Reorienting the Security Paradigm

This book is a welcome addition to the literature on a subject, Women in Peace Politics, which needs more exploration. It is densely written and its heavily footnoted text draws on a vast and diverse array of academic research. As one might expect, the essays cover a range of subjects and vary in their depth and complexity. Ruhi Kandhari reviews the book

Third in the series of South Asian Peace Studies, ‘Women in Peace Politics’ elaborates on the ‘non-traditional’ security concerns that are being continuously thrown up by social and political realities of conflict-torn areas in South Asia. The book points to the need for a new vocabulary, which probes into the local dimensions of peace as separate from the global understanding of security; prioritising justice, human rights and dignity over state-sponsored terror. After three volumes in the South Asian Peace Studies series that dealt with the concept, scope and theme of peace studies as separate from security studies and peace accords in South Asia, this book brings out the experiences of women in conflict situations.

The global understanding of security is largely understood as the absence of violence. By raising a debate on the quality of peace, seen through the lens of gender, the compilation of essays fulfils the imperative to widen the catchment-area of security to include peace.

Women’s experiences of war and conflict have, by and large, been etched in the popular consciousness by mainstream media as the distress of mothers and widows.  However, ‘women in peace politics’ highlights the role of women, as cadres in revolutionary movements and as women who face displacement, migration, harassment and sexual exploitation by foregrounding gender in the security discourse. Control Arms Foundation of India Vice President, Anuradha Chenoy, points out, “The gendered aspect of military violence, by emphasising that sexual violence continues to be the specific experience of women during war.”

The outlines of the discourse on the quality of peace from a gender perspective are being laid out in the 21st century global order just as the perils of the globalised markets begin to gain prominence and laws that curb civil liberties by empowering military get publicly debated. Insurgency and lopsided development are becoming the breeding grounds for the birth of movements and these political tensions often subsume within themselves a hierarchy of conflicts. As renowned environmental and social activist, Vandana Shiva, points out that military and markets are major threats to human security. However, there appears to be considerable ambiguity on what constitutes the sphere of peace studies and how gender is understood in the, by and large, masculine turf of war.

The UN Decade for Women from 1975 to 1985 brought forth the idea of building positive peace, by addressing gender-based inequalities within the nation, thus adding to women’s vulnerability, as opposed to the idea of negative peace that merely means the end of war. The essays in this volume bring into sharp focus the subtle and nuanced experiences induced by everyday negotiations by women in South Asia, issues that normally escape public debate.

Sumona Das Gupta observes in his book, ‘Security, Gender and Conflict Prevention: Perceptions from South Asia, “By prioritising survival, livelihood and dignity as the building blocks of security, human security has helped to rethink security in ways that place people and their participation at the centre. In the absence of such an enabling concept, political and economic elites often invoking national security tend to do it alone in a process that often marginalizes and impoverishes the people.” She identifies three clusters of security issues through the lens of the non-traditional and critical security approaches: militarism and militarisation of state and society; development and globalisation; and post-conflict reconstruction and peace building processes.

The central argument of the book is that the South Asian region has emerged as one of the most conflict prone zones in the world and so it is apparent that the agenda for peace has, as yet, not received the attention that it should. Feminist researchers, activists, journalists and civil society groups draw on insights from fieldwork to illuminate important questions of wide relevance in the essays. Paula Banerjee, a specialist in issues of conflict and peace in South Asia, has edited the volume and written its introduction.

This volume is divided into three sections with their own sectional introductions: Ideas and Ideologies; Movements and Voices. Of the many faces of women in conflict in South Asia, the book looks at three major ones – fate of women migrating in search of jobs and security, women in revolutionary political space and women protesting for peace as mothers.

Ranabir Samaddar’s essay titled ‘Shefali on a woman’s trans-border migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal in India’ calls attention to the fact that thousands of women and children from Bangladesh and Nepal are sold and forced into prostitution, organ trade and slave labour in India and Pakistan. He has based his findings on human rights activists, civil society groups, newspaper reports and police records, he argues that every day, more than 50 women and children are reportedly trafficked with false promises of jobs, marriage and other forms of security. Women and children are not only trafficked within South Asia, they are trafficked to other Asian countries and to Europe and America as well.

The story of Shefali showcases the oppression she faces at the household, societal and state levels. She is called an illegal immigrant and deported back to Bangladesh. Her story needs to be deliberated on for the implications it holds of being a ‘woman’ in such a scenario and getting rehabilitated appropriately.

The concerns of women in South Asia range from that of the innumerable Shefali to women of violence represented by the armed soldiers of the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam) in Sri Lanka or the Maoists fighting in the Telangana movement in Andhra Pradesh. Movements from such conflict torn areas have in turn influenced wider social movements, which have impacted larger movements for justice.

Women’s participation in armed conflict, their feelings and the push and pull factors influencing the decision to join the struggle for Telangana are some of the issues explored in this book. Besides women’s views on the movements, their leaders, policies, and the programmes of their parties are also brought into focus. On the one hand, the movements filled women with unprecedented confidence. They could travel alone at night and carry guns, which gave them a sense of equality with men. The change in public life made it necessary for them to recast their private lives, which were otherwise an impossible agenda for organisations spearheading such movements.

While analysing the lives of women cadres in the LTTE and Telangana movements, the essays, rich in detail, raise several questions. How involved are these women in decision-making and to what extant are they initiators of political and social projects? How are women’s sexualities used to control their physical movement? What are the manners in which marriage, relationships and child-birth are regulated?

Similarly, Saro Thiruppathy and Nirekha De Silva in Women in Sri Lankan Peace Politics point out that even though advocacy on peace politics continues through a variety of women’s organisations and at the individual level as well, the role of women in direct peace negotiations is not yet a reality. While the Sri Lankan government has taken a positive initiative by becoming the first country in South Asia to have a gender subcommittee as part of the formal peace-building process, women’s voices are still not taken seriously where they count the most—at the negotiating table.

On the one hand there are the women of violence and on the other the women for peace. In north-east India and Sri Lanka, women have successfully organised mothers’ movements and made successful claims to sit in ceasefire negotiations, which are often male domains. At various points, the essays delve into the question of how the anxieties and pains of individual mothers about their daughters and sons – tortured, incarcerated, killed or missing in action – get slowly translated into collective and more organised forms of resistance. It is often argued that motherhood has become the governing metaphor of women’s politics in North-East India today.

A case in point is that of 32-year-old Manorama Devi, who was pulled from her home by soldiers and found dead a few hours later. Her bullet-ridden body was left beside a paddy field in Manipur in 2004. The army defended itself by saying that she was a militant and was shot while trying to escape. After the incident, Imphal erupted in protest. Old women took off their clothes in front of army barracks and paraded a sign saying “Indian Army, Rape Us”.

Paula Banerjee’s, The space between, focuses on the north-eastern region of India, which has witnessed sustained insurgency, socio-political turmoil due to draconian laws like Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) which legitimise military violence and ethnic conflicts. The region also has many strong civil society movements, particularly women’s movements. Similar social movements in Nagaland and Manipur have been represented by two strong women’s organisations that are active in social and political affairs. Naga Mothers’ Association (NMA) and Meira Paibis (a Manipuri women’s organisation also known as torchbearers) believe in a broader definition of peace. That is the reason, according to Banerjee, their movements are more successful than those who find peace in ending armed conflict in the region. These groups believe that peace can be achieved through dialogue and political negotiations. They equate peace with justice and development. Paula Banerjee argues: “Women not only influence the politics of peace but their own lives are affected by participating in the politics of peace in myriad ways. They are able to legitimise their leadership roles and question unequal distribution of resources.”

The last section of the book, Voices, documents some of the inspiring tales of women who struggle against oppression. The introduction to this section by Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal emphasises the fact that these women have also fought against all that is unfair to humans. The section structured around six narratives of women negotiating violent politics in their everyday lives shifts the focus away from the discourse of the victimised and explores women’s agency for peace and conflict. It includes individual pamphlets by the Naga Mothers Association, Womens Action Forum of Pakistan and an extract from Viramma: Life of an Untouchable.

Missing issues

While ‘Women in Peace Politics’ points out the impediments to security arising from globalisation, the assault on minorities and ‘the war against terror’, which has added yet another dimension to the existing polarisation in South Asia, it does not delve deeply into any of them.

The book fails to cover the entire gamut of issues. While arguments on conflicts in Andhra Pradesh and north-eastern India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka run across the three sections of the book and come through repeatedly, the volume omits issues ranging from communal violence in India, violence due to the imbalances of the neo-liberal growth patterns and to the US war on terror in Afghanistan. Delhi in 1984, Gujarat in 2002 and Orissa in 2008 showed the failure of the democratic state as it acted on communal lines. One would have liked to see more debates on globalisation in the light of protests by the Narmada Bachao Andolan and the Nandigram rapes. Fauzia Gardezi’s essay touches on the tension between religion and gender but the book misses the larger debate on the US war of terror in Afghanistan. A global women’s movement has made itself heard over the violence of Bush’s so-called “war on terror” following the 9/11 attacks. Reports of Taliban insurgency, factional fighting, instability in Kandahar and Kabul, widespread looting and banditry, rapes and abuse continue unabated. Another problem with the book, a trait it shares with many academic books, is its size and verbosity. What has been expressed in 300 pages could easily have been compressed in about 200, without sacrificing any substance.

Despite these shortcomings, the book is a welcome addition to the literature on a subject that needs more exploration. It is densely written and its heavily footnoted text draws on a vast and diverse array of academic research. As one might expect, the essays cover a range of subjects and vary in their depth and complexity.

Women in many parts of the world find themselves in trying situations of violence. They continue to battle for a more human world, struggling against war, religious and ethnic hatred and for protecting the environment against the ravages of global capital, raising questions about nationalism and humaneness in an increasingly violent world. Volumes such as this, by expanding the definition of security and focusing on such issues, help in reorienting attitudes towards the orthodox security paradigm.

Caste in gender

Dalit feminists share a definite sense of identification with many basic articulations raised by the Dalit movement and the feminist movement due to the shared historicity based on experiences of oppression and discrimination.

 

Dr. Ambedkar responded strongly to the age old religious and social practices of Sati, enforced widowhood and girl marriage in the paper ‘Castes in India, their Mechanism, Genesis and Development’. He believed that the Varna system had not only subjugated untouchables but also women. He attacked the scriptures that granted social sanction to such practices by tracing the genesis of discrimination and degradation of the Indian women to the Laws of Manu and his Manusmriti.

 

“There can be no doubt that there has been an utter downfall in position of women in India from what it was once was. One cannot say much about the part they played in ancient time in the state craft. But there is no doubt they did occupy a very high position in the intellectual and social life of the country.”

According to him a caste was an enclosed class that existed before Manu. However, Manu’s codification of caste rules reinforced all these practices.

Later, Ambedkar’s introduction of the Hindu Code Bill to liberate the upper caste women laid the keystone for an attack on feminist causes by the religion based identity politics. The battle lines remain multi-layered and meaningful even today in religious identity-based politics that has become a dominant feature of Indian politics now. He critiqued the Brahminical centre of Hinduism by emphasising that the lower caste women did not suffer from as much inequality as compared to the higher caste women. As he said, “It would however be a mistake to suppose that only the wrongs of men are a religion to him. For the Brahmin has given his support to the worst wrongs that women have suffered from in any part of the world. Widows were burnt alive as suttees. Widows were never allowed to remarry.” To save those women the Hindu Code Bill was brought to parliament.

 

Ambedkar was way ahead of his time and this was reflected when he drafted the Hindu Code Bill. However he resigned from the cabinet after the Hindu Code Bill could not be passed as visualised. His fight for a woman’s right to divorce was fiercely opposed in the Parliament by the right wing Hindus like Shyama Prasad Mukharjee.

The parallels of this polarisation between these two camps came to the fore much later, when on September 4, 1987, 17-year-old Roop Kanwar consigned herself to flames or was burnt alive on the funeral pyre of her husband Maal Singh Shekhawat at Deorala village of Sikar district in Rajasthan. This infamous incident came to be referred to as the “sati” case. Sixteen years later, 11 persons, including Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) legislator and then State party vice-president Rajendra Singh Rathore, nephew of Vice-President Bhairon Singh Shekhawat and Narendra Singh Rajawat of the Rajput Mahasabha were let off for lack of evidence. They were among 16 persons accused of participating in the protests glorifying the practice of sati against the alleged police action in the wake of the incident.

 

Dalit feminists share a definite sense of identification with many basic articulations raised by the Dalit movement and the feminist movement due to the shared historicity based on experiences of oppression and discrimination.

 

The question of communalism has been fore grounded in the discussions about identity. This predominant strand within the thinking of the women’s movement is evident as defined by Jana Everett for analyzing the relationship between gender and identity politics. This frame identifies contemporary contexts which have shaped much of feminist notions of identity politics in India. According to Everett, ‘The upsurge of fundamentalism and communal violence in India over the past decade has led feminist scholars to analyse the interrelationships among the state, identity politics and gender.’

 

Zoya Hasan has also pointed out, ‘In the final analysis, the reaffirmation of religio-cultural distinctions constricts the articulation of gender interests within the terms of reference set by a specific communitarian discourse, and whatever rights may have been achieved in earlier political moments are sacrificed in the interests of identity politics’

 

Both texts raise different questions, the solution is obviously premised on the belief that a woman’s identity and her rights can be disassociated from the religious, ethnic, national or cultural context of her existence. These contexts do not shape her identity as a woman. However, they overlook the fact that it is in the realm of the culture that a ‘woman’ exists and it is in the cultural realm that alternate and feminist identities are sought to be constructed.

 

Different identity movements are indeed patriarchal. But the question for feminist politics really is: Is patriarchy the only lens through which to view women’s identity? The women’s movement has to find other ways of engaging with identity movements, specially, in India rather than focus only on the patriarchal dimension of the movements and denounce them.

Stuck in the male gaze

The female nude, in her collection offers surprising, fascinating, and sometimes disturbing definitions of the female form from stark, high contrast black and white to soft-focus colour in soft and personal images.

 

Each faceless image of the ‘nude’ puts forward the ‘liberation’, she feels from the societal norms, but one can’t help noticing the politics of the ‘male gaze’. The collection ‘Uncovered’ exhibited at Photography Exhibition, ended on 15th march 2008, at Apparao Gallery makes an interesting and ironic comment on intended and inadvertent expressions of a naked woman. Monika Ghurde, the photographer showcases her “personal journey as a girl and a woman”, with the medium of camera in solo show exhibiting Uncovered. She writes in her introduction to the collection that when a woman puts on clothes she is a different person. “When she takes it off she is herself since every girl has an overpowering consciousness of her body and sexuality.” ‘Uncovered’ attempts to explore the subject of nude, in all its beauty and vulnerability, in the sphere of “female gaze”.

 

The female nude, in her collection offers surprising, fascinating, and sometimes disturbing definitions of the female form from stark, high contrast black and white to soft-focus colour in soft and personal images. “The perception of a girl from a conservative society who is told from a very young age to maintain her modesty and is constantly made conscious of it” as Monika puts it, is a documentation of historical and cultural constructs enveloping women that come alive with each image. Besides, the photographs put forth a greater feminist issue about whether a woman’s attempt to cultivate her appearance makes her a dupe of fashion, the plaything of men, and thus a collaborator in her own oppression, as Linda Scott writes in her book.

On one hand, feminists have attempted to find answers to what they must wear (or not wear) in order to be ‘liberated’. The symbolic act of tossing clothes into the trash was meant as a serious critique of the modern beauty culture, of valuing women for their looks instead of their whole self. With the 1970s came a new feminist critique of bralessness and the sexual revolution in which many feminists participated but conversely, in many circles, being sexually free has meant primarily being more sexually available to men.

In art, the representation of a naked woman found scrutiny in the idea of ‘male gaze’. The introduction of the term “the male gaze” can be traced back to Laura Mulvey and her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. In it, Mulvey states that in film women are typically the objects, rather than the possessors, of gaze because the control of the camera (and thus the gaze) comes from factors such as the as the assumption of heterosexual men as the default target audience for most film genres. John Berger took the concept further while studying the European nude and found that the female model is often put on display directly to the spectator/painter or indirectly through a mirror, thus viewing herself as the painter views her. For Berger these images record the inequality of gender relations and a sexualization of the female image that remains culturally central even today. They reassure men of their sexual power and at the same moment deny any sexuality of women other than the male construction. They are evidence of gendered difference. ‘the assumptions of the likely viewer’ as Berger puts it does not fit with intention of the artist(the photographer in this case) but transgresses it.

Any image in ‘Uncovered’ is, thus, being sold to men as an attractive naked woman while the image being sold to women is a beautiful woman flaunting her body. Thus the image being sold, for both men and women, quite literally becomes that of the male gaze. Thus pointing tha although the “male gaze” is most easily illustrated in places where creator’s intent is clear but creator’s intent is not actually a prerequisite for a creation to fall under the male gaze. Given that the medium, photography, carries less absolute meaning or, as Berger says, “its meaning multiplies and fragments into many meanings”.

In the essay ‘Girls in Boots: Returning the Male Gaze’ Jean Shepard indicates that the painted female nude has a long-standing history in the West, functioning variously as high-class soft-core pornography, iconic representation of the Western art tradition, and ground for feminist critique. 

But capturing the image of a naked woman begs for many answers. Is the artist aware of the ‘male gaze’? Can that gaze be subverted in a creation? Is it even possible to create art showcasing a powerful female nude that is viable as an art object without being misogynistic?