ON TOPIC: Kashmir Protests, Castile and Sterling, Legislation, Trans Rights and Sex Work

A lot has happened and a lot has been written since we wrote last. Here is what we have been reading:

Burhan Muzaffar Wani, the Hizbul Mujahideen commander, was killed in an encounter on July 8. As thousands of mourners began to gather for his funeral in South Kashmir, the Indian State opened fire on the protestors, leading to the death of 18 people so far, apart from hundreds who have been injured. In addition, hospitals were raided, minors, disabled and terminally ill people were harassed, and ambulances were attacked. As severe militarization and human rights violations intensify in Kashmir, Ipsita Chakravarty and Rayan Naqsh discuss what oppression, death, mourning and memorializing the dead means in the Valley, after more than two decades of state-sanctioned impunity to the Indian Army.

It might also be appropriate to remember how insidiously the oppression has entered homes and villages in Kashmir. Sindhuja Parthasarathy’s photo essay on widows and ‘half-widows’ of Dardpora village in Kashmir looks at how unexplained ‘disappearances’ have result in social and economic isolation of different generations of women in the Kashmir Valley.

The murders of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, two black men, by the American police within a gap of two days, have sparked powerful and emotionally charged outrage across the country. Doreen St. Félix in this article talks about the two kinds of summers experienced in America: one of picnics, walks and spontaneous trips, and the other of such killings which become public spectacles. Roxane Gay talks about the murder of Alton Sterling and what it says about the universality of the American justice system.

[Back home, Mahesh Shantaram documents testimonies of palpable fear of racism faced by people from Africa in the urban village of Soladevanahalli, Bangalore, in this photo essay.]

Women and the Law

Nausheen Yousuf discusses the current, multi-sided campaign to ban the triple talaq system, drawing on her experience of litigating on behalf of Muslim women. She attempts to unravel the myths and misconceptions around the triple talaq system and how women negotiate the complex web of institutions and government/religious bodies. You can read the full article here.

Germany passed a historic law redefining both rape and consent. Both physical and verbal cues from the victim will now affect the decision making process. The law is being seen as a consequence of widespread outrage after several women alleged sexual assault on New Year’s Eve in Cologne. Read the BBC report here.

Back home, early in July, a young 21-year-old woman from Salem district committed suicide after finding her face digitally superimposed on the semi-nude body of another woman. In a similar case last October, a 15-year-old girl from Bengaluru committed suicide. Ashwaq Masoodi in this article discusses how cyber stalking and bullying figures within the Indian Penal Code and the Information Technology Act, 2000.

A draft Anti-Trafficking Bill was introduced in the Parliament by Ministry of Women and Child Development and has evoked criticism from several quarters. Geetika Mantri in this article argues that the Bill is incomplete and ambiguous and how it fails to address several issues that it claims for itself.

In this article, Mona Mishra discusses the Bill vis-à-vis the debate between the anti-trafficking campaigners and campaigners fighting for the rights of sex works. Mishra talks about how ‘work’ is conceptualized both socially as well as legally and how sex work often lies outside it, thereby denying basic human rights to its practitioners.

In a similar context, Smarika Kumar discusses the underlying moral judgement and ‘fear of recreational sex’ in legal and social opinions on sex work. She talks about this in the context of the Ministry of Home Affairs seeking to ban 240 websites offering female escort services:

“All this in effect implies that sexual material in human expression, which can only be surmised in 19th century Victorian vocabulary such as  “lascivious” and “prurient” tends to deprave and corrupt persons and when published or transmitted in “electronic form” must be punished quite severely. But why in electronic form, and why on the Internet? Or, what is different about sexual expression on the internet that it is sought to be so specifically curbed by Section 67?”

To move beyond legislations, an insightful article by Ei Cherry Aung discusses the need to do more to protect the rights of women who migrate from rural Myanmar to the urban centres in order to work as housemaids. Read it here.

Trans Lives and Rights

Arvind Narrain analyzes the implications of India’s abstinence from voting to establish the first Independent Expert on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) in the UN Human Rights Council. In this interview, Narrain talks about how in a larger sense, Indian Government’s abstinences reflects its larger apathy towards the LGBT community.

The Wire published a powerful conversation with activist Raina Roy where she talks about her personal and political journey as a trans-woman and her arrival at Samabhabana, a group committed to work for intersectional positions within gender, caste, class, disability and age. You can read the full account here.

Here is an interview with Qamar Naseem, a member of the advisory council of Trans Action Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. He talks about trans rights, sexual violence and torture against transgender people in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and whether their situation as changed after the government issued them National Identification Cards in 2012. Violence against trans people has been on the rise in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, in spite of criticism from several groups, including a fatwa by Ittehad-e-Ummat Pakistan.

Meanwhile, in India, Debaditya Bhattacharya discusses the Central Government’s recent attempt to delimit the meaning of the term ‘third gender’ as given by a Supreme Court Bench on April 15, 2014 as an attack on individual freedom to decide one’s sexual identity:

“Given the degree of emphasis in the judgment on processes of self-assignation of gender, the Centre’s call to empirically ‘delimit’ the exact number of beneficiaries of a third gender legislation is no less than an attack on civil rights. The same freedom that the NALSA judgment attests as an individual right is what the state appropriates for itself by reserving the authority to determine who to recognise as third gender and who not to. Going by the text and spirit of the Radhakrishnan judgment, this is an assault on the fundamental right to freedom of expression as including self-identifications of gender. Such illegal usurpation of an individual civil right by the government underscores an attempt to reduce a progressive ruling to a debate about definitions.”

Here is a powerful account of growing up with a variety of gender based labels and the continuous sense of alienation that they produce.

Ruth Padawer discusses how gender boundaries for women continue to be policed in the world of Sports in order to arrive at the ‘right’ type of female body.

Women, Media and Politics

Arundhati Roy’s interview for Elle Magazine has stirred up some interesting responses, to say the least. In the interview, she discusses her literary art, life and political opinions, making some rather problematic statements in the process. Apart from several other problems that surface in what she says, Mishka Wazar discusses what it means to call yourself a ‘black woman’ and claim that experience for yourself (which Arundhati Roy does at the outset of the interview). You can read the response here.

This fascinating article narrates the history of the Hindi soap, from 1980s Doordarshan to the present, looking at how intersections and alliances of caste, religion and neo-liberalism affect the representation of women on Hindi Television.

Here is an entertaining as well as frustrating account of a woman’s experience at working in a feminist magazine.

J Devika reminisces about Kamala Das and her legacy of women’s political participation, poetry and an ‘affective community’, a few days after her birth anniversary. You can read the full article here.

Caste, Protest and Appropriation

P.S. Jaya painted herself black everyday for 150 days and roamed Kochi’s streets to protest the institutional murder of Rohith Vemula. The idea was to make the community face its own prejudices. The responses, however, have ranged from support to outright rejection.

Here is a response by Archana Bidargaddi and Prabhu Venkat to this instance of ‘artivism’, as Jaya calls it, arguing that the protest is not only an attempt to appropriate the everyday experience of a Dalit woman, but also rests on outdated theories of castes and races.