for help, and the man must go through a difficult adventure to save the princess. I think it is important to look at the underlying assumptions that are key to these stories. The first is that the princess is portrayed in a very delicate and fragile role, which needs to be defended by a male. Rarely in these games is the princess even given a voice other than calling for help. She enjoys butterflies, the color pink, and surrounds herself with delicate accessories. The next assumption is that women are trouble, which is a stereotype that has been repeated in many forms from The Bible to classic literature, and even in reality TV. These women through their kidnapping have become a burden that the hero must bare. This point is emphasized by the continuous and repetitious use of the hero/damsel in distress formula, spanning across twenty different games. The princesses are most often portrayed as victims who must be both protected and taken care of by men. The message sent to men–the primary consumer–is that women are delicate and fragile, and are in need of protection, which perpetuates the idea of male superiority and female dependence.

Although women are sometimes portrayed as the helpless victims in interactive media, other times they are presented as dominatrixes, which represent the other extreme stereotype of women. The primary game I will be discussing is called Bayonetta. In this game you play as the character Bayonetta who is a witch whose clothes transform into monsters that attack enemies, rendering you as the player naked for a short period of time. In addition, many of her attacks involve the spreading and contorting of her legs. Bayonetta also represents an idealized female form that is unattainable by the majority of women. She has a very tiny waist and extremely large, unrealistic breasts for a woman of her size. The clothes she does wear are leather and skin-tight, pistol-equipped high heels, and glasses that can be described as librarian-esque, which no doubt imply an aura of sexual vulnerability and fantasy for men. Compared to her counterparts in Mario and Zelda, she is substantially more sexual in nature and her language reflects this as well. This, like the other roles females play in games, reinforces a variety of stereotypes. The first is that women are sex objects, and that in order for them to be powerful they must embrace this sex object role. The character of Bayonetta is a powerful woman, but she is a sex object first and foremost, and this is the message that is sent to the player. If Bayonetta were not a sex object, men would be less likely to accept her as a powerful character. This implies that if women want to be powerful, they essentially must accept their objectification and celebrate it. The next stereotype that she represents is the unrealistic ideal female form. She is proportioned in an hourglass shape that a very small percentage of women could even become close to replicating. This is significant because it sends the message to the player–predominantly men–that women can and should look this way in order to be perceived as confident and powerful. Most women would most likely agree it would be very difficult for her to perform the acrobatics she performs with her small size, heels, large breasts, and leather clothing. This reinforces the idea that women’s bodies are objects, which men may rate and evaluate. These attitudes by men further perpetuate internalized objectification for women and result in lower self-esteem, greater body shame, and higher anxiety.

Before I discuss men, it is important to have a theoretical framework from which to work with. On the topic of technology, our society picks and chooses which aspects perpetuate masculinity and which do the opposite. For example, changing oil or putting new speakers in a car are considered masculine activities, while reprogramming software or installing a new sound card represent a nerd stereotype that is the opposite of masculine. Some argue that the activity of gaming walks the line between the two. Although playing with a machine by oneself may be a “nerdy” activity, the fantasy of playing as a hero or on your favorite football team is very attractive to even the most masculine. Regardless of gaming’s place in the masculinity spectrum, the behaviors individuals perform while playing through the games are very masculine in nature, and ultra competitive. Often, homophobia makes an appearance during this time as many gamers call each other “fags” via Internet chat in order to compete for dominance. These same men will call one individual a “fag” and then turn around and pretend to dip their testicles into another male player’s mouth (teabagging).

Men play a more linear role in most games. Often they are “the protector” with a hyper-masculine emphasis. Most male characters are rough and tough, have no reservations about killing, usually have super human strength and abilities, and always end up with the girl. Generally, their body type is substantially larger than the averages male’s and contain very large, well-defined muscles. The game I will look at for masculinity is titled Gears of War, a story of two warring worlds. In the game, there is not a single female soldier and the men are giants who wear metal armor. They carry enormous guns which have chainsaws attached to them. The men talk “like regular guys,” signified by competing for dominance through insulting their enemies as though war is just a game. They also downplay and punish anything emotional in the game. They deal with their emotional problems through action instead of internal processing.  The game prides itself in being manly and not being for “sissies.” It is ultra violent, full of blood and gore, and portrays a few dominant masculine stereotypes. The first is physical perfection for men’s bodies. These men are not only in shape; they are almost monster-like in appearance. This allows the man’s body to exert the maximum amount of action, which represents the idea of the “body of action” ideal that men strive for. Next, the men create a system of communication among them that punishes emotions, care-centered thinking, and compassion in general, while rewarding the use of brute force, anger, and violence as a means of expressing oneself. This emotional processing is an externalizing defense style, which means rather than processing their feelings the soldiers externalize their pain, in a form of violence or anger against an objectified opponent. Men are generally portrayed as ill tempered, independent and self-sustaining in games and this results in very poor models for boys and men to follow and act through.

Almost all modern video games are targeted toward the 18-24 year old male demographic. One question that may be asked is why is gender in video games important? Isn’t it a good thing to have women playing video games too? In the book From Barbie to Mortal Kombat, Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins discuss the social ramifications of games being gendered. They tie together the need for technology literacy and gender equality. Many careers, especially those in which women have a difficult time accessing, have a technology literacy precondition that may filter women from these job markets, and therefore allows for gender segregation. Boy’s access to computer games which involve networking computers, interpreting technical jargon, following technical directions, creating peer to peer networks, and general computer use, greatly enhance their technical abilities when entering the job market. This allows men to gain experience while women fall behind. It is important to create less sexist video games that are targeted for women; to give men better male role models in media; and to reinforce realistic and healthy ideals about women.

Overall video games are very sexist in nature, and although there are a few that break down gender stereotypes (Metroid, Beyond Good and Evil, and Heavy Rain) for the most part they seem to perpetuate America ’s patriarch. This has been very trying to write for me personally because I am an avid video game fan, and it was difficult to label something that I enjoy “sexist.” These games are not just a hobby for me, but also large part of my childhood and adult life. I have tried throughout this piece to set aside my emotional reaction of defensiveness to this subject in order to give an objective and realistic look on the subject. Although difficult at times, I felt that this article was a great way to challenge my beliefs, defensiveness, and some of my own sexism. I would ask you to do the same.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of Kipp Pietrantonio.

*** Editor’s note:  As a standalone piece, I feel Kipp’s article is well-written, and it states his point of view perfectly. Gender equality for some continues to be an unfortunately controversial subject matter. This is a first for Elder-Geek.com, but I’ve decided to remove commenting for this article. Some comments have been disrespectful and so for this article, I’ve removed the ability to comment altogether.  I understand that the Internet is a jungle and everyone has a right to say things on their mind, but on Elder-Geek.com, I simply cannot stand for intolerance of any type whether it’s for race, religion, age, gender or sexual orientation. Let it be said that I am always open for and highly encourage healthy discussion about our articles here on Elder-Geek.com and hope to encourage more in the future.- – -Randy ***

Arundhati Roy

http://www.guardian .co.uk/commentis free/2009/ oct/30/mining- india-maoists- green-hunt

The low, flat-topped hills of south Orissa have been home to the Dongria Kondh long before there was a country called India or a state called Orissa. The hills watched over the Kondh. The Kondh watched over the hills and worshipped them as living deities. Now these hills have been sold for the bauxite they contain. For the Kondh it’s as though god had been sold. They ask how much god would go for if the god were Ram or Allah or Jesus Christ.

Perhaps the Kondh are supposed to be grateful that their Niyamgiri hill, home to their Niyam Raja, God of Universal Law, has been sold to a company with a name like Vedanta (the branch of Hindu philosophy that teaches the Ultimate Nature of Knowledge). It’s one of the biggest mining corporations in the world and is owned by Anil Agarwal, the Indian billionaire who lives in London in a mansion that once belonged to the Shah of Iran. Vedanta is only one of the many multinational corporations closing in on Orissa.

If the flat-topped hills are destroyed, the forests that clothe them will be destroyed, too. So will the rivers and streams that flow out of them and irrigate the plains below. So will the Dongria Kondh. So will the hundreds of thousands of tribal people who live in the forested heart of India, and whose homeland is similarly under attack.

In our smoky, crowded cities, some people say, “So what? Someone has to pay the price of progress.” Some even say, “Let’s face it, these are people whose time has come. Look at any developed country – Europe, the US, Australia – they all have a ‘past’.” Indeed they do. So why shouldn’t “we”?

In keeping with this line of thought, the government has announced Operation Green Hunt, a war purportedly against the “Maoist” rebels headquartered in the jungles of central India. Of course, the Maoists are by no means the only ones rebelling. There is a whole spectrum of struggles all over the country that people are engaged in–the landless, the Dalits, the homeless, workers, peasants, weavers. They’re pitted against a juggernaut of injustices, including policies that allow a wholesale corporate takeover of people’s land and resources. However, it is the Maoists that the government has singled out as being the biggest threat.

Two years ago, when things were nowhere near as bad as they are now, the prime minister described the Maoists as the “single largest internal security threat” to the country. This will probably go down as the most popular and often repeated thing he ever said. For some reason, the comment he made on 6 January, 2009, at a meeting of state chief ministers, when he described the Maoists as having only “modest capabilities”, doesn’t seem to have had the same raw appeal. He revealed his government’s real concern on 18 June, 2009, when he told parliament: “If left-wing extremism continues to flourish in parts which have natural resources of minerals, the climate for investment would certainly be affected.”

Who are the Maoists? They are members of the banned Communist party of India (Maoist) – CPI (Maoist) – one of the several descendants of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) , which led the 1969 Naxalite uprising and was subsequently liquidated by the Indian government. The Maoists believe that the innate, structural inequality of Indian society can only be redressed by the violent overthrow of the Indian state. In its earlier avatars as the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) in Jharkhand and Bihar, and the People’s War Group (PWG) in Andhra Pradesh, the Maoists had tremendous popular support. (When the ban on them was briefly lifted in 2004, 1.5 million people attended their rally in Warangal.)

But eventually their intercession in Andhra Pradesh ended badly. They left a violent legacy that turned some of their staunchest supporters into harsh critics. After a paroxysm of killing and counter-killing by the Andhra police as well as the Maoists, the PWG was decimated. Those who managed to survive fled Andhra Pradesh into neighbouring Chhattisgarh. There, deep in the heart of the forest, they joined colleagues who had already been working there for decades.

Not many “outsiders” have any first-hand experience of the real nature of the Maoist movement in the forest. A recent interview with one of its top leaders, Comrade Ganapathy, in Open magazine, didn’t do much to change the minds of those who view the Maoists as a party with an unforgiving, totalitarian vision, which countenances no dissent whatsoever. Comrade Ganapathy said nothing that would persuade people that, were the Maoists ever to come to power, they would be equipped to properly address the almost insane diversity of India’s caste-ridden society. His casual approval of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) of Sri Lanka was enough to send a shiver down even the most sympathetic of spines, not just because of the brutal ways in which the LTTE chose to wage its war, but also because of the cataclysmic tragedy that has befallen the Tamil people of Sri Lanka, who it claimed to represent, and for whom it surely must take some responsibility.

Right now in central India, the Maoists’ guerrilla army is made up almost entirely of desperately poor tribal people living in conditions of such chronic hunger that it verges on famine of the kind we only associate with sub-Saharan Africa. They are people who, even after 60 years of India’s so-called independence, have not had access to education, healthcare or legal redress. They are people who have been mercilessly exploited for decades, consistently cheated by small businessmen and moneylenders, the women raped as a matter of right by police and forest department personnel. Their journey back to a semblance of dignity is due in large part to the Maoist cadre who have lived and worked and fought by their side for decades.

If the tribals have taken up arms, they have done so because a government which has given them nothing but violence and neglect now wants to snatch away the last thing they have – their land. Clearly, they do not believe the government when it says it only wants to “develop” their region. Clearly, they do not believe that the roads as wide and flat as aircraft runways that are being built through their forests in Dantewada by the National Mineral Development Corporation are being built for them to walk their children to school on. They believe that if they do not fight for their land, they will be annihilated. That is why they have taken up arms.

Even if the ideologues of the Maoist movement are fighting to eventually overthrow the Indian state, right now even they know that their ragged, malnutritioned army, the bulk of whose soldiers have never seen a train or a bus or even a small town, are fighting only for survival.

In 2008, an expert group appointed by the Planning Commission submitted a report called “Development Challenges in Extremist-Affected Areas”. It said, “the Naxalite (Maoist) movement has to be recognised as a political movement with a strong base among the landless and poor peasantry and adivasis. Its emergence and growth need to be contextualised in the social conditions and experience of people who form a part of it. The huge gap between state policy and performance is a feature of these conditions. Though its professed long-term ideology is capturing state power by force, in its day-to-day manifestation, it is to be looked upon as basically a fight for social justice, equality, protection, security and local development.” A very far cry from the “single-largest internal security threat”.

Since the Maoist rebellion is the flavour of the week, everybody, from the sleekest fat cat to the most cynical editor of the most sold-out newspaper in this country, seems to be suddenly ready to concede that it is decades of accumulated injustice that lies at the root of the problem. But instead of addressing that problem, which would mean putting the brakes on this 21st-century gold rush, they are trying to head the debate off in a completely different direction, with a noisy outburst of pious outrage about Maoist “terrorism”. But they’re only speaking to themselves.

The people who have taken to arms are not spending all their time watching (or performing for) TV, or reading the papers, or conducting SMS polls for the Moral Science question of the day: Is Violence Good or Bad? SMS your reply to … They’re out there. They’re fighting. They believe they have the right to defend their homes and their land. They believe that they deserve justice.

In order to keep its better-off citizens absolutely safe from these dangerous people, the government has declared war on them. A war, which it tells us, may take between three and five years to win. Odd, isn’t it, that even after the Mumbai attacks of 26/11, the government was prepared to talk with Pakistan? It’s prepared to talk to China. But when it comes to waging war against the poor, it’s playing hard.

It’s not enough that special police with totemic names like Greyhounds, Cobras and Scorpions are scouring the forests with a licence to kill. It’s not enough that the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), the Border Security Force (BSF) and the notorious Naga Battalion have already wreaked havoc and committed unconscionable atrocities in remote forest villages. It’s not enough that the government supports and arms the Salwa Judum, the “people’s militia” that has killed and raped and burned its way through the forests of Dantewada leaving 300,000 people homeless or on the run. Now the government is going to deploy the Indo-Tibetan border police and tens of thousands of paramilitary troops. It plans to set up a brigade headquarters in Bilaspur (which will displace nine villages) and an air base in Rajnandgaon (which will displace seven). Obviously, these decisions were taken a while ago. Surveys have been done, sites chosen. Interesting. War has been in the offing for a while. And now the helicopters of the Indian air force have been given the right to fire in “self-defence”, the very right that the government denies its poorest citizens.

Fire at whom? How will the security forces be able to distinguish a Maoist from an ordinary person who is running terrified through the jungle? Will adivasis carrying the bows and arrows they have carried for centuries now count as Maoists too? Are non-combatant Maoist sympathisers valid targets? When I was in Dantewada, the superintendent of police showed me pictures of 19 “Maoists” that “his boys” had killed. I asked him how I was supposed to tell they were Maoists. He said, “See Ma’am, they have malaria medicines, Dettol bottles, all these things from outside.”

What kind of war is Operation Green Hunt going to be? Will we ever know? Not much news comes out of the forests. Lalgarh in West Bengal has been cordoned off. Those who try to go in are being beaten and arrested. And called Maoists, of course. In Dantewada, the Vanvasi Chetana Ashram, a Gandhian ashram run by Himanshu Kumar, was bulldozed in a few hours. It was the last neutral outpost before the war zone begins, a place where journalists, activists, researchers and fact-finding teams could stay while they worked in the area.

Meanwhile, the Indian establishment has unleashed its most potent weapon. Almost overnight, our embedded media has substituted its steady supply of planted, unsubstantiated, hysterical stories about “Islamist terrorism” with planted, unsubstantiated, hysterical stories about “Red terrorism”. In the midst of this racket, at ground zero, the cordon of silence is being inexorably tightened. The “Sri Lanka solution” could very well be on the cards. It’s not for nothing that the Indian government blocked a European move in the UN asking for an international probe into war crimes committed by the government of Sri Lanka in its recent offensive against the Tamil Tigers.

The first move in that direction is the concerted campaign that has been orchestrated to shoehorn the myriad forms of resistance taking place in this country into a simple George Bush binary: If you are not with us, you are with the Maoists. The deliberate exaggeration of the Maoist “threat” helps the state justify militarisation. (And surely does no harm to the Maoists. Which political party would be unhappy to be singled out for such attention?) While all the oxygen is being used up by this new doppelganger of the “war on terror”, the state will use the opportunity to mop up the hundreds of other resistance movements in the sweep of its military operation, calling them all Maoist sympathisers.

I use the future tense, but this process is well under way. The West Bengal government tried to do this in Nandigram and Singur but failed. Right now in Lalgarh, the Pulishi Santrash Birodhi Janasadharaner Committee or the People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities – which is a people’s movement that is separate from, though sympathetic to, the Maoists – is routinely referred to as an overground wing of the CPI (Maoist). Its leader, Chhatradhar Mahato, now arrested and being held without bail, is always called a “Maoist leader”. We all know the story of Dr Binayak Sen, a medical doctor and a civil liberties activist, who spent two years in jail on the absolutely facile charge of being a courier for the Maoists. While the light shines brightly on Operation Green Hunt, in other parts of India, away from the theatre of war, the assault on the rights of the poor, of workers, of the landless, of those whose lands the government wishes to acquire for “public purpose”, will pick up pace. Their suffering will deepen and it will be that much harder for them to get a hearing.

Once the war begins, like all wars, it will develop a momentum, a logic and an economics of its own. It will become a way of life, almost impossible to reverse. The police will be expected to behave like an army, a ruthless killing machine. The paramilitary will be expected to become like the police, a corrupt, bloated administrative force. We’ve seen it happen in Nagaland, Manipur and Kashmir. The only difference in the “heartland” will be that it’ll become obvious very quickly to the security forces that they’re only a little less wretched than the people they’re fighting. In time, the divide between the people and the law enforcers will become porous. Guns and ammunition will be bought and sold. In fact, it’s already happening. Whether it’s the security forces or the Maoists or noncombatant civilians, the poorest people will die in this rich people’s war. However, if anybody believes that this war will leave them unaffected, they should think again. The resources it’ll consume will cripple the economy of this country.

Last week, civil liberties groups from all over the country organised a series of meetings in Delhi to discuss what could be done to turn the tide and stop the war. The absence of Dr Balagopal, one of the best-known civil rights activists of Andhra Pradesh, who died two weeks ago, closed around us like a physical pain. He was one of the bravest, wisest political thinkers of our time and left us just when we needed him most. Still, I’m sure he would have been reassured to hear speaker after speaker displaying the vision, the depth, the experience, the wisdom, the political acuity and, above all, the real humanity of the community of activists, academics, lawyers, judges and a range of other people who make up the civil liberties community in India. Their presence in the capital signalled that outside the arclights of our TV studios and beyond the drumbeat of media hysteria, even among India’s middle classes, a humane heart still beats. Small wonder then that these are the people who the Union home minister recently accused of creating an “intellectual climate” that was conducive to “terrorism”. If that charge was meant to frighten people, it had the opposite effect.

The speakers represented a range of opinion from the liberal to the radical left. Though none of those who spoke would describe themselves as Maoist, few were opposed in principle to the idea that people have a right to defend themselves against state violence. Many were uncomfortable about Maoist violence, about the “people’s courts” that delivered summary justice, about the authoritarianism that was bound to permeate an armed struggle and marginalise those who did not have arms. But even as they expressed their discomfort, they knew that people’s courts only existed because India’s courts are out of the reach of ordinary people and that the armed struggle that has broken out in the heartland is not the first, but the very last option of a desperate people pushed to the very brink of existence. The speakers were aware of the dangers of trying to extract a simple morality out of individual incidents of heinous violence, in a situation that had already begun to look very much like war. Everybody had graduated long ago from equating the structural violence of the state with the violence of the armed resistance. In fact, retired Justice PB Sawant went so far as to thank the Maoists for forcing the establishment of this country to pay attention to the egregious injustice of the system. Hargopal from Andhra Pradesh spoke of his experience as a civil rights activist through the years of the Maoist interlude in his state. He mentioned in passing the fact that in a few days in Gujarat in 2002, Hindu mobs led by the Bajrang Dal and the VHP had killed more people than the Maoists ever had even in their bloodiest days in Andhra Pradesh.

People who had come from the war zones, from Lalgarh, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Orissa, described the police repression, the arrests, the torture, the killing, the corruption, and the fact that they sometimes seemed to take orders directly from the officials who worked for the mining companies. People described the often dubious, malign role being played by certain NGOs funded by aid agencies wholly devoted to furthering corporate prospects. Again and again they spoke of how in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh activists as well as ordinary people – anyone who was seen to be a dissenter – were being branded Maoists and imprisoned. They said that this, more than anything else, was pushing people to take up arms and join the Maoists. They asked how a government that professed its inability to resettle even a fraction of the 50 million people who had been displaced by “development” projects was suddenly able to identify 1,40,000 hectares of prime land to give to industrialists for more than 300 Special Economic Zones, India’s onshore tax havens for the rich. They asked what brand of justice the supreme court was practising when it refused to review the meaning of “public purpose” in the land acquisition act even when it knew that the government was forcibly acquiring land in the name of “public purpose” to give to private corporations. They asked why when the government says that “the writ of the state must run”, it seems to only mean that police stations must be put in place. Not schools or clinics or housing, or clean water, or a fair price for forest produce, or even being left alone and free from the fear of the police – anything that would make people’s lives a little easier. They asked why the “writ of the state” could never be taken to mean justice.

There was a time, perhaps 10 years ago, when in meetings like these, people were still debating the model of “development” that was being thrust on them by the New Economic Policy. Now the rejection of that model is complete. It is absolute. Everyone from the Gandhians to the Maoists agree on that. The only question now is, what is the most effective way to dismantle it?

An old college friend of a friend, a big noise in the corporate world, had come along for one of the meetings out of morbid curiosity about a world he knew very little about. Even though he had disguised himself in a Fabindia kurta, he couldn’t help looking (and smelling) expensive. At one point, he leaned across to me and said, “Someone should tell them not to bother. They won’t win this one. They have no idea what they’re up against. With the kind of money that’s involved here, these companies can buy ministers and media barons and policy wonks, they can run their own NGOs, their own militias, they can buy whole governments. They’ll even buy the Maoists. These good people here should save their breath and find something better to do.”

When people are being brutalised, what “better” thing is there for them to do than to fight back? It’s not as though anyone’s offering them a choice, unless it’s to commit suicide, like some of the farmers caught in a spiral of debt have done. (Am I the only one who gets the feeling that the Indian establishment and its representatives in the media are far more comfortable with the idea of poor people killing themselves in despair than with the idea of them fighting back?)

For several years, people in Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand and West Bengal – some of them Maoists, many not – have managed to hold off the big corporations. The question now is, how will Operation Green Hunt change the nature of their struggle? What exactly are the fighting people up against?

It’s true that, historically, mining companies have often won their battles against local people. Of all corporations, leaving aside the ones that make weapons, they probably have the most merciless past. They are cynical, battle-hardened campaigners and when people say, “Jaan denge par jameen nahin denge” (We’ll give away our lives, but never our land), it probably bounces off them like a light drizzle on a bomb shelter. They’ve heard it before, in a thousand different languages, in a hundred different countries.

Right now in India, many of them are still in the first class arrivals lounge, ordering cocktails, blinking slowly like lazy predators, waiting for the Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) they have signed – some as far back as 2005 – to materialise into real money. But four years in a first class lounge is enough to test the patience of even the truly tolerant: the elaborate, if increasingly empty, rituals of democratic practice: the (sometimes rigged) public hearings, the (sometimes fake) environmental impact assessments, the (often purchased) clearances from various ministries, the long drawn-out court cases. Even phony democracy is time-consuming. And time is money.

So what kind of money are we talking about? In their seminal, soon-to-be-publishe d work, Out of This Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminum Cartel, Samarendra Das and Felix Padel say that the financial value of the bauxite deposits of Orissa alone is $2.27 trillion (more than twice India’s GDP). That was at 2004 prices. At today’s prices it would be about $4 trillion.

Of this, officially the government gets a royalty of less than 7%. Quite often, if the mining company is a known and recognised one, the chances are that, even though the ore is still in the mountain, it will have already been traded on the futures market. So, while for the adivasis the mountain is still a living deity, the fountainhead of life and faith, the keystone of the ecological health of the region, for the corporation, it’s just a cheap storage facility. Goods in storage have to be accessible. From the corporation’s point of view, the bauxite will have to come out of the mountain. Such are the pressures and the exigencies of the free market.

That’s just the story of the bauxite in Orissa. Expand the $4 trillion to include the value of the millions of tonnes of high-quality iron ore in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand and the 28 other precious mineral resources, including uranium, limestone, dolomite, coal, tin, granite, marble, copper, diamond, gold, quartzite, corundum, beryl, alexandrite, silica, fluorite and garnet. Add to that the power plants, the dams, the highways, the steel and cement factories, the aluminium smelters, and all the other infrastructure projects that are part of the hundreds of MoUs (more than 90 in Jharkhand alone) that have been signed. That gives us a rough outline of the scale of the operation and the desperation of the stakeholders.

The forest once known as the Dandakaranya, which stretches from West Bengal through Jharkhand, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, parts of Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra, is home to millions of India’s tribal people. The media has taken to calling it the Red corridor or the Maoist corridor. It could just as accurately be called the MoUist corridor. It doesn’t seem to matter at all that the fifth schedule of the constitution provides protection to adivasi people and disallows the alienation of their land. It looks as though the clause is there only to make the constitution look good – a bit of window-dressing, a slash of make-up. Scores of corporations, from relatively unknown ones to the biggest mining companies and steel manufacturers in the world, are in the fray to appropriate adivasi homelands – the Mittals, Jindals, Tata, Essar, Posco, Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton and, of course, Vedanta.

There’s an MoU on every mountain, river and forest glade. We’re talking about social and environmental engineering on an unimaginable scale. And most of this is secret. It’s not in the public domain. Somehow I don’t think that the plans afoot that would destroy one of the world’s most pristine forests and ecosystems, as well as the people who live in it, will be discussed at the climate change conference in Copenhagen. Our 24-hour news channels that are so busy hunting for macabre stories of Maoist violence – and making them up when they run out of the real thing – seem to have no interest at all in this side of the story. I wonder why?

Perhaps it’s because the development lobby to which they are so much in thrall says the mining industry will ratchet up the rate of GDP growth dramatically and provide employment to the people it displaces. This does not take into account the catastrophic costs of environmental damage. But even on its own narrow terms, it is simply untrue. Most of the money goes into the bank accounts of the mining corporations. Less than 10% comes to the public exchequer. A very tiny percentage of the displaced people get jobs, and those who do, earn slave-wages to do humiliating, backbreaking work. By caving in to this paroxysm of greed, we are bolstering other countries’ economies with our ecology.

When the scale of money involved is what it is, the stakeholders are not always easy to identify. Between the CEOs in their private jets and the wretched tribal special police officers in the “people’s” militias – who for a couple of thousand rupees a month fight their own people, rape, kill and burn down whole villages in an effort to clear the ground for mining to begin – there is an entire universe of primary, secondary and tertiary stakeholders.

These people don’t have to declare their interests, but they’re allowed to use their positions and good offices to further them. How will we ever know which political party, which ministers, which MPs, which politicians, which judges, which NGOs, which expert consultants, which police officers, have a direct or indirect stake in the booty? How will we know which newspapers reporting the latest Maoist “atrocity”, which TV channels “reporting directly from ground zero” – or, more accurately, making it a point not to report from ground zero, or even more accurately, lying blatantly from ground zero – are stakeholders?

What is the provenance of the billions of dollars (several times more than India’s GDP) secretly stashed away by Indian citizens in Swiss bank accounts? Where did the $2bn spent on the last general elections come from? Where do the hundreds of millions of rupees that politicians and parties pay the media for the “high-end”, “low-end” and “live” pre-election “coverage packages” that P Sainath recently wrote about come from? (The next time you see a TV anchor haranguing a numb studio guest, shouting, “Why don’t the Maoists stand for elections? Why don’t they come in to the mainstream?”, do SMS the channel saying, “Because they can’t afford your rates.”)

Too many questions about conflicts of interest and cronyism remain unanswered. What are we to make of the fact that the Union home minister, P Chidambaram, the chief of Operation Green Hunt, has, in his career as a corporate lawyer, represented several mining corporations? What are we to make of the fact that he was a non-executive director of Vedanta – a position from which he resigned the day he became finance minister in 2004? What are we to make of the fact that, when he became finance minister, one of the first clearances he gave for FDI was to Twinstar Holdings, a Mauritius-based company, to buy shares in Sterlite, a part of the Vedanta group?

What are we to make of the fact that, when activists from Orissa filed a case against Vedanta in the supreme court, citing its violations of government guidelines and pointing out that the Norwegian Pension Fund had withdrawn its investment from the company alleging gross environmental damage and human rights violations committed by the company, Justice Kapadia suggested that Vedanta be substituted with Sterlite, a sister company of the same group? He then blithely announced in an open court that he, too, had shares in Sterlite. He gave forest clearance to Sterlite to go ahead with the mining, despite the fact that the supreme court’s own expert committee had explicitly said that permission should be denied and that mining would ruin the forests, water sources, environment and the lives and livelihoods of the thousands of tribals living there. Justice Kapadia gave this clearance without rebutting the report of the supreme court’s own committee.

What are we to make of the fact that the Salwa Judum, the brutal ground-clearing operation disguised as a “spontaneous” people’s militia in Dantewada, was formally inaugurated in 2005, just days after the MoU with the Tatas was signed? And that the Jungle Warfare Training School in Bastar was set up just around then?

What are we to make of the fact that two weeks ago, on 12 October, the mandatory public hearing for Tata Steel’s steel project in Lohandiguda, Dantewada, was held in a small hall inside the collectorate, cordoned off with massive security, with an audience of 50 tribal people brought in from two Bastar villages in a convoy of government jeeps? (The public hearing was declared a success and the district collector congratulated the people of Bastar for their co-operation. )

What are we to make of the fact that just around the time the prime minister began to call the Maoists the “single largest internal security threat” (which was a signal that the government was getting ready to go after them), the share prices of many of the mining companies in the region skyrocketed?

The mining companies desperately need this “war”. They will be the beneficiaries if the impact of the violence drives out the people who have so far managed to resist the attempts that have been made to evict them. Whether this will indeed be the outcome, or whether it’ll simply swell the ranks of the Maoists remains to be seen.

Reversing this argument, Dr Ashok Mitra, former finance minister of West Bengal, in an article called “The Phantom Enemy”, argues that the “grisly serial murders” that the Maoists are committing are a classic tactic, learned from guerrilla warfare textbooks. He suggests that they have built and trained a guerrilla army that is now ready to take on the Indian state, and that the Maoist “rampage” is a deliberate attempt on their part to invite the wrath of a blundering, angry Indian state which the Maoists hope will commit acts of cruelty that will enrage the adivasis. That rage, Dr Mitra says, is what the Maoists hope can be harvested and transformed into an insurrection.

This, of course, is the charge of “adventurism” that several currents of the left have always levelled at the Maoists. It suggests that Maoist ideologues are not above inviting destruction on the very people they claim to represent in order to bring about a revolution that will bring them to power. Ashok Mitra is an old Communist who had a ringside seat during the Naxalite uprising of the 60s and 70s in West Bengal. His views cannot be summarily dismissed. But it’s worth keeping in mind that the adivasi people have a long and courageous history of resistance that predates the birth of Maoism. To look upon them as brainless puppets being manipulated by a few middle-class Maoist ideologues is to do them a disservice.

Presumably Dr Mitra is talking about the situation in Lalgarh where, up to now, there has been no talk of mineral wealth. (Lest we forget – the current uprising in Lalgarh was sparked off over the chief minister’s visit to inaugurate a Jindal Steel factory. And where there’s a steel factory, can the iron ore be very far away?) The people’s anger has to do with their desperate poverty, and the decades of suffering at the hands of the police and the Harmads, the armed militia of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) that has ruled West Bengal for more than 30 years.

Even if, for argument’s sake, we don’t ask what tens of thousands of police and paramilitary troops are doing in Lalgarh, and we accept the theory of Maoist “adventurism”, it would still be only a very small part of the picture.

The real problem is that the flagship of India’s miraculous “growth” story has run aground. It came at a huge social and environmental cost. And now, as the rivers dry up and forests disappear, as the water table recedes and as people realise what is being done to them, the chickens are coming home to roost. All over the country, there’s unrest, there are protests by people refusing to give up their land and their access to resources, refusing to believe false promises any more. Suddenly, it’s beginning to look as though the 10% growth rate and democracy are mutually incompatible.

To get the bauxite out of the flat-topped hills, to get iron ore out from under the forest floor, to get 85% of India’s people off their land and into the cities (which is what Chidambaram says he’d like to see), India has to become a police state. The government has to militarise. To justify that militarisation, it needs an enemy. The Maoists are that enemy. They are to corporate fundamentalists what the Muslims are to Hindu fundamentalists. (Is there a fraternity of fundamentalists? Is that why the RSS has expressed open admiration for Chidambaram? )

It would be a grave mistake to imagine that the paramilitary troops, the Rajnandgaon air base, the Bilaspur brigade headquarters, the unlawful activities act, the Chhattisgarh special public security act and Operation Green Hunt are all being put in place just to flush out a few thousand Maoists from the forests. In all the talk of Operation Green Hunt, whether or not Chidambaram goes ahead and “presses the button”, I detect the kernel of a coming state of emergency. (Here’s a maths question: If it takes 600,000 soldiers to hold down the tiny valley of Kashmir, how many will it take to contain the mounting rage of hundreds of millions of people?)

Instead of narco-analysing Kobad Ghandy, the recently arrested Maoist leader, it might be a better idea to talk to him.

In the meanwhile, will someone who’s going to the climate change conference in Copenhagen later this year please ask the only question worth asking: Can we leave the bauxite in the mountain?

By Gloria Steinem

http://womensmediac enter.com/ ex/101509. html

October 15, 2009

You’re going to be seeing a multimedia blitz about a new national study of women’s status called The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything. Gloria Steinem gives you a preview of this project created by Maria Shriver and a D.C. think tank, and suggests ways you can use it and also judge its success.

For the first time in the history of the United States , half of all people on payrolls are women. This big landmark is the centerpiece of The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything, a newly released 400-plus page study that includes a national poll of changing attitudes among women and men, and two dozen essays from experts on various aspects of women’s status, including Billie Jean King, Oprah and others who have lived it.

Time magazine, which consulted on the poll, is releasing a related cover story today, and NBC, which provided free office space and other in-kind support, will make it the subject of a week of television programming.

The creators of this campaign to launch a national conversation are Maria Shriver, who lent her skill at cross-country interviewing and wisdom from running the California Women’s Conference, plus the Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank self-described as a source of progressive ideas, and headed by John Podesta, former chief-of-staff for President Bill Clinton.  The result is a freestanding project with Rockefeller Foundation and other private support, and also a very conscious echo of a government commission and report on the status of American women that was ordered up by Shriver’s uncle, President John F. Kennedy, almost 50 years ago. Headed by Eleanor Roosevelt, it set up state commissions that led to the founding of the National Organization for Women.

Will this $250,000 poll and estimated $2 million project succeed in creating real change where so many others have failed?  The report itself headlines such warnings as “Plenty of study, few results: Real family friendly workplace reform is long overdue.” It lists some of the many prestigious calls for, say, a national system of childcare; an area in which every other modern democracy has long done better than the United States . In the Nixon era when women were a third of the paid labor force, for instance, Congress passed childcare legislation, only to see it vetoed as “family-weakening.” Now that women are half of all workers with incomes that are necessary to 80 percent of families—indeed, 40 percent of babies are now born to single mothers—childcare is still nowhere on the list of priorities in Congress, and we have also become the only industrialized country without any requirement of paid family leave.

The good news is that The Shriver Report is useful, timely, enlightening and even enjoyable to read—an improvement over many such studies—and could inform discussions from the kitchen table to the halls of Congress. At a minimum, it should end forever the debate about women’s place in the labor force; women are the labor force. It also goes into such deeper places as the racial and economic disparities in women’s health and the invisible and essential jobs done by immigrant women. It also exposes the frequent truth that women are better educated than men yet it doesn’t afford them equal advancement, and critiques the media for portraying women as far more successful than they really are, thus creating the myth that no more progress is needed.

The bad news is that by its title and promotion, this report risks portraying women’s arrival at 50/50 as an irresistible force that by itself “changes everything.” You have to pay attention to understand that the immediate cause of workforce parity is not women’s advancement but men’s job loss: three out of four paychecks eliminated by the recession have been in construction, manufacturing and other fields that are better paid and therefore still overwhelmingly male. This fact has already been much reported, often with more concern for the male breadwinning ego than for the now even greater number of women who are struggling to support families while still averaging twice as much childcare and housework as men (though as The Shriver Report points out, men are doing much more than their fathers). Increased domestic violence and alcoholism have been reported as if they were inevitable results of a recession—if there were a Men’s Anti-Defamation Society, it should sue—and women are being made to feel almost guilty for having a job at all, however poorly paid and rivaled by work at home.

Personally, I’m rooting for The Shriver Report to be right in its underlying assumption that government and business will have to adjust policies to meet women’s needs as parents and workers in order to keep the economy going, and also that more men will get accustomed to women as indispensable co-workers and co-breadwinners, and thus increase their share of housework and childcare. Men will still have more to say about the success of this report than women do, so I recommend the essay, “Has a Man’s World Become a Woman’s Nation?” by sociologist Michael Kimmel. He offers a long list of benefits to men, women and children when fathers are egalitarian. It stretches from better sex for the parents to children who get along better with their peers and have more friends because they learn cooperation by doing housework with their fathers. This alone could be worth the price of admission.

If the attention this report generates helps create ideas and pressure for more equality in practice, the money and effort will have been worth it a hundred fold. If it meets the dusty fate of so many other reports and opinion polls, it will have helped to keep a Washington think tank going in an off-election year, but the same effort and funds could have been better spent in support of grassroots women’s groups that create small businesses, jobs and childcare from the bottom up. Right now, anyone with a stake in increased equality also has a stake in the success of The Shriver Report. Go to http://awomansnatio n.com and see what you can use to make the change you need.

Somewhere between the Man’s World that is gone, and the Woman’s Nation that could be unequal, too, you’ll find a step toward democracy.