SACW | March 8, 2007 Women's rights

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire  | March 8, 2007 | Dispatch No. 2373 - Year 9

[1]  Dishonour and death (Ritu Menon)
[2]  Cultural code versus legal code (Muhammad Badar Alam)
[3]  The state of the national mindset (Ardeshir Cowasjee)
[4]  For Mukhtaran, Kainat et al (Angela Williams)
[5]  Gender and Jirga Gender (Farhat Taj)
[6]  India: Caste Panchayats Getting Away With Murder (Uddalak Mukherjee)
[7]  India: The 'acid test': will Government 
regulate sale of deadly chemicals? (Bageshree S. 
and M.V. Chandrashekhar)
[8] Two terrible crimes (Editorial, The News)
[9] Report: young couple in India killed on the orders of village council
[10] India's missing girls (Raekha Prasad and Randeep Ramesh)
[11] The Case of Boro Chupria's Tomboy (Chandrima S. Bhattacharya)
[12] After The Fact (Nivedita Menon, Chandrasekhar Mukherji, Tarunabh Khaitan )
[13] Walk on the safe side - Jagori's The Safe 
Delhi campaign (Paromita Chakrabarti)
[14] The secret violence that challenges Britain's Asians (Sunny Hundal)
[15] Upcoming Events: 
- International Festival & Forum on Gender and Sexuality (?)
- IAWRT IIC Asian Women's Film Festival 2007 - 
Reflections: Women Imaging Realities (New Delhi, 
March 7th and 8th 2007)
- Invitation for A Joint Programme On 
International Women's Day (Stree Adhikar 
Sangathan)

____


[1]


Index on Censorship No 406
Jan 22, 2007

Dishonour and death

There is nothing but dishonour in what men do to 
women who flout their code. By Ritu Menon


Killing women to redeem honour has no pedigree in India. These
dishonourable killings leap across caste and 
creed: Hindu, Sikh and Muslim, are united in 
their agreement that avenging male honour entails 
killing one's own women. Feminist publisher Ritu 
Menon writes on a nation's shame.

Eighteen-year-old Maimun, filled with dreams of 
romantic love, made the mistake of eloping with 
Idris, who was already married with two children.

It was mostly love that blinded her to the 
consequences of her action, but also the 
desperate desire to escape marriage to an uncle 
she loathed. She was dragged back home, and 
hastily and forcibly married to a local lout. On 
their way to his home after the wedding, he raped 
her brutally, calling her a whore, invited his 
friends to do the same, then slit her with a 
knife from neck to navel and left her for dead. 
That's what she deserved for besmirching the 
honour of her family.

In another part of the country, village goons 
tied Pribha to an electric pole, beat her black 
and blue and shaved her head because she had 
chosen to spend the night with a relative. 
Nearby, the village of Johri in eastern Uttar 
Pradesh forbade the marriage of Yashpal's 
daughter to a man of her choice because it 
violated caste norms.

Killing women to redeem honour has no Muslim 
pedigree in India. These dishonourable killings 
leap across caste and creed: Hindu, Sikh and 
Muslim, touchable and 'untouchable' are united in 
their agreement that avenging male honour entails 
killing one's own women. Such killings may be 
carried out in public with the active connivance 
of village elders and caste panchayats (village 
councils), or in private by family members alone.

They may take place because women have chosen to 
love within the faith but not within permissible 
norms - like Maimun; or because women choose to 
transgress community and religious boundaries 
altogether by marrying across caste, community or 
ethnicity; or if they are audacious enough to 
commit adultery. Whatever the provocation, what 
they prove is that there is a patriarchal 
consensus around the violent 'resolution', so to 
speak, of the troublesome question of women's 
sexuality.

Their sexual status - chaste, polluted or impure 
- is a matter of extreme and stringent control, 
and any attempt by women to resist it may be 
punished with death.

Some feminists and women's groups in India who 
have been active in bringing all such cases to 
public and judicial attention, seriously question 
the use of the term 'honour killings' or 'honour 
crimes' to characterise this deadly form of 
violence against women - and, occasionally, men.

They argue that it obscures the true nature of 
the crimes by 'othering' them, seeing them as 
characteristic of non-modern societies, aberrant 
and irrational. They ask, instead, that we see 
such killings for what they are: violent acts of 
sexual control and subjugation of women in order 
to maintain either social and economic disparity, 
or the legitimate (caste, religious or ethnic) 
community.

Boundaries

All these stratifications are contingent upon the 
rigidity of boundaries; maintaining them, in 
turn, is contingent on endogamy, hence the strict 
supervision of women's sexuality.

Relationships of choice disrupt this continuity 
and threaten the political economy of 
communities. When a high-caste woman marries a 
Dalit man, for example, and then has the temerity 
to claim her inheritance, she rocks the boat of 
inequality and destroys the status quo in every 
respect.

Purna Sen of Amnesty International has identified 
six key features of what I shall now call 
dishonourable killings: patriarchal gender 
relations that are predicated on controlling and 
regulating women's sexuality; the role of women 
in policing and monitoring women's behaviour; 
collective decisions regarding punishment for 
transgressing boundaries; the potential for 
women's participation in such killings; the 
ability to reclaim honour through enforced 
compliance or killings; and state and social 
sanction for such killings that recognise and 
acknowledge 'honour' as acceptable motivation, 
mitigation and justification.

In Maimun's case, the marriage arranged by her 
parents to her uncle had the attraction of 
monetary gain, as well as conformity to family 
and social expectations.

When Maimun repudiated both, her mother was the 
first to react. 'You infidel!' she shrieked, 'you 
have actually married a man from your own 
village, from another sub-caste - I will kill 
you! If they don't slice you up, I will!' And 
when a team of officials from the National 
Commission for Women went to the village to 
enquire into the violence, they were surrounded 
by villagers who shouted, 'These are our customs, 
no one can interfere. Neither man nor god.'

In the other two cases above, the decision of the 
caste panchayat was taken on behalf of the whole 
village, collectively upholding its 'honour'. 
Unlike elected panchayats, which are 
constitutionally empowered to function as 
institutions of self-governance, caste panchayats 
are illegal and unconstitutional.

They act as moral policemen to the communities 
they 'govern' through power that is often 
hereditary. 'Office-bearers' can be corrupt, and 
caste considerations weigh heavily when 'justice' 
is being dispensed. More important, however, they 
make for a curious legal conundrum. Supreme Court 
lawyer Indira Jaising says that caste panchayats 
displace the justice-dispensing function of the 
state and elevate informal or non-state systems 
of justice into 'customary' practice, recognised 
by law.

Such systems rarely recognise the principle of 
gender or social equality, and almost inevitably 
reinforce patriarchal gender relations. Their 
assumption of adjudicatory power, moreover, is in 
effect sanctioned by institutions of the state 
through inaction.

Documentation

The experience of several activists and women's 
groups who have reported dishonourable killings 
bears this out. The All India Democratic Women's 
Association (Aidwa), which has documented 
killings in the north Indian state of Haryana, 
says that the police are reluctant to record them 
because the state machinery and caste panchayats 
are in cahoots.

Policemen have not set foot in the village of 
Johri for more than five years; and in Bijnore, 
when Pribha was being beaten, the beat constable 
was a mute witness. When AIDWA activists have 
exposed the killings, the villagers themselves 
and the panchayats try to cover them up. 
Post-mortems, which are crucial in establishing 
that women have been murdered, are never 
conducted. And in a recent menacing twist, AIDWA 
activists have been told that they should pay 
protection money to the local panchayat because 
their safety is at risk from charged-up villagers 
and avenging families.

In the rare instance that a case comes up to the 
National Commission for Women or the National 
Commission for Human Rights, justice dispensed by 
the court in favour of the women may easily be 
reversed by murderous vigilantism.

Maimun, who was left for dead, was discovered by 
an elderly couple on the road where she had been 
abandoned. They nursed her back to health and 
restored her to Idris. The Commission took up her 
case and successfully fought it in the Supreme 
Court. Four years later, Maimun was killed by her 
younger brother who declared that only a dead 
sister could restore his family's honour.

Contrary to the image they conjure up of barbaric 
communities living in the dark ages, these 
dishonourable killings take place in modern 
societies, in broad daylight, with the full 
knowledge of those in charge of upholding the 
law. They are crimes against the state as much as 
they are vendettas against particular groups, 
clans or families.

Yet the state, through acts of omission and 
commission, and through its tacit endorsement of 
patriarchal privilege-including the right to kill 
transgressors-aligns itself with the 
perpetrators. It would seem that for the state, 
too, a woman's body is a man's property, to 
dispose of as he will.


* Ritu Menon is the founder of the feminist 
publishing house Women Unlimited and a co-founder 
of Kali for Women.

_____


[2]

The News on Sunday
21 January 2007


Cultural code versus legal code

What happens when upholding the collective honour 
of a tribe, clan or family is more important than 
protecting and individual's life and property

By Muhammad Badar Alam

View from the barrel of a gun is narrow and the 
laws governing the possession and use of a gun 
even narrower. This does not mean that the 
availability of a gun in Pakistan is a big deal. 
No, it's not. In the tribal parts of the country, 
carrying guns and not-so-infrequently using them 
is a custom, not a crime. Even in the so-called 
settled areas -- including big cities -- many 
people believe they are a necessity, not a 
nuisance.

What is it that makes something palpably illegal 
socially so acceptable? First the dichotomy 
between social norms, that have evolved over 
time, and the laws governing the society, which 
are a relatively new phenomenon.

The modern state structure that countries like 
Pakistan have inherited from their colonial 
rulers is based on the premise that the use of 
violence cannot be allowed to be a private 
affair. The nation state, ideally, has a monopoly 
over the use of violence and, therefore, the 
possession of the tools and weapons to perpetrate 
that violence. This flows from the premise that 
state, being the representative of all its 
citizens, keeps the public good in mind and to 
ensure that may have to resort to violence 
against some individual bent upon doing damage to 
that public good. To define what constitutes 
public good and what will happen to those not 
respecting it, the state makes laws and creates 
mechanisms to implement those laws.

The nature, number and scope of these laws may 
vary from country to country as do the 
institutional mechanisms to ensure their 
implementation but almost everywhere they are, 
first and foremost, aimed at safeguarding the 
lives and properties of the individuals and 
ensuring a desirable level of public order and 
decency. The most important conditions for that 
to happen is equality before law, regardless of 
individuals status, and the state's ability to 
eliminate and override all other structures and 
apparatus existing within it for using violence 
as a means to create order and dispense justice.

In colonised states this theoretical ideal was 
done away with at the altar of political 
expediency. The colonisers' primary purpose was 
to remain supreme in terms of power, so they 
allowed any social, political and even judicial 
mechanism to stay put which ensured that their 
supremacy was not challenged. In British India, 
this allowed jirgas, qazis and tribal justice 
systems -- run by powerful individuals called 
sardars, nawabs, khans and maliks -- to be 
protected rather than uprooted by the colonisers. 
In the post-colonial independent states, at least 
in the case of Pakistan, there were no tribal and 
traditional vestiges where rule of the modern law 
did not apply. In fact, they were everywhere and 
the equality before the law and supremacy of the 
state to implement that law was exception rather 
than the rule. The society was, and remains, 
largely tribal and feudal.

In a tribal/feudal society and even the modern, 
urban culture that evolves from it, it's not an 
individual's life and property which needs to be 
protected the most. As is evident from the 
oft-read stories about honour killing and 
tit-for-tat bloody feuds, this society gives 
honour the pride of position and all the rest are 
subordinate to it. There is no sanctity attached 
to an individual's life and property. Even when 
someone is killed, his or her murder is avenged 
not because an individual is killed but because 
not being able to take revenge is seen as 
sullying the honour of the tribe/clan/family.

Also, tribal/feudal societies are hierarchical 
where some are more equal than the rest. The 
surest way to be above others is to be powerful 
by any means possible. Being able to defy the 
state-sponsored legal and judicial systems which 
at least theoretically treat everyone equally is 
sine-qua-non of power. When a society for various 
historical and political reasons sees power 
flowing from the barrel of a gun, those using it 
illegally -- and getting away with it -- are seen 
as more powerful than those who can wield it 
legally. Nobody should challenge their supremacy, 
let alone attempt to have them tried for their 
criminality because that, more often than not, 
will never happen.

Policemen with a vast field experience point out 
that ethical values of such a society are hardly 
compatible with the legal system that we have. 
"There are many practices which constitute a 
crime in legal terms, but the society condones 
them, nay promotes them, in the name of societal 
norms," says Fayyaz Chaudhry, a middle-ranking 
police officer posted in Lahore. Take honour 
killing. Fayyaz says policemen are individuals 
living in a certain social set-up before they are 
law-enforcers. "They are bound to be influenced 
by the society they come from. If that society 
does not, for example, considers family feuds a 
crime, the policemen belonging to it should not 
be expected to think and act otherwise. They are 
after all still part and parcel of that society 
in their roles as fathers, brothers, husbands and 
friends," he tells The News on Sunday.

Others in police department believe that a 
policeman's duty is to uphold the law no matter 
what. "Of course, our culture does not promote 
rule of the law as European cultures do, but this 
does not mean that a police official cannot do 
anything about it," says Javed Hussain Shah, 
working as district police officer in Sahiwal. "A 
well-meaning police officer can curb any crime if 
he wants to disregard any cultural or other 
pressures that he faces in doing. The law of the 
land should be upheld and it can be only if 
police officials refuse to budge under external 
pressures," he tells TNS on phone.

If that's the case, all Pakistan needs is a 
battery of policemen ready to take on the powers 
of sub-state/non-state structures and mechanisms 
in the country. But another district police 
officer, Raja Riffat posted in Pakpattan, 
observes that crime in a country is directly 
proportional to the acceptance or otherwise of 
crime and criminal in the culture of that 
society. "It's as basic as that: Culture is one 
of the six reasons for crime in a country -- the 
other five being biological, psychological, 
economic, political and sociological factors," he 
says.

If a culture condones, rather promotes, some 
crimes, they will keep happening no matter how 
rigorous the laws governing them and how strict 
their implementation.

_____


[3]

Dawn
February 04, 2007  

The state of the national mindset
By Ardeshir Cowasjee

ON February 1, just after the return to the 
beloved homeland of our two world travelers, 
President from the East, Prime Minister from the 
West, the national press carried two stories, 
both highly shaming to this republic and its 
leadership.

On the morning of January 27 in the village of 
Habib Labano, Ubauro, near Gotkhi in Sindh (some 
500 km from Karachi), reportedly and allegedly, a 
16-year old girl, Nasima, was grabbed by a group 
of 11 men, taken away and gang-raped and then 
forced to walk back to her home, through the 
village streets, in a state of semi-nudity. The 
story spread, as all such stories do after the 
Mukhtaran Mai incident, and was picked up by a 
foreign news agency. Various human rights 
associations have been alerted and certain NGOs 
have approached the Supreme Court requesting the 
judges to take suo motu notice of this incident. 
It was reported on the front page of two 
publications of our national press on February 1.

In one publication, bang next to this front-paged 
story headlined 'Girls raped, paraded naked in 
Ubauro,' was another headline 'Lovers stoned to 
death in Multan village."

On January 28, a woman of Donga Bonga, Ellahi 
Hussain, was accused by her family of having an 
affair with a man, Hafeez Shah, from the same 
village. Her murder was planned by her relatives. 
The man and woman were dragged out of a house by 
a gang bent on vengeance, ropes were bound around 
their necks and they were tied to a couple of 
trees. They were stoned to death by a 
bloodthirsty mob which "smashed their heads with 
stones and bricks." This act of sheer barbarism, 
which took place in the ruling province of 
enlightened Punjab, near the great and ancient 
city of Multan, has also no doubt been picked up 
by foreign news agencies.

We, the nation, are fully deserving of whatever 
international odium and contempt is stirred by 
these two disgraceful and truly shaming acts. 
There are laws galore on the statute book which 
provide for speedy arrests of all the culprits 
concerned who should be put on trial for murder, 
plain and simple murder in the first degree, and 
awarded with as little delay as is legally 
possible the ultimate punishment for their crimes.

But this will not happen. The question of 
'honour' killings will arise, the jirga system 
will be brought into play, old feudal traditions 
and customs will be evoked and it is quite 
possible that these cold-blooded murderers amidst 
us will go free - as so many have done before.

We then come to the question of the great triumph 
of last year, the passage through parliament of 
what is erroneously known as the Women's 
Protection Bill and its subsequent transition 
into law. Where did this law come into play in 
Ubauro and Donga Bonga? How did it protect Nasima 
and Ellahi? How will it protect hundreds, maybe 
thousands, of other young girls and women who 
will succumb to the mores of the Pakistani jungle 
and to the national mindset present in the vast 
majority of the illiterate, poverty-stricken 
160-plus millions of this land and the few 
thousand wicked feudals who keep them firmly 
where they are?

Yesterday, Dawn carried a story datelined 
Gujranwala, February 2, relating how "students 
torture to death bus checker." A bus on its way 
from Lahore to Gujrat was halted when the GT road 
was blocked by students (of what?). They 
"forcibly boarded the bus" and when the ticket 
cheeker asked them for their tickets they beat 
him to death. Charming.

A far more gory tale was also carried yesterday 
by another daily publication under the headline a 
"28-year old was castrated with a broken tea 
cup." Huzoor Baksh Malik of Larkana who was about 
to be married - he "was awarded a girl by a jirga 
in compensation for his mother's murder ten years 
ago." That in itself is grossly wrong. On January 
21, his employer, one Tonio, accused him of theft 
and he was handed over to the police and locked 
up. On January 24 Tonio and some friends arrived 
at the police station, asked Malik to admit to 
his crime, and when he refused they "castrated 
him with a broken tea cup." What comment can 
possibly be made?

Back to the nation's physical health (having 
dealt with just the tip of its mental 
aberrations) on which I wrote two weeks ago 
quoting from a report authored by Dr Jamsheer 
Talati who has yet to be contacted by our 
'proactive' health minister who has more 
important matters on which to focus than the 
nation's health problems.

Why he was appointed health minister is anyone's 
guess as he is obviously incapable of advising or 
guiding his boss, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, 
when it comes to matters of health. On January 24 
a news item in this newspaper informed us that Mr 
Aziz, indulging in one of his favourite pastimes, 
performed the "groundbreaking ceremony" of a 
"Rs.2 billion medical complex for the elite," in 
Islamabad, the "first of two elitist medical 
towers" (14-storey) to be built. The second one 
(13-storey) is destined to go up and up on the 
premises of Karachi's Jinnah Postgraduate Medical 
Centre at a cost of Rs.3.4 billion. This is a 
gross and criminal misplacement of priorities and 
someone should have so advised the prime minister.

With the divide between the haves and have-nots 
growing wider by the day, such hare-brained 
schemes are not what the nation needs. Karachi 
has to its credit a couple of newly developed and 
tested models of public private partnerships, 
conceived and built for the people, poor and 
rich, without wasting public or private money. 
Both are situated in the JPMC, and the motivating 
force behind them was Professor Dr Hasan Aziz.

The Accident and Emergency Foundation (cost Rs.30 
million - various philanthropists of Karachi) is 
equipped with two operation theatre suites with 
state of the art stand alone facilities. It has 
its own medical supplies, instruments, equipment, 
round-the-clock theatre managers, and outsourcing 
security, sanitation and civil works maintenance. 
It has been in commission for almost three years 
during which 5,000 emergency surgeries have been 
performed without one single patient being 
charged one single rupee. Because of its 
excellence, it is often the chosen venue for 
visiting surgical specialists to hold special 
skills workshops and teleworkshops. Donations 
continue to flow in from private sources without 
having to hold a mass of fund-raising functions.

Then there are the model labour rooms and 
gynae-surgical theatres, planned by a group of 
health workers and concerned laypeople, and 
adopted by the Marium Ali Mohammad Tabba 
Foundation which runs and manages the complex 
entirely from Tabba family funds. The complex is 
contained in a two-storey building, a state of 
the art facility with all equipment required for 
obstetric care plus five operation theatres for 
surgical cases. The complex can deal with over 
12,000 deliveries per year and with over 6,000 
surgical patients per year.

The Tabba Foundation provides maintenance, 
medication, repairs and replacement of equipment 
and all machinery, and it provides the management 
to run the complex.

Suggestion : Next time the prime minister visits 
Karachi, he should take a break from his run of 
the mill inaugurations and foundation stone 
laying ceremonies, and with the two monstrous 
'elitist' medical towers in mind, pay a visit to 
the JPMC and see for himself what can be done for 
the people, the awam so beloved of our 
politicians, at a reasonable cost when the 
private and public sectors cooperate 
meaningfully, practically and with good intent. 
He can always bring along the health minister in 
tow.

______


[4]

The Daily Times
February 05, 2007

For Mukhtaran, Kainat et al

by Angela Williams

How many Mukhtaran Mais must become the victims 
of male gang viciousness and have their lives 
marred forever? When will the 'influential 
people', who seem to crop up like fungus in every 
case, perverting and distorting the process of 
law, develop a sense of decency, justice and 
conscience

Over the last week the national news has been 
even more horrific and cringe-making than one 
would have imagined possible in a country not 
actively under siege by marauding, raping enemy 
troops, nor groaning under some overt form of 
totalitarianism. Words almost fail me...but not 
quite.

In Sindh, a sixteen-year-old girl has been 
publicly humiliated and raped by eleven men 
because her cousin married a woman whose men-folk 
didn't like it. So the scum men-folk naturally 
decided to take out their grievance against one 
little girl, eleven of them. (One report states 
that fifteen men were involved.)

When will this cease, this organised, unashamed 
bullying and hurting of girls and women, 
sanctioned, or indeed instigated, by criminals 
referred to as 'village elders'? This is a 
strange name for them, suggesting as it does that 
there is some traditional, time-honoured sagacity 
behind gang rape. And in case anyone is under the 
idiot misapprehension that there is anything 
'sexy' about this particular form of male 
violence, the young girl is in a very un-sexy 
hospital recovering from her injuries; her mental 
scarring will never completely heal.

How many Mukhtaran Mais must become the innocent 
victims of male gang viciousness and have their 
lives marred forever? When will the ubiquitous 
'influential people', who seem to crop up like 
fungus in every case, perverting and distorting 
the process of law, develop a sense of decency, 
justice and conscience, good Muslims that they no 
doubt are? Apparently there is currently a bunch 
of them pressurising the injured girl's father to 
drop his complaint, perhaps because the eleven 
(fifteen?) rapists come from 'good' families. 
(And when will people stop using this silly 
phrase! 'Good' is not a synonym for 'monied'. I'm 
an English teacher and I'm telling you: it's not.)

It's no good our getting all excited and showing 
off to Hillary Clinton our mixed marathons, as 
Body Shop, Next and MacDonalds set up shop in 
Pakistan's major cities, giving the impression 
that all is enlightened modernity and Western 
moderation, when pre-medieval stuff like this 
goes on and attitudes to women are barbaric and 
apelike. On second thoughts, I don't think apes 
behave this badly and I apologise to any ape who 
may be reading this.

Everyone perhaps knows that Mukhtaran Mai was 
awarded the Fatima Jinnah Gold Medal for Bravery 
in August 2005 because she had become the 
torchbearer for abused and powerless women who 
might be encouraged by her example to stand up 
and demand justice instead of committing suicide 
as many women do, in the West as well, after 
being raped. Whether this medal was actually 
awarded in recognition of her courage, or as a 
form of whitewash is not fully clear to me. She 
had, after all, only two months earlier, been put 
on the Exit Control List and had her passport 
removed by the embarrassed, jittery government of 
Pakistan to prevent her taking up Amnesty 
International's invitation to go to London and 
speak of the plight of women in rural Pakistan. 
New York was also ready to hear her story, but 
what use was the American visa stamped in her 
passport when the passport was confiscated?

Such harassment by the government of an 
uneducated, impoverished village woman whose 
adolescent brother had been kidnapped and 
sodomised by three men for allegedly committing 
zina (for which no evidence was ever produced) 
and who was then herself seized and repeatedly 
raped while her father and uncle were forced to 
stand helplessly by! Sensitive.

Mai has recently stated that the ordeal of the 
sixteen-year-old last week appears to render null 
and void all Mai's campaigning over the past 
couple of years against such barbarity.

But there's more. In Multan, a man and a woman in 
their forties were tied to a tree last week by 
the woman's brothers and two 'helpers,' and were 
hit with bricks until they were dead. One of the 
arrested brothers said that he and his fellow 
avengers could not tolerate the immoral act of 
the couple sleeping together. Reasonable enough, 
I suppose. Especially if you live in a place 
called Donga Bonga.

As I write, today's newspaper has just been 
delivered and I can scarce believe my eyes. 
Another little girl, this time aged thirteen, was 
reportedly abducted from Larkana on 10th January 
and repeatedly raped in several different 
localities by a number of men, but police are 
reportedly reluctant to arrest the alleged 
culprits because they are supported by members of 
the ruling party in the area. Now these blokes 
must come from really good families; they're way 
above the law. Shame on these ruling damn 
parties, and shame on Pakistan for its festering, 
antiquated system that has fostered such chaos 
for decades. Is this what Quaid-e-Azam, a 
barrister, had in mind sixty years ago for the 
Muslims of India, when Pakistan was created with 
such fervour and high hopes for a secular and 
just society?

But it seems that they're going to have to mint 
Fatima Jinnah Gold Medals for Bravery on a 
conveyor belt quite soon, because the 
thirteen-year-old, Kainat Soomro, and her parents 
went on a hunger strike outside the Larkana Press 
Club, despite the fact that Kainat was threatened 
with death by her attackers if she breathed a 
word of what happened to her. Her alleged 
attackers are Shahban Shaikh, Naomi alias Ihsan 
Thebo, Roshan Thebo and Kalimullah Thebo.

Greetings to these fine, brave men; may Allah grant them justice.

The writer is the Academic Co-ordinator and a 
founder of Bloomfield Hall Schools. She has been 
teaching in Lahore for the past 20 years and has 
directed numerous highly acclaimed stage plays


____


[5]

Dawn Magazine
February 18, 2007

Gender and the jirga

By Farhat Taj

NOT many people in Pakistan would mention the 
country's police in a good way. Inefficiency, 
brute force, highhandedness and corruption are 
some of the terms the police are often associated 
with. There are plenty of examples manifesting 
the violation of the law by the police for their 
vested interests or under political pressure. I 
am, however, personally witness to an incident 
where the police seemed to violate the law out of 
goodwill.

Hadia, 19, accompanied by her mother, came to a 
police station in Peshawar and complained that 
due to sexual harassment by her father-in-law, 
she had to leave her husband's house. She said 
that her 10-month-old baby boy was retained by 
her husband and the father-in-law on the ground 
that a child belonged to its father and she might 
go wherever she liked but could not take the 
child with her. She also requested to the police 
staff: "I am not interested in lodging an FIR. I 
want my child back. You (police) should guide me. 
If you think I can get my baby by lodging an FIR, 
I am ready to lodge one. If you think I can get 
him without FIR, I will not ask for an FIR."

The police told the women it was not a police 
case and they should resolve the issue through 
family elders or go to a family court. The two 
women started crying and repeatedly begged the 
police to help them recover the boy. They said 
they are too poor to hire a lawyer for the family 
court and the family elders were of no help. 
Finally, the SHO asked two policemen to escort 
the women to her in-laws' house and get the child 
to the mother. Hadia's mother inundated the 
police officers with expressions of good wishes. 
Looking upbeat, the two women got into the police 
vehicle.

In about 15 minutes the police vehicle stopped 
near the house of Hadia's parents-in-law in a 
thickly populated rural locality of Peshawar. One 
of the policemen knocked at the gate. After some 
time a woman, without opening the door, asked 
from inside who it was. Hadia recognised the 
voice, it was her mother-in-law's. The policeman 
told the woman inside the house: "We are police. 
We have come to get the child. The child's mother 
and grandmother are also with us. Please get us 
the child so that he is given to his mother."

After a pause, the woman said: "No man of my 
family is home now. I cannot give you the child 
without their permission. Therefore, you must go 
away now and come back when the men are home."

Meanwhile, Hadia jumped into the conversation: 
"Open the door. I want to get my child. I will 
leave your house immediately after I get my 
child."

"How come you want the child now? You don't even 
care for him. If you had cared, you would not 
have left him in the first place. You are a 
shameless woman. You have brought the police at 
the door of your husband's house," said the 
mother-in-law.

After that there was an exchange of angry 
remarks, even derogatory words between Hadia and 
her mother on one side of the closed gate and the 
woman, whom Hadia said was her mother-in-law, on 
the other side of the gate. One of the policemen 
tried to pacify the women by requesting them not 
to quarrel. Meanwhile, several people of the area 
came to the spot. A few elderly men came near the 
policemen and requested them to talk with them 
about the problem. They took the policemen under 
the shade of a nearby mulberry tree. Hadia and 
her mother followed them. One of the elderly men 
turned back and asked Hadia and her mother to 
stay away from the men. Hadia and her mother 
immediately held their steps moving forward and 
stood at a certain distance from the men where 
the two could not hear the men.

Under the shade of the mulberry tree, one of the 
policemen told the elderly men of the area: "It 
is wrong from any point of view, human, legal, 
Islamic to keep a 10-month-old baby away from her 
mother."

One of the elderly men said: "You are absolutely 
right. But the problem is that no man is home now 
and you as stranger man cannot force a purdah 
observing woman of the house to open the door. It 
is not acceptable in our culture. The men of this 
house come back from work at about 5pm. 
Therefore, we suggest you should go back now. I 
promise I will come to your police station today 
at 6pm along with the father and grandfather of 
the child. Then we will discuss the problem."

Almost all people standing on the spot agreed 
with the suggestion, including the policemen, who 
then came towards Hadia and her mother and one of 
them said to them: "You must go back home now. 
Ask any male member of your family to come to my 
office in the police station today at 6pm. The 
child's father and grandfather will also come. 
Then we will decide the issue. You may now get 
into our vehicle, if you want us to drop you at 
your place."

The women got into the vehicle. Both mother and 
the daughter looked very disappointed and sad. 
Later, the jirga was held at the police station 
but Hadia did not get her child.

From a legal point of view, Hadia's is not a 
police case. If she had moved to a family court, 
she would have most probably been given the 
custody of her child. But why did Hadia take 
recourse to jirga justice rather than formal 
courts of law in Pakistan?

The juridical system of Pakistan is slow, 
expensive and at times incapable of delivering 
justice. Due to the high illiteracy rate, people 
don't understand the law or its procedure. Most 
people cannot speak the language of judiciary -- 
English. Due to poverty, they cannot afford to 
hire legal services of lawyers. Therefore, people 
like Hadia have to take to jirga justice. But 
jirga justice is often no justice for women. 
Women are not even allowed to sit in a jirga as a 
complainant, accused or even spectator. If 
necessary they must be represented by male family 
members. This is the reason why the policemen 
told Hadia to send her male family members to the 
police station for further consultation. In this 
regard, Afrasiab Khattak, a known human rights 
activist in Peshawar, told me that only a few 
civil cases in Pakistan make their way to 
official family courts, while most of them are 
decided on the lines of the tribal justice 
system, which is very discriminatory against 
women. Thus, I was not surprised when I came to 
know that even after a jirga in the police 
station, Hadia was still living without her child.

Secondly, holding a jirga may be a violation of 
the law of Pakistan. According to the 
Constitution of Pakistan: "Any law, or any custom 
or usage having the force of law, in so far as it 
is inconsistent with the rights conferred by this 
Chapter (chapter on Fundamental Rights), shall, 
to the extent of such inconsistency, be void."

Recently, the press reported the acting Chief 
Justice of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, Bhagwan 
Das, saying that the jirga system is illegal. 
This implies that holding a jirga in a police 
station would be even more illegal. Then why do 
the police involve themselves in jirgas? 
According a lawyer in Peshawar, this happens for 
one of the three reasons: vested interests or 
pressure from 'above' or goodwill. At times 
people request the police to sit in the jirga and 
help them reach an acceptable solution with the 
other party. Hadia's case seems to be the one in 
which the police jumped out of goodwill. However, 
the police seem to share a tribal view with the 
wider society. Traditionally, the jirga has been 
a respectable forum for resolution of disputes, 
especially in the NWFP. But the jirga has hardly 
been noted for dispensing justice to women. Thus, 
whether policemen sit in a jirga or not, the 
institution is not the place where women can hope 
to get justice. That's why even police presence 
in the jirga did not reunite Hadia with her son.

______


[6]

The Telegraph
February 06, 2007

GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER
If caste panchayats still rule the roost in 
India's villages, it is only because the State is 
unwilling to intervene, writes Uddalak Mukherjee

Tradition over compassion

Ninteen-year-old Gudiya, born in Nehra, a village 
near Agra, led an ordinary life. There was 
nothing ordinary about her death though. Gudiya 
and Mahesh Singh, her physically challenged 
boyfriend, had eloped and left Nehra quietly, 
early one February morning, and escaped to 
Bandipur, thirty kilometres away, to get married. 
However, irate villagers, who had declared 
Gudiya's relationship with Mahesh incestuous as 
the couple were from the same gotra, brought them 
back to the village two days later. Soon after, 
at a panchayat meeting, Gudiya and Mahesh were 
ordered to put an end to their relationship. When 
they refused, the panchayat decided that they 
must die. The village elders got together, had a 
few drinks, and then hacked the lovers to death. 
Then their body parts were burnt in a drain near 
the village.

It is not as if killings such as this one are 
restricted to the tribal belts of Pakistan or 
other Islamic societies. The rise in the number 
of murdered lovers makes it impossible to believe 
that honour killings are 'new' to Indian society. 
In fact, the first reported honour killing in 
Muzaffarnagar, a district in western Uttar 
Pradesh, which has gained notoriety for such 
slayings, goes back to 1993. Since then, the 
numbers have been rising. For instance, in 
Muzaffarnagar, 16 such deaths were reported in 
2005 alone. Other districts in the state, such as 
Saharanpur, Bijnor, and now Agra, have also 
witnessed similar crimes. Significantly, the 
claim that honour killings are restricted to 
certain feudal pockets in north India is a 
dubious one. The day Gudiya and Mahesh were done 
to death in Nehra, Mohua Mondol, a girl from 
Purulia in West Bengal, was shot dead by her own 
father, for daring to fall in love.

It is not as if the deaths go unreported. But the 
method that the Indian media employ while 
covering such events is quite interesting. The 
vernacular press resorts to sensationalizing such 
deaths. On most occasions, there is also a hidden 
moral tone, which helps to legitimize the 
violence in the name of punishing defiance. The 
English dailies, as well as the electronic media, 
invariably point to these killings as tangible 
proof of the failure of the country's vast rural 
hinterland to keep pace with an enlightened, 
modern, urban India.

The caste panchayats, which often order lovers to 
be strangled, burnt or hacked, are found to have 
a direct role to play in the violence. But they 
are by no means alone responsible for the assault 
or killings; a patriarchal society's curious 
interpretation of 'honour' and its relationship 
with gender and caste are as important. But while 
a lot has been written on this interdependence of 
caste, honour and gender, caste panchayats and 
their sinister designs remain curiously 
under-reported in the media.

The caste panchayat is different from the gram 
panchayat, which is an elected body, headed by 
the sarpanch. The former draws its legitimacy 
from its claims of being a self-appointed keeper 
of tradition, customs and cultural practices, 
while the latter is a representative of the law 
of the land. However, in India's villages, it is 
the caste panchayat which serves as an 
extra-judicial agency, a parallel court of law 
that resolves 'private' disputes at the local 
level. Its macabre verdicts are often read out in 
the course of conciliatory meetings, known as 
shalishis in Bengal. The nature of the disputes 
vary - people approach the panchayat for settling 
altercations arising out of inter-caste marriage, 
elopement as well as supposedly incestuous 
unions, as was the case in Nehra. A careful 
scrutiny of the incidents of honour killings 
would show that in most cases, the caste 
panchayats have passed judgments in an arbitrary 
manner, and always in favour of those who wield 
real power - social, economic or otherwise - to 
ensure that the status quo remains undisturbed. A 
runaway couple, guilty of defying time-honoured 
traditions, is invariably doomed once the 
kangaroo court steps in.

Significantly, it is not as if only couples 
hailing from different castes are murdered. 
Mahesh and Janaka, a married couple from the same 
caste, were abducted from Kanpur and taken to 
Chak Kushehari, their native village in central 
Uttar Pradesh. They were first tortured for two 
days, then taken to a paddy field where they were 
left to die after the bride's father and his 
henchmen slit their throats. What binds the 
killings in different parts of the country is the 
violence that is inflicted on the victims. The 
caste panchayat will not tolerate any resistance 
to a set of archaic rules, which determine 
individual lives in the rural hinterland. The 
gruesome deaths are meant to remind the men and 
women the price one pays for love.

Unfortunately, neither the sarpanch nor the gram 
panchayat has quite managed to stem this 
particularly brutal trend. It is possible to draw 
two different conclusions from this. First, these 
acts of reprisal are accomplished with tacit 
support from the agencies that represent the 
State. That this is indeed true is borne out by 
the statement of a police officer in 
Muzaffarnagar who has gone on record saying that 
if his daughter were to elope, he would wait for 
her, not with roses, but guns. Second, and more 
important, the sway that caste panchayats hold on 
the lives of the people also indicate that the 
State is clearly unwilling to play an 
interventionist role in these affairs. It is 
absence of the State that has further emboldened 
caste panchayats to mete out their brand of 
capricious justice. The question that needs to be 
asked is whether the State has the right to 
recede completely from the 'private' sphere, 
especially when such a retreat has imperilled the 
lives of innocent men and women.

The deaths of Gudiya and Mahesh, among many 
others, can also be interpreted as a violation of 
individual rights on the part of a twisted, 
unequal, culture. The right to love and live with 
a person of one's choice is a fundamental right 
that is enshrined in the Constitution. Each 
murder, therefore, signifies the victory of 
primitive customs over a modern, liberal and 
democratic society. The killings also strengthen 
the hand of a sinister agency, which has 
demonized concepts as natural as love and 
affection. Perhaps it is time for the State to 
look at the caste panchayat's mischief in a more 
serious light. It is one thing to protect a 
nation's traditions. But shedding blood in the 
course of such a defence is unacceptable in any 
society.

There have been sporadic attempts to rein-in 
caste panchayats and defy their decrees, without 
much success. When asked about police inaction in 
the case of honour killings, a police officer 
answered that in a democracy, a caste panchayat 
plays an important role and hence cannot be 
banned. But, the police, he assured, would take 
action if they chanced upon an instance where 
such a body had violated the rights of an 
individual. He was wrong on both counts. A caste 
panchayat has no legitimacy. It is not an 
inclusive agency and hence cannot have a role to 
play in an egalitarian society. And a couple in 
India's villages can never expect help from the 
police when their community turns against them 
for being in love.

______


[7]

The Hindu
Feb 05, 2007

The 'acid test': will Government regulate sale of deadly chemicals?
by Bageshree S. and M.V. Chandrashekhar
[. . .]
http://www.hindu.com/2007/02/05/stories/2007020511570100.htm

____


[8]

The News International
February 2, 2007

Editorial

Two terrible crimes

Two separate incidents involving yet more grisly 
cases of so-called 'honour' crimes provide 
further -- albeit extremely distressing -- proof 
of the fact that this barbaric phenomenon is 
still very much alive and well in Pakistani 
society and culture. They also remind us that the 
passage of the Women's Protection Bill was a very 
good step but only a small first one and that 
much more needs to be done before this land is 
rid of horrible injustices and discriminatory 
treatment against women. In the first incident, a 
16-year-old girl was allegedly gang-raped and 
paraded naked in a village outside Karachi by a 
group of men. Her crime was only that one of her 
male cousins had eloped with a young woman who 
was a relative of the men who gang-raped her and 
then paraded her naked. And lest we be aghast by 
this incident (which all reasonable and sensible 
people should be), it should be worth reminding 
that such incidents of extreme injustice and 
maltreatment of women are quite frequent in the 
land of the pure.

The second incident -- even grislier, if that is 
possible -- took place in a village in southern 
Punjab. A woman said to be in her forties was 
alleged to have been found in a 'compromising 
position' with another man after which both were 
dragged to a tree by the woman's relatives' place 
and stoned to death. One can only wonder with a 
somewhat sick feeling as to what is wrong with 
some people in this country -- it appears that 
there are some among us who think that we are 
still living the Dark Ages because that is the 
only conclusion that one can draw from such 
grotesque incidents. The police are already said 
to be in action -- which they usually are in such 
high-profile and well-publicised cases -- but it 
needs to be reiterated that the culprits in both 
crimes should not be spared by the government. 
Often times, it has happened that after the 
initial hue and cry following a particularly gory 
incident, after the media spotlight goes away, 
the police sometimes seek a 'compromise' by 
pressuring the victim's family to pardon the 
culprits. It will have to be ensured that no such 
thing happens in this case - the perpetrators of 
these vicious acts need to be taught a lesson and 
it should be so exemplary that other would-be 
rapists and killers are forced to think twice 
before deciding to act on their misogynist 
impulses.

A report prepared by the Aurat Foundation shows 
that in Sindh alone more than 219 women and 128 
men were reported killed on the pretext of 
karo-kari in 2006. One reason why we see so many 
cases of such a heinous nature may well be that 
the media tends to report them much more. 
However, that debate is only of academic value 
and is certainly of no help to victims of such 
abuse. The question that needs to be asked is 
what should be done now? Clearly, the government 
cannot do everything and it would foolish and 
unrealistic to expect it to change attitudes 
towards women by enacting legislation alone. Of 
course, what it can and should do is lead by 
example -- and that can be done in these two 
cases by making an example of the culprits. So 
while good legislation such as the WPB is always 
welcome, and even necessary, it cannot do much in 
and of itself. Attitudes of people, especially 
those living in rural areas, need to change with 
respect to women. This can be done by improving 
literacy rates and by making educational 
opportunities available to everyone, especially 
women who live in such regions. Also, the 
government along with NGOs needs to take measures 
to encourage more women -- resident in the 
villages as well as the cities -- to enter public 
life and seek employment opportunities. This will 
be very useful because a decent education and a 
job is perhaps the best way for an individual -- 
especially a woman -- to become independent and 
assertive.

_____


[9]

The Associated Press
Published: February 1, 2007

Report: young couple in India killed on the orders of village council

NEW DELHI: Villagers in northern India beat a 
young couple to death and burned their 
dismembered remains after a local council ordered 
the killing, saying the pair were too closely 
related, a newspaper reported Thursday.

The couple - Mahesh, 20 and his girlfriend Gudia, 
19 - lived in neighboring villages near Agra, 250 
kilometers (155 miles) southeast of New Delhi, 
and fled their homes when their relationship was 
discovered.

Their families tracked them down and brought them 
back to her village, Naharra, where the council, 
known as a panchayat, told them to end the 
relationship because they were too closely 
related, The Hindustan Times newspaper reported.

The paper did not provide details of the 
relationship, but said Gudia lived with Mahesh's 
uncle and suggested she was Mahesh's cousin.

The council deemed the relationship to be 
incestuous, and when the two refused to break it 
off, it ordered them killed.

The couple was beaten to death by a mob Tuesday 
and their bodies were dismembered and set on 
fire, the paper reported, adding that police were 
investigating 12 people believed to be connected 
to the deaths.

Authorities were not immediately available to confirm the report.

Village councils wield great influence in rural 
India and marriages are usually arranged by 
families in keeping with local customs. Rural 
couples, even if they are not related, may face 
ostracism or even death if they choose their own 
partners.


______


[10]

The Guardian
February 28, 2007

India's missing girls

Daughters aren't wanted in India. So many female 
foetuses are illegally aborted that baby boys now 
hugely outnumber baby girls, while a government 
minister has begged parents to abandon their 
children rather than kill them. What does this 
mean for the country's future, ask Raekha Prasad 
and Randeep Ramesh

[. . .]
Although gender-based abortion is illegal, 
parents are choosing to abort female foetuses in 
such large numbers that experts estimate India 
has lost 10 million girls in the past two 
decades. In the 12 years since selective abortion 
was outlawed, only one doctor has been convicted 
of carrying out the crime.
[. . . ]

FULL TEXT AT: http://www.guardian.co.uk/india/story/0,,2022983,00.html

______


[11]

The Telegraph
February 15, 2007

THE CASE OF BORO CHUPRIA'S TOMBOY
Chandrima S. Bhattacharya meets the girl who was 
publicly stripped, beaten and photographed in a 
Bengal village for being "like a boy"

Boro Chupria is a small village about 25 km from 
Krishnagar. It is a pretty village, with its huts 
of mud, brick and darma, and its grounds are 
clean. Things look peaceful - and unspoilt. There 
are no blatant signs of the world outside: only a 
large haath chhap, the Congress symbol, is drawn 
on the outside of a hut. Yet this prosperous 
jute-producing village sends a large section of 
its men to the Gulf countries.

On December 25, newspapers had reported an 
incident concerning a young woman from Boro 
Chupria. She was dragged to Gyanrapota, the 
village across the main road, stripped, beaten, 
tonsured and photographed naked because she 
behaved "like a boy". The reports suggested that 
the villagers thought of her as a lesbian. But 
since spoken Bengali has no equivalent for the 
English word - samakami not being used in 
everyday speech - being "like a boy" was perhaps 
the phrase being used to denote lesbianism.

Mamata Biswas (name changed) was beaten up for 
allegedly "preying on" another young, but 
married, girl, who lived in a nearby village. 
Mamata lived in a run-down brick hut, which stood 
out from the rest of the houses. As we, a team of 
reporters, approached her house a week after the 
incident, an assertive woman in her late 30s came 
out. She was Mamata's mother. Mamata, a small, 
thin girl, dark and very hirsute, with a tonsured 
head, came out too. She looked stunned by what 
had happened. She was wearing just a kurta 
without the salwar. Her mother said she was 16, 
but she looked about 12. She looked like a boy in 
girls' clothes, and stood stiffly, with her head 
bowed. But her jaws were set when she looked up. 
She spoke with deliberation.

She said that five days ago, on December 22, 
Ramakrishna Moitra, a resident of Gyanrapota 
village, descended on her house and forcibly took 
her to his house in Gyanrapota. There he, his 
mother-in-law Kusum and another person called 
Tarak beat her, tonsured her, stripped her and 
then photographed her naked, to show the world 
that biologically "she was not a girl". Tarak, 
the alleged photographer, did not develop the 
film, presumably because he was disappointed. 
Next day, Ramakrishna was arrested after Mamata's 
mother lodged a complaint against him, Tarak and 
Kusum at Hanskhali police station. However, 
Mamata, who had stated before the magistrate 
after the incident that Tarak had photographed 
her, has told the investigating officer that she 
cannot identify the man who photographed her. 
Ramakrishna has not been granted bail.

Mamata said that she was not "like a boy in any 
way". She said the girl with whom she was 
allegedly having an affair was just a friend, who 
was being tortured by her in-laws and would ask 
Mamata to visit her. Her mother said the same and 
removed Mamata's kurta to show her badly bruised 
back. "How will I get such a scarred girl 
married?" she asked angrily. At this point, 
Mamata lost her self-control and broke into sobs. 
"Aamar life-tai noshto kore diyechhe ora [They 
have just destroyed my life]," she cried between 
sobs and ran inside her house. By this time, a 
crowd of villagers had collected around the 
house. "Yes, she looks like a boy," an old man 
said. "She had short hair and wore pants. She 
also rides a bicycle and most of her friends are 
boys. But we all know she is a girl." We asked 
her if she had offended any one with her 
behaviour previously. At this, the man made a 
most startling statement: "There was no such 
incident before, but she was arrested on a murder 
charge," said the old man. "A boy from the 
village was killed three years ago and she was 
accused of the murder."

We went back to Mamata's house. Her mother was 
reluctant to speak, but said that Mamata had been 
picked up by the police after a neighbour's 
ten-year-son was killed. She added that Mamata 
had served two terms at the Behrampore and Liluah 
correction homes for women and children, but was 
later released on bail. She said she didn't know 
why her daughter was picked up for the murder, 
but said Mamata was friendly with the dead boy's 
sister.

We met Mamata again. She said she was innocent of 
the murder and of any liaison with the other 
girl, whose father had beaten her up. But when we 
asked her if the other girl also thought of her 
as another girl, Mamata said her friend had 
written her a letter "as a boy", to which, she 
replied "as a boy". "But I want to marry now. It 
is the duty of every girl to marry."

This time, too, a crowd had collected. "You can't 
leave without speaking to us," a man said. He 
made us sit in the courtyard of a nearby house 
and asked a couple, an old, frail man and his 
middle-aged wife, to come forward. The woman was 
holding a framed photograph to her breast, which 
showed the couple with a good-looking boy. "See 
this photograph! That girl, Murderer Mamata, 
killed this boy!" screamed one man. "She is a 
'homo-sex'!" shouted another. The girl, who was 
assumed to have been victimized because of her 
deviant sexuality, was being charged with murder.

The parents of the dead boy began to tell their 
story. The woman could barely speak: "Tanmoy was 
our only son, born after four daughters," said 
Santosh Dhali, the village homeopath, "Mamata 
killed him because she had a physical relation 
with my youngest daughter."

Dhali said he was sleeping outside his house one 
night, but was woken by a noise. Mamata was 
staying over, as she often did, with his youngest 
daughter. When he entered the room, he saw the 
two girls in a "sexual" position. Next morning he 
told his daughter, now married and living in a 
neighbouring village, to end the relationship. He 
stopped Mamata from entering his house. That 
enraged her into threatening and beating up his 
other daughters. On September 12, 2003, the day 
the boy went missing, Mamata had apparently 
trailed the boy the whole day, at the end of 
which they were seen disappearing into the 
fields. His body was discovered from a pond on 
September 15. He had been strangled with jute 
fibre. Dhali's FIR alleged that Mamata had killed 
Tanmoy, the go-between for Mamata and his 
daughter. Dhali had found that out and asked 
Tanmoy to stop arranging meetings between the two 
girls. The boy backtracked, and Dhali said that 
Mamata killed him to take revenge.

The police picked up Mamata on September 20, 2003 
She was produced at Salt Lake Juvenile Court, 
and, after being in correctional homes for about 
two months, came back to the village on bail. The 
police "indifference" enrages the villagers: "She 
is a murderer. She goes after what really matters 
- the son. She beats everybody up, young men too. 
But they don't hit back at her, because after all 
she is a girl. Her mother says she is a farm 
labourer, but she is a prostitute and strange 
women come to her place at night. She is into 
meye pachar [trafficking of women]." 
Ramakrishna's Moitra's wife said that her 
daughter was being harassed by Mamata for which 
her daughter's in-laws were upset. "That's why my 
husband beat her. She has terrorized all the 
villagers. Only photographing her was wrong." She 
pulled out a letter written by Mamata to her 
daughter. It was a passionate letter: "Last 
night, I wrote your name across the courtyard. 
You were sleeping then." She had signed off, 
"E.T. Tomar Moner Manush."

Mamata's trial is yet to start. Aparesh Das, the 
deputy panchayat chief of Gyanrapota, said that 
as the case was sub judice, the local 
CPI(M)-controlled panchayat could do little: 
"Although we condemn the incident we cannot go 
against the villagers."
WITH INPUTS FROM RABI BANERJEE


_____


[12]

The Telegraph
February 15, 2007

AFTER THE FACT
A political scientist, a psychiatrist and a 
lawyer comment on the incident in Boro Chupria

NIVEDITA MENON (political scientist): Have you 
heard of 'nude make-up'? The whole point of it is 
to spend hours painting your face in order to 
make it look like you have just finished 
scrubbing it clean. The maintaining of social 
order is rather like that. It requires the 
faithful performance of daily rituals. Complex 
networks of cultural reproduction are dedicated 
to this sole purpose. But the ultimate goal is to 
produce the effect of untouched naturalness.

There is thus zero tolerance for those who breach 
this carefully produced natural order of society 
by refusing to conform to norms of looks and 
behaviour. The incident in which Mamata was 
beaten, tonsured and stripped naked for 'behaving 
like a boy' is one instance of the effort that 
goes into maintaining the natural order. It is 
all too easy to understand it as the action of 
uncivilized villagers. How different would the 
response be though in, say, the head-office of a 
multinational corporation, to a male employee who 
insisted on wearing a sari and bindi at work?

Thus, while the horror that Mamata had to live 
through may be at the more extreme end of a 
spectrum, the point precisely is that it is a 
spectrum of intolerance to difference. Each of us 
bears responsibility in some degree for 
maintaining these protocols of intolerance, which 
could not be kept in place if every single one of 
us did not play our part. From bringing up 
children appropriately, to lovingly correcting or 
punishing their inappropriate behaviour, to 
staring at people who look different, to coercive 
psychiatric and medical intervention, to 
emotional blackmail, to physical violence. It's a 
range of slippages all the way.

But the incident was not only about 
gender-appropriate looks and behaviour. It has 
another equally significant dimension - the 
anxiety around maintaining and protecting the 
institution of marriage. That is, of 'actually 
existing' marriage - the patriarchal, 
heterosexual kind. For the young girl was 
tortured not only because she behaved like a boy, 
but because she refused to give up her friendship 
with a newly-married woman of the village.

The question of gender-appropriate behaviour is 
thus inextricably linked to legitimate 
procreative sexuality as embodied in the 
patriarchal heterosexual family. This institution 
is the foundation for maintaining property 
relations as well as the source of the crucial 
identities of caste and religion.

The ideology that sustains this institution 
correctly recognizes non-heterosexual desire and 
defiance of gendered appearance as signalling the 
refusal to participate in the business of 
reproducing society, with all its given 
identities intact. The same threat is perceived 
with heterosexual desire too, when it refuses to 
flow in legitimate directions - hence the 
violence unleashed on those who fall in love even 
with people of the appropriate (that is, 
'opposite') sex, if they are of inappropriate 
caste or religion.

Mamata is said to be 16, but is small and thin, 
and "looks about 12". How did she escape the 
binding force of those protocols that most of us 
seem to have internalized so unquestioningly? 
Evidently, the structure built by those protocols 
is shakier than it seems. There are fissures, 
leakages, the borders are porous and vulnerable. 
There are many more Mamatas, perhaps even inside 
ourselves. It is precisely because the structure 
is so fragile that such enormous force had to be 
mobilized against the recalcitrance of one thin 
little girl.

CHANDRASEKHAR MUKHERJI (psychiatrist): In today's 
rural India, tightly-knit hierarchies of caste, 
class and privilege allow little room for a 
tolerant accommodation of behaviour which is 
perceived to be different or deviant. More often 
than not, the victims of such disproportionate 
community responses are women. Societal attitudes 
to variations in sexual orientation have 
fluctuated over the ages. References in ancient 
Indian texts are not always stigmatizing. The 
unbending morality of the Victorian era brought 
with it the criminalization of homosexuality. The 
vigour with which the Indian urban middle class 
adopted such inflexible notions of correctness 
stemmed from the need to identify with the 
colonizer.

The penetration of such adopted attitudes into 
rural India has been more uneven. Words and 
phrases like masti and saheli rishte describe 
same-sex relationships in rural India. However, 
where difference is perceived as a threat and 
perhaps even competition, the retaliation is 
massive. But what of the girl-child who starts to 
wear pants and behaves more and more 'like a 
boy'? The outcomes vary. Some defy societal 
stricture and 'marry', as in Ambikapur or in 
Chhattisgarh. In such instances, the strength of 
their sexual orientation overcomes the knowledge 
that they are committing to a life of pain and 
stigmatization. Occasionally, I have come across 
cases where the strong-willed and probably 
privileged of such rural women undertake a 
sex-change operation. But some, like the girl 
suspected of 'being a boy', are tonsured, 
stripped and photographed naked. Comments made by 
her co-villagers reveal not only her pitiful 
loneliness but also an exaggerated demonization, 
which often precede or accompany violent acts. 
The ultimate loss in the small but structured 
world of the village is that of reputation and 
identity. There is nowhere to flee. I read with 
interest Mamata's comment, "I want to marry now. 
It is the duty of every girl to marry." An act of 
self-preservation, perhaps appeasement, to ward 
off the frightening abyss of social oblivion.

TARUNABH KHAITAN (lawyer): The drama in Boro 
Chupria is an old one. Countless Mamatas are 
tortured and killed at the altar of caste, class, 
religion and sex. Mamata's transgressions were a 
combination of who she allegedly was ('boyish'), 
and what she allegedly did (developed 
relationships/friendships with other women). 
These acts of violence violate her most basic 
human rights, most fundamentally the right to 
life with dignity and the freedom from torture 
and other forms of violence.

The failure of the state in providing protection 
to the vulnerable is telling. The first mark of 
the movement from a state of nature to civilized 
society is the state's establishment of a 
monopoly over the use of force. The state alone 
may judge and punish, following due process of 
law. The Indian state may be failing its raison 
d'être, for it protects unequally.

The demand, then, is one of fairness. For queer 
identities that question the rules of gender and 
sexuality, even a normative recognition of the 
right to a dignified life is not forthcoming. 
Legal provisions, such as Section 377 of the 
Indian Penal Code, aid rather than counter 
societal violence against sexual and gender 
minorities. But the state alone is not to blame. 
A society that engages in and tolerates 
collective acts of violence against helpless 
people is in urgent need of moral introspection. 
The denial of the suffering of hijras, kothis, 
gays, lesbians and bisexuals is usually disguised 
as a need to deal with 'more important issues', 
like poverty. But suffering cannot be 
hierarchized. Different facets of vulnerability 
like class, caste, gender, sexuality, race, 
religion and so on do not act independently of 
one another, they intersect. The movements 
founded by Dalits, women, religious minorities 
and the poor share their most important article 
of faith with sexual and gender minorities - a 
belief in the equal moral worth of every 
individual. Mamata's story should be the last 
word on the concern that gender and sexuality are 
'elite' issues.

______

[13]

New Delhi Newsline
March 04, 2007

Walk on the safe side
The Safe Delhi campaign is Jagori's latest effort in a two-decade career
Paromita Chakrabarti

It's the ad campaigns plastered around city 
billboards that grab your attention first. 
Chubhta hain, reads the first one. Chherkhani 
roko, says the next and finally, 'Make Delhi 
safe.' Then there are the small booklets in Fab 
Indias and Baristas in the capital that offer a 
guideline on safety for women in the city.

This Safe Delhi campaign is Jagori's latest 
offering to the city. Started in 1984 by seven 
feisty women-Abha Bhaiya, Kamla Bhasin, Runu 
Chakravarty, Gouri Choudhury, Sheba Chhacchi, 
Manjari Dingwaney and Jogi Panghaal, Jagori, an 
organisation based in Malviya Nagar, has been 
instrumental in spreading feminist consciousness 
to women beyond the urban metropolis.

''Feminism is very often an urban concept. We 
wanted to empower women in the Hindi speaking 
belt about their rights. That's how Jagori came 
into being,'' says co-ordinator Kalpana 
Vishwanath.

What followed were workshops, trainings, 
compiling and disseminating information in Hindi, 
feminist songs and posters spreading the message 
far and wide. The Sikh riots and the Bhopal Gas 
tragedy had just happened and the group engaged 
itself in developmental issues that concerned 
women at large.

In its career spanning over two decades, Jagori 
has branched out in to running a helpline for 
women affected by domestic violence and sexual 
harassment, involving college students in 
sensitising programmes and imparting training to 
other NGOs and helplines. In December last year 
Jagori also did a project with Blank Noise on 
street intervention in Saket called Kya Dekh Rahe 
Ho? ''The objective was to question staring as it 
is the most common form of sexual harassment,'' 
says Vishwanath.

The Safe Delhi project has been one of Jagori's most sustaining campaigns.

''Delhi is known for being unsafe for women and 
it's a tag that refuses to go. We have been 
conducting safety audits in different parts of 
the city, checking on the infrastructure, talking 
to people and gauging the safety quotient of the 
place. It's been an engaging exercise and the 
report is due to come out next week. This city 
still has a long way to go before it becomes more 
sensitive to women,'' says Vishwanath.

Jagori can be contacted at 26691219-20

______


[14]

The Times
February 26, 2007

The secret violence that challenges Britain's Asians
This conspiracy of silence over immigrant brides must end
Sunny Hundal

Last week a young bride was living in fear of her 
life after managing to escape from a violent 
husband and his family in Manchester. She had 
suffered six months of domestic violence and 
verbal abuse. She said that "family honour" made 
it difficult for women in similar circumstances 
to admit to domestic problems and feared that her 
escape would bring shame on her own family.

"This is happening to many other Asian girls - 
our lives are being destroyed. Something needs to 
be done," she told the Manchester Evening News.

It is indeed happening to many other Asians girls 
around the country. Today I will present a 
documentary for the BBC Asian Network radio 
station highlighting domestic violence against 
women. It focuses on brides who have come over 
from South Asia and their particularly difficult 
position.

In 2005 the Government recorded just over 10,000 
women coming from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh 
as part of a marriage. There is a discussion to 
be had on why so many British Asian men feel the 
need to marry someone from where their parents 
were born. Being fairly libertarian in my 
outlook, I'm not all that concerned about who 
people choose to marry or from where. I don't 
have anything against such transnational 
marriages. After all, my brother found his bride 
while travelling around India and I happily 
attended his wedding in New Delhi.

But I am concerned about the attitudes that 
underpin some of these marriages and the 
consequences for the brides. The view of most 
British Asian women we interviewed was that these 
men simply wanted someone who was submissive and 
willing to do their bidding. We even found men 
who openly admitted such attitudes.

The more pressing problem is that women who come 
here as brides are very vulnerable to the whims 
of their husbands. What happens if the marriage 
fails? What if she is beaten by her husband or 
in-laws? One in four British women is a victim of 
domestic violence within her lifetime but at 
least most of them will have someone to turn to. 
Overseas brides face problems unique to their 
circumstances that make them more vulnerable.

First, there are legal issues. These women are 
usually unsure of their nationality because they 
have to rely on their husbands to apply for 
citizenship. They frequently don't run away 
because they fear deportation. They may even be 
unwilling to contact the authorities, believing 
the police may be as unsympathetic to their 
plight as those in South Asia.

Then there are communication problems. 
Transnational brides usually have nobody to turn 
to for support; many don't speak English or know 
much about British society; some are even 
prevented by their husbands from meeting 
outsiders.

One campaigner at a leading ethnic minority 
women's group admitted that brides from South 
Asia were overrepresented in cases referred to 
them. This doesn't take into account those women 
who are too afraid to run away. Unfortunately not 
enough is said or done about gender-related 
violence, while terrorism or racism continue to 
dominate the news.

In many cases where ethnic minorities are 
involved, social ills such as forced marriage, 
so-called honour killings, domestic violence and 
even rape are framed by self-appointed "community 
leaders" and even by the Government as problems 
of culture or religion. But the problem here 
isn't culture or religion - it is the sexist 
attitudes towards women that some people hold.

This Government, instead of making small noises 
about deploring violence against women and not 
tolerating so-called honour killings, needs to 
take firm steps in fully supporting such women if 
they face domestic abuse. At present most victims 
face not only difficulty getting access to social 
support but also have to go to extraordinary 
lengths to prove they are genuine victims.

The legislation also needs to change to put the 
naturalisation process into women's hands, rather 
than that of their partners. One activist 
described the Government's attitude as racist 
because it discriminated against these victims on 
the basis of their nationality.

Labour has also failed to take meaningful action 
against forced marriages, which is part of the 
broader problem.

There is also a need to ensure these women become 
active British citizens. Last week the Commission 
for Integration and Cohesion said that new 
entrants to the UK should learn English. But 
teaching English is not just about integration. 
More important is that it is empowering.

Most campaigners I spoke to agreed that language 
was a key barrier in learning more about British 
society and getting help. Translation services 
are part of this problem - taking away the 
woman's incentive to learn English, whether or 
not her husband lets her. Rather than funding 
these services the Government should phase them 
out while expanding ESOL (English for speakers of 
foreign languages) classes, which have miserably 
failed to keep up with demand.

In addition, we need greater self-reflection of 
the attitudes of many Asians who not only use 
culture or religion as a cover for controlling 
women, but also invoke "family honour" as a means 
to hide abuse underneath their very noses.

Activists who challenge these attitudes usually 
invite howls of protest from some 
government-appointed community leader or 
accusations of being "a traitor" for airing dirty 
laundry in public.

But highlighting such social problems is not 
about tarring everyone with the same brush. It is 
about highlighting misogynistic attitudes that 
lead to many vulnerable women being abused or 
abandoned every year.

Progressive voices from within the British Asian 
community and outside need to help and empower 
these brides as women, not simply ignore them as 
unfortunate victims of cultural attitudes.


______


[15]  ANNOUNCEMENTS:


Call for Productions from African, Asian, Pacific, Latin American,
European and Caribbean countries

The Public Service Broadcasting Trust is pleased to invite audiovisual
productions for

The International Festival & Forum on Gender and Sexuality

New Delhi, India, March 2007

The Festival will bring together a rich collection of films from India
and across the world delving into the deep intricacies of our everyday
experiences of gender and sexuality and those that raise some of the
larger issues associated with these identities and constructions.

If you have recently directed a documentary, a short fiction film, a
feature or a television programme that is innovative (in form or
content), creative, challenging and goes beyond conventional forms of
television/ film language, we are interested in screening your work.

For details on entering films visit www.psbt.org

Public Service Broadcasting Trust is a not for profit trust that
represents the confluence of energies in an attempt to foster a shared
public culture of broadcasting that is as exciting and cutting edge, as
it is socially responsive and representative of democratic values. In
seeking to do this, PSBT seeks to situate a new vocabulary and activism
at the very heart of broadcasting in India.

____


INVITATION:-   IAWRT IIC Asian Women's Film Festival 2007
Reflections: Women Imaging Realities

March 7th and 8th 2007
10 AM - 8:30 PM
at the India International Centre
Lodi Estate, New Delhi
   ENTRY IS FREE. NO PASSES NEEDED.   A two-day 
event, to mark the International Women’s Day (on 
8th March).
This year's festival will present films that 
explore how women negotiate, resist or document 
political, social, environmental or other issues. 
How are women filmmakers widening the frame for 
issues concerning women? The festival will 
showcase documentary films by women covering a 
range of genres. It will also include animation 
and fiction short films. Among other films, the 
festival includes Q2P by Paromita Vohra; 7 
Islands and a Metro by Madhushree Datta; 
Delhi-Mumbai-Delhi by Saba Dewan; Tales from the 
Margins by Kavita Joshi; and Bare by Santana 
Issar. The festival also features docus and 
animation from Taiwan, Sri Lanka and Kazakhstan; 
and films by the Asian diaspora.

Download the SCHEDULE (as PDF) here:
<http://base.google.com/base_media?q=hand-411915045118389357&size=8>http://base.google.com/base_media?q=hand-411915045118389357&size=8

o o o

8 th March 2007
Invitation for A Joint Programme On International Women's Day

Friends

This is an appeal to organisations/ groups/ individuals to join hands to
celebrate International Women's Day together on the Delhi University
campus.Please come with your banners/posters/programmes and inform as
many people as possible to make it a big event.

It would not be a cliche to say that the need to strengthen our unity
has never been so pressing as it is felt today. Despite our collective
struggles to establish 'Zero Tolerance for Sexual Harassment' on the
campus, everybody knows that there has been no qualitative improvement
in the situation.

Let us meet at Vivekanand Statue, Delhi University (North Campus) at 12
noon ( Thursday, 8 th March). It will be good if you can just forward
the invite to other friends/formations so that they can also join us.

In solidarity

Anjali

Stree Adhikar Sangathan

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
Asia. SACW is an independent & non-profit
citizens wire service run since 1998 by South
Asia Citizens Web: www.sacw.net/
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DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not
necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.