Wednesday, December 18, 2013

A citizenship deficit

Published here on November 1, 2013.

In a classic but much-criticised 1968 book, the political scientist Samuel Huntington put forward a model to explain “instability,” a problem American scholars and policy-makers then worried about a great deal. With a better quality of life, people come to have expectations for delivery and access that governments cannot meet. The political mobilization—protests and rallies, for instance—that follows creates instability. The great worry in the 1960s was that this instability would lead to the spread of communism. We have other anxieties today but the idea of government falling short continues to concern us.

We live in an age where every way of thinking has developed a crust of science envy and every sphere of action is pressurised into management envy. We borrow words and frames from both to describe our lives and sometimes they are pithy enough that we instinctively understand what they mean. Take the deficit. We have gone from using the term in the context of budgets and inflation, to talking about trust deficits, democracy deficits and governance deficits. In all instances, the deficit describes a shortfall in relation to some standard or some expectation. How do you move from the frame to the fix in matters social and political?

Expectations are inherently problematic: they arise in my head but pertain to some action that you are supposed to take. Given that my ability to make you act effectively is limited, the likelihood of realising expectations is improved by imagining ways for us to work together. Taking responsibility repairs deficits better than cataloguing the areas of shortfall or assigning blame. Not for nothing do we say, “When you point a finger at someone, three fingers point back at you.” So when we talk about political shortfalls like trust deficits, democracy deficits and governance deficits, what is the underlying citizenship deficit? This, to my mind, is of greater interest and utility. The Constitution of India points to this with its list of ‘Fundamental Duties,’ underscoring its nature as a compact between state and citizens.

Yes, India’s infrastructure is notional in places; too many of us still live in squalor and insecurity; our freedoms feel fragile; basic needs are still a daily struggle—water, food, schooling, health; and of course, corruption is everywhere. What’s the fix? What can I do, as a citizen?

In the information age, not being aware is either a choice or a lifestyle consequence. If anything, what makes it hard for us to stay in touch is “too much information” rather than too little information. Overwhelmed, we opt out. A better citizenship choice is to stay informed selectively—I know at least what is going on in my neighbourhood, I stay informed about policies in my industry, I keep in touch with one area of policy that is important to me. If I choose to tune out completely, then I should not tune in just to complain.

What are my rights and what are the protections that the law affords me? It is important to find this out, and all too often, we skip this step. We outrage and demand, but our sense of entitlement is not always aligned with reality. For instance, it is in the aftermath of last December’s gang-rape, that many first learned about the many laws India has relating to different kinds of violence against women. We really should know. Legal literacy is an important element of citizenship, and primary responsibility for this lies with schools, colleges and civil society organizations. But in the age of the Internet, it is also possible to teach yourself. Laws, both as bare acts and FAQs and other accessible formats, are readily accessible.

One might postulate that there is an inversely proportionate relationship between the tendency to pontificate on politics and policy and the willingness to go out and vote. That’s what voter turn-out statistics suggest—the “educated” urban middle class cares enough to complain, but not enough to go out and vote. And voting is the citizenship equivalent of Facebook ‘likes’—a minimalistic-to-the-point-of-passive way of saying, “I was here, I saw this, wanted you to know.” Yes, voter registration and getting an election ID are still painful processes, names remain missing from voting day lists, booths get captured, and so on—but getting all this right cannot be a prerequisite for participation. In fact, as more people show an interest in using the process, the pressure to fix and rationalise procedures increases. And if voting feels like so much work, how much harder must it be to get in the fray and contest elections? Perhaps we should not revile politicians so; they choose to do something much harder than the voting we are too lazy to bother with. 

Public engagement can begin with becoming an active member of your residential housing society, even by just paying your society dues regularly and throwing garbage where it should be thrown. One might debate the specifics of taxation schedules and one might contest the use of public revenue, but the reality is that unless all of us chip in, there will not be enough resources in the public pool to do anyone any good. And while private companies may build and maintain shinier airports, governments also do unglamorous things like fumigate mosquito-breeding grounds and change bulbs in street-lights—things that neither bring great profit nor particular brand value. Who will pay for those, if we don’t? Tax evasion, bending traffic rules, illegal construction in our homes, siphoning off water and electricity—compliance is necessary for good governance. Compliance is our part of the deal we make with government; the terms are negotiable, but compliance is not.

But for those who hanker to do more, there are a million ways to get involved. Travelling through a very young United States of America in 1831-32, Alexis de Tocqueville was impressed by how Americans volunteered in many community activities that worked towards their collective interest. He was convinced that the roots of American democracy lay therein. Residents’ Welfare Associations, voter drives, drives to clean up and against corruption and post-disaster relief activities are easy entry points for any of us. In addition, many service organizations might be able to use our skills, resources and facilities. You can give a little time to maybe proof-read for an NGO, to create and maintain their website, check their accounts, or help them raise funds. If you are a care-giver, you might donate some time to taking care of people who work in emergency services and occasionally need a little support. So much to do, so much need, so much to give! You can start exactly where you stand.

Civil society organizations and social movements perform very important political functions. One, among these, is to aggregate and make available information and platforms for learning. They create rallying-points for collective action and offer a counter-point to political parties that might be too invested in the systems they claim to want to change. Ultimately though, politics, the policy world, civil society and social movements begin and end with individuals—you and me. We choose engagement and activism over apathy and ignorance, and thereby, make the difference. And when we try to live the ideals we espouse, we deepen change into transformation.

As Alice Walker wrote, “Expect nothing. Live frugally/ On surprise./ Become a stranger/ To need of pity/ Or, if compassion be freely/ Given out/ Take only enough/ Stop short of urge to plead/ Then purge away the need.” Or Iqbal’s words might resonate better: “Khudi ko kar buland itna ki har taqdeer se pehle/ khuda banda se khud poochhe, bata, teri raza kya hai.”

Behind every governance deficit, there lies a citizenship deficit. It’s a simple thing. If I cannot be bothered to stay informed and participate, and if all my ingenuity is spent in getting around the rules I authorise my government to make for our collective welfare, then really, I cannot and should not complain. That goes for you too.

Swarna Rajagopalan is a political scientist by training and runs Prajnya, an NGO mandated to undertake public education as part of its activities. 

The deadly burden of honour

Published here on October 27, 2013

In 2001, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia ruled that wartime rape is an act of torture and that sexual enslavement is a crime against humanity. This marked a historical break from the idea that rape may be regrettable but was just one of the spoils of war. Last week, when the United Nations Security Council once again unanimously resolved to engage more women in peace processes and peace-building and stated that helping women pregnant after rape should be a part of humanitarian aid, it signalled the great distance that we have travelled in the last twenty years. But why would the rape, forced pregnancy, abduction and enslavement of civilian, non-combatant women even happen in the course of a war?

The answer lies in this double-edged sword that is women’s relationship with their communities—whether caste, or ethnic, or religious.

The pretty, touristy edge is the idea that women are the vectors of a culture. They teach the next generation the language, the material culture, the social mores and the history of the group. Most of us, even before we know to which community we belong, know that “in my house” we do this or we eat that or we wear such clothes. The responsibility for this learning usually rests with mothers, aunts and grandmothers. In college and in offices, women are entrusted with conceptualising and organising “cultural” activities. Society pays homage to this role even though it undervalues the work that goes into it—the cooking of food, the choosing of clothes, the planning of festival celebrations, the choice of leisure activities, the giving of music, art and dance lessons.

We imagine the community in the body of a woman—Mother India, for instance. This privilege of embodying the community comes at a horrific price for women. And that price is the loss of autonomy over their bodies and lives—for seemingly trivial matters and in extremely dangerous ways.

Look at the clothes we wear. Moral policing has almost no dress codes for men, and several for women. We talk about conservative dress, and modern dress, and traditional dress and Western dress, for women, and each comes with a value attached. Dress codes signify women as being from this or that community, and can also serve as a character certificate.

Women embody tradition in ways that men don’t. When possible, girls are trained in a number of artistic pursuits, whether the classical arts of dance and music or household arts like kolam or traditional crafts like weaving or embroidery. Rarely expected to perform, but they are expected to ensure the next generation’s familiarity with this heritage. Some arts and crafts do also become livelihoods (and sometimes, that is when men take them up)—weaving, for instance.

School friends are sometimes the first encounter a girl has with the invisible but solid borders of her community. But while there are lines demarcating difference between girls from different families, those lines turn into walls between the same boys and girls who grew up playing together. The list of don’ts grows at an accelerated rate after puberty. The possibility of encountering and interacting with unknown boys and men keeps too many girls from completing their education. The fear that they might want to choose their own paths and partners results in too many girls being married early, by force and to men they do not choose. Cross-cousin marriages, which are still common in South India, probably began as a way of keeping property within a family. They also reinforce clan and caste ties. When the right to marry a cousin, niece or uncle is asserted forcefully, what is laid bare is this: Control over women’s bodies (and lives) becomes the guarantor of community solidarity.

Patriarchal societies locate the honour of a community in the bodies of its women. Therefore, what women wear, where they go, what they do and with whom, become communal concerns. Daring to choose your own life-partner and worse, to choose one from another community, is punished with death or harassment that sometimes leads young people to take their lives. The exchange of girls in marriage as part of a conflict resolution deal is another way this "honour-body" equation works. Decisions are taken by male-run community bodies and women are complicit in enforcing them. 

In times of conflict, then, it is not surprising that violence against women becomes just another instrument of war, and one that hits where it most hurts—where men and communities locate their honour and display its distinctiveness—women’s bodies. Rape and forced pregnancy by conflict parties; opportunity rape when displacement and bereavement leave families without support networks; trafficking and sexual exploitation; sexual slavery; and preemptive, forced and early marriage—are all part of the conflict experience for women. We know in our part of the world that moral policing and dress code enforcement are also part of this deal.

None of this is new. What is new is that we are beginning to find these practices repugnant.

This repugnance has been expressed in the global effort to draw attention to sexual violence in conflict situations, through resolutions, through programmes to share their import, through implementation projects and also, through an annual naming and shaming of offending parties. The next step is to extend this repugnance to situations outside the traditional definition of conflict. As we fight globally to end impunity for these crimes, a broader understanding of conflict allows us to apply the norms we are creating to other situations where violence is endemic—communal clashes between sects and religious communities; inter-caste violence; insurgency and counter-insurgency situations; and the newest entrants, development-related campaigns and conflicts over resource use. In each of these, as hostilities increase all around, so does the threat of sexual violence. It is as much an instrument of these wars as the ones that the UN talks about or that we abhor in other countries. (We, of course, would never do such things.)

And we then come full circle, because increasing levels of violence in the public sphere lead inevitably to a brutalization where violent responses to everything become normal and violence within the home escalates. Women, children, the elderly, the infirm, the disabled and sexual minorities are all vulnerable in such a climate.

In India, communal riots get a great deal of attention, but everyday caste violence rarely does. While for non-Indian observers, everything in India can be explained through the lens of caste, sometimes it seems that we Indians (the middle class, “people like us” variety like me) barely notice either the small acts of exclusion or the most horrific acts of arson, mass killing or rape when they happen in the context of caste. But when you read the work of Bama or Sivakami for instance, violence is an integral part of the landscape in which their stories unfold. Violence against women is just another feature of this landscape. The interweaving of caste identity and patriarchy makes a deadly combination, affecting so many of us that to ignore it is inhumane.

In the last few months, we have seen some questioning—can we protest this rape and not that one where a Dalit girls is gang-raped by non-Dalit men? Can we condemn this violence and not that massacre of the members of one caste by another? There are so many stories that call for our attention, so many questions to ask of ourselves, so many perspectives to understand and so many changes to make.  We are barely at the beginning of this long road and the bumpiest stretches lie within our hearts.

Swarna Rajagopalan is writing this article a few days before UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000) enters its teens. Much of her research and writing are on women, violence and conflict. She also runs Prajnya.

The gift of infinite possibility

Published here on October 19, 2013.

The education of India’s women was placed on the national agenda by the social reformers of the nineteenth century. Through the last two centuries, philanthropists and community organizations have found the idea of setting up girls’ schools and colleges very appealing. State governments have created subsidies to promote girls’ education. Clearly, we have come a long way from the days when Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Pandita Ramabai, Ramabai Ranade and Dhondo Keshav Karve had to battle odds to convince society women should be educated too. For most of us now, it seems intuitive that women should be educated.

We take for granted growing enrolment and better retention of girls in schools; more women graduates; more women taking up professional courses like engineering or medicine; and more women teachers. 53.7% of Indian women are literate.That means almost half of us cannot read, write or count, like the local entrepreneur who owns an ironing shop but cannot calculate her own earnings each day. Most of the women who make up this 53.7% have barely finished school, with about half of them having finished only primary school. There are also 12 million Indian women who are “graduates and above.”

My great-grandfather, who was an educator and educationist, would say, “Educate a woman and you educate an entire generation.” Education is profoundly empowering in a woman’s life because it gives her self-confidence, a network of peers to grow up and grow old with and credentials that improve her life-chances. Over decades of development planning and programme reports, we know that educated women have better life-chances, marry later, have fewer but healthier children and serve as role models to other women. We pin our hopes on education to deliver empowerment and safety to women. The argument is that if you educate girls, they will be somewhat more secure from violence—ostensibly because they can walk away. Ordinarily though, education does not secure them from violence, from discrimination or from the patriarchal conditioning that reinforces the idea that girls have no value.

Today, the world is celebrating a young girl whose parents believed and raised her to believe that she was a human being, entitled to education and self-expression. But in every other home, there is a young girl whose dreams are dismissed, whose potential is overlooked, who loses out to her male siblings or whose voice is silenced.

Education happens in the home, in the classroom and in the neighbourhood, and it happens as a celebration of freedom and equality. Without the creative engagement of parents, teachers and curriculum designers, the emancipatory potential of education is just an idea.What should this creative engagement promote? What are the things girls need to learn and in their turn, to teach?

Girls should learn first and foremost that they are human beings—not more, not less than that. Their experiences are valid and their self-expression is important. We must show girls that we value their intelligence and initiative. When we teach girls to be self-effacing and non-confrontational, we clip their wings for life. Girls must learn that there is nothing wrong in standing up for yourself and asking for your due—whether it is help with classwork or an equal wage or that an FIR be filed for sexual harassment. Different standards and different expectations at home and school send one clear message that most girls internalise: there is a gender hierarchy, girls come last and they just don’t matter. When parents and teachers discriminate, the idea of gender inequality is internalised by both boys and girls, and both lose out in the long run. 

Girls should learn that they are entitled to every right that applies to human beings and they are obliged to share the responsibility of citizenship. A society that wants to raise daughters and sons as equal citizens would include gender sensitization materials in its civics classrooms and teacher training programmes. In our work with graduating college students, we have found them frighteningly ignorant about their rights. They appear to put up with many threatening situations mainly because they are unsure of themselves—are they reading the situation correctly—and because they don’t know how to cope. An important part of their education must be to teach girls what their rights are in all situations—from political participation to fighting sexual violence to inheritance. And how would you address sexism in the classroom—where teachers valorise and call on boys and not girls, for instance?

Girls should learn that other girls and women have been agents of change and creative contributors to our heritage. History books rarely feature an equal number of women rulers or scholars as men. Male authors and poets outnumber women in literature text-books and syllabi, with the latter being tagged by gender as “women writers”—suggesting that somehow their gender is the most important feature of their work. When we do oral history interviews, we ask women about their lives and experiences, but they return like homing pigeons to talk about the men in their lives. We have learnt to erase ourselves from the narratives of our own lives. Our daughters should learn that women before them have been scientists, mathematicians, poets, philosophers, artists, film-makers, political scientists, soldiers and even politicians! Neither they nor their problems are unique; but equally, they are not alone in their struggles.

Girls should learn that there are no barriers to learning. This, we demonstrate to them by removing the barriers outside their mind, by guaranteeing easy access to schools, public transportation, scholarships, tutoring as needed and exposure to ideas and experiences outside the syllabus. However, these cannot help if interactions in school and at home reinforce gender stereotypes about potential. For instance, the best school facilities in the world will not make up for a parent who says to a boy, “Such poor marks in Science? Even your sister does better.” The message is really not subtle—girls are hardly smart enough to be able to comprehend science. Instead, what we should be saying to girls and boys is that anyone can learn anything they set out to learn. 

Girls should learn that they can do anything they dream about. Education should give them confidence. The best gift my parents gave me, perhaps differently from many of my peers, was that they never once said to me that something was not possible. Any ambition or aspiration of mine was fine and feasible; life itself made some minor adjustments but my parents never did. To paint on a limitless canvas is the right of every human being, and teachers and parents can enable that work of art. It is one thing for tired adults to debate whether women can have it all or not; it is absolutely essential that girls and young women believe that they can and will.

If we don’t give our daughters the gift of infinite possibility, who will?

Swarna Rajagopalan trained as a political scientist. She is the founder of Prajnya

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

The tree-lined road to equality

Published here on October 11, 2013.

“X” built broad roads around the country, with large shady trees on either side.
  • Thanks to “X” generosity, dharamshalas were built along the highways where travellers could rest for the night.
  • In “X”’s kingdom, an old woman could walk on the road at midnight with a pot of gold on her head and be unharmed.
Who was “X”? The problem with this as a quiz question is that in the narrative of South Asian history, “X” was any king commonly considered exemplary—Sher Shah, Harsha, the Kings of Kandy in Sri Lanka, any good king. As a student, if you had a broad sense of the reputation of the king, these were elements of a safe exam answer. For us, as we ponder governance, these are indicators we have always considered available, accessible, usable and well-maintained infrastructure a measure of quality.

Good, broad, well-lit roads, with large, shady trees on either side immediately make you feel good and dispose you well towards the powers that be (especially if you don’t live in such a place). In India, sometimes driving from one constituency into another, you can feel the difference in the roads—and sense the difference in how much local representatives care about their voters. When you travel from a congested city with narrow, crowded roads to a modern planned city like Chandigarh or parts of New Delhi, that exclamation, “Great roads!” is always accompanied by a little envy, “Lucky people!” 

A good road and the ability to travel on it have always been important constituents of gender equality.
Although tradition and patriarchy (are they the same?) dictate that a woman’s place is at home, the fact is that home-related responsibilities always take women outside. Till date, women go out to collect water—from rivers, from wells, from tanks and from the local tap which gets water at midnight on alternate nights. Paths are made by feet walking up and down to collect water. Making potable water available to everyone in their homes is good governance, but making it possible and safe to go out to collect water is also important. So paving and lighting that path, building steps where necessary and creating transport options should be on the agenda of government.
Lighting the stove to boil the water to make it potable also requires a long hike for women in many communities, as they have to walk to the nearby forest area to gather firewood. Clean, easily available, renewable sources of fuel for cooking are also an appropriate governance priority.

Electricity, not something that Samudragupta and Sher Shah had to worry about, has become a necessity today. There are two important reasons why a steady supply of electricity is a gender issue. First, good lighting is critical for women’s safety. Well-lit roads, well-lit public bathrooms and roads to bathrooms, well-lit homes, well-lit compounds, parking lots, stairwells and landings—all make a huge difference to how safe women feel. The fear of what lurks in the dark is hard to shake off, and even if lighting will not stop a determined assailant, it does dissuade opportunists.

Second, given the number of women who run small and/or home-based enterprises, the kind of power shortages that states like Tamil Nadu have lived with, hit them hardest. When you cannot work or run your equipment for most hours of the day, and your income does not extend to spending on diesel for a generator, power shortages must force a decline in living standards, often to the brink of poverty. Also, it is harder for young girls to sit alone and study under a street lamp, so prolonged power cuts will at some point hit their access to education. And this brings us back to the question of well-lit roads—that allow girls to attend evening classes and night-school and early morning sports.

For some distances, roads are not enough. In Tamil Nadu, a few decades ago, teaching women to cycle and giving them bicycles was found to improve their mobility, their education and livelihood prospects, their sense of confidence and empowerment. Buses may be necessary, with either mixed or segregated seating, but always with well-lit and clean bus-stands that perhaps have a security monitor or an emergency phone. In large cities, rail-based transit systems make a difference; but they make a difference only if the subways to the stations, the station platforms themselves and the trains are safe. A government that is serious about women’s equality is a government that invests in public transportation that is reliable, safe and accessible. I grew up long ago in a Bombay that was safe for women; and one important piece of that was surely that the city had safe and reliable public transportation. Growing up in such a place gave me the confidence that I could do anything I wanted; no matter where life led, there would be a bus to take me there and back safely!

For women, public toilets are a vital element of infrastructural development—and not the kind whose location you can smell two kilometres away. Chennai, for instance, has only 714 public toilets for a city its size, a local research organization found, and most of these were in terrible shape. And Chennai is not unusual. In a country which is trying to get people to build toilets in their homes, clean and usable public toilets may be too much to ask. But that woman who sells coconut water all day near your office would have to do without a toilet all day. And the woman sales executive who sells detergent from door to door has no access to a toilet, so that must limit the number of days she can work. That men should have access to public toilets is also important to women who, in many areas, cannot walk down a road that is not lined by urinating men. (We have come such a long way in terms of what lines our roads.) Can you imagine what it is like for adolescent girls to walk past that sight on the way to school or back?

An easy conclusion for this article would be that governments should pay attention to infrastructure issues, but to my mind, each of these instances makes the case for infrastructure to be taken on more explicitly as a feminist issue. The women’s movement talks about access to public spaces in the context of safety. We also talk about it in the context of livelihoods. Some of us make the case that women are as entitled to enjoying public spaces as others are. But what we need to see and hear more of is feminists engaging in research and advocacy on infrastructural issues, town-planning and urban design. Women need to develop both technical expertise and advocacy skills in these areas. These women already exist, but we need to create high profile platforms for their work.

Equality in social and political relations depends on equality of access to educational, livelihood and other opportunity, and access depends largely on the quality of infrastructure. Being able to count on good infrastructure frees individuals up to lead creative and productive lives. Women, who are usually saddled with responsibility for water, food, fuel and other domestic support and supplies, bear the brunt of poor infrastructure, forever limited by its constraints and fearful of its consequences. A government’s lack of commitment to women’s rights may be obscured by its verbiage, but can clearly be read in the quality and quantity of its infrastructural investments. Which roads are being built; which facilities are being created and how accessible they are to women; whether public transportation systems are being imagined and how; whether public toilets are merely the subject of competitive polemics—are clear indicators of where female citizens stand. And so far, where we stand is nowhere.

Swarna Rajagopalan trained as a political scientist, works as an independent scholar and runs Prajnya.  

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

One idea in eight stories

Published here on October 4, 2013.

The term ‘governance’ gained currency several years after I started studying political science. I may have first heard it used when I was hired as a researcher on a now-classic  multi-country project on governance in South Asia. I had such a lowly part to play on the project that it really didn’t matter that I had no idea what it meant. I came to understand that while government was the structure and framework my political science classes had taught me, governance was what government delivered. There was no good governance or bad governance. Governance existed by virtue of being delivered; if government was not delivering on its functions, governance wasn’t happening, didn’t exist. Now, twenty-five years later, everyone talks ad nauseum about good governance. The truth is I still don’t have a text-book, “expert” sense of what it means.

Never having formally learnt a pithy definition that I can put to work, measuring the government’s performance, in the time-honoured Indian way, I turn to the stories from mythology and history that are deeply embedded in my consciousness. What do they tell me about what to expect from my government?

Once there was an Emperor who built himself a new city. In that city, he built a special place for teachers and thinkers from different places to meet and exchange views. He dreamt of building a new syncretic way of thinking based on their best and their common teachings. In his heart, their incompatibilities were outweighed by the possibility of their confluence. We remember Akbar for many things, but most of all, he stands out in our memory as a person who wanted to make space in his empire for every faith and every school of thought.

And it’s not just about religion and secularism. It’s the idea that all are equal in the eyes of the state—irrespective of sex, age, caste, faith, class, language or any of the other. To me, bringing people together, and not dividing or ghettoising them, is an important political and policy value. The minimalist corollary of this is not to discriminate on any of these bases. The maximum extension of this is to facilitate everyone’s participation and to invest in consensus-building and consultative decision-making.

A very long time ago, kings sitting in Pataliputra imagined, directed, strategized and created an empire whose borders look incredibly like those of modern South Asia. They had no telegraph, no photography and not even horses. They pulled this empire together through conquest, but their genius lay in holding it together. The Mauryas did this by creating a clear administrative structure where every level and office knew its jurisdiction and where every functionary knew their work, who was reporting to them when and to whom they were expected to report and on what schedule. Well-established lines of reporting, feedback and information sustained the system.

Work is so much easier for governments in this information age. Government works when public servants are able to communicate and implement policies across jurisdictions. It works best when citizens are able to engage with these processes and inform them. Indispensable to this end are clear maps of authority and lucid delineation of duties—as well as rights.

A single road connects Chittagong to Kabul. It was said of the king who got it built that in Sher Shah Sur’s kingdom, an old woman could safely walk highways at night carrying a basket of gold on her head. The elaborate multi-level structure of administration created by the Mauryas was now supplemented by infrastructure development and codified systems of revenue collection. His dynasty was short-lived, but his administrative legacy makes Sher Shah one of India’s most celebrated rulers.

It is the small things, the boring details that make government effective. The road that is paved. The garbage that is collected. The tax assessment that is clear. Comprehensible procedures for every transaction. Beyond the vision statements, laws without loopholes and unobjectionable policies, the work of government is done everyday in individual transactions and exchanges.

He did not make the promise in person but in a guest appearance in a dream. But when the venerable sage came to claim the kingdom he’d been promised in that dream, Harishchandra did not hesitate and gave it all away. Selling his wife, his child and himself to meet the sage’s demands and honour his promise, Harishchandra brought the same integrity to his work at a crematorium when he insisted on his wife paying tax to cremate their child.

The proprietorial sale of wife and child make me flinch, but combine Harishchandra’s commitment to truth with Gandhiji’s transparent introspection and you have a quality of integrity that public servants must have. The Right to Information would then be hard-wired into them, and their inner Lokpal would suffice—no need for a monster institution with all kinds of powers.

All over the northern part of the subcontinent are strategically located rocks and pillars that took his words and ideas out, in multiple languages and scripts, to those in his land and those who visited it. In addition, these edicts were read out to the people from time to time. There could be no doubt that Asoka, who saw everyone in his empire as his children, tried very hard to communicate with them.

It is not enough to have good intentions; it is very important to communicate them. In recent decades, how many large budget projects have been launched without the initial field assessments and expert reports shared? The will to communicate, to respond, to engage is conspicuously missing. That there might be questions or objections or that there might be alternative views is rarely taken on board. We are left fighting decisions after they are made, rather than engaging with the process of making them.

One morning, he heard of a husband’s taunt to his wife who had stayed away all night, “I am not Rama to accept my wife after she spent a night elsewhere.” Stung by the thought that someone in his kingdom was sceptical about his actions and motives, and moved to respond with action, Rama exiled a pregnant Sita.

I now read this problematic episode from the Uttarakandam of the Valmiki Ramayana as an illustration of how patriarchal our traditions are but what it also shows is that kings were meant to respond (with tangible action) to public opinion. It was one person’s opinion, but it was important enough to hold up a mirror to the king, who felt obliged to respond. That is the only good thing we can take out of this story, and we must.

By omission, this story also underscores the importance of justice and rule of law. Should responsive action be summary justice? Following procedure, listening to both sides, allowing people to defend themselves—qualify a response as appropriate. A fair response is also a proportionate response. To have explained himself may have been a proportionate response, and also fair to Sita. Disproportionate responses please some but are unfair to others.

Backed by an army of friends and family, faced with an army of friends and family, Arjuna’s resolve wavered. He put down his bow and asked, “What is the point?” And the answer was: The point is to do your work. Your only entitlement is to do the work in front of you, without expectation of reward. It is more important to do your work than to agonize and strategize and pontificate, the charioteer’s teaching suggests.

The best stories are fine clay and can be shaped as we wish. Anyone who has been given the run-around to get work done to which they are entitled and anyone who has been trying to figure out who is supposed to do what work in an office would like to use this one to say to people in public service: Please do your work properly. If governance must have a very simple definition, surely it is this: things working as they should.

Whoever approached him with a request was sure to go away satisfied. One morning, he tore off the armour he was born with and gave it to the mendicant who was seeking to secure his son’s life. On another, he promised his mother he would leave all his half-brothers unharmed except one, so that she would always have five sons. Karna’s generosity stuns, every time you hear the story.

The generosity of kings is repeatedly extolled. Travellers to Harsha’s Kanauj wrote about the grand assemblies where he generously gave away food, clothing and wealth to everyone who came. Giving is important because redistribution of wealth in order to provide for everyone is an important duty of the state. Whether you call it development work or social welfare, taking care of those in need and those in distress is an inalienable duty of government. Caring government is good governance.

And what is the role of citizens in ensuring the quality of governance? After all, they say, “yatha raja tatha praja” (As the king, so the people) and that “people get the government they deserve.” And the distance between those who rule and those who are ruled has shrunk so much that citizenship must matter.
The relationship between citizenship and governance is a symbiotic one. Citizenship is entitlement, but it is also public service. It is ownership and it is responsibility. Government works when citizens make it work—holding representatives and government functionaries accountable; engaging with law and policy; taking responsibility to vote and participate, and being responsible and honest consumers of government services. Good citizenship enables good governance; and apathetic citizenship reinforces governance failure. Which one do you choose today?

PS: None of my stories feature women as agents; they are merely objects that are sold, exiled or protected. I noticed that, did you? If we cannot come up with stories starring women, how will our daughters know that they too can be rulers and decision-makers? What are the stories of women you would bring to this discussion of governance?

No money, no value; no value, no money

Published here on September 27, 2013.

“Where is Daddy? Daddy is in the office. Where is Mummy? Mummy is in the kitchen.” When I was a child, a very long time ago, girl children mostly played house, or teacher, or sometimes, doctor. Our doll sets rarely included males, because men were always outside the house or away from the kitchen set which defined the boundaries of our ‘house.’ I hope that play is not as gendered any more (I fear it might be); but that is another topic for another day.

From this very simple middle class childhood experience, one took away abiding lessons. First, men do not work in the house. My father did, but sooner or later, I came to tag him as exceptional. Second, the work that is done in the house somehow lacks value. Chicken-egg reasoning: Men did not do this work because it had no value, and the work had no value because men did not do it. When men did housework, they were to be celebrated and their work valued. Third, the daily work of women in the house did not need to be acknowledged (that is, paid). A woman (family member or worker) doing work in the house created less value than a man doing the same work. Fourth, women only worked outside the house out of necessity. Fifth, the work that women do, inside or outside the house, was in general less valuable. Furthermore, because it was safe to assume that women were not the primary bread-winners in the household, one could pay them less. Sixth, men needed to support a family, so for the same work, they deserved to earn more than the women who might just be doing the same work as a hobby or who might be better able to adjust their needs and household expenses to their income. Finally, for women, the lessons of acceptance and adjustment came with doing housework free and earning less than men at every turn. Most of us, in my generation, never learned to negotiate good working terms for ourselves.

I qualify all these statements with ‘in my generation,’ but my suspicion is that while the young women I work with are less reluctant to ask for better money, they are a lot more accepting of other workplace sexism. That too, is another topic for another day. The bottomline is, in an age where value is expressed as money, women learn very early that they are worth far less than men. This is reinforced by the world in every transaction.

Patriarchy’s cruellest turn, I believe, is the expectation that women have a natural instinct for and derive pleasure from housework and domestic duties. No doubt, because they are raised to think of themselves as nurturing and natural care-givers, most women learn to feel this way. The truth is, and few will say it, housework is mind-numbing drudgery if you don’t do it out of true choice, and though it keeps the world moving, no one will ever thank you for it or pay the true value of that work. And it’s not just work within the home—in the kitchen, cleaning, taking care of children, the sick and the elderly—it’s also going to fetch water and firewood; it’s going to pay household bills; money management within the household; tutoring the children; income generating activities (for the household, not the woman). Think also of the number of small family-owned enterprises (shops, for instance) where wives and daughters work alongside, but never receive pay. Women’s work, they say, is never done and all of it is under-valued. Paying women for the work they do would not only express value for the work, but express value for the women.

An internet-based labour research project has found that in India, women earned about 54% what men did for the same job. The gap is negligible at lower income levels but grows with rising incomes and with age. That is, it is much greater at senior management levels than at entry-level or minimum wage jobs. And older women earn much less than their contemporaries at the same career stage. The same project also found that the more educated women were, the greater the gap between what they earned and what their male colleagues earned. The profession with the largest wage gap was medicine. And we’re not even talking about ‘glass ceilings’ here.

Women’s work within the household, we have established, is not regarded as ‘work.’ The International Labour Organization has found that fewer women in India are working outside the home or looking for a job. In part they attribute this to rising incomes (so women do not need to go out to work) and in part, to occupational segregation—women tend to seek work in fewer sectors than men. Women also work preponderantly in the informal sector, where wages are low. Whether it is domestic work, construction work, agricultural work or as a small entrepreneur, this work yields a low income and an uncertain livelihood.

Gender stereotyping and gender roles play a part in this. Women’s access to education and livelihood skills are often determined by what is considered suitable. While professional colleges admit more girls than ever before, elsewhere in the economy, it is less likely that women will choose to be plumbers, electricians or auto-drivers. Discrimination in health care and nutrition only compounds the physical challenge of coping with the double-burden of working inside and outside the home.

Economists have been writing about and debating the “feminization of poverty” for three decades. By this, they meant that women were making up ever-larger percentages of the world’s poor, largely because they earned less and held worse jobs; and because more and more of them were single-handedly bearing financial responsibility for their families, stretching one small income further. Where market reform and globalization are exacerbating income inequalities and inequalities of access within society at large, this impact is felt even more by women. They are locked out of many emerging opportunities, and end up earning less in a time when everything costs more.

The conclusion is inescapable: the low value placed on women is reflected in the value we place on their work and the way we express that value in terms of money. Women read this clearly, and learn not to value themselves as individuals. They are a burden, what happens to them is their fault, they have no rights or entitlements; so, they adjust, accept and live as lesser citizens. The real loser is society itself.

Breaking out of this cycle is one way to change the status of women in India. This could be done by helping women increase their incomes through education and training, access to opportunities and access to credit. More fundamentally, of course, this means that the life-chances of women, men and others should be the same in any society—health care, education, livelihood and security. The burden of unrecognized and unpaid work that women carry can be reduced, partly by acknowledgment, possibly by the payment of a standard wage, and most definitely, by work-sharing in the household and in family enterprises. Finally, civil society and policy experts need to step up advocacy efforts towards “equal pay for equal work.”  No money, no value, no equality, no citizenship.

The instinct to care, the will to heal

Published here on September 20, 2013.

The right to health is a human right. First, human rights violations such as harmful traditional practices (for instance, female genital mutilation), slavery and torture have health consequences. Second, health policies and practices can have human rights dimensions, such as discrimination or loss of privacy. Finally, respect for human rights usually goes along with better health care policies and access. The “right to health” idea works mainly as a “call to action.” The “call to action” in this short article centres on four challenges that stem in different ways from the cocktail of patriarchy and poor health care.

Maternal mortality

“In India, we worship women as mother-goddesses.” We hear this all the time. Notwithstanding such devotion, India’s Maternal Mortality Ratio is officially 212 per 100, 000 births but others estimate it may be as high as 450 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. Data controversies should not detract from the unacceptable reality that too many Indian women die from pregnancy, childbirth and unsafe abortions. A 2009 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report says that one in 70 Indian women who reach reproductive age will die this way.

Why? Working in Uttar Pradesh in 2008-09, the HRW team identified four factors. The first was the difficulty of accessing emergency care. If complications arose, women were sent from clinic to clinic in search of one with the right facilities. The second factor is that at a very fragile time, women had to travel long-distances to be able for instance, to have a caesarean section. No proper transport was available to help them, either. Non-existent post-natal follow-up and care, ergo post-birth complications, were the third factor they identified. Finally, the researchers found that even free health-care cost money because of the expectation that health-care workers would be tipped for every service—from cutting the umbilical cord to cleaning up. Failing to pay once, meant that the next time families approached the hospital, they could be faced with the nightmare of referrals.

For the same study, Tamil Nadu provided some pointers to good practices (though not to remedy the above factors), from awareness campaigns around maternal health to better death reporting to better training for health workers on how to report death with a view to improving health facilities in both public and private hospitals.

Universal access and sex-selective abortion

Modernization and increasing access to health facilities, usually considered factors that are good for women, have made sex-selective abortion more accessible and contributed to India’s declining sex ratio. Modernization has promoted the small family norm without getting rid of male child preference. Dowry is more common and lavish weddings a common aspiration. Simultaneously, more and more people have access to pre-natal diagnostic tools. This partly explains why rise in female foeticide correlates to affluence and the richest cities in India have the worst sex ratios.

Technology and patriarchy have together taken sex determination and sex-selective abortion to every corner of India. In 2010-11, the Health Ministry’s report stated that 39854 ultrasound and scanning centres had been registered under the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act, 1994. Many of these were being used as mobile units—in addition to registered and unregistered mobile clinics. Access to diagnostic techniques that can be used for sex determination plus the availability of legal abortion have also placed sex-selective abortion within the reach of NRIs who live in places where this is not an option.

The solution here is not to limit access to pre-natal diagnostic tools and make abortion illegal. It is to ensure safe and universal access to both along with strict regulation, honest and rigorous implementation of laws and parallel programmes to create awareness. Creating universal access without regard to its unintended gendered consequences is irresponsible and boomerangs on the most vulnerable—here, the female foetus.

Violence as a public health issue

Sometimes it seems as if an epidemic of sexual and gender-based violence has overtaken India.
A recent report found that, worldwide, violence against women is one of the most common causes of death and injury among women. Experiencing or witnessing violence leaves women (and others) with mental health illnesses, including depression. Those who experience violence are found to be far more prone to alcohol abuse (and this probably extends to other substances). They are also far more vulnerable to sexually transmitted infections, and in some regions, to acquiring HIV. Finally, not only is sexual violence likely to leave a woman pregnant, but in the quest to have an abortion where this may be neither legal nor safe, she puts herself at great risk all over again. The report also stated that women who experience partner violence are more likely to have a low birth-weight baby.

In the context of sexual and gender-based violence, two care-related issues come to mind. The first concerns the level of preparation among doctors and nurses to recognize and respond to signs that someone before them may have experienced violence. Having good protocols to follow is one part of this, but inculcating sensitivity is the other. The second has to do with the availability of crisis support—not just crisis support for victims of sexual violence, but immediate and intermediate term medical, psychological and social support that is available to anyone experiencing violence. As a society, we are unable to stop the incidence of violence. Are we able to provide survivors with the opportunity to heal?

Trauma care in conflict zones

Innumerable Indian women live with conflict, whether in areas with insurgency and counter-insurgency operations or in the middle of a communal riot or inter-caste violence. They experience conflict differently from men—be it bereavement and widowhood with all the stigma it carries in India; being left as head of the household without proper title to property; living with fear; experiencing sexual violence as part of conflict; being displaced and homeless. In the immediate aftermath of violence (or disaster), the everyday tasks of reconstruction are typically undertaken by women—finding belongings in the rubble, gathering up and caring for family, making arrangements for food. They are raised to disregard their physical and mental health needs, and society and state take this as their cue. As the habit of violence—as protest and in response to protest—takes root in Indian society, so should an instinct to provide trauma care.

A 2011 study by the Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research set out to speak to women suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder in Nagaland and Assam. Their conversations in Nagaland suggested to them that in addition to the trauma of experiencing assault, women internalised the trauma that others around them experienced or that they had witnessed. They were traumatised by hearing, across generations sometimes, of the experience of violent assault; and by displacement, which deprived them of home and history. Forced interaction with and having to adapt to others was a source of trauma and despair did not help. In Assam, livelihood anxiety also caused trauma. But in both states, counselling facilities were rare and people knew very little about what was available.

And on a final note: I believe you can read the state of women’s health in a society by the absence or availability of clean, safe and functional toilets that women and girls can use. This is the most fundamental measure of how much we value women. High maternal mortality, female foeticide, gender-based violence and neglected post-conflict trauma—none of this should surprise us at all. The fact that millions of Indian women still have to risk sneaking out in the dark for the most basic bodily needs, says everything. It is the picture that speaks a thousand words.

Sunday, September 22, 2013

We are all works in progress

“Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, 
Where wealth accumulates and men decay.”

All too often, one hears the view that all the good people are gone and we are left with an irreparable intellectual and moral deficit. The headlines seem to bear this out: what appears to be an epidemic of violence—sexual, structural and political; corruption; and pervasive posturing, both in public and in our personal lives. Oliver Goldsmith, writing about the advent of the industrial society, seems to be writing about us.

True confession: I cannot write about moral decline; I just do not understand the topic well enough. What seems far more tangible is to think about the qualities or values we need (and needed) to learn as children that would enable us to cope with life’s challenges and complexities, and to become good human beings. I offer you my list in no particular order; different moments may call for different combinations.

Compassion is the starting point of most of the world’s faiths, and for a good reason. Every teacher and text points out that the experience of pain is universal, and yet we suppress compassion in our interactions. Even as we live with hurt, our first instinct seems to be to snap and judge. Sometimes it seems like the smart response to a situation. Sometimes it seems to be the realistic response to something we see. But yesterday, someone reading about the Delhi rapists thought for a minute about their mother. What must she feel? In the middle of all the expert opinion swirling around me, that is the thought that I learnt most from. From compassion, flow empathy and acceptance without judgment.

In an age of physically daring pastimes, we seem to have less courage to be ourselves, to be true to ourselves in a given moment. The crush of peer pressure is no longer an adolescent reality, but something that governs all aspects of our lives. The context may vary, but the pressure to conform is uniform and overwhelming. This is the way we (are supposed to) dress to work. This is what we (are supposed to) think about a movie. This is what we (are supposed to) say about food. The ‘done’ thing is grossly overdone. The ultimate extreme sport is to stand ankle-deep in the rapids of peer pressure, to feel the water try to lift you off your feet and to stand your ground.

Without courage, life is a performance. Some kinds of pretension may even be desirable, such as pretending to like something someone has offered you with love or pretending you did not notice that someone’s wig has fallen off in the middle of a theatre production. Lying, giving and taking bribes, cheating people, stealing, being deceitful—not doing these are an aspect of integrity crucial to our interactions with other people. However, the kind of critical and transparent introspection that Gandhiji undertook sets a higher bar in my view. Can we be completely honest with ourselves? That takes clarity and courage. I envy this kind of integrity and prize it well beyond morality—whatever that is. 

Life is not fair, but we could learn to be. A sense of justice and fair play is about equal portions for everyone at the table. A sense of justice is about giving everyone an opportunity to learn and a fair chance to grow at their pace. A sense of fair play is to listen to what others have to say. It is the instinct not to discriminate or favour and to compensate for injustice. I do not know if perfect fairness or perfect justice is possible. In a hierarchical world structured to differentiate, is there any way to be fair that does not place someone at a disadvantage for some time? But the choice seems clear to me: I can either wait for that debate to play out or I can try and be fair everyday in my own way at my own little level.

To give is to live. This is the lesson I have learnt from four generations in my family, each person giving in their way, some more publicly than others. To give what you can without keeping accounts; to give in response to someone’s felt need and not your own assessment of what they deserve; to give what you can in the moment and not wait for a perfectly suitable time; to give in money and materials, in time and effort and in love and support; to give without judgment—this is what family stories valorised. I witnessed great generosity of spirit—to disregard slights, to overlook differences of perspective and lifestyle, to turn the other cheek, to accept. To be as generous as mythical Harishchandra or Karna, as my elders, remains an aspiration for me. How can I not list generosity here?

Like Rome, nothing worth building gets done in a day. In the university of my life, I have long suspected that I am undeclared “Patience” major. To learn to work very hard and wait a really long time to do the things I love, to do work with a painfully long gestation period, to wait for payment and to defer and strategize gratification—these are the themes of my adult life. Learning to be patient is learning to value process and means over outcome, to value doing things right. Patience is acceptance and tolerance of people and situations you don’t understand completely for any reason—cultural difference or temperamental difference or any other kind of difference.

Reading Indian mythology, one comes across the idea of ‘control over the senses.’ In most stories, the senses in question are physical but it must mean more. To control anger, for instance, must be such a powerful achievement. To control anger does not mean not to feel anger about injustice, but to take that anger and put it to good work. To control anger means recognizing that some expressions of anger amount to abuse. This must be true of every human thought, emotion and action—being self-aware must harness one’s energy in wonderful ways. That quality of restraint, that self-discipline, I hope to glimpse just once in this lifetime. 
I really don’t know about morality or moral decline. Most of us are doing the best we can and have no time to dwell on how we measure up to people in our real and mythical pasts. It probably does not matter. We are all works in progress.

Ultimately, I can only speak for myself. The truth is, like most people, I am too busy getting through the day and getting things on my task list (like this column) done. I hope I can do these things well, without hurting anyone, without getting angry or stressed or sick, frugally, honestly. I don’t know if I possess any of the qualities I list in any measure; I cannot worry about that. If I can take each minute, each day as they come, that has to be good enough. To try my best in this moment--that is all there is; that is already a great deal.

Cross-posted here.

Sunday, September 15, 2013

Where prices rise and the value of women declines

Published here, DNA, September 6, 2013

Scores of women marching through the streets of 1970s Bombay, brandishing belans and beating steel plates with them, in protest against rising prices—the image of this novel and effective protest is what I recall as I start writing this. How do rising prices affect women in all the different ways in which they are economic actors?

Entering alien territory—economics—to understand this, much of what I found addresses women primarily in their role as caregivers and then, as consumers of essential items. The rising price of food strains household budgets and consumption. A SEWA study in 2009 found as a result of food inflation, the number of meals a household consumed had come down. Moreover, the consumption of nutritious ingredients like dal and dairy products had come down. This applies to vegetables as well; after all, the prices of onions and potatoes have come to symbolise the everyday consequences of inflation.

As wages rarely increase commensurate with prices, the challenge of providing enough to eat, means that a household has to trade off other costs. Often, families trade off the way they access health care. The SEWA study found that most families opt for government health care where they might have paid to go to a private doctor. A small but significant percentage in this survey were not accessing any formal healthcare because they could no longer afford it.

For women, given the traditional hierarchy in patriarchal India, the health consequences are particularly troubling. First, always at the tail end of the food consumption trail, they now get to eat even fewer nutritious foods, the best of each meal being apportioned to men and children, in that sequence. Second, their health concerns are most easily negotiated away. They are more likely to self-medicate or use home remedies more than men or children in the household. Finally, if cost-cutting measures necessitate the firing of household help and the need to augment household income results in their taking up paid work, then a decline in health and health care comes at a time when their responsibilities and workload are growing. Women are more than mothers, but poor nutrition and health in pregnant women and new mothers has lifelong consequences for the health of a child—this should also be noted.

On every cost-cutting measure within the household, including the ones related to transport and schooling, chances are that girls and women come last. If more hands are needed in the household because the mother has to go out to work, it is likely the daughter stays home. Patriarchy finds expression everywhere.

In general, inflation pushes households further into debt and poverty. Single women and female-headed households are often the first to suffer. Their savings decline and the lack of a safety net places them on the brink of survival.

But women are more than homemakers and caregivers—more than wielders of belans and fillers of thalis and mothers of children. Women are factory and agricultural workers, entrepreneurs, service providers and bankers, as well as economists.

Rising prices also reduce earnings for entrepreneurs. One way in which they stay competitive is by keeping their prices constant as far as possible. If you consider the kinds of businesses that women run, however, not many of them work with a large profit margin anyway. For many small and medium enterprise owners, smaller profits do not mean the delayed purchase of a yacht but trouble paying rent, loan instalments and wages. And the first jobs to go in a firm are the support jobs that women are more likely to hold.

Most women in India work in the informal sector, making up one-third of all informal sector workers. Of these, most women work in the informal agricultural sector. Outside agriculture, most women do home-based work. A small percentage of women also work as street vendors; but this small percentage actually masks hundreds of thousands of women. None of these women enjoy benefits (dearness allowances, health care, unemployment benefits) that could cushion the impact of inflation on their lives and households. When inflation strikes, their earnings are simply likely to decline. Think of the woman selling vegetables around the corner from you—as your purchasing power shrinks, you bargain harder over the tomatoes, and at some point, in order to not throw her stock unsold, she has to cave. Her daily earnings shrivel.

The link between inflation and gender-based violence is forged by the way we view daughters in India—as a non-remunerative investment (paraya dhan) whose lesser being must be compensated by the provision of a dowry consisting of gold, immovable property and/or consumer durables, ownership over all of which are transferred in a lavish, more or less public ceremony. Economic opportunities for the bridegroom’s family, weddings ease the bride’s family’s descent into financial ruin--more expensive gold, more expensive goods, more expensive wedding halls, more expensive priests (who have to run their households in this inflationary environment) and more expensive food, transport and housing for guests. Violence does not occur only with dowry harassment and bride-burning; it begins much earlier with the devaluation of the daughter. But when the price of everything rises, the value of the daughter in the wedding transaction is greatly diminished. Her security depends on her ability to deliver goods and services, and she is vulnerable to dowry harassment, to other forms of cruelty and domestic violence, including economic and emotional abuse.

When everything becomes more expensive, the value of the government’s spending on social welfare declines. Charities and individual donors have less to spare and shrink their giving. Some casualties include services to women and girls in the area of health care and education. Also imperilled are support services to victims of violence such as helplines for assault victims or safe houses for domestic violence survivors.

Every changing circumstance brings with it both challenges and opportunities. As a political scientist and a feminist, I think about women’s agency in the face of rising prices. Anti-price rise protests are certainly an example, but are there others and how does their influence endure?
Coming from the study of conflicts and other emergency situations, we know that the new roles that are thrust upon women in these times increase their decision-making power in many ways. As female heads of households, women in refugee camps make decisions for their families that they never could before. The story of the thousands of women who worked in factories in the US during the Second World War and as auxiliaries in the armed forces, is well-known.

Does sustained price rise have this unintended effect? Do more women find ways to add to their household income by starting small home-based firms or looking for jobs? As more women enter the workforce, are jobs created for household support-providers? And the experience of emergencies and conflicts also leads us to ask: What happens when prices come down or become ‘normal’? Do women return to the home and to marginal roles therein? Does the double-burden of household and income-generating work remain that for women, while men enjoy the additional household income without the additional work?  The feminist economists (and there are many in India) that would have insights into some of these questions are rarely seen or heard in the mainstream media.

Inflation and economic hardship reinforce and intensify the structural disadvantages that women face, well beyond the challenges of caregiving in straitened circumstances. Women’s access to nutrition and health care is further diminished. Their workload increases. Social welfare and support services decline. Diminished means and status add up to greater vulnerability to violence. As the purchase price of goods and services goes up, it would appear that we value women and girls less. All of us are responsible for helping women find agency and autonomy in these circumstances.

"Hamaara paisa, hamaara hisaab"

Published here, DNA, August 29, 2013.

There is a story Aruna Roy often narrates when talking about the genesis of the Right to Information legislations in India. She quotes a woman in Beerawar,Rajasthan, who said, “If I give Rs 10 to my son and send him to the market to do some shopping then when he returns surely I have every right to ask him to give me hisaab. Hamara paisa, hamara hisaab. Why should I not do the same with the government?” While the anti-corruption churning of the last two years would appear to have been an urban, middle-class affair, women participating in social movements like the campaign for the Right to Information have long understood how corruption works.

Is this because women are in general, less corrupt or less prone to corruption than men? One 1999 study based on cross-national data came to the conclusion that women were more honest and less inclined to give or take bribes. Will the entry of more women into the public sphere—in politics, in the bureaucracy, in the social sector—make public services and interactions less corrupt? But charges of corruption are also levelled against women politicians, for example—and certainly of abuse of power. In a 2003 paper, the question is raised: are women less corrupt because they have less opportunity to be corrupt?
This, however, is a counter-factual debate at the moment. What is more important, perhaps, is to understand that corruption too has gendered consequences. That is, women and men feel the impact of corruption in some similar ways, but their experiences with it are different in others that reflect their different power positions in society.

Does this really matter? After all, anti-corruption movements seek to throw out corrupt people and practices, lock, stock and barrel. I would argue that it does matter. As we continue to discuss welfare policies, identity-based party politics, inclusion, governance (and its failures) and safety, corruption emerges as a common thread—whose existence we lament but often with resignation—and insofar as different women experience each of these differently, this is true of corruption too. What is true of how women experience corruption is also likely true for other minority and marginalized groups in society. For instance, understanding that corruption further disenfranchises poor women might help design better projects, with fewer loopholes, greater accountability and more careful recruitment of service delivery staff. Everyone benefits from this, not just poor women.

In a 2012 UNDP study, almost 400 grassroots women surveyed in several countries, including India, defined corruption very broadly to include the following: bribery; abuse of power or poor leadership; illegal or deceptive actions; poor or absent service delivery; sexual exploitation; and physical abuse. The women surveyed saw all public agencies as corrupt with the police and local government being the most corrupt. It was found that women encounter corruption most in the delivery of basic services (like getting food ration allocations, government documents or even health-care) and in the years when they needed public care services most, but that it extended to all their interactions with the state.

In any discussion of the gendered impact of corruption, three factors are relevant.

A majority of the world’s poor are women, and the income gap between men and women is only growing. Landlessness, lack of access to credit and gender inequitable inheritance laws contribute to what economists have called “the feminization of poverty.” Their health and nutritional needs are rarely met, and lack of education and insecure livelihood trap them in their situation. Poor women and those under their care depend most upon the welfare services of the state. Corruption, in the form of poor service delivery, abuse of power and bribery, accosts them at every turn, limiting their ability to use the services that are ostensibly meant primarily for them. This snowballs across generations. Thus it is, that after six decades of development planning for poverty alleviation, very little appears to have changed.

Sexual exploitation and the seeking of sexual favours in exchanges for the delivery of services or entitlements is something we associate with crisis situations like displacement after disasters or war. Vulnerability to sexual and gender-based violence exacerbates the impact of corruption on women’s lives. This extends also to what women face when they seek justice for violence. In the UNDP study quoted above, women said that the police took bribes from both the complainant and the alleged perpetrator. Not just bribes, but nepotism and string-pulling also play a part here. This resonates as true and is reflected throughout our public discourse on governance and sexual violence as well as in our popular culture.

Not just in conflict and post-conflict situations, militarization is shadowed by corruption. The more we call out the para-military and the military to deal with law and order or disaster situations, the greater the opportunity for corruption. This is because in highly militarised situations, we increase the number of gate-keepers for everything. Access and mobility require checking and permission. More documentation is required and papers are checked more often. Property and amenities are commandeered for use, and the transfer involves an invocation of authority but possibly also a negotiation of the terms of use. The gendered impact of militarisation (limited mobility, for instance), the distress of poverty and vulnerability to violence might be compounded here by women often not having ownership of their homes or family property or female-headed households not being listed on a register of who is entitled to help.

The leadership of the anti-corruption mobilization of 2011-12 was very male, in spite of the important role that Kiran Bedi and Aruna Roy played. The crowds of volunteers at rallies across India seemed to have large numbers of young women and young men. One cannot expect a lot of nuance from spontaneous expressions of frustration, but it is still remarkable that for all the discussion at that time about corruption, very little of it was actually related to how corruption affects people differently depending on their social location and their gender. Moreover, a corollary of the myth that women are more honest than men is that the male-dominated public sphere is seen as being too corrupt for women to be able to survive and thrive. Corruption becomes a barrier for women’s participation.

We need to understand how corruption affects women—in different situations, at different life-stages—differently. We also need to ensure it doesn’t stop them from doing the things they need or the things they want to do. Some methods advocated by feminists, including gender budgeting and gender audits, have sought to introduce some measure of accountability for gender just practices into resource allocation and policy decisions. Building capacity should also mean training men and women in these and other tools.

Most of all, however, we need to stop teaching our daughters (particularly, but also our sons) that resignation to one’s fate is a virtue. If we continue to valorise resignation, then they will continue to think: a government officer will ask for a bribe and must be appeased; my passport application must be promoted by an influential relative; I cannot get a loan without a recommendation; I am nobody, the police will not register my FIR; I cannot ask questions. Asking questions, saying no, holding others accountable, gives all of us—women and men and others—agency in the fight against corruption. It really is that simple.