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Khemkaran- a border village where the partition line drawn in 1947 cuts through the
village dividing its inhabitants into the citizens of India and Pakistan. Draped
in chunnis, every Thursday till today, women, particularly young girls, from both
sides gather together under a tree next to a pir's mazaar. Singing together, sharing
news, they gift each other new clothes, leaving behind old ones....a continuing connection.
(Shanti's story - a punjabi beggar woman who came over to India in the first kafila,
as told to Urvashi Butalia and Sudesh Vaid)
Koitta - a village in Bangladesh. In 1986, South Asian women, including 14 from
Pakistan and India, meet for a month long workshop. A celebration of intellectual
and creative energy - sharing experiences, discussing the nature of the state, capitalism,
patriarchy and the womens movement in each country, singing and dancing, composing
new songs, poems - connecting at multiple levels. At the end of the month we tied
rakhi on each other, a promise of protection and support.
Huiarou - a small mountain resort town, turned into a site for the Fourth World
Conference on Women, 1995. In a corner of the Peace Tent, " Caught in the Crossfire:
Women against Militarisation", an exhibition made by Indian women - walking
between two poles/walls hung with portraits and testimonies of Kashmiri women, from
the valley and the refugee camps in Jammu and Delhi. The testimonies speak of violence,
terror, of being caught between the guns of the security forces and the militants.
They also speak in anger at the destruction of their lives, the loss of childhood
and youth and the indifference of others. At the end of a South Asian peace march,
women, including Pakistani and Indians, tie coloured threads onto strings between
the walls, threads of solidarity, of hope, threads as wishes, a demand to put a stop
to militaristic methods, to look for a democratic solution for peace in the valley
and subcontinent. The threads are to be woven into a multicoloured tapestry and taken
back to Kashmiri women as an expression of support ....
Three moments in time. The first moment is a continuous one - a special connection
between village women which is part of the larger cultural mosaic which links people
at a popular level in both countries. The origins of these predate the emergence
of nation states and their persistence defies erection of divisive boundaries of
nationality or religion. No amount of barbed wire along the Wagah border can barricade
the cultural exchanges and links between people who share an essential similarity
and whose hearts resonate collectively to the poems of Faiz, Sahir Ludhianvi and
Amrita Pritam, the voices of Abida Praveen, Lata Mangeshkar and Nusrat Fateh Ali
Khan or the mesmerism of dancing feet, the fantasy world of Indian cinema and the
addictive drama of Pakistani plays. Spatially divided today, this continued exchange
unites the people of India and Pakistan in a special, almost timeless relationship.
The second and third moment is a connection consciously forged by the womens movement
in South Asia to overcome the divisiveness and hostitlity between governments in
the region. In the ten years between Koitta and Huiarou, numerous such meetings,
workshops, training programmes have been held between South Asian women. Women from
India or Pakistan have been involved in national workshops in either country. In
1989 a South Asian Feminist Declaration further strengthened the linkage and more
and more women and groups have been drawn into the process. In 1995, a number of
the participants from the 1986 meeting, gathered again in Dhulikhel, Nepal, and formed
a South Asian Women's Peace Bahini to focus on militarisation and violence in civil
society in the region.
The hostile relations between India and Pakistan are the most contentious in the
region and the dynamics of the links built between Pakistani and Indian women forms
a distinctive leitmotif within these interactions. The process of connecting across
borders is a political one, a delicate unravelling of inherited prejudices and stereotypes
created by war hungry governments and the propaganda machinery - a systematic operation
over many years whereby 'permeable identities were forged into bunkered mentalities'.
The Koitta workshop in 1986 was my first meeting with women from Pakistan - a meeting
that changed many of our lives as deep friendships formed, forged through a common
process of understanding. As we enter the 50th year of our existence as separate
nation states, I reflect back on the interaction between Pakistani and Indian women
and the processes by which we dealt with the historical and psychological knots in
the relationship between our countries, weaving from 1986 onwards a new tapestry
of peace.
We always began the meetings with sharing our personal lives. In talking about
our families and ourselves, the gates of nostalgia opened...grandmothers stories
- stories our fathers and mothers still tell - walking on the Mall in Lahore, the
havelis...my mother still keeps a boxful of mitti from Lucknow under her bed ....clamps
on tablecloths to keep them from flying off in the strong sea breeze when we lived
in Karachi - today it is full of high rise buildings - hardly a breeze......Chandni
Chowk ... tongas from the Delhi railway station.... is the Oriental Fruit Mart still
there?
Nostalgia and the sharing of memories are essential moments in meetings between
Indians and Pakistanis - an amalgam of childhood memories, pain, regret and a sense
of loss. Even if it is mainly northerners and some from the Deccan, these should
not be belittled. The images of the enemy Other constructed to provide a rationale
for keeping alive divisions, mutual suspicion and hatred, and designed to further
militaristic and domestic control state policies are difficult to disassemble. As
they slowly began to recede, we moved to the next stage.This however, was more difficult
as we began to question why and how - what led to partition, was it inevitable? We
began the process of interogating history with new questions - not just 1947 but
also 1971- a process which assualted hitherto assumed identities, unquestioned allegiances
to state discourses of national honour, of heros and victims. It was not easy for
many of us to accept for instance, that India's role in the creation of Bangladesh
was not simply one of saviour against a rapacious Pakistani army but dictated by
its own geopolitical interests. Or for the Pakistanis to accept that West Pakistan
had a racist, colonial extractive relationship with the east. It took time to acknowledge
that in fact the Bangladesh movement was an autonomous expression of bengali and
secular nationalism.
The process of unearthing personal experiences of partition, breaking through
the shroud of silence over the experiences of abducted and raped women in 1947 still
continues as Indian and Pakistani feminists research and rewrite the history of the
creation of two nations. As one of them wrote in 1994 "....we were acutely conscious
that we were also the subjects of our study and that in unravelling the many threads
that clothed our view as Pakistanis (add Indians), of Partition and of Pakistan (add
India), that we were unravelling ourselves".
Slowly the images of the 'Other' constructed by our governments and media began
to dissolve - India was not just poverty stricken, not every Indian was a fanatic
hindu persecuting all muslims, there were groups in India which had spoken out on
state repression and violence in Kashmir .... Pakistani women were not all enclosed
within chador and chardiwars, there was an active women's movement Womens Action
Forum but also Sindhiani Tehrik, a strong mass based peasant womens movement, both
had confronted the military dictatorship, feudal explotation as well as Zia's Islamisation
policies, there were even women trade union leaders heading the Karachi Shipyard
and Engineering Works Union and the Steel Mill Union...
It was only after confronting our national identities and dealing, albeit partially,
with the shibboleths of the past, a past which still inhabits our present, that we
could move to our other identity and location as women. Sharing at this level bought
out sharply the commonalities in our situations as women in a patriarchal society.
As we listened to each other's lifestories, there were many instances when, struck
by the cultural similarity, one of us would say " if the names and places were
replaced, the same story could be my own".
The most striking was the similarity in the experience of violence in the family
and in society. The statistics are revealingly alike. If we look just at the tip
of the iceberg - reported cases of rape - in 1994 the frequency of rape was one women/child
raped every three hours in Pakistan, while every 47 minutes a woman is raped in India.
In 1994 there were 151 cases of extreme domestic violence resulting in death or disability,
92 cases of public humiliation in Pakistan while in India, a woman is kidnapped/abducted
every 44 minutes, and 17 women are killed for dowry every day.(from The Human Rights
Commission of Pakistan, 1994 and Crime Records Bureau, Home Ministry, Government
of India 1994 ) Our countries also have the distinction of being two, of the few
in the world where more women die due to the discrimination in access to food, and
health care as reflected in the sex ratio - 92 women/100 men in India and 91 women/100
men in Pakistan in 1991.
So whether it is stove bursts/ dowry deaths, public humiliation through naked
parades and gang rapes of women to reassert upper caste/landord authority in rural
areas, or equal access to jobs, wages, political participation and economic autonomy,
Indian and Pakistani women are subject to similar structures of patriarchal control
within their families and communities.
The greatest threat to women in both countries is from religious fundamentalist
forces and the power they exercise over the state. In Pakistan, anti -woman legislation
such as the Hudood Ordinances, the Law of Evidence and the law on Qisas and Diyat,
passed as part of President Zia's Islamisation program, are maintained till today.
These laws equate rape with adultery, make the victim into the accused, reduce a
women's testimony to half that of a man and makes it virtually impossible to prove
the crime of rape. The communal judgement in the Shah Bano case and the passing of
the Muslim Women's (Protection) to Rights of Divorce Bill which took away citizenship
rights from muslim women, the blatantly communal statements in recent judgements
of the Supreme Court on cases of bigamy and triple talaq, and of course the complicity
and silence around December 6th and the Bombay riots, leaves little doubt about the
government's secular credentials.
There are significant differences - in Pakistan, fundamentalist groups such as
Jammat- e-Islami have never got more than 3% of the vote while in India the hindu
fundamentalist party BJP has got 30% of the popular vote in the last elections. Fundamentalists
in Pakistan call for a restriction of women in chador and chardiwari and a return
to archaic 16th C customs while the BJP uses the rhetoric of liberalism, of a "gender
just uniform civil code'. Yet Sushma Swaraj's strictures on a dress code for women
television announcers, the nature of the Shiv Sena women's wings campaign against
'pornography' and bar workers is a sign of times to come. In both countries it is
fanatic fascists who are taking on the mantle of being guardians of public and private
morality. There is a common basis for joint strategies on legal rights, a Charter
of Womens Rights based on the principles of the U.N. Convention on the Elimination
of Discrimination Against Women, as well as broad based campaigns for women to be
recognised as independent citizens.
New areas of commonality are emerging as both counteries are subjected to IMF
dictated patterns of globalisation and liberalisation. Whether it is in relation
to spiralling prices, cuts in social sector spending and reduction in job security
or the creation of new jobs for young, unmarried women in export industries, the
effects of these on women as workers, household managers, consumers and citizens
are the same in both countries.
A crucial issue in South Asian feminist interactions has been the increasing militarisation
of our societies. Making a link between excessive defence spending, lack of democracy
and underdevelopment, the South Asian Feminist Declaration 1989 highlights the threat
of a nuclear holocaust in the region. It also points out the ways by which militarisation
of daily life - war toys, daily violence on television and in films have created
a militarised culture which makes brutalised relationships a 'normal' way of life.
The links built between women from both countries has also led to joint interventions
in the broader peace movement and the forums of other peace initiatives. In the Lahore
Convention of the Pakistan-India People's Forum for Peace and Democracy in November
1995, we formulated a resolution which urged -
"the governments and civil societies of Pakistan and India to undertake measures
to counter adverse effects of foreign and domestic policies of militaristic nature
on the daily life of citizens, reflected in the growth of a culture of violence,
hatred and guns, an aggressive and communalised nationalism, a distorted model of
masculinity and an increasing sense of insecurity for citizens of the two countries."
Bringing a feminist perspective into the discussions on militarisation is not
without opposition. Before the resolution was presented to the plenary, we heard
sniggers from some members of the forum at the link made between sexism and war,
making us realise, yet again, that the struggle to change mind sets has to continue
even within the peace movements. Anticipating a rejection of the resolution on' technical'
grounds, we added more concrete suggestions to the resolution demanding that,
"a. the governments of India and Pakistan should dismantle and refrain from
installing weapons of war as national monuments. b. wasteful expenditure on military
parades and exhibitions of military hardware be stopped and c. a citizens monitoring
group be set up to monitor hate producing and sexist images of war and military prowess
in the media."
The resolution was passed unanimously and it is significant that the Urdu newspapers
highlighted the first demand.
From common issues to joint strategies, from nostalgia to concrete action, over
the last ten years a number of collaborative projects have emerged from the interactions
between Indian and Pakistani feminists. Along with the recognition of commonalities,
there is also recognition of differences. At one level are differences in strategies
and political analysis such as the debate on reform within personal laws vs. a common
secular code to ensure women's rights, but these are differences amongst feminists
within each country rather than between Indian or Pakistani women. At another level
there is a maturing of perceptions and a respect for differences that arise from
the specificites of each country as well as an acceptance of the existence of each
others historically formed identities.
Most of us engaged in building these connections come from the immediate post
partition generation and have carried the mixed emotions and memories of partition,
articulated by an older generation that experienced the division in 1947. The second
generation has grown up in a political and cultural context of fortified national
borders and two wars. They have been taught and believe that India or Pakistan is
our primary enemy, that our borders are constantly threatened by an Islamic terrorist
state or a Hindu, expansionist state which has never accepted the existence of Pakistan.
They would therefore find it perfectly reasonable that we should spend money on accquiring
the most sophisticated weapons, including the bomb, for our security. The significance
of the connections built across borders by different sections of people with specific
issues and interests, lies not only in countering the disinformation, transfering
history, memory, but in showing the younger generation that it is possible to build
friendships and that Indians and Pakistanis have similar situations and common interests
in working together for peace and democracy in the region.
I watch my three year old son grow - born in Holland, Indian nationality, Pakistani
father, Indian mother, Sikh grandfather, Muslim grandmother - not an unusual combination
in the subcontinent. .. and yet I cannot help the fear that sometimes rises - during
a cricket match - riot, or worse if there is war? The fear goes as I know that he
is growing up with the love and affection of people from both countries, without
an image of one as the "enemy other". As the number of people involved
in peace initiatives expand, the possibility of a different world for him increases.
Amrita Chhachhi
August 1996
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