Abstract
Kavita Krishnan, Fearless Freedom. Penguin, 2020, 264 pages (e-book).ISBN 978-0143444688.
Fearless Freedom is like an Everywoman’s Manifesto and a Guide to Freedom, an unambiguous statement on behalf of women to assert their autonomy on an everyday basis. The book seeks to lay bare the many shades, forms and guises in which patriarchy ‘protects’ women, how familial bonds, socialisation, notions of ‘family’ recreated in public/work spaces, together create an ideological smokescreen, wherein denial of freedom and access to public spaces are justified in the name of ‘protecting’ women. Its title comes from the slogan Krishnan raised at the time of the massive protests in 2012–2013, against the brutal gang-rape of Nirbhaya, the name given to the victim at that time. Krishnan had then famously stated, ‘… we need to tell them: if you want to “protect” anything, protect our fearless freedom, our bekhauf azaadi’.
A critical view of the ‘protectionist’ ideology emerges as the main plank and autonomy as the key concept to critique restrictions on women’s sexuality and ideologies embedded in patriarchal frameworks. The call for freedom and autonomy seeks to identify retrogressive viewpoints and hold politicians across political parties accountable. There is strength in Krishnan’s argument. Undoubtedly, the book speaks to the millennial woman. The author confronts an oft-repeated statement ‘If you want to be safe, why do you demand freedom?’ to recount struggles that young women growing up in urban middle-class India wage while fighting for their basic rights—to education and more to confront restrictions imposed in the name of ‘bonds’ of love. Over eight chapters, Krishnan probes ideological moorings and entangled practices on the basis of which women are sought to be ‘protected’. Yet, somehow, over the next 270-odd pages, this frame becomes a restrictive exercise, rather than a means to throw open more questions.
The chapter on ‘Organized Crimes Against Women’s Freedom’ documents the culture of violence imposed in the name of ‘honour’ by caste councils, while another, ‘Profiles in Courage’, focuses on ‘love jihad’ and the myriad ways in which women are denied the right to choose their partners, including the well-known Hadiya 1 case.
The discussion draws attention to the role of state agencies, who often connive with conservative families, backed by so-called ‘community-based’ right-wing organisations, with ‘godmen’ sometime playing their part, to deny women the autonomy and the right to choose, even as the recourse to law remains tortuous and tricky. In ₹Empowering Women’, Krishnan reflects on state-led campaigns—such as the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (BBBP)—which symbolise the official embracing of the movement’s agenda. Krishnan probes the underpinnings of official campaigns, including the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (SBA), to expose the hidden message to keep women at home and safe (p. 84). She explores the underside of violence and the moral cover schemes, such as the BBBP, SBA, Micro Finance Institutions and population policies provide for voyeurism and vigilantism, to make violence acceptable.
Factories as ‘Families’ provide insights into how patriarchy operates to control young women workers in supposedly modern mills and the garment industry. ‘In the globalized workplace, then, surveillance, sexualized abuse, sexual harassment and public humiliation are not aberrations—these are integral to the production process, and are used to keep the women workers insecure by pressurising them to meet impossible production targets’, she argues (p. 119). There is a glimmer of an argument about the complicity between capital, capitalists and patriarchy; as also with the feudal forces represented by the upper castes, who commit sexual crimes, more specifically against Dalit women, enjoying immunity due to political clout.
‘Constructing a Fascist Patriarchy’ draws attention to increasing polarisation in India, and espousal of the agenda of racial/religious segregation—reminiscent of the Nuremburg laws—which legitimises lynch mobs, supposedly out to ‘protect’ women. One of the many nuggets in the book refers to a selection of Modi’s speeches, which points to the saffron brigade’s attempt to appropriate and distort Ambedkar’s fight against caste (p. 150). This comes up again in the concluding pages, with reference to Prachi Trivedi—a trainer at a Durga Vahini camp—whose father burnt her foot to punish her. Trivedi, ‘not conventionally feminist’, feels a thrill being in the Durga Vahini, an outfit which remains ‘circumscribed by an ideology that tells women to be subservient to men’. This is not ‘feminist autonomy’, Krishnan observes. Only to quickly move on to a wishful fantasy: we need women to be Abhisarikas (women who go to meet their lover) today, ’with their desires—for lovers, yes, but also for the simple pleasure of a walk on the street or a cup of chai at a street corner, for reading and research, for adventure, for wanderlust, for andolans for revolution—to light up everything around them…’ (pp. 223–225). Soothing thoughts, surrounded as we are by the dark clouds.
The author delves into real-life stories in ₹Where Women are Worshipped, Can Women Roam. ‘Misogyny—cutting across party groupings—has been very much a discussion point in the media. The Sangh’s efforts to legitimise hierarchies include allowing for Familyism to be posited in opposition to feminism (p. 131) is discussed. Krishnan points to the mother nation ‘being weaponized against the nation’s own citizens, especially its own religious minorities’, as also in conflict zones (p. 189). The chapter on ₹Mothers and Motherlands’ attempts to infuse the discussion on autonomy with politics in a more overt sense. The argument on the mother image—as conjured by Hindutva ideology and its affiliated organisations which mobilise women in very specific ways—poses more questions than it can answer and there is only cursory reference to research around the trope of motherhood and the nation.
How the Hindu Right has succeeded in coopting feminist symbolism and women’s aspiration for ‘equality’ into its project of political Hindutva remains unexplained. On crime and violence against women, the movement and women’s studies have opened up many more lines of enquiry than Krishnan lays out in her approach. These have pointed to a more complex field of enquiry and the challenges to probing the layers of identities and their political assertion. In her search for quick-fix pathways to autonomy, Krishnan chooses to plough a rather restricted field. Her references to landmark cases involving violence—from Satya Rani to Shahjahan, Radhika Vemula, the parents of Rajan killed during the Emergency—the rape of Meena Khalko in Chhatisgarh—all in one stroke, ignore the need to contextualise the violence women face in contemporary India. This overarching sweep points to a symbolic opposition, rather than attempt at deeper analysis. Though the central trope of engaging with motherhood in the saffron imagination remains valid, the analysis does not flow from the preceding narrative, mainly because the author refrains from drawing upon the women’s movement’s long-term engagement with issues of democracy and citizenship.
The hope that the author is moving towards exploration of deeper structures to probe the links between power, hierarchy and ideologies, which adapt to changing social forms, remains elusive. Krishnan chooses to locate the discussion on violence against women in an autonomous terrain, at best-seeking validation drawn from her personal engagements and encounters.
In the Afterword, Krishnan seeks to open up a discussion on notions of honour, consent and the subject of punishment for rape, given the so-called ‘popular’ demand for capital punishment, citing denial of or delays in the judicial process as justification for violation of the law by security agencies. This is also in the context of the Hyderabad case. 2 The shooting down of the ‘accused’ by the police met with public applause (p. 229). In a country where those guilty and convicted for gang-rape and murder can be released on a remission policy on Independence Day and felicitated thereafter, many more Afterwords will be needed to understand the challenges before the women’s/the movement. Krishnan makes an effort to point to the threat held out by fundamentalism and Hindutva, which pose a major challenge today both in terms of their political domination and the cultural hegemony that right-wing ideology asserts.
There is much that goes unrecorded in this manifesto for a struggle against violence. The near-total absence of the women’s movement, its experiences and of work undertaken in Women’s Studies, remains a major weakness of the book. This shows up when Krishnan discusses incidents where the movement has intervened, and effectively so. Bekhauf Azaadi is about the here and now. It is framed in the terrain of autonomy—including that of the activist—who chooses to take no note of most of that which has gone before. The movement does not seem to exist in the firmament where Krishnan’s clarion call for azaadi is raised. Krishnan writes that ‘addressing these other forms of violence without tackling the attacks on autonomy is like rearing the furniture in the patriarchal house. bring down the walls instead and the whole patriarchal edifice will come tumbling down’ (p. 32). She then asks, ‘will this book change the world? Perhaps not. But if it can even alter by a millimetre how you and I look at women’s autonomy and autonomous women—if we can begin to admire and cherish women’s bekhauf azaadi, their veera sutantiram, their fearless freedom—perhaps we can change the world!’ (p. 227). That’s about how far the book goes.