A chance encounter with a 55-year-old Ho tribal woman in Lonjo
village, Jharkhand, was a life transforming experience for me. In 1981,
Jharkhand, then part of Bihar, was witnessing a tribal movement to reclaim forest
rights. A reign of terror was unleashed with mass arrests and rapes of women by
the police and paramilitary forces. Around this time, a group of activists had
invited me to document atrocities against women as part of an all-women team..
After intensively working with victims of domestic
violence in Delhi, we at Manushi came to the conclusion
that the fragile and uncertain rights of women in their parental property make
them easy targets of violence. Even within communities where women are the
economic mainstay of the family and run farm operations and the village economy
without much help from men, women find it difficult to hold on to landed
property if they have no men in the family – sons, brothers or husband --- to
bolster their claim.
In 1981, Manushi filed a petition in the
Supreme Court on behalf of Maki Bui and her daughter, Sonamuni, Ho tribal women
of Lonjo Village in Singhbum District, Bihar whereby we challenged the denial
of equal inheritance rights to women of the Ho tribe. Though this petition
focused on the plight of Ho women, the conditions that contribute to women’s
vulnerability are as true for tribal women in most other parts of India as well
as peasant women in many other caste Hindu communities.
I was introduced to Maki Bui and the plight of women
like her through a social worker and missionary named Pilar. This
happened while I was traveling through Singhbum gathering information on police
atrocities against tribal women. When I first met her, Maki Bui was in her
early fifties. She had recently been widowed. Her husband had been a retired
police constable who had served for many years. Like most rural women with a
husband who worked outside the village. Maki Bui stayed in the village working
on the land through most of the period he was employed elsewhere. The couple had
no sons, just one daughter named Sonamuni. According to customary practice in
her area, Maki Bui was entitled to occupy her husband’s share of the family
land during her lifetime. After his death, the land would revert to one of her
husband’s agnates rather than her already married daughter, Sonamuni, who would
have been allowed limited usufructuary rights in her natal family land only if
she had remained unmarried.
Maki Bui wanted to pass on the land to her daughter,
Sonamuni, who had been married into a poor family. At first she tried to get
her daughter and son-in-law to come and live in Lonjo so that they would have
some customary claim to her land after her death. Customary law does have
provisions for adopting a son-in-law for inheritance purposes. The strategy was
resented by Maki Bui’s husband’s family, who began to threaten her with
violence. When Maki Bui sought my help, I suggested we challenge the
constitutional validity of the discriminatory tribal law. It appeared to me
that it would be simple to get the Supreme Court to rule that those aspects of
tribal customary law that discriminate against a woman’s inheritance rights
were unconstitutional.
Following Maki Bui’s petition, which was published in Manushi No. 13, many other
individuals and activists wrote to us saying that the situation was similar
among several other communities and therefore, they wished to join us in
challenging these laws that discriminate against women in matters of
inheritance. One of Manushi’s subscribers, Mary Roy,
who belongs to the Syrian Christian community, wrote to say she had filed a
petition along the lines of the Manushi petition challenging
similar discrimination against Syrian Christian women. From Maharashtra’s
Dhulia district, Sharad Patil, a prominent political activist working among
tribals, also filed an intervention petition because many tribal communities in
that area practiced similar denial of land rights to women. From within Bihar
some activists working with the Jharkhand movement brought more intervention
petitions involving other tribal communities. In Mumbai, activists of Nivara
Hakk Samiti, who were fighting for the housing rights of pavement dwellers,
wrote to say that they had decided to demand house pattas in the name of the women
in these families. Even in far off Nepal, activists who were in touch
with Manushi such as Hsila Yami, who
later became a prominent Maxist leader, responded to this issue with great
enthusiasm and made it part of their own campaigns in villages of Nepal.
Maki Bui’s case seemed to have a large ripple effect. Within a short time, we
had succeeded in getting the issue of women’s land rights debated and discussed
among a whole range of social and political organizations.
The responses can be broadly divided into three
categories:
a) Those who were actively
working with poor tribal or other disadvantaged communities including urban
slum dwellers fighting for legal housing rights responded with enthusiasm and
adopted the demand for women’s right to property in their own campaigns as
well. They even filed intervention petitions in the matter from other
tribal communities in other regions of India. Mary Roy, a Syrian
Christian from Kerala told us she shared the same predicament in her own family
and therefore filed a case on the same lines in the High Court of Kerala.
This set the stage for this issue becoming a core women’s rights issue all over
the country in the years to come.
b) Male tribal leaders from
mainstream political parties – both Hindus and Christians -- rose in unison and
condemned the petition as an encroachment in their “personal customary laws”
and conspiracy by non tribal “outsiders” to deprive them of their land. They argued that it was
impractical to give land rights to women because they go away to their marital
homes and claim land rights there.This attack was unleashed even though in our
petition we had built several safeguards to ensure that even when tribal women
got full inheritance rights in the family land, in case of a marriage of a
tribal woman to an “outsider” it would not pass on to non-tribals.
c) Leading feminists based
in metro cities condemned it as a “bourgeois” demand. Their argument was
that private property is a bourgeois evil. Therefore, it was a retrogressive
demand while a “progressives” should demand abolition of all private property.
At the other end, the lawyers arguing the case as well
as judges hearing the case seemed so removed from the ground level reality that
I decided to bring the situation of women in the village society and economy to
life by writing a detailed report from Singhbhum District. Pilar -- my host,
informant and translator -- knew the lives of most of these women closely. Most
women trusted her even with intimate information since she had worked as a
primary health care provider for many years. In addition I travelled to
numerous other villages with local activists assisting me in collecting
information. Spread over four visits, the study was an eye opening experience
for me in more ways than one. My study entitled “Toiling without Rights-Ho
women of Singhbhum” attempts to answer the various objections raised by local
leaders against giving land rights to women. This was published in “Zealous
Reformers, Deadly Laws-Battling Stereotypes” (. published by SAGE Publications,
2008) It is interesting that the points they raised are not very different from
those offered as justifications by caste Hindus for denying women a share in
family inheritance, even though the stereotype notion is that tribal culture is
far more pro-women than caste Hindu culture and practices. The similarities are
evident in the article “Inheritance Rights for Women: Response to Some Commonly
Expressed Fears”. This piece was addressed mainly to urban middle class
audiences who prefer to spend large amounts of money on providing daughters
exorbitant dowries but do not consider them worthy of independent property
rights.
Several urban educated activists involved in various
tribal rights movements in the region actively assisted Manushi in mobilising opinion in
favour of our petition. Veer Bharat Talwar, a respected intellectual activist
travelled through Jharkhand with me to hold discussions with important
politicians and activists, Josna, Alosius Raj and Xavier published a Hindi
version of our petition and held several meetings in the area on this issue.
Rose Kerketta of Ranchi University intervened in the Court on behalf of her own
tribe requesting to be impleaded in the case since similar discrimination was
practiced among her tribe as well. And yet, women of this region who stood to
gain most from our intervention could not get organized and put up a united
front in the same way that men did to safeguard their collective interests. In
fact, Maki Bui’s own female relatives turned against since her since her land
was expected to revert to their families after her death. Since in most
instances women’s identification with men of their own families is much
stronger than their sense of solidarity with other women, we could not unite
them on gender lines. Had a few mainstream male leaders championed women’s
cause, that might have brought a much larger number of women together to stand
up for their rights. We have seen it time and again if all men gang up against
a move to empower women as a group, a good proportion of women themselves often
join men in attacking and undermining an initiative for women’s rights.
At the other end, the Supreme Court proved very
ineffective in dealing with the case. Getting the case admitted into the
Supreme Court was no problem. Getting the case heard was a far more difficult
matter. The years that followed were full of unending petty harassment,
slipshod court procedures and interminable delays. After the case was
admitted on August 20, 1981, the Supreme Court ordered the Bihar government to
ensure that during the period that the case remained before the court and until
final orders were passed, they were to see to it that Maki Bui continued to
enjoy her customary rights as a widow without fear or hindrance.
But that was not to be. After the Court ordered an
enquiry into her allegations through the Block Development Officer,
her-in-laws’ family began to harass and intimidate her even more for having
dared to take them to Court. We did all we could to get her case expedited.
However, the Bihar government kept requesting postponement after postponement
on one pretext or the other. In the meantime, Maki Bui was getting desperate as
her in-laws made concerted efforts to drive her out of the village. Finally,
she had to leave her village, Lonjo, and go far away to live in her daughter’s
village. Maki Bui had started off by asking our help to enable her to pass on
her piece of land to her daughter. Instead of assisting her to get more than
the discriminatory customary law allowed, her coming to the Supreme Court had
actually endangered her life even further and she could not even continue
living in her village. The local police as well as the BDO and other officials
actively supported those who were endangering Maki Bui’s life both in the
village as well as by submitting false affidavits in the Supreme Court.
We filed a petition alleging contempt of
court against the Bihar government for violation of the court’s interim orders
that Maki Bui be offered protection. Even though by now our expectations
of the Supreme Court had been scaled down considerably, we were still not
prepared for what happened. Justice Mishra, who heard the case at that
stage, said openly in a packed court: “We can pass a contempt order if you
insist. But what good will it do for the petitioner? The Bihar government or its
police are not going to heed it any more than they did our original order.
Better that you advise that old woman to continue staying with her daughter so
at least she is safer than in her own village. Or else bring her to Delhi and
keep her with you so she is safe.” The Bihar government showed no inclination
to propose a solution and the Supreme Court insisted on forever waiting for the
Bihar government’s proposal for finding a satisfactory formula on this issue.
We had approached the Supreme Court in the hope that
its judgment would help millions of women, not just Ho women but other peasant
women as well. Now the Supreme Court was itself admitting that it could not
even provide this one woman with elementary protection, leave alone strengthen
her economic rights.
What
was the point of fighting this case for so many years if the highest court of
the land was admitting that its orders carried no weight whatsoever with the
government of Bihar, that even a BDO does not have to pay any heed to it? What
good would any final judgment be in such a situation? Maki Bui and her daughter
both died under mysterious circumstances years before the Supreme Court
pronounced its judgment. Their deaths left me so traumatized with guilt and
remorse that I was physically sick for months. When the Court judgment was
finally delivered I did not even bother to read it for several years. Maki
Bui’s fate came to be a permanent symbol and reminder of the dangers of
political intervention without preparing adequate support within the
community. Since then I have tried hard to stick to my resolve that never
again would we endanger the life of an already vulnerable person by taking
their battle to a level which was beyond their strength and our control. Even
if risks had to be taken, they would be of such a nature that the brunt is
borne by those of us leading the initiative. It also taught me yet again the
importance of avoiding situations in which our interventions appeared like an
attack from “outsiders”. This caution becomes doubly necessary when you are
dealing with groups and communities who are much poorer and in a weaker
position than those of us who take up their causes. Men of such communities are
already victims of exploitation, discrimination and contemptuous treatment meted
out to them by powerful outsiders. The low self-esteem and frustration of men
of such downtrodden communities finds an easy outlet in oppressing women in
their own community because that is the only way they can feel “manly” since in
the outside world their manhood is constantly crushed by powerful aliens. In
such a situation, when an outside agency or individual descends in their midst
to attack their treatment of their own women, their response is inevitably one
of aggression and hostility. Using “shame” as a weapon of transforming gender
relations tends to generate anger and resentment rather than make them more
sensitive to women’s needs.
When
instead, you appeal to people’s sense of honour and justice and work with them to find a solution
to their problems rather than present them in a humiliating light to the
outside world, it produces far better results. But if you rely on shame as a
weapon of behavioural transformation, it leads to greater resistance to
changing power equations. By contrast, we saw much better and swifter results
when we appealed to the conscience of fathers and brothers to take
responsibility to save their daughters and sisters facing violence or abuse.
Therefore,
we began to emphasize the need to work towards creating a new social consensus
in society and in the family, to strengthen the notion of what is a woman’s
rightful due. We endeavour to help her secure it with honour rather than focus
obsessively on securing legal rights that would leave her at the mercy of an
inefficient, corrupt and venal state machinery, while everyone else disowns
responsibility for her well being.
Freeing of Enslaved Goddesses
My
reading of Indian history as well as our experience with victims of domestic
violence in Delhi had taught me that Indian men not only become willing
participants in movements for strengthening women’s rights, but have led
numerous movements for women’s rights and succeeded far better than feminists.
Manushi’s own experience of working with families of domestic violence victims
had shown that men become solid allies provided you know how to appeal to their
sense of honour and fair play.
Fortunately, we got a chance to test this approach out
on large scale through Manushi’s association with
Shetkari Sangathana – one of the largest mass based movement of farmers founded
in Maharashtra in 1980 by Sharad Joshi. In 1986, Joshi invited Manushi to come and participate
in their newly formed women’s front – Shetkari Mahila
Aghadi and
evolve a programme of action aimed specifically at empowering women of farm
households who had till then been mobilized mainly on economic issues affecting
the farm sector.
Since the Sangathana is committed to non-violent
agitational methods, and their meetings and rallies are exceptionally
disciplined without any policing methods, women have always felt very safe and
comfortable in this movement. Therefore, all their agitations have included
massive participation of women, many of whom come with a do-or die spirit. For
many years they participated only on general issues affecting the farm sector
as a whole without raising gender specific issues till Joshi decided to set up
a separate wing for women.
My contribution was to convince Joshi and his colleagues
that, just as, for the farm sector as a whole, their emphasis was on farmers
getting their due price for their labour, with economic freedom being the core
issue rather than a demand for subsidies or protection from the government, so
also it should be their strategy for women of farm families. The organization
ought to ensure that women too did not have to live a life of hapless
dependence with all economic resources concentrated in the hands of the men of
the family. I was able to convince Joshi that for strengthening women’s
rights in the family, they need not wait till the government agreed to change
this or that law. It was far more important that the Sangathana be able
to persuade its followers to willingly give women of their family their due share;
the best of laws can be rendered useless if people are not convinced of their
worth. I wanted to see whether the success we had in convincing
individual families in Delhi to avoid begging for help from the police and law
courts and instead ensure that women got justice within the family itself could
be replicated on a large scale. The product of this collaboration between Manushi and Shetkari
Mahila Aghadi was
a unique campaign called Lakshmi Mukti Karyakram.
Sharad Joshi announced in 1988 that any village which
performed the following three acts for women’s empowerment would be honoured as
a Jyotiba Gram:
1) Ensure by consensus the
victory of an all women panel in panchayat elections,
2) Close the village liquor
shop by mobilising the whole village in order to curb drunkenness and wife
beating.
3) Voluntarily transfer a
piece of land from husband to wife by a hundred or more families in the
village. Such a village would be honoured as a Lakshmi Mukti
gaon (a
village which had liberated its hitherto enslaved Lakshmis) through a public
function at which Sharad Joshi would personally distribute certificates of
honour to each such family.
A small remote village named Vitner in Jalgaon district
made history by performing all the above tasks within a month and received the
Jyotiba Phule award from the then Prime Minister of India. My very positive
report on the amazing change in village culture as a result of these
achievements enthused Joshi to launch a movement for the implementation of
Lakshmi Mukti in all the districts where they had a stronghold. The only
incentive offered was that Sharad Joshi himself would go and bestow
certificates of honour to each such village.
The nomenclature and symbolism of this unique campaign
is itself fascinating. The goddess of wealth is named Lakshmi. However, a wife
is also traditionally referred to as “griha Lakshmi” – i.e., goddess of the
household. Likewise the birth of a daughter or daughter-in-law is also meant to
be celebrated as the coming of Lakshmi in the family, even though many
communities have come to see females as a burden rather than a blessing. Thus,
the message of the Lakshmi Mukti Karyakram was that by enslaving
their household Lakshmis, the farmers had incurred the curse of poverty.
Therefore, in order to free themselves from economic bondage, they had to
liberate their own Lakshmis and earn her blessings. My own campaign speeches
were more focused on the advantages Lakshmi Mukti would bring to farm
families but Joshi's speeches dexterously used economics, mythology, and a
sense of sacred and dharmic responsibility to get his point across. Joshi would
introduce the Lakshmi Mukti campaign by saying that
so far the Sangathana had worked tirelessly to get various exploiters off the
farmers’ backs and ensure that farmers got fair and remunerative prices for
their produce. Now it was time for the Sangathana to ensure that men associated
with the movement also were just to the women of the household.
Joshi linked the whole endeavour to an earlier Karzmukti
Andolan (movement
for freedom from debts) whereby he had built a case through careful economic
calculations that the farm community needed to be liberated from the stress of
indebtedness to government banks by writing off of their loans since the
government robbed the farm sector of Rs.72,000 crores every year by
artificially depressing prices of farm produce through numerous authoritarian,
statist controls. He would then give them a similar lesson in household
economics to explain the debt they owed their wives. Joshi told me some of
these ideas took shape in his mind after reading certain articles in Manushi, notably a report of a
Punjab village study by Berny Horowitz published in Manushi Issue No.11, as well as
my study of the Hindu Code Bill. I have rarely seen academic studies put
to better creative use in a campaign speech.
In village after village I would see men reduced to
tears listening to Joshi’s appeal. Within two years husbands in hundreds of
villages carried out the Lakshmi Mukti programme of land transfer to wives,
celebrating the occasion as though it were a sacred festival. The entire
village would be spruced up and decorated with men dancing to the beat of
drums. We would be received with much fanfare with women performing arti and singing songs as
they received Joshi to preside over the certificate giving ceremony. Men
seemed even more elated than women. Much of the initiative for preparing
villages for Lakshmi Mukti was taken by young male cadres of the
Sangathana. Some of the men I interviewed described the whole campaign as
a mahayagna (a sacred dharmic ritual).
The occasion would attract many people from
neighbouring villages. After each public meeting, men from surrounding
villages would come up and volunteer to affect similar transfers of land in
their own village provided Joshi joined them likewise for the celebration. Thus far from creating a
backlash among men, the approach of appealing primarily to the sense of fair
play and justice among men created a supportive atmosphere for women to
exercise their rights. Domestic violence went down dramatically in all such
households where the beginnings of a new equation between men and women were
being established.
I attribute the success of this campaign to the
following factors:
1) High-level credibility
of Sharad Joshi in those days among the farmers of Maharashtra. His track
record of self-sacrifice, of being non-corrupt, played a vital role in
influencing opinion in favour of Lakshmi Mukti.
2) Joshi had a long enough
track record of demonstrating to the farmers that his ideas and methods of
struggle yielded beneficial results for them. Therefore, when he told them
Lakshmi Mukti is good for the well being of their family and for their own
self-respect, they trusted his word. Their slogan “Bheekh
naka hawe ghamache daam” (we don’t want concessions, we want the due
price for our labour) could easily be used for lending legitimacy to women’s
right to land because women in most farm families are the primary workers on
the land.
3) The Gandhian paradigm
within which Joshi operated put great emphasis on self-respect and
justice. While many other contemporary movements of farmers were more
oriented towards appealing for concessions and subsidies and government supports
of farm prices, Joshi’s movement chose economic freedom and justice rather than
concessions.
4) Once men become
self-respecting by giving up grovelling before their own tyrants (in this case
various government agencies) they are more easily able to extend the same
respect to women. Men who themselves live under authoritarian regimes and
controls become less self- assured and, therefore, more tyrannical towards
women.
5) Key men of the Sangathana led by personal
example. They not only transferred land to their wives’ names but also
encouraged them to take a part in Sangathana work. Their
domestic conjugal lives showed visible improvements rather than becoming more
stressful. Therefore, people could see for themselves that strengthening
the rights of women need not lead to breakdown of the family or greater
conflicts between husband and wife. Rather it could lead to happier
relations. Men did not feel attacked; rather they felt elevated when being
called upon to do justice and being honoured for it.
This
campaign led to far reaching changes in the area, including creating greater
space for women in political and public life of Maharashtra and curbing
domestic violence. While the entire might of the Supreme Court and agencies of
the Indian State failed to protect one Maki Bui, the enthusiastic response to
the message of a respected leader could move many thousand of families into
changing repressive norms towards women.
Interestingly, this entire campaign was also soundly
condemned by leftists’ feminists as “bourgeois-fication” of women’s issues at
the behest of kulak farmers, even though Joshi’s movement consisted primarily
of poor farmers at the brink of survival whether they held small or medium
sized land holdings.
None of the leftist/feminist critics ever bothered to
come and see for themselves what kind of farmers the Sangathana had mobilized
and the economic distress under which the farmers whose cause Sangathan had
undertaken actually survived.
All these reactions added to my growing
disillusionment with leading sections of Indian feminism, some of who have a
propensity to see life through the prism of ideology with little respect for
ground reality. Subsequent events made me realize that if I had done the
same work with the support of powerful international donor agencies which would
take on the job of making the issue politically fashionable, most of these
critics would have easily fallen in line. Some of the leading feminists
applied for and got hefty grants to “study” women’s land rights, make
documentary films on the issue and make it a lucrative academic exercise.
It only strengthened my resolve to avoid encashing the
poverty and misery of fellow Indians for my own career advancement. When
one meddles in the lives of the poor, one should keep a strict account: Do I
really have something to “give” to them without wanting any returns? Has my
work actually strengthened their rights, bettered their position, or have I
used their misery for my own career advancement without giving anything in
return?
This audit can’t be done by any external agency.
It has to be done by our own conscience as a daily exercise.
Unfortunately, the campaign could not be sustained in
a consistent manner beyond the first three-four years because Lakshmi
Mukti Karyakram was
pursued or abandoned depending on the urgency and priority it received in
comparison to the other Sangathana campaigns. Over the years the Sangathana got more and more
embroiled in electoral politics, which curtailed its appeal and made it appear
as yet another politically partisan group. Moreover, while it was
relatively easier to build a consensus in favour of a share in land for wives,
most families were not willing to concede that daughters too should get a share.
Since women depended too much on the family’s men to carry forward this task,
they could not keep the momentum going when men’s interest declined. Even
though many women emerged in leadership roles through the Shetkari Mahila
Aghadi, very few commanded the kind of respect and reverence given to Joshi.
Therefore, when Joshi’s attention shifted to other issues, Lakshmi Mukti took a
back seat. Joshi repeatedly pressed me to take charge of the campaign and keep
it going in a consistent manner. However, my work with Manushi and my teaching
job in Delhi made me reluctant to shift base to Maharashtra. Thus, though
people did not lose their enthusiasm, the leaders could not sustain their
commitment for a long enough period.
Despite
these and other limitations, the movement clearly showed that building a
campaign based on compassion and trust in the inherent goodness of human
beings, making them active agents of redressing wrongs, works far better than
attempts to make them passive and supine recipients of authoritarian measures
of reform carried out through threats of punishment to ensure compliance.
-----------------------------
This is an extract from the Introduction
to my book of essays “Zealous Reformers,
Deadly Laws-Battling Stereotypes” published by SAGE publications. Copies can be ordered through Manushi at a 10%
discount. Price: Rs 525/-
An edited
version of this article has been published in Tehelka (February
14, Volume 10, Issue 8. See link: http://tehelka.com/breaking-the-silence-over-womens-land-rights/ )
Posted on 11 February, 2013