Abstract
Conservative politicians are telling Indian women that protest is not feminine.
Some protesters were injured and, far from supporting them, the university’s then vice–chancellor, Girish Chandra Tripathi, said that they had “sold a woman’s modesty and brought dishonour to the university” by holding protests. He also defended differential curfew timings in the hostels for male and female students, by citing security needs for women.
The idea that women do not belong in the public, much less in protests, is one that has considerable sway, even in the 21st century.
In India, there has always been great anxiety about the presence of women in public, including in protest spaces. Part of the anxiety is that women will be harassed, even assaulted. Another unspoken concern is that the presence of women in public as political agents, making claims as citizens, will lead them to “get above themselves”.
In an interview with the Indian Express, the vice-chancellor said: “If we are going to listen to every demand of every girl, we won’t be able to run the university. All these rules are for their safety, all in favour of the girl students.”
Women’s access to the public square is mediated by the twin, and by no means unconnected, fears that women will be assaulted by strangers and that women could enter into consenting relationships with men of the wrong community or class. So pervasive is the fear that, in the states of Haryana, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, khap panchayats (community organisations usually representing clans) have forbidden women to use mobile phones, which are seen as a possible conduit to transgression.
The Hindu right wing have, in the last few years, focused on unearthing what they call love jihad – ostensibly a ploy by Muslim men to marry Hindu women. Thus far, they have not been able to prove a single case.
Women’s movements have rallied against these ideas with protests and campaigns, drawing attention to them and exposing arguments that suggest that if women are outside, particularly at night, they are creating risk for themselves.
The question of restrictions imposed on women living in hostels and paying guest accommodation in New Delhi spawned a vibrant and creative movement in 2015. The Pinjra Tod (Break the Cage) campaign seeks to highlight how these women have curfews imposed upon them. No such curfews are imposed on male students. Pinjra Tod uses a mix of posters, protest rallies, petitions, sit-ins, public hearings, marches and social media to further its cause.
On 21 January 2017, to coincide with the Women’s March in the USA, women in India protested against a mass molestation that took place in Bengaluru on New Year’s Eve.
In the I Will Go Out protest, women across 30 Indian cities marched in the streets to claim the right to public space.
Many protests also take place online via hashtag activism. Perhaps the earliest example of this was the Pink Chaddi campaign, in 2009.
A group of men had attacked women who were at a pub in Mangalore, an incident followed by Pramod Muthalik, head of the Sri Ram Sena [a right-wing Hindu group], threatening to marry off couples who were seen together on Valentine’s Day. In response, journalist Nisha Susan created the Facebook page A Consortium of Pub-Going, Loose and Forward Women. Within hours, the page had thousands of members. This led to the Pink Chaddi campaign, where women were invited to send Muthalik pink pants for Valentine’s Day. Hundreds of parcels were sent, and the protest was effective because it invited ridicule towards such acts of moral policing.
Online activism has only grown more powerful since then.
I am part of a group which has run the #WhyLoiter campaign every December since 2014, inviting women to post images of themselves having a good time in public space, organising loitering sessions in parks and tweet chats. In the last two years we have done this along with Girls at Dhabas, in Pakistan, which led the mainstream media to comment on how there was no line of control to feminist solidarity.
Several non-governmental organisations focusing on gender concerns have also taken to the internet in their campaigns. Street protests are sometimes mobilised online, such as the I Will Go Out campaign.
Protest is not limited to large groups of women picketing outside offices of political and structural power. Many women-led protests, especially those aimed at accessing public space, have been subversive and much smaller, though often no less successful.
A woman poses with a cow mask as part of a protest that argues cows have more rights than women
CREDIT: Sujatro Ghosh
One of the more visible among these has been the Blank Noise campaign, which reminds women, “I Never Ask For It”, exhibiting clothes in which women were harassed and involving women staring at men on the street, to give them an understanding of what it feels like. More recently, Blank Noise has run a campaign called Meet to Sleep, inviting women to sleep in their city parks. Women go into these spaces with rugs and sleep on the grass or on benches.
One year I joined the protest with my mother, my then four-year-old daughter and some students. The park security were very upset and insisted the park was not intended for “such purposes”. Eventually we got fed up with repeated intrusions, took photographs to upload to social media and left.
Protests that take place on the streets and in the parks must also be publicised online for greater impact. The idea that women have the right to the simple pleasure of sleeping in a park is a radical one that shatters the stereotype which locates women firmly in the home.
In 2011, Why Loiter? – a book which I co-authored – was published. It focused on “loitering” as transformative politics for women seeking to access public space. The movement around Why Loiter? has spread from Mumbai to Jaipur and Pune.
India is no stranger to women’s protests, nor are they all located in the cities. In the early 1970s, Gaura Devi led several women in the Chipko Movement against deforestation in contemporary Uttrakhand (then the state of Uttar Pradesh).
In the early 1990s, women in rural Andhra Pradesh led a successful movement against the government sale of alcohol to their men, who would waste money and often abuse women.
The early 2000s saw the growth of the Gulabi Gang, a group of women vigilantes in Badausa, in Uttar Pradesh, who took it upon themselves to address domestic violence, bribery and other problems. They wear pink saris, often carry sticks and are not averse to using violence to make their case.
In 2004, women in Manipur mounted a protest that still reverberates. Protesting against the rape and murder of Thangjam Manorama by the Indian army, several women stood naked, carrying a banner saying, “Indian Army Rape Us” outside the Kangla Fort, in Imphal, where the army was stationed. This protest led to the Assam Rifles being forced to vacate the Kangla Fort.
As much as women are pushed back into the private spaces of the home, they have pushed back in subversive and confrontational ways, protesting and claiming space with their bodies.
A poster from the Pink Chaddi campaign, encouraging women to send in pink underwear to a politician on Valentine’s Day, 2009
The women’s movement in India is diverse, often at odds with itself, alive and engaged in a loud – and mostly productive – debate. It is this diversity that makes for complex feminist politics of protest and that allows women to claim spaces – public, private and digital – in a variety of ways.
Women are refusing to conform, and through their various transgressions, small and large, they are claiming the streets.
Girls Just want to have Fun(Damental Rights)
All over India, there are girls who don’t want to be good any more. You see them everywhere. They’re in classrooms and offices, zipping around on two-wheelers and driving SUVs. They’ve swapped their modest clothing for tight leggings and short tops. About 10 years ago, an automobile manufacturer sniffed the change in the air. Their advertisements showed sparky young women flying off on bright red scooters. “Why should boys have all the fun?” asked grinning girls, pressing the ignition. Women are asking this in many different ways now.
Next door in my remote hill town in literate family of cowherds. They earn little but send their teenage daughter to an expensive school. She reads books, speaks fluent English, writes poetry. Her themes are sexual harassment and freedom. “Why the hell are restrictions only for a girl?” she asks in a poem, and muses: “Dreams are not the ones that happen when you sleep, they’re those that keep you awake.”
This new combination – asking tough questions and aspiring to a larger life – is at the root of agitations like the one at Banaras Hindu University, a conservative Hindu stronghold.Here, where female students are locked into hostels after dark and denied the internet and night-time access to libraries, they recently broke out in protest after a student was molested on campus.
In another collision, a marriage was annulled by the Kerala High Court on the grounds that the woman, named Hadiya, had been forcibly converted from Hinduism to Islam. She denied this, yet was living under court-decreed house arrest for three months. The Supreme Court (one female judge, 25 male judges) heard her case on 27 November, the first time Hadiya was allowed to speak for herself. While the court struck down her house arrest and allowed her to resume studies, judgement on her marriage was postponed to January 2018.
But a new audacity is in the air. Women are angry in ways they would never have been, and they won’t back off. When a right-wing politician blamed a molested woman for being out late at night back in August, women all over India screamed back with selfies hashtagged #Aintnocinderella, picturing themselves out partying at midnight. A startling series of photographs featuring women wearing cow masks asked why Indian cows were better protected than Indian women. It went viral when it was launched earlier in the summer. Widespread protests after the 2012 gang rape and murder in Delhi of Jyoti Singh led to amendments to the rape law in 2013. It may have led also to a greater awareness of rights and justice among women, and a sense that fighting for these can lead to change.
Conservative Hindus have always derided Muslims for oppressing women. Religious divisions in India have sharpened recently, but it is clear that one thing unites conservative men regardless of religion: their fear of fearless women. They might be out of luck. For, as the poet Tishani Doshi said: “Girls are coming out of the woods, clearing the ground to scatter their stories.”