In India, 24-year-old Hadiya Jahan says, “I want freedom”

November 27, 2017 by 33 Comments

Hadiya Jahan at today’s Supreme Court hearing

Today, November 17, 2017, Hadiya Jahan spoke … or better, was “allowed” to speak and perhaps be heard. Hadiya is a 24-year-old woman, who for the past year has been caught in a web of “protections” “for her own good.” Throughout, Hadiya has tried to speak in her own voice, and has been thwarted. Today, she spoke, and she was partly listened to. More people should be listening, because Hadiya Jahan’s story haunts women, and womanhood, everywhere.

Hadiya’s story is both straightforward and complicated. She was born in Kerala to an atheist father and Hindu mother. Her birth name was Akhila Ashokan. In 2010, at 18 years of age, she went off to study homeopathy. In 2015, she publicly declared she was considering converting to Islam. In January, she attended school, wearing a hijab. Her Hindu “friends” reported this to her parents. Her father rushed to the school, did not find his daughter, and filed a missing person’s complaint. Meanwhile, his daughter had gone to Sathya Sarani, a self-described Islamic educational and charitable trust. They provided her with shelter. Akhila changed her name to Hadiya. When the missing person’s case came to court, Akhila showed up and said she was neither missing nor abducted. The court agreed.

In August 2016, Hadiya’s father filed a second petition, claiming there was a plan to move his daughter out of India. The implicit claim was trafficking. Hadiya denied this. The court placed her in a women’s hostel. At the next hearing, on December 19, 2016, the Court said Hadiya must be allowed to return to college and complete her studies. Meanwhile, also on December 19, Hadiya married Shefin Jehan. When the Court was informed that Hadiya had married, they returned her to the hostel. The Court told Jehan to keep away from Hadiya. No interaction whatsoever. On May 24, 2017, the Kerala High Court annulled the marriage, and sent Hadiya to “live” with her parents. Hadiya appealed to India’s Supreme Court, and that’s who heard her today.

Since May, Hadiya has been under house arrest, at her parents’ house. She has been forbidden from talking with the world. Everyone has spoken for, and even as, Hadiya, but Hadiya has been silenced. Finally, the Supreme Court demanded that Hadiya be produced.

Much has swirled around this case, from claims of “love jihad” to “mental kidnapping.” Hadiya’s story has split women along predictable lines. In a smuggled video, shot in August, Hadiya said, “You need to get me out. I will be killed anytime, tomorrow or the day after, I am sure. I know my father is getting angry. When I walk, he is hitting and kicking me.” She begged for freedom. Who listened?

Today, Hadiya spoke, and not only to the Court. She said, “I want freedom… I want to complete my studies and live my life according to my faith and as a good citizen.” The Court released Hadiya from her parents’ custody and sent her back to homeopathy college to complete her studies. In late January, the Court will hear the couple’s appeal to undo the annulment of their marriage. Hadiya, a 24-year-old woman, wants to be free. It’s not complicated.

 

(Photo Credit: Vipin Kumar / Hindustan Times)

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Lupe Gonzalo: “We are women, and nobody is going to keep stepping on our dignity.”

November 25, 2017 by 24 Comments

For women farmworkers seeking an end to workplace sexual violence, now is the time! On January 6, 1941, in his State of the Union Address, Franklin Roosevelt elucidated the four freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. The Monday before Thanksgiving, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Women’s Group declared it’s time to demand a Fifth Freedom: freedom from sexual violence. With other members of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and with supporters, including the T’ruah Tomato Rabbis, women tomato pickers from Florida stormed the Park Avenue office building where Wendy’s Board Chairman, Nelson Peltz, holds court. They chanted, “Nelson Peltz, escucha, mujeres en la lucha!” and “Nelson Peltz, shame on you, farmworkers are people, too!” Denied entry to the building, they shouted their message to the streets and to the world. Workplace sexual violence must end. Now is the time!

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers has been working with the Fair Food Program to secure real dignity and justice in the tomato fields of Florida and beyond. At this point, Wendy’s is the only large restaurant chain to refuse to sign onto the Fair Food Program code of conduct. Why? They say they have their own code … which is precisely the problem. McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Subway, and Burger King have signed onto the code, and have found that it works. Whole Foods, Aramark, Walmart, and Trader Joe’s have also signed. All these major players find that a worker-run code of conduct works. Report after report after report after report after report demonstrate that the Fair Food Program works. And yet Wendy’s continues to hold out.

In the decades’ long process of organizing and of developing strategies and structures, women tomato pickers and farmworkers – such as Lupe Gonzalo, Silvia Perez, Nely Rodriguez, and scores of others – began organizing a quiet revolution. As the Coalition of Immokalee Workers organized, the Immokalee Women’s Group pushed the recognition of women as central to the struggle for farm workers’ rights, dignity and power. Recognizing women’s centrality meant recognizing that the struggle for rights, dignity, and power is a community wide struggle rather than strictly a `shop’ issue. From exorbitantly expensive, predatory housing to food deserts in the midst of farmlands to rampant, and often illegal, use of pesticides to sexual abuse at work, women were particular targets.

On Saturday, March 8, 2014, the women of Immokalee wrote and delivered a letter to Wendy’s, “Hear the voice of the woman, who today dares to defend her dignity in the fields. A new day is coming to Florida’s fields, with the Fair Food Program. It guarantees that dignity of women is respected. We have to keep fighting, and we have to keep shouting, at Wendy’s and other corporations, that the hour has arrived. NOW IS THE TIME!”

They have kept fighting. Lupe Gonzalo was one of the leaders then, as she is today. On Monday she had a message for Nelson Peltz, for Wendy’s and for all of us: “It doesn’t matter which country we’re from, which language we speak, which color is our skin. We are human beings, we are women, and nobody is going to keep stepping on our dignity. It’s time to take the hand of the person that’s next to you, to walk together.  Let us not abandon each other, let us not leave each other.  Wendy’s will sign.  Sooner or later, they will come to the table of dialogue, and we will feel so proud to walk together with them in this struggle.”

Today, November 25, is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and Girls. That sounds big, and it is. But it’s also realizable. Ask Lupe Gonzalo and the other members of the CIW Women’s Group. It takes commitment, clarity, concrete structures and collective action. It’s time to walk together. Now is the time!

Lupe Gonzalo

(Photo Credit 1: Forest Woodward / Facebook) (Photo Credit 2: Coalition of Immokalee Workers)

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Zimbabwe: The uncountable time of eternity has come to an end

November 23, 2017 by 2 Comments

It was 2003. Green Bombers were roaming the streets of Zimbabwe. It was 2005. Operation Murambatsvina was in full swing. And then there were the daily unreported unnamed acts of violence. Zimbabwe seemed like a swirling mass. I remember the moment when, looking from afar, looking from either Washington or Cape Town, and seeing the spectral image of Robert Mugabe, as he was in his later years, emerging from the devastation being created not only in his name, but by his direction. Where was Zimbabwe, the bread basket of the southern region? Where was Zimbabwe, the thriving economy? Where was Zimbabwe, that boasted, rightfully, of its educational structures, that provided quality education for so many? Where was Zimbabwe?

In 2003, I decided that Zimbabwe was somewhere in Colombia. For decades, I had maintained that the one thing one needed to read to “understand the world” was Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Watching the machinations of this other Gabriel, Robert Gabriel Mugabe, I saw that I had been wrong. If Zimbabwe was to be taken as the center of anything, the essential reading would have to be Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch.

Autumn of the Patriarch ends with the patriarch coming to know what he has known all along:

“… he had known since his beginnings that they deceived him in order to please him, that they collected from him by fawning on him, that they recruited by force of arms the dense crowds along his routes with shouts of jubilation and venal signs of eternal life to the magnificent one who is more ancient than his age, but he learned to live with all these miseries of glory as he discovered in the course of his uncountable years that a lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth, he had arrived without surprise at the ignominious fiction of commanding without power, of being exalted without glory and of being obeyed without authority when he became convinced in the trail of yellow leaves of his autumn that he had never been master of all his powers … because we knew who we were while he was left never knowing it forever with the soft whistle of his rupture of a dead old man cut off at the roots by the slash of death, flying through the dark sound of the last frozen leaves of his autumn towards the homeland of shadows of the truth of oblivion, clinging to his fear of the rotting cloth of death’s hooded hassock and alien to the clamor of the frantic crowds who took to the streets singing hymns of joy at the jubilant news of his death and alien forevermore to the music of  liberation and the bells of glory that announced to the world the good news that the uncountable time of eternity had come to an end.”

Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote those words between 1968 and 1975. Now, at last, it’s time to find another book.

 

(Photo Credit: Bloomberg / Getty Images / AFP / Jekesai Njikizana)

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Michael Komape did not fall to his death in a pit latrine. The State pushed and murdered him.

November 20, 2017 by 95 Comments

On January 20, 2014, Michael Komape, five years old, went to the toilet in his primary school in Limpopo, in South Africa. He never returned. The toilet seat was corroded, gave way, and Michael Komape fell into the pit and drowned to death in feces. Three years later, his parents and siblings have received neither apology nor support from anyone in government. His parents sued the Minister of Basic Education, and that trial began last week. Today, the court heard that the Department of Basic Education had been warned numerous times about the dangerous condition of toilets in Limpopo schools. The Department did nothing. The Department received three series of warning letters, in 2004 and 2008 and 2009, that described the school’s toilets as dangerously sinking. The State did nothing. Doing nothing means refused to act. Michael Komape did not fall to his death in a pit latrine. He was pushed, by a State that decided it had more important issues to deal with. In 2014, five-year-old Michael Komape did not fall to his death. He was murdered.

The afternoon of January 20, 2014, the school called Michael’s mother, Rosina Komape, to tell her that Michael was “missing.” Rosina Komape went to the school, and a classmate of Michael’s told her that Michael had last been seen going to the toilet, an outside pit latrine. School officials denied this, and claimed that Michael had gone out to play. Rosina Komape told the classmate to take her to the toilets: “When I looked inside the toilet I saw Michael’s hand. I then said that my child died asking for help … I asked them to pull him out by the hand maybe we can save him. I thought if we pulled him out we could save him. The principal said they had called someone to pull him out. I thought he was still alive and if we pulled him out and took him to hospital he would get help.” Michael Komape drowned in a pool of human feces, reaching to the sky. His mother came and found his outstretched arm.

The family is traumatized by and angry with the State. Days of testimony have revealed what we already knew, that the family of parents and siblings is grieving and living with nightmares, that the State has steadfastly stood fast and never extended any kind of hand to the family, and that this was a death foretold. In South Africa, 4624 schools have pit latrines.

The family is haunted, but not the State. Why not? While this story is particular to South Africa where it is seen as yet another referendum on the state of the democracy, and the human heart, it sits with similar stories around the world. It’s the story of neoliberal development, centered on global cities. Walk the streets of the Cape Town or Johannesburg or Washington, DC, metropolitan centers, and you will see extraordinary change taking place. Buildings go up, streets are torn up to lay underground cables, mansions rise where once modest homes sat, shopping malls and boutique shops proliferate, and the list goes on. Who pays for that? Michael Komape, Michael Komape’s brothers and sisters, Michael Komape’s mother and father. Last Wednesday, James Komape, Michael’s father, said, “They should have helped. My son was going to school. I did not send him to die.” I did not send him to die, and yet he was sent to his death, by a State that prefers waterfront malls to safe and secure school toilets.

Someone once wrote “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear … twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Today, the first time is tragedy, and the second horror. Michael Komape did not fall, and his death, however painful and haunting, was not tragedy. Michael Komape was murdered, and, other than the family, who today is haunted? Who is haunted by the dead of Marikana, by the dead of Life Esidimeni, by the dead five-year-old child drowning in a pool of shit, reaching to the sky? When we look, do we see Michael’s hand? We should have helped.

Michael Komape two months before he died

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STATEMENT BY CIVIL SOCIETY ON THE CURRENT SITUATION IN ZIMBABWE

November 15, 2017 by Leave a Comment

While we do not have total clarity as to the situation on the ground, it has come to our attention that there have been sudden changes in the government structures of Zimbabwe, resulting in the army taking control of leadership. This has raised concerns for many Zimbabweans in that their country is in a state of flux which can escalate and result in dire consequences for the people of Zimbabwe.

The people of Zimbabwe have continuously been subjected to oppression, exploitation and poverty, and the current developments have the potential to exacerbate their suffering.

The role of SADC and governments in the region in supporting the regime in Zimbabwe should also not be overlooked. Their actions, including at times inactions, have contributed to the current situation in Zimbabwe.

The Civil Society Organisations and actors listed below confirm their solidarity with the people of Zimbabwe in this volatile and unsettled period.

We call on the role-players within the country to exercise restraint and to place the well-being and protection of the Zimbabwean people at the top of their priority objectives.

We call on the role-players within the country to ensure that the civil liberties of the people of Zimbabwe are recognized and respected and that their physical integrity and democratic principles are guaranteed.

We call on our respective governments and SADC to engage with all relevant role-players to broker a positive way forward with the least possible upheaval and pain for the people of Zimbabwe.

We stand in solidarity with the movements and organisations in Zimbabwe that have engaged in the struggle for transformation and democratisation in their country and that will continue to do so. 

We call for people to people solidarity.

Civil Society Organisations and Actors in support of this statement: 

 A União Nacional de Camponeses, UNAC, Mozambique

 Acção para o Desenvolvimento Rural e Ambiente, ADRA, Angola

 Associação Moçambicana para Desenvolvimento da Família, AMODEFA, Mozambique

 Aurea Mouzinho, feminist activist, Angola

 Church Land Programme, CLP, South Africa

 Community Healthcare Worker Regional Movement, Southern Africa

 East Cape Agricultural Research Project, ECARP, South Africa

 groundWork, South Africa

 International Labour Research and Information Group, ILRIG, South Africa

 Just Associates, JASS, Southern Africa

 Justiça Ambiental, Mozambique

 La Via Campesina – Southern and Eastern Africa

 Labour Resource and Research Institute, LARRI, Namibia

 Legal Assistance Centre, LAC, Namibia

 Livaningo, Mozambique

 Positive Vibes, Namibia

 Rural Women’s Assembly, Southern Africa

 South African Careworkers Forum, South Africa

 Surplus People Project, SPP, South Africa

 Wellness Foundation, South Africa

 Women’s Legal Centre, WLC, Namibia

 WoMin, African Gender and Extractives Alliance, Africa

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Every day in Latin America, 12 women are killed. Seven of them are killed in Mexico.

November 13, 2017 by 41 Comments

 

“In 1993, a group of women shocked Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, with the news that dozens of girls and women had been murdered and dumped, like garbage, around the city during the year. As the numbers of murders grew over the years, and as the police forces proved unable and unwilling to find the perpetrators, the protestors became activists. They called the violence and consequent impunity for the crimes `femicide,’ and they demanded that the Mexican government, at the local, state, and federal levels, stop the violence and prosecute the murderers.”

In 1993, the murder of women, and the refusal of the State, in this instance the Mexican state, to do anything, was shocking. In an interview today, Luis Raúl González Pérez, President of Mexico’s National Commission for Human Rights, said that, across Latin America, 12 women are murdered every day. Seven women are killed every day in Mexico. In Mexico, this is called feminicidio. In English, it’s both femicide and feminicide. Whatever it’s called, it’s an atrocity, one that’s been created by successive Mexican governments, governments north and south, east and west of Mexico, multinational corporations, and more. Mexican femicide is the nation’s, and the world’s, cost of doing business. That’s why the hotspots of femicide in Mexico have moved from the southern border to the northern. Ever increasing mounds of women’s cadavers is not even collateral damage in the national, regional and global development scheme, and those mounds are piling up at an ever-increasing rate.

A recent report on household relations, from the National Institute for Statistics and Geography, suggests that in Mexico 7 out of every 10 women has experienced violence, most of which is sexual and emotional. Ten areas exceed the national average. In Mexico City, for example, eight of ten women have suffered violence.

Right now, 12 areas in Mexico have been issued a “femicide alert” by the Commission. Another five been under the alert for almost six months. When these alerts are issued, the locale often sees it as a hassle and an embarrassment. As González Pérez explained, “Local governments must see that this alert is a tool that does not seek to harm, but to contribute to the solution of the problem. [Some consider it a political coup] because it is misunderstood. It feels like it’s  reproaching them for the past, but it’s actually a proposal to move towards the future.” In what world do governments see femicide as a misplaced garbage dump, as bad for business, and nothing more? In our world.

Since that day in 1993, women have been protesting, organizing, militating against femicide. Mexican women have reached across borders and across oceans for support and for models of anti-femicide activism and policy. Since January 2016, Maria Salguero, a geophysical engineer, has designed and maintained an interactive femicide map. Guadalupe García Álvarez, a member of the Mazahua indigenous nation, suffered violence at home and then, at the age of 13, was sent to Mexico City to work as a maid. She decided enough was enough, and left. She went to university, completed her studies, and then returned home, where she founded, MULYD, Mujeres Lucha y Derechos Para Todas. Women’s Struggle and Rights for All (Women and Girls). Poets, such as Mijail Lamas, have invented new kinds of poetry, documentary poetry, to do more than “draw attention” to femicide and to violence against women. Lamas, and other poets, are insisting that the assault on women is an assault on language, on communication, on the soul and spirit of each and every human being, and not only in Mexico.

Every day, seven women in Mexico are murdered. That arithmetic is described as a crisis. It is. The crisis is violence, the violence committed by men in relationships, by men in corporations and investment agencies and banks, and by men in charge of governments, and not only the government of Mexico. Where is the global outrage at a contemporary witch hunt that threatens, as they always have, every woman?

 

(Photo credit: SDP Noticias / Claroscuro)

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There are no plans to close the camp in Nauru

November 10, 2017 by 20 Comments

“There are no plans to close the camp in Nauru.” Thus ends Reuters “Factbox: Why does Australia detain asylum seekers in offshore camps?”. The “Factbox” relates the current situation in the closed detention centers on Manus Island and, to a much lesser extent, on Nauru. Last year, the Papua New Guinea High Court declared the Manus detention center illegal. Last month, Australia closed the center and tried to move its 700+ men to another center, one without running water. 600 some men decided to stay and have occupied the center since, at great risk to their own lives. Journalist and Iranian refugee Behrouz Boochani, imprisoned on Manus Island since August 2014, wrote, “Death is always ever so present. Death. The breath of death. The scent of death. The reign of death over Manus prison. This is the reality of living out here.” Death. This is Australia’s vaunted “Pacific Solution”: horror, torture, death. Take the bodies, the more vulnerable the better, and throw them in a pit, far away, where the “good people” of Australia need not see or hear them cry. Pregnant women, children, men, survivors all, throw them away. To re-open the “Factbox”, “So far, no `boat person’ detained on Manus or Nauru has been resettled in Australia.”

Last year, all eyes were on Nauru. Leaked reports last year showed that 2,000 incidents of sexual abuse, assault and attempted self-harm had occurred. Many of these involved children. The United Nations chastised Australia and Nauru for their failure, call it refusal, to protect asylum seeker and refugee children from sexual abuse. Amnesty International called the conditions on Nauru torture. Currently, Australia detains 369 people on Nauru. 46 of them are women, and 43 are children.

By air, Nauru is a little over 2000 miles from Brisbane, and, for those detained and tortured there, galaxies and light years away. And for Australians? Why does Australia detain asylum seekers in Nauru? Why is Australia not only not shocked but proud of its torture of refugee and asylum seeker children, women, and men on Nauru? Why does Australia hate pregnant and abused women asylum seekers on Nauru? The answer? “There are no plans to close the camp in Nauru.” There is no more to be said.

 

(Photo Credit: The Guardian / Saba Vasefi)

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Virginians decided yesterday, and we decided to move forward

November 8, 2017 by 12 Comments

In 2006, Mazie Hirono was elected to the U.S. Senate. She was the first and only Asian-American woman U.S. Senator and the first woman Senator from Hawaii. A year ago, today, the people of Washington’s 7th Congressional District elected Pramila Jayapal to the United States House of Representatives. Pramila Jayapal was the first Indian-American woman elected to Congress. On the same day, in Minnesota, Ilhan Omar won a Minnesota House seat, making her the first Somali-American legislator in the history of the United States. Yesterday, Virginia voters decided to smash a few more glass ceilings, and elected Danica Roem, Elizabeth Guzman, Hala Ayala, Kathy Tran, Dawn Adams, Jennifer Carroll Foy.

Here’s the list of firsts. Danica Roem is the first openly transgender person to win elective office in Virginia. Elizabeth Guzman and Hala Ayala are the first Latinas elected to Virginia’s House of Delegates. Elizabeth Guzman is also the first social worker and the first AFSCME member elected to the House of Delegates. Kathy Tran is the first Asian American woman elected to the House of Delegates. Dawn Adams is the first open lesbian elected to the House of Delegates. Jennifer Carroll Foy is the first public defender elected to the House of Delegates. That’s a lot of firsts, and that’s a whole lot of women.

Who voted these first women into office? Extrapolating from those who elected Ralph Northam to be the next Governor of Virginia, women. 61% of all women voted Democratic. 91% of Black women voted Democratic. 58% of women with college degrees voted Democratic. 54% of married women voted Democratic, and 77% of women who are not married voted Democratic. The turnout yesterday was the highest in 20 years for a gubernatorial race. That’s a whole lot of women.

There were other firsts in the Commonwealth. Voters elected Chris Hurst, a first-time candidate and a leading gun control advocate. Voters also chose Justin Fairfax, the first African American elected to a Virginia statewide office since 1989.

Thanks to the great work of Governor Terry McAuliffe and New Virginia Majority, thousands of formerly incarcerated people – including LaVaughn Williams and Brianna Ross – voted for the first time.

Virginians decided yesterday, and we decided to move forward, not back. Virginians decided to remember and honor Heather Heyer, whose last, and lasting, public statement was, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” In the words of Sojourner Truth, “If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again!” And Mary Harris Jones roars in response, “Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living!” We’re outraged, we voted, and we’re going to keep on voting, organizing, mobilizing, and moving the agenda forward.

 

(Photo Credit: The New York Times / Chet Strange) (Infographic: The Washington Post)

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26: The infinite mirroring of the horror we have created

November 6, 2017 by 10 Comments

Sutherland Springs

“Whose grave’s this, sir?”
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

“Mourning. We will be speaking of nothing else.”
Jacques Derrida. Specters of Marx

26. Two mirrors face each other. “Sutherland Springs: Texas church shooting leaves 26 dead”. “Italy probes deaths of 26 Nigerian women from migrant boats”. These headlines both appeared on the BBC news website today. In Texas, the Governor said, “This will be a long, suffering mourning for those in pain.” In Texas, half of the people killed were children. In Italy, most of the women were between 14 and 18 years old. This is the fearful symmetry we have produced. No immortal hand or eye would dare produce such horror. This is completely ours. 26. We should all be in pain, and not just today. Who will remember the day in which 26 innocents here and 26 innocents there became specters, objects for the work of mourning, subjects for the never-too-soon debates? Who will claim responsibility, for the wholesale mass production of guns, refugees, asylum seekers, and corpses? 26. Whose world is this? Whose grave’s this, sir? 26.

Salerno

 

(Photo Credit 1: BBC / AFP) (Photo Credit 2: BBC / EPA)

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In India, the Bihar “stampede” was a planned massacre of elder women

November 5, 2017 by 1 Comment

Kartik Purnima is a holy festival celebrated by Sikh, Jain and Hindu people. Yesterday, thousands gathered in the village of Simaria, in Bihar, to celebrate. They went to Simaria to dip into the Ganges River. Something happened. The press and the State called it a stampede. Three elderly women, each reported to be in their 80s, were killed. The State says the women died of suffocation. That may be the forensic determination, but those women, and so many others in stampedes – from Jakarta to New Delhi to KwaNongoma to Karachi to Abidjan to Valley Stream to Lahore to Johannesburg to Mymensingh to Khayelitsha – were part of the plan. Yet again, the gender of stampede is women, and yet again, the world takes little or no notice. Just another sudden rush, just another panic, just another day in which women `naturally’ dominate morbidity and mortality rates. Just another day.

In 1999, a “high powered committee”, established by the Indian government, released a report on disasters. They determined five categories: water and climate; geological; biological; nuclear and industrial; and accidental. They described accidental catastrophe as “urban and forest fires, oil spill, mine flooding incidents, collapse of huge building structures, bomb blasts, air, road and rail mishaps, boat capsizing and stampede during congregations.” None of these are “accidental”, since all are preventable. Since that report, the State has done less than nothing to “mitigate” the possibility of “stampedes”. In the intervening eighteen years, they have expressed “concern” at “the recurring stampedes at places of mass gathering, including religious places, and typically ad-hoc responses to those”, and issued “crowd management” guidelines, with absolutely no force and little promotion. At the same time, India’s National Management Authority lists three categories under “Man-Made Disaster”: nuclear, biological, chemical. No stampede, no crowd control, and no concern.

Yesterday, in Bihar, thousands of devotees passed through capillary alleys barely wide enough to allow passage to hundreds. The result was predictable, and the State did nothing. That was not a stampede in Bihar yesterday. Instead, three elderly women were massacred. Now, after decades of doing nothing, the State claims concern and pretends to act, but it will not acknowledge its own guilt. There was no accident. There was no stampede. Just another day.

Scattered slippers after the event

 

(Photo Credit 1: The Tribune of India / PTI) (Photo Credit 2: Scroll / PTI)

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