[Reader-list] Ousting the Sex Workers: An Invisible land Issue in Kerala

[Anivar Aravind]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: bharadwaj reshma
Date: Nov 18, 2007 1:59 PM
Subject: [GreenYouth] Ousting the Sex Workers: An Invisible land Issue in
Kerala

Ousting the Sex Workers: An Invisible land Issue in
Kerala

             Even among the claims for land and
struggles for land rights by the marginalized there
are situations which never go on record as claims and
struggles. Presently sex workers of Kozhikode who are
marginalized among marginalized are engaged in one
such invisible agitation.
              Most of the sex workers in Kozhikode
are living in Bangladesh Colony lying at the outskirts
of the town, near to the sea shore. It was a vacant
area encroached upon by the marginalized people for
the last fifty years or so. Sex workers started
occupying the place only within the last 30 years.
Some brought the land by paying money to the then
occupied and later got title deeds, while some others
occupied vacant areas. In the beginning it was a
deserted place with only thorny bushes and no water
facilities. Now the place had become inhabitable. Some
of the sex workers who worked with the political party
committees in that area bargained with them and got
water and other facilities.
But now Janakeeya Samithi, formed by the CPI (M), has
given the ultimatum that only those women who are
ready to stop doing sex work will be allowed to stay
in that place. Most of the sex workers had built
houses there with their savings and their children are
studying in the nearby schools. Usually they come to
the town to do sex work and return home early in the
morning. Now if they want to stay with their children
they will have to stop with sex work and if they stop
sex work they and their children will starve. Or they
can live in another place without being able to come
home and see their children every day (who cares for
the needs of motherhood of a sex worker!). In the
beginning CPI (M) gave the women some underpaid and
insecure part time work and even that is stopped now.
Around forty women were forced to leave the house as
their houses were burned down and are living on the
pavements and construction lots. Even that has become
difficult now as Janakeeya Samithi is on move to clean
Kozhikode city and they don't want to besmirch town
with the presence of sex workers.
               The petition given by the sex workers
to the authorities had disappeared and none of them
are aware of the status of the case filed by them.
Even the police are asking for the approval of
Janakeeya samithy to take up the cases on atrocities
against sex workers. Janakeeya samithy has become
parallel governmental institution and this is alarming
as they take upon themselves to be the moral police as
well. As they have brought up the accusations of sex
workers being drug carriers the public sympathy is
also with them. But sex workers whom I talked to are
against the drug trafficking as it effects the health
of their own children and more over they accused that
members of Janakeeya Samithi to be in league with the
drug mafia of that area. They also told that they the
suspect this to be a ploy for the real estate agents
to buy that land from the present owners for nominal
price. In a press conference conducted by FIRM-JWALA,
an organization supporting sex workers, the sex
workers narrated their plight to the media personnel
and the press conveniently  highlighted only the
version by Janakeeya Samithy.
              CPI (M) is trying out the same move in
other towns as well. In Kannur an office bearer of
Snehatheeram, a group by transgenders and male sex
workers told me how the Kannur municipality tried to
push them out of the town as part of an attempt to
provide them with housing facilities but which
actually turned out to be a dump yard chocked with
wild shrubs.
Most of these people had to forego their rights over
their ancestral property and their community rights
due to their 'deviant' sexual choices. They had to
leave their family and were living in very insecure
condition on the streets until they found land in
Bangladesh colony. But now when they are driven away
from that place they are also losing the security that
a house can provide and along with it, their political
rights to join a party, to vote and to have access to
other social security measures.
              We can also see that the situation is
further compounded on other axes of power as well.
Many of the sex workers, who come from lower castes,
find that once they change the residence they will
have to produce new caste certificate in order to
avail the stipend their children are receiving in
educational institutions.  But the law which now
stipulates that mother's caste is immaterial in
deciding their children's caste and the fatherhood is
which counts had taken care to see that it becomes
extremely difficult for their children to continue
their studies, thus in effect limiting their future
choices. This sudden withdrawal of the existing
educational support had resulted in a crisis for these
students. As an activist of the sex worker's
organization in Kozhikode asked me, 'so now they want
my daughter also to be a sex worker?'
                So now I want to ask left
intellectuals waxing eloquent on Munnar a simple
question, 'Do you have any stand point on this issue
except for legitimizing the hooliganism of local CPI
(M) cadres? Where should they go? Or should they lose
their work and starve, just to remain where they are?
By sanctioning the 'clean and smart upper middle
class) cities' are you not degrading into an elite
bunch of experts? The rights of people who do not fall
within the boundaries of Elite citizen ship (which is
the only citizen ship in theory and practice), and the
existential struggles brewing in the thickly populated
'boundaries' to claim exactly that citizen ship have
to stimulate the political imagination of current
intellectual enterprises. This calls for a radical
rethinking of all the founding concepts of democracy.
Hope the traditional left theoretician will at least
concede that "economic" criteria alone won't
justify/explain the experiences I have described
above. Owners are denied rights out of social stigma.
In our discourses there is an implied and invisible
assumption that ownership of land is an exclusive
right of certain particular sections belonging to
particular castes, to particular jobs and conforming
to acceptable moral standards.

               reshma

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Anivar Aravind
http://anivar.movingrepublic.org