Fearless Freedom

by Kavita Krishnan

  Tilak obstinately insisted that ‘the object of female education is not to make the woman the equal of man . . . it must also be remembered that women having to perform the wifely and maternal duties require a fund of energy to perform them satisfactorily’.24 Energy required for ‘wifely and maternal duties’ must not be dissipated in learning.

  Just to put things in perspective, let us remind ourselves that Rashsundari began stealing time from her unending ‘wifely and maternal’ duties to teach herself to read in 1834. Her autobiography was published first in 1868, and then an expanded version was published in 1888. Rashsundari—a child bride who had not been given an ‘English education’ or any education—felt no attachment or sense of achievement over her ‘wifely and maternal duties’ and instead yearned to read and write. What seemed an approaching disaster to Tilak was welcomed by Rashsundari as the ‘blessed Kaliyug’ where the doors of education could finally let in those hitherto excluded.

  Why, you may ask, am I spending so much time recounting history? Isn’t the past over and done with? Women no longer have to face what Rashsundari or Rakhmabai had to, right?

  Well, flip back to the previous chapter, to the essay by Yogi Adityanath who was handpicked by the BJP to be the chief minister of UP, where he demanded that posts in Parliament and Assemblies be reserved for women only after an assessment to see if ‘women who are in active politics and public life like men’ might not be losing their ‘role as mothers, daughters and sisters’. The same essay also argued for women to be kept under the strict control of men so that their ‘matrshakti’ (maternal energy) might not be dissipated. The politics of the Sangh Parivar is pushing hard to wind the clock back a couple of centuries—forcing women and oppressed castes in India to respond to debates which many had considered long settled.

  Imagining the nation as a mother and a mother goddess, valorizing and worshipping women as divine goddesses, is fully compatible with treating women as less than human. In fact, the very ideology of ‘worship’ for mother and motherland seems designed to disguise and rationalize the restrictions on the autonomy of women. The real live woman yearns to breathe free—but her desire for freedom is castigated and delegitimized as a betrayal of her role as mother and miniature icon of the motherland. The unique, specific personalities and experiences of each of our own mothers are undermined and rendered invisible in our culture—what remains visible is only bland, abstract, generic ‘mothers’, each of whom could easily be substituted by another. Womanhood and motherhood, as well as motherland are all worshipped in India—but women and mothers in India are not free.

  8

  Mothers and

  Motherlands

  Just as ‘daughters in danger’ is an ideological pretext for violence against Dalits and minorities, ‘Mothers/Motherland in danger’ is also a pretext for terrible violence against minorities and oppressed nationalities.

  The idea of ‘mother’ connotes love and acceptance. And yet, the idea of a ‘Motherland’ is so often used to rationalize horrific acts of violence and coercion.

  In the conflict areas where we are told ‘the Motherland is being defended’, what consequences does the presence of armed forces in civilian areas have for the autonomy of girls and women?

  Whose Mother?

  Who does the mother nation need to be defended from? If the nation is imagined as the mother’s body, any dispute over its borders is pictured as an act of aggression against the body and the honour of the mother nation. Political disputes are instead treated as primordial emotional matters—disguising the fact that nations routinely hold hard-headed negotiations and diplomatic bargains with each other. A good son (it’s usually a son) of the mother nation can always, only, be a soldier, violent towards some external or internal enemy.

  Most disturbing of all is the image of the mother nation being weaponized against the nation’s own citizens, especially its religious minorities. Equating Mother India with a Hindu mother goddess, the Sangh Parivar insists that Muslims prove their patriotism and sense of national belonging by chanting ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’ (Victory to Mother India) and singing ‘Vande Mataram’—the song that was the rallying cry of anti-Muslim warriors in Anandamath, a novel by nineteenth-century Bengali novelist Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, which explicitly defined Muslims as evil and alien enemies, and British colonial rule as benign and beneficial.

  Seeing one’s country as a mother may be a benign and comforting image—but using ‘Mother India’ slogans and songs to disinherit, bully and exclude Muslims defeats that purpose. After all, which mother demands that some of her children keep having to prove their loyalty to her? Why insist that the mother nation requires these tests of loyalty—tests that are especially applied selectively to minorities?

  Way back in 1937, Rabindranath Tagore (author of the song that was adopted as India’s official anthem) wrote to Subhash Chandra Bose, pointing out that, ‘The core of Vande Mataram is a hymn to goddess Durga: this is so plain that there can be no debate about it,’ and that, therefore, it would be unreasonable to expect Muslims to view a Hindu deity as the nation and worship her. He concluded, ‘The novel Anandamath is a work of literature, and so the song is appropriate in it. But Parliament is a place of union for all religious groups, and there the song cannot be appropriate.’1 Ironically, Tagore, the author of India’s national anthem, would fail the loyalty test set by Hindu majoritarian groups. Nearly eighty-two years since Tagore’s letter to Bose, we still see the Sangh and BJP, amplified by propagandist TV anchors, insisting that ‘Vande Mataram’ be played inside the Madhya Pradesh Assembly, and claiming that a refusal to do so amounts to ‘anti-national appeasement of Muslims’. The BJP, which raises slogans of ‘Vande Mataram’ during anti-Muslim pogroms, also raised it while the law criminalizing instant triple talaq was being passed in Parliament.

  Not just ‘Vande Mataram’, even the official national anthem ‘Jana Gana Mana’ is deployed by communalists as a bullying tool to test the loyalty and patriotism of Muslims and of any and every Indian who is not a supporter of the Sangh’s fascist ideology. The funny thing, though, is that the RSS itself is known to viciously oppose ‘Jana Gana Mana’ and the Indian tricolour.2 As late as August 2016, RSS leader Bhaiyyaji Joshi said that ‘Vande Mataram’ is the real national anthem, while ‘Jana Gana Mana’ is merely the anthem mandated by the Constitution. Likewise, he said that the saffron flag had been venerated by Indians from time immemorial, while the tricolour was mandated by the Constitution. The tacit implication is that one day the Constitution will be replaced by the Manusmriti once India is a Hindu nation, and then ‘Jana Gana Mana’ will be replaced by ‘Vande Mataram’ and the tricolour by the saffron flag.3 In the run-up to the Babri Masjid demolition, Sadhvi Rithambhara’s vitriolic speeches attacked ‘Jana Gana Mana’, declaring that this song was substituted for ‘Vande Mataram’ only to appease Muslims and secularists.4 The Sangh abhors ‘Jana Gana Mana’ because it does not worship the country as divine, and it comprises a diversity of the country’s geographical terrain and regions and its ‘jana gana’ (its people).

  A song that can be beautiful and appealing in the anti-colonial freedom struggle can turn ugly and small when someone is forced to raise it as a mark of their (and their community’s) defeat, humiliation and subjugation to the Hindu nation, rather than their willing and equal partnership in secular India.

  For the Sangh, ‘love’ and ‘worship’ of the motherland can only be displayed through hatred for various sections of the people who inhabit the country. There are others who have imagined their country as motherland, without displacing its people from the picture. During the Naxalbari movement, prisoners in jails inscribed a much-loved song on the prison walls: ‘Mukt Hobe Priya Matribhumi’ (The Beloved Motherland Will Be Free). That poem expresses a spirit of ‘people-first’ patriotism—a love for the country that is not the possessive love of the real estate and resources of a country, but rather a love for the people and a desire for their liberation. The son
g ends on this note:

  Mukt hobe priya matribhumi

  Shey din door nei aaj

  Mahaan Bharater janata mahaan

  Bharat hobe janatar.

  The beloved motherland will be free,

  That day is not far today!

  See, great India’s people are great,

  India will belong to its people!

  (Author not known, translation my own)

  Such a love isn’t expressed in terms of hatred for some other nation but in terms of the true liberation of the people of this and all nations. This is exactly how Bhagat Singh and his comrades loved their country—seeking to free its people from colonial bondage and keep it free from the rule of the ‘kaale angrez’ (India’s own ruling class), while also striving to unite and liberate the working people across the world. Bhagat Singh’s dreams of freedom and equality were not confined by national boundaries—he dreamed of a free India in a world free from exploitation and oppression.

  An Alternative Politics of Parenting

  Whether it is ‘Bharat Mata’ or ‘Gaumata’, it seems as though ‘mothering’, in Indian politics today, is a pretext for violence and hate. In particular, parenting a daughter, in our dominant political discourse, amounts to ‘protecting’ her from exercising her own autonomy, from loving someone from a prohibited community or gender. And parenting a son, in the same discourse, amounts to training him to hate the people of other communities or countries. Are there other ways in which the love and pain of parenthood figure in Indian politics?

  In 1997, when student leader Chandrashekhar (who was a close friend and comrade of mine) was killed at the behest of the criminal don and RJD MP Shahabuddin, his mother Kaushalya Devi led a sustained movement demanding justice.5 Since 2016, Radhika Vemula has led a struggle to demand justice for her son—Ambedkarite student activist Rohith, who took his own life following persecution by the authorities at Hyderabad University, under pressure from Central government ministers and Sangh leaders. The prime minister, in a vain attempt to quiet the rage that followed Rohith’s death, said that he was ‘Maa Bharti Ka Laal’ (a beloved son of Mother India)—even as the BJP kept slandering Maa Radhika and her son!6 Fathima Nafees, the mother of JNU student Najeeb (who vanished from the university’s campus and is feared to be the victim of a ‘disappearance’ following a thrashing by a group of ABVP cadres) is also leading an agitation to find her son.7

  Chanderpati of Haryana has been fighting for justice for her son Manoj who was killed along with his wife, Babli, in Haryana for marrying within the same gotra.8 The abduction and ‘honour killing’ of her son Nitish Katara in 2002 turned Neelam Katara into a tireless campaigner against caste-patriarchal crimes against love.9

  These mothers offer us a politics that restores the humanity and the pain of motherhood. In contrast to the rhetoric about ‘Maa Bharti’, these women, with the unbearable pain of losing a child, restore to the image of the mother, the love, labour and loss of mothering.

  Satya Rani and Shahjahan: Mothers Who Became Sisters in Struggle

  In 1979, Satya Rani Chadha’s daughter Shashi Bala, married for less than a year, was one of the thousands of young brides who died of ‘kitchen stoves bursting’ after their parents failed to meet the ever-increasing demands from the husband and in-laws for dowry. Satya Rani knew her daughter had not committed suicide—because Shashi Bala’s husband had been threatening to kill his wife if she failed to meet their demands for dowry.10 In the same year, a woman worker, Shahjahan Apa, also lost her daughter Noorjahan to a dowry killing.11

  In the massive anti-dowry protests that hit the streets of Delhi in the 1980s, Satya Rani and Shahjahan met—and three years after the deaths of their daughters, they together set up the feminist organization Shakti Shalini to help women facing domestic violence. As Shahjahan Apa puts it, they ‘resolved to use the death of [their] daughters as the impetus to fight for the rights of others’.12

  Shahjahan Apa later said,

  In our society, the men get a free servant when they marry, but I believe that men and women are partners in marriage and stand on equal footing. Today our own government betrays us. The police betray us . . . But each day I board the bus that will bring me to our office so that I can meet with the women who have nowhere else to turn. There is a saying in Hindi: ‘Meri shakti, meri beti,’ which means, ‘My strength is my daughter.’13

  Our mainstream political discourse is full of shrill slogans about ‘saving’ daughters and worshipping mothers. Yet, in a country where daughters are considered undesirable and dispensable, how come we hear so little about these two mothers who turned the love for and loss of their daughters into strength offered to other women in need?

  A Father’s Search for His Son

  On 1 March 1976, during the Emergency, Rajan, a young student at REC Calicut (today known as NIT Calicut), in Kerala, was picked up by the police and taken to a detention camp. He then ‘disappeared’. His father, a retired Hindi professor T.V. Eachara Varier, began a futile hunt for his son. Ministers, chief ministers, all knew the truth, but none would admit it in front of him. His stubborn struggle eventually unearthed the truth: Rajan had died in police custody following brutal torture.

  Rajan had been arrested as a ‘Naxalite’, with no evidence linking him to any crime. His story became synonymous with the Emergency and its attack on civil liberties and human rights. He was subjected to a particularly brutal form of torture known as uruttal (rolling) in which a heavy wooden log would be rolled over the thighs followed by kicking in the stomach by a police officer with heavy boots.

  Professor Varier wrote a book about his experience of searching for his son. He described the way in which Rajan’s mother (who became insane) never stopped expecting her son to return. He ended the book with an account of a visit to the Kakkayam detention camp where his son was tortured and killed. His final words leave the reader with a question and a challenge:

  I still have no answer to the question of whether or not I feel vengeance. But I leave a question to the world: why are you making my innocent child stand in the rain even after his death?

  I don’t close the door. Let the rain lash inside and drench me. Let at least my invisible son know that his father never shut the door.14

  Rajan’s father wrote, ‘I should not leave the new generation to that wooden bench and the rolling.’15 Those words should shame and haunt us today because brutal torture—including the uruttal torture—continues even today in our police stations. These forms of torture were not an ‘excess’ of the Emergency—they are part of casual, everyday routine policing in India. For the poor, for the Dalits, Adivasis and minorities, every day is an ‘emergency’, irrespective of who is in power.

  In 2018, again in Kerala, sixty-seven-year-old single mother Prabhavathi Amma succeeded in winning the conviction of the policemen who had performed the same brutal rolling torture on her son Udayakumar, a scrap collector, thirteen years ago. Udayakumar was picked up by the police on charges of petty theft and killed under custodial torture. Prabhavathi said their family was so poor that they never had the money to get a photograph taken of Udayakumar; the only picture she has of her son is of his dead body. When a special CBI court convicted the police officers for her son’s custodial killing, Prabhavathi said exactly what Varier had said decades ago: ‘I should do this for my son, so that no other mother will have to go through what I went through.’16

  These fathers and mothers lost everything when their sons were taken, tortured and killed—they struggled so that others should be spared the same fate. Our callous tolerance of custodial torture, as a society, lets down these parents. It is even more obscene that such custodial torture is rationalized as ‘national security’ and ‘protecting the motherland’, and the voices arguing in favour of the principles of human rights and civil liberties are vilified as ‘anti-national’.

  When Women’s Autonomy Is ‘Anti-National’

  Autonomy for girls and women means the freedom to wander
around in public spaces, make friends and hang out with them, fall in and out of love, make decision for themselves and explore their full selves.

  But for Adivasi girls and women of Bastar, where the ‘war on Maoists’ is the pretext for extreme militarization in civilian areas, their very autonomy and mobility are cited as alibis to defend police and paramilitary forces accused of rape and murder. For them, the police and paramilitary do not represent ‘security’, they represent arbitrary, cruel power and terror that can rape or kill with total impunity.

  Take the case of Meena Khalko, a fifteen-year-old girl from the Oraon Adivasi tribe who lived in the remote village of Karcha in Balrampur district, Chhattisgarh. Meena grazed goats and was a familiar figure on her bicycle. She was friends with a truck driver whom she would meet near a river close to her village. One evening in 2011, she left home on her bicycle, telling her parents she was visiting her friend. Her parents never saw her again. The next morning, they were summoned to the hospital, to find their daughter dead. The police claimed she was a Maoist who had been killed in an ‘encounter’ near the neighbouring village of Nawadih.17

  Meena’s parents, Buddheshwar and Guttiyari, as well as all the people of Karcha, were absolutely sure she was no Maoist. The people of Nawadih also strongly countered police claims that there had been any prolonged gunfire indicating an encounter near their village. The postmortem report showed sperm in Meena’s body. The villagers were all sure Meena had been raped and killed by the police, who then claimed she had been killed in an encounter. The government and the police insisted the encounter was genuine—and yet, compensated Meena’s family with cash and a job for her brother. If the encounter was genuine, why was the government paying compensation? If it was an attempt at hush money, Meena’s parents refused to be hushed.