Subject: Delhi gang rape

1. Have you cried and publicly announced it?

2. Have you derided the political insensitivity?

3. Have you said, oh, everyone is talking about Modi and no one cares about the Delhi gangrape?

4. Have you applauded Jaya Bachchan for breaking down in Parliament after insisting she have her say?

5. Have you handed out certificates to the last word on rape to someone who is sitting in a posh office and writing about it, just as I am doing now?

6. Have you signed a petition?

I have done none of these. There is a half-written piece. And I look around and see the same old riding-the-bandwagon of a media-propped tragedy.

Look at this ad:

When will we be a shamed India? Is it all about shame? A commercial brand using rape to sell its butter is shameful.

Then, there is this comment at a petition site under 'Reasons for signing' (It has got 170 'likes'):

"I guess until some big politician's wife and or daughter is raped, Indian politicians won't wake up"- B Suri, India

Does anyone realise how regressive it is? You talk about protecting women and allude to the rape of other women. How is a politician's wife or daughter to be blamed for laws and the acts of criminals?

Jaya Bachchan too touted the regressive "In the land where woman is worshipped" line, giving the example of goddess Durga. Her tears became national news.

A 23-year-old fighting for her life is a 'subject'. This is not one case. If we must speak, then speak at every opportunity we get. Speak before it becomes a TRP rating. It does not mean one should not speak about it. Just let's not get into a race to reach some goalpost.

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End note

Raise these questions, particularly about a celebrity, and brown-nosers snigger. I, who have been accused of being too emotional in my writings, am given the riposte that it is okay to get emotional in Parliament, but not on a public forum like a blog. This is so asinine it does not even merit a response.

People who don't understand patriarchy are ready to lecture you.

I bring this up because it is just such an insecure masculine mindset; it afflicts some women too.

(c) Farzana Versey

The Indian Army’s Women

The headline is deliberately sensational. This is how the women officers are treated – with scant respect and without getting their due. Worse, the government that talks about reservations for women in Parliament agrees with the court that women in the Indian Armed Forces are lesser than men. Major Seema Singh has challenged the Supreme Court:

“The policies for women in army not only discriminate her against male officers but also lower her status to that of a jawan/junior commissioned officer, whom she has been leading for 14 years.”

After this, she is “thrown out”, and given the number of years she receives no pension and no retirement benefits. In the scathing words of Major Singh:

“The army is using the policy of use and throw while dealing with its trained women officers.”

The risk theory is propounded, which is flimsy:

“Women officers and gentlemen officers commissioned into these services are performing similar jobs, undergoing similar professional courses and are being posted to all field and peace postings. There is no separate charter of duties for women officers or short service commissioned male officers and permanent commissioned male officers. The strength of women officers posted in services in combat zone is 30% whereas short service commissioned gentlemen officers comprise 29% and permanent commissioned gentlemen officers have 23% presence.”

Even if one is to take the facing the enemy line, these tasks are not about combat. Besides, how many troops are really in a constant state of battle? Why must only combat zones be considered real work? This is just a manner in which the army, a male preserve, keeps its image of machismo alive.

It is clearly not an issue of performance but gender, for why do the officers doing the same job get to stay and why are some pushed up to give orders to the women who were once their seniors? How many women officers have been implicated in scams? How many have had cases against them for sexual harassment? How many have shirked their duties? How many have dropped out mid-way? How many have used excuses to get out of the army – it is tough and the excuses are fine-tuned? How many instances have the armed forces encountered where women officers specifically asked for soft postings? Are there more applications for leave from women officers?

Do remember these women are not getting brave in bunkers for a short while; this is their job and they ought to be given all the facilities due to them.

If militant organisations can have their women’s wing, and be sure they are combative, then the army need not worry about our women officers. They joined the forces knowing what they were getting into and not to nurse the wounds and egos of our male officers.

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On an unrelated note: 

Cinema halls play the national anthem before the start of a movie. Of late, they have the film Rajneeti's team on screen before the flag singing the anthem. No one resents standing up out of respect, but I certainly do not want to see the faces of Katrina Kaif, Ranbir Kapoor, Prakash Jha and the rest covering the flag. Why do we have to face them? It appears we are paying respects to them as representing the anthem and the flag.

The CIA Chicks?

Would you like to sell your story to help promote war? Do you believe that troops marching into terrain that has abused women would truly help them?

The CIA plans to use women to market the war.

“Afghan women could serve as ideal messengers in humanizing” the mission for Europe, according to the CIA analysis, posted on WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website. Afghan women could express “their aspirations for the future, and their fears of a Taliban victory”.

Isn’t there a difference between humanising and being humane? True, many of these women have suffered, but how will a war solve their problems, their social status, their gender roles, their subjugation? Who will help them realise their dreams once the war is over and there are many left dead, including their fathers, their husbands, their sons? What if they want a future that includes family?

The analysis, dated March 11, says “outreach initiatives that create media opportunities for Afghan women to share their stories with French, German, and other European women could help to overcome pervasive scepticism among women in Western Europe”.

This is too conniving. You get women under Taliban rule (from where will they get real women or will they be westernised spokespersons?) to talk to women in the west and convince them that a war is essential. This is blackmail that is planned by one set of patriarchy to subvert another. Both kinds of women are being used.

Even if the Taliban loses, we already know the cost of such wars – in economic as well as psychological terms. The woman in the west perhaps understands that besides those being sent off to fight a futile war, the immense tragedy is of bringing back a baggage of guilt.

Those plotting such efforts simply reveal another dimension of machismo. This isn’t much different than keeping women in an intellectual harem and expecting them to send off the men to slay the lions while they wait for them to return, bloodied and victorious.

Neither woman gains anything. The memorandum is subtitled, “Why Counting on Apathy Might Not Be Enough.” The PR exercise is itself apathy, using a tragedy as a soap opera.

The Curious Case of Dr Afia Siddiqui

The demonisation of violence
The Curious Case of Dr Afia Siddiqui
by Farzana Versey
Countercurrents, February 6, 2010

The mosquito hovered over skin and with one little prick it had sucked out blood, infected an innocent person who might suffer from malaria. If the person is poor and lives in inhabitable surroundings, it could prove to be fatal. The insect is not accused of violence.

Had it been ‘Lady Al Qaeda’, she might have raised her hand and screamed, “Out, damned spot!”

Is Afia Siddiqui a Lady Macbeth metaphorical clone, a “psycho”, anti-Semitic as she is being accused of and which reveals the febrile mindset of those indicting her? Did she carry chemicals that would make bombs? Why did the judge often throw her out of the court accusing her of outbursts, which is a strange reason indeed?

She had fought back by saying, “Since I’ll never get a chance to speak…If you were in a secret prison, or your children were tortured…Give me a little credit, this is not a list of targets of New York. I was never planning to bomb it. You’re lying.”

There are clear divisions in this case and part of the reason is that she was an educated, articulate woman, a neuroscientist. The world cannot yet deal with this ‘type’. Incidentally, Dr Siddiqui has not been convicted for an act of terror but in the popular imagination even felony, if the victim is the lordly West, can pass muster as militancy. It is another matter that no tangible evidence has been provided for this too.

After the judgement she reportedly told her attorney, Elaine Sharp, to inform her supporters abroad of her fate and that she did not want any violence to ensue. What is violence? Support groups? Those who retaliate? The Establishment?

The malaria example might appear a facile metaphor for something that wreaks havoc and creates fissures in society. Truth is that violence is seen through a microscope instead of a telescope. In the laboratory the specimen sample is militancy and not martini. Martini by itself may remain shaken within the confines of a glass, but it stirs the sort of sophisticated idea of good versus evil where good is a given. There are no nuances, no dimensions. You meet the hero and just accept him. To enter into a debate would be travesty. He belongs to Her Majesty’s Secret Service and not the Hizbul Mujahideen or the Ku Klux Klan.

By pinning down one particular stream of fiendishness we completely ignore the more rampant issue of social violence – at the workplace, at home, as petty crime, as psychological aggression.

Religion and nationalism are the two most brutal forces. They do not give you a choice to understand the greys. They are intangible and, as in Sartre’s world, the incommunicable is the source of violence.

Every belief system has arisen due to some skirmishes. Amazingly, we use tribal warfare and mythology as benchmarks in a world that aims for détente. The penury of organised faith to sustain human civility is manifest when temples, mosques, churches are regularly desecrated – a term that takes the shine off violence and transforms it into something akin to a satanic act of sin. Stampedes at pilgrimage sites are further evidence of just this sort of pugnacity.

Using hostile opposites as an example, Leo Tolstoy said, “The churches are arrogance, violence, usurpation, rigidity, death; Christianity is humility, penitence, submissiveness, progress, life.”

The problem is arrogant display often gets wiped out by penitence. Cries of “Allah-u-Akbar” and “Jai Siya Ram” are the precursors of contemporary violence. Thieves and rapists do not shout out slogans.
A headcount of dead patriots glorifies the sense of nationhood that the wrapped-in-flag corpses had no premonition of. In their trail are thousands of cadavers that worked in those conquered countries, had names stamped on identity cards. That did them in. Their being certain people.

Certain people are not important. Their lives standing on footholds of local trains, losing limbs in factories, fighting for basic wages, fighting to enter places of worship, to marry someone from another caste, class, race, religion do not constitute brutality, even if they lose their lives in these battles. They are not burnished with the gold of nationalistic gunfire.

The American people are brainwashed into believing in a just fight. No explanation is given because it is about Being American, an America that can now show off god’s creation and liberty at the White House by installing a totem Harlem. It won’t pay heed to Malcolm X’s words: “If it is wrong to be violent defending black women and black children and black babies and black men, then it is wrong for America to draft us, and make us violent abroad in defense of her.”

Defence is rarely the goal of violence. It is an advertisement for oneself. What tells a militant apart from a James Bond? If we take away the so-called ideology of the former and the willingness to die for it, then both are comic-strip like characters that transmogrify into soap-opera heroes whose travails are ongoing as is their invincibility.

There is one crucial difference in the machismo: a lack of brotherhood. As a loner, Bond tempts the enemies instead of vanquishing them. It is a violence that seeks male bonding. He kills violence using violence.

The fanatically-driven sadist dies killing a lot of others with him. Both use ‘goodness’ as their calling card and although representative of specific places are rootless. Such emotional diaspora makes their aggression almost democratic and global in its sweep. Nothing is above them and everyone is below them.

The targets don’t get brownie points for making them happen. It’s a win-win situation. Therefore, by demonising violence we sanctify it. Why stone a devil that is within?