Fearless Freedom

by Kavita Krishnan

  What the APDP does in Kashmir, mothers and fathers have done in other parts of the world, where military dictatorships have ‘disappeared’ people and robbed parents of their offspring. In Argentina, during the US-backed military dictatorship (1976–83), mothers of disappeared persons began to defy the regime’s bans on protests and gather at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires.39 To convey that mothers would always remember the babyhood of their adult offspring, they would wear white scarves on their heads to symbolize diapers. These women were referred to by the regime as ‘las locas’ (madwomen). But the government found the ‘madwomen’ dangerous enough to ‘disappear’ many of them. In 2005, the remains of three of the leading mothers of the Plaza de Mayo—Azucena Villaflor, Esther Careaga and María Eugenia Bianco—who had themselves been ‘disappeared’ in 1977, were identified in an unmarked grave.40 CoMadres is a similar organization of mothers whose sons and daughters were abducted by a dictatorial regime in El Salvador. A 1987 song titled ‘Mothers of the Disappeared’, by the Irish rock band U2 and their lead singer Bono is a tribute to the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and CoMadres who hear the heartbeat and see the tears of the sons and daughters who were taken from them at midnight.41

  In Chile, too, women would gather in the capital, Santiago, to protest the disappearances of their loved ones, at the behest of the dictatorial regime of Augusto Pinochet.42 These Chilean women would dance the cueca, the national dance of Chile that is usually danced in couples, alone—holding a photograph of their loved one. In 1987, the English singer Sting composed ‘They Dance Alone’ in memory of these women who by ‘dancing with the missing . . . dancing with the dead . . . dancing with their fathers . . . dancing with their sons’ kept an accusing finger pointed at the brutal Pinochet regime.43

  Writing in December 1999, the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano asked, ‘What would it be like if we began to exercise the never proclaimed right to dream? What if we raved without constraints for a while?’ And as part of this utopia he dreamed of, Galeano said, ‘In Argentina, the Locas de la Plaza de Mayo (madwomen of the Plaza de Mayo) will be held up as examples of mental health, because during the time of obligatory amnesia they refused to forget.’44 As Indian citizens, we have a choice. We can either help our governments and our media enforce the ‘obligatory amnesia’ about the terrible crimes committed in the name of India—in our name. Or we can be ‘mad’ enough to join Parveena Ahanger and the parents in APDP in challenging this obligatory amnesia. The parents can never forget, and the least we can do is to do them the favour of letting them remind us.

  Autonomy—as Women, as Communities

  Women, in every community in India, face patriarchal restrictions on their autonomy. But when their community itself faces severe, violent militarizations that restrict its own autonomy as a community, it becomes much more challenging for women to assert their own autonomy. Some of the most inspiring assertions of women’s autonomy under these challenging circumstances come from Kashmir.

  In the summer of 2017, newspapers carried photographs of Kashmiri schoolgirls pelting stones at armed forces. In one of the most iconic of these photos, a schoolgirl could be seen with a football in one hand, pelting a stone with the other.45 It emerged later that these girls were part of a football team, walking to the playground with their coach. When a policeman ‘mistook them for stone pelters’ and slapped one of them, the girls picked up stones and hurled them at the cops. Essar Batool, Kashmiri feminist activist and writer, observed, that ‘these images of young women with their cute bunny bags or football in hand are extremely powerful. They shatter many myths and stereotypes about Kashmiri women.’ Batool felt that for the Kashmiri schoolgirls, picking up a stone was ‘about feeling empowered’, a way of challenging ‘not only the political regime but also patriarchal norms within which women have been subjugated’.46

  Nearly a decade ago, in 2010, filmmaker Sanjay Kak had already remarked on the significance of Kashmiri women stepping out of traditional roles to directly confront and defy the Indian state’s armed forces. He commented on the presence of the ordinary middle-aged Kashmiri woman in the protests, ‘dressed in ordinary salwar-kameez, pastel pink, baby blue, purple and yellow’, her head ‘casually covered with a dupatta’, seeming to be ‘unconcerned about being recognized’, and carrying a stone in her hand ready to fling at security forces. What put that stone in her hand? Kak wrote that ‘this is no ordinary anger, but an old, bottled-up rage, gathered over so many years that it has settled, and turned rock hard. That accumulated fury is the stone in her hand.’47

  Batool was one of the six young Kashmiri women in their twenties, who during the protests that followed the Delhi 2012 gangrape, began to revisit the Kunan Poshpora rape case of 1991, in which thirty-one women of Kunan and Poshpora villages were gang-raped by Indian armed forces during a night raid. They wrote about that experience, documenting the narratives of the women who survived that rape and still fight for justice, in a book titled Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora?48

  Natasha Rather, one of the co-authors of that book, addressed a conference of my organization as a guest in November 2016, and offered insights into the burden of ‘honour’ that links the struggles of Kashmiri women and those of women in India and South Asia more generally:

  In 1991, and even now, it is not easy for women to speak of rape or anything ‘sexual’ in Kashmiri society. We just heard Neelam-ji [Neelam Katara] speak about women facing violence in the name of ‘honour’. We know how women in every section of South Asian society are made to bear the burden of honour. Whether we like it or not, we women are forced to uphold the honour of our husbands, fathers, brothers or sons. And if we fail to maintain that honour, we are blamed. It is this honour that the Indian Army soldiers targeted at Kunan Poshpora and other places. When you ‘disappear’ Kashmiri men in extra-judicial killings, when you detain and torture them, you are targeting their bodies and their spirit as individuals. But when you target women, you are targeting their entire families, their entire community. What the women of Kunan Poshpora showed was that by targeting women to attack the ‘honour’ of the struggling people, you cannot wound their spirit.49

  During our visit to a village in Kashmir in November 2016, a group of women and girls told us about an attack on their village. Most of the women spoke only Kashmiri, so a Class IV schoolgirl, Muskan, stepped forward to speak to us in Hindi.50 Looking us boldly in the eye, she told us, ‘Army wale Eid ke din hamari behanon ke baal pakad kar ghaseet kar le gaye. Ek mahila behosh ho gayi. Army wale hans rahe the, hame laga ki woh hamari izzat loot lenge isliye ham bhag gaye.’ (On the day of Eid, armymen came and dragged our sisters by the hair. One woman fainted. The armymen were laughing. We thought they will rape us, so we ran away.)

  I asked her if she had ever joined the protests, and if so, why. Without a moment’s shyness or hesitation she replied, ‘Han hum andolan karte hain. Hum Modi se kehte hain Kashmir se nikal jao. Hum azadi chahte hain. Hum Mehbooba Mufti se kehte hain gaddi chhor do.’ (Yes, we agitate. We tell Modi to get out of Kashmir. We want freedom. And we tell Mehbooba she must quit her chair.)

  On an Aaj Tak show51 about rape threats to a Delhi University student, the BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra declared me ‘deshdrohi’ (anti-national) because ‘she says army men can rape’. Repeatedly raising long-drawn-out slogans of ‘Vande Mataram’, which he asked the studio audience (of journalism students) to join, Patra instigated an ABVP cadre in the audience to ask me to declare whether or not I considered Kashmir to be an integral part of India. A debate that was supposed to be about rape threats, turned into a test of ‘nationalism’ and ‘loyalty’ for a women’s rights activist, the show’s sole woman panelist!52 Likewise, Arnab Goswami on the Republic ran a show haranguing the left with the hashtag #LeftInsultsArmy, about the remarks of a left leader against the draconian nature of AFSPA, which is used as a shield for rape and murder.53

  As I pointed out on the show, if criticizing the Army’s impunity from charges of rape and m
urder amounts to ‘insulting the Army’, the Supreme Court itself is insulting the Army by demanding accountability from it for no less than 1528 extrajudicial killings and instances of rape in Manipur. The Supreme Court judges slammed the attorney general with these brutally harsh words for the Army:

  Do you have people in Army who rape? It is an alleged gangrape in uniform—an aggravated form of crime . . . Here is a thirteen-year-old girl who worked in a rubber farm. There was no allegation that she was an insurgent. Two people come and rape her. She narrates her ordeal to her mother and a sister and then commits suicide. Have you [state government] decided that let Army come and rape anyone, what can we do?54

  When 700 Army officers filed a petition suggesting that such remarks by Supreme Court judges had a ‘demoralizing’ effect on the armed forces, the court responded that surely the armed forces are made of ‘sterner stuff’ and the apprehension that they have been demoralized ‘is suggestive of a weakness in them’.55 Why should it be an ‘insult’ to the armed forces to be held accountable to India’s Constitution and international conventions? After all, it is the military dictatorships that boast of being immune to human rights standards and international conventions: surely it is a far greater insult to the armed forces of a democratic India to fail to hold them accountable?

  On 5 August 2019, the Modi government abrogated Article 370, which was a move towards stripping Jammu and Kashmir of statehood and autonomy. Subsequently, many in the government claimed that the move was necessary to liberate Kashmiri women from patriarchal oppression.56 I visited the Valley with other activists and concerned people just days after 5 August, and it was under total lockdown. We had asked girls and women what they felt about these claims that the government sought to liberate them. This question was met with angry retorts such as this one: ‘Who will liberate us? The BJP leaders who are saying men in UP or Haryana (where the sex ratio is low) can now source fair brides from Kashmir? Are we apples or peaches of Kashmir—goods to be looted by our conquerors?’57

  These girls and women were referring to a statement by Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar in the wake of the abrogation of Article 370. Khattar had said that Haryana had a poor sex ratio, forcing men to ‘source’ brides from other states like Bihar. He said, ‘People are saying that doors of Kashmir have been opened and we can get girls from there.’58 Not long before him, a BJP MLA from Khatauli in Muzaffarnagar, UP, said his (male) party workers were excited because they could now ‘marry the fair girls of Kashmir’.59 There has been a flurry of pop songs urging Indian men to travel to Kashmir to claim the land and women.60 Such rhetoric is redolent of colonial conquest, fantasizing about the sexual conquest of women as the spoils of war. And these fantasies have a real-life impact on women. People of several villages in Kashmir told reporters that soldiers raiding their homes at night had not only indulged in torture and loot, they had ‘threatened to take away and marry their female relatives’. One man said he had sent his daughter away to a safer place because soldiers would come repeatedly to his home looking for his daughter. Another added, ‘They’re marauding our homes and hearths like a victorious army.’61

  In previous chapters, we’ve seen how parents, communities, even courts, often take decisions for women against their will, claiming that women cannot be expected to know what’s best for them. ‘We are curtailing your liberties for your own good’ is a sentiment with which women in India are very familiar. Similar arguments are now being given to justify the caging of Kashmir.

  In a piece in the Washington Post, an Indian journalist wrote that in 2016, a less-than-strict curfew allowed protests to take place, costing the lives of thirty-seven protesters in the first week.62 She then quoted a spokesperson for the Indian government’s administration in Kashmir, who said, ‘to protect lives, some liberties may have to be compromised’.63 Kashmiri civilians have lost their lives in protests because the forces are empowered to use pellet guns and bullets against them.64 The lockdown endangered lives by jeopardizing access to medical care.65 Earlier in this book, we have seen that women are not safer when they are less free. The curtailment of freedom itself is never ‘protection’, but one of the worst forms of violence.

  When I think of Kashmir, I do not think of a piece of real estate, but of the living, breathing people there—people who are an ‘integral part of humanity’. When I think about Kashmir, I remember Muskan—that bold, brave girl who was asserting her own autonomy and that of her people.

  Conclusion

  Towards Fearless Freedom

  You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world . . . The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even but a millimeter the way people look at reality, then you can change it.

  —James Baldwin1

  Kal ka geet liye honthon par, aaj ladaai jaari hai [With tomorrow’s song on our lips, we fight today’s battles]

  —Maheshwar2

  In December 2012 and January 2013, the anti-rape movement that swept Delhi heard bold cries demanding ‘Fearless Freedom’, and also demanding ‘naari mukti, sabki mukti’ (freedom for women, freedom for all).

  Women (and indeed all of us—women, LGBTQIA persons, men) can be fully free only when humanity is free—and that, as I see it, will need us to throw off the yoke of the entire oppressive, exploitative structure. It will, in other words, need a revolution, a complete change in the way human beings stand in relation to each other and to nature.

  What is the point of imagining a revolutionized world free of all hierarchies; it is not going to be a reality in our lifetime, I am often asked.

  Revolutionary goals are like a compass on a long march—it may take very long to reach the destination, and the destination may not be in sight, but a compass makes sure we march in the right direction and do not lose our way.

  If you are putting together a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, you can do it only with the full picture clear in your head. Without the full picture, you cannot connect the little pieces to each other.

  We need to keep tomorrow’s song on our lips in today’s battles—and that is what gives meaning and direction to today’s battles. We need to hope and work for the day that all women and all of humanity shall be free, and all hierarchies shall be history—and it is then that we are able to see today’s struggles whole, rather than as piecemeal and disconnected from each other.

  Revolutionary goals are not empty dreams made up of nice ideas. Revolutionary dreams are rooted firmly in the earth—and humans working together can make those dreams come to life on this earth. With that revolutionary destination firmly in our sights, we are able to recognize how each of the less distant goals we seek for ourselves, cannot be achieved without a struggle for women’s autonomy at their core.

  Autonomy is not about a mere ‘choice’ made by an individual—it isn’t like choosing between various brands at a supermarket. Autonomy in a feminist sense is necessarily autonomy—to whatever extent possible—from social and economic structures, and it is never autonomy for oneself to hurt the rights and liberties of other women, other oppressed people.

  I have in mind Prachi Trivedi, one of the protagonists of the 2012 documentary film by Nisha Pahuja, The World Before Her.3 Prachi is a young woman, a trainer at a Durga Vahini camp, in which young girls from rural India are taught to wield weapons and hate Muslims. Prachi’s father, a VHP leader, once burnt her foot, to punish her for lying—but Prachi says it’s okay for him to do that, since he allowed her to live, rather than be killed at birth like so many other baby girls in India. Prachi is not conventionally feminine, she says she wishes she had been born neither a girl nor a boy, and she is not interested in getting married, but she accepts that her father will take that decision for her. The thrill that women in the Durga Vahini camp get from wielding weapons, raising slogans and learning martial arts moves is all circumscribed by an ideology that tells them women
must be subservient to men; that women’s purpose is to give birth; and that women are required to step out of domestic roles and be battle-ready only to ‘save’ the country from Muslims—i.e., to inflict violence on minorities. This is not feminist autonomy. A young woman like Prachi, who joins the Durga Vahini, experiences, briefly, what may feel like a taste of liberty—but she’s ‘allowed’ that autonomy by a patriarchal father and a fascist organization only so that she can hate and inflict violence on Muslim minorities.

  The same film also follows young women who are participants in a Miss India beauty pageant. Does the world of the beauty pageant offer autonomy? The young women’s bodies are subjected to Botox and to humiliating tests (such as when all their faces are covered to allow judges to judge the beauty of their legs alone). The pageant encourages every woman to compete fiercely with other women—each is out for her own. And yet the pageant not only disallows mutual solidarity, it also erases individuality: so much so that a contestant’s own mother is unable to recognize her daughter in the line-up of contestants who all look the same!4

  Both the Durga Vahini camp and the beauty pageant boot camp offer young women what can pass for ‘empowerment’. But both demand a measure of self-hate: the Vahini wants women to internalize a brutal patriarchy and become its agents, while the Miss India pageant wants women to internalize the notion that ‘beauty’ requires their bodies to be subjected to all sorts of ‘corrections’, indignities and humiliations. In addition, of course, the Vahini camp requires young girls and women to learn to hate Muslim men and women, and trains them to attack the autonomy of other Hindu women who may love or marry a Muslim!

  To wrest autonomy from oppressive and exploitative structures calls for collective struggles, for drawing strength from each other, not in competition with each other. That’s why a feminist quest for autonomy cannot be about a few individual women ‘breaking the glass ceiling’ in competition with a handful of other men and women. A recently published Feminism for the 99 Per Cent: A Manifesto asserts, ‘We have no interest in breaking the glass ceiling, while leaving the majority of women to clean up the shards.’5