[Reader-list] Democracies Don’t Strip Their Women, India Does

[Asit Das]

Democracies Don’t Strip Their Women, India Does

*By Samar*

07 March

*The article looks into the desperation that forced women of the Govindpur
village of Jagatsingpur district in Odisha to go for a naked protest in
front of the policemen against forced acquisition of their lands that too
on the eve of the International Women's Day*

The decision of going naked in protest to the oppression committed on them
by POSCO and its supporters must not had come easily to the women of
Govindpur village of Jagatsingpur district in Odisha. It cannot come easily
to women of anywhere in country, however, much distressed they are. It is a
country, after all, that still abides by essentially feudal codes of honour
hinged, primarily, on their bodies and punishing those who stray with
extreme, and extrajudicial, measures like honour killing with the law
enforces looking away.

But then, this is exactly what the women of this POSCO-infested village (to
borrow from the mainstream media that refers to all such areas as
‘infested’ by this or that dissenting group) have been forced into. The
desperation betraying the decision is unmistakable. It can startle even
those who deal with such stories of despair day in and day out. Last time
one had seen such a protest taking place was in Manipur in July 2004. The
situation, however, was a little different in that case. Manipur has always
been a ‘disturbed’ area for the Indian state and condemned, therefore, to
be reined in by brute force. Brute force in military parlance, in turn, has
always included sexual assault as a weapon of shaming and controlling the
enemy.

Elderly women of Manipur were aghast at that and decided for going that
protest in sheer desperation. They were a people who had completely lost
their faith in the nation that claimed to be their own but acted as an
occupying force. It did never treat them, or their menfolk, as its own. Its
security forces assaulted the men and raped the women at will and the state
legitimised such dreadful practices by allowing the Assam Rifles deployed
in Manipur to provide condoms as an integral part of the
travel<http://www.countercurrents.org/samar0703113.htm#> kit,
to be used while on patrol duty. Having had enough of this, Manipuri women
went to the headquarters of the Assam Rifles, disrobed and flung a banner
reading “INDIAN ARMY RAPE US”.

Odisha is thousands of kilometers away from Manipur. It is not a
‘disturbed’ area with the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958, a
colonial relic very dear to Indian state, in force. Its women are not that
alien to Indian state as Manipuri women are to it, despite all its claims
on the contrary. Yet, the desperation and the progressive loss of any faith
of the citizenry in the state are same. This is what explains the
disarmingly simple and yet dangerous message that seeps out of the
statement issued by the POSCO Pratirodh Sangram Samiti (PPSS). “Left with
no other option, women from the village have decided to get naked before
the Policemen tomorrow” is all that it says. The pain and agony it would
take to first decide for holding such a protest and then announcing it to
the public is something lost on the state and the moral guardians it
deploys to keep the pretension of being a democracy on.

The women have reached the decision because the state has abandoned them
for POSCO, the multinational company that has been violating all their
rights with impunity. They have reached the decision after getting many of
their near and dear ones killed by the hired goons of the company. They
have reached the decision for the state government sending in an
armed-to-teeth police force for cracking down on the peaceful protesters
and forcibly acquire the lands even when the environmental clearance that
is mandatory for such projects stand cancelled by the statutory authorities.

The immediate provocation comes from the stubborn refusal of the police to
lodge a formal First Information Report (FIR), a constitutional right of
the people, against the perpetrators of a bomb attack on the nonviolent
protesters that killed several of them. Despite unambiguous indications
that the attack was carried out by the hired goons of POSCO, the police
have obstinately maintained that the deceased were involved in bomb-making
and perished when it exploded prematurely, all this without even a pretense
of investigation.

Unfortunately, this is not the first time that the anti-POSCO movement has
faced such violence or police apathy. On one hand, it has been a victim of
ruthlessly violent attacks on its activists purportedly carried out at the
behest of POSCO and on the other a systematic victimisation by the state by
filing fabricated cases against them as exposed by a fact finding report
titled “Captive Democracy”.

The message that the state is not ready to listen to peaceful voices of
dissent is loud and clear. It has abandoned the citizenry for the reasons
best known to it and had decided to side with the private interests even at
the expense of rule of law. It has shifted the boundaries and pushed the
citizens to the extremes. It is no more a struggle for justice that had
become a distant dream, but a struggle for survival that starts with being
heard and noticed. It is a struggle for asserting one’s existence against
those who want to erase the poor and the downtrodden from nation’s
conscience. It is, therefore, a struggle for reclaiming the citizenship in
a democracy that is going truant.

The signs are not good for such struggles. The wretchedness hitherto
reserved for those living on the peripheries of the nation has been slowly,
but consistently, moving inwards. The country has already stripped
thousands of its women naked underlining what Ms. Arundhati Roy calls a
‘rape culture’. It has looked away when the non-state actors, so to say,
have done the same with other set of victims hounded along the fault lines
of caste, kinship and religion. It had yet not reached a stage where its
women have to get naked in front of the police, supposed to be law
enforcers, unlike its atrocious armed forces for their legitimate rights.
It would better not let that happen.

*Samar,* Programme Coordinator, Right to Food, AHRC, Hong Kong.