Wednesday, December 19, 2001
by Chithra KarunaKaran

Male Violence Female Silence and the Politics of Being Heard : The attack on Parliament was an attack on Indian Democracy. Is there any other way to view it?  Yet discussion on the subject seems strangely muted.  And it is women, Indian women, South Asian women who have had the least to say.  

It is women who must speak out against this outrage. And they must speak out now.  Not tomorrow, not later but now. Women have a greater stake in democracy, a greater stake in secularism, a greater stake in freedom from fundamentalism and extremism than ever before. Those who have threatened democracy and secularism and have offered fundamentalism and extremism instead have been overwhelmingly male. In recent years They have been essentially males with heavy political investment in the patriarchal order of gender inequality of access resources and opportunity.. This is such a truism in the Indian political context, as it is in the US political context and elsewhere, that it  goes unrecognized.

Why have South Asian women been silent?  Partly is must be because our women have long been exposed to large doses of political violence in which they are hapless victims of liberation struggles as in Bangladesh in 1971, as in Afghanistan under the Taliban in the 90’s or as silent spectators as in the current drama that unfolded on the steps and corridors of Parliament on December 13.  Partly, women  have said little because the consequences of the attack on the Peoples’ House are not directly felt. A few families lost kin but most experienced no personal sense of loss. And probably more important, women experience so many acts of violence, so many affronts to their personal and social selfhood in the daily act of living that this heinous act against the citadel of democracy, an institution, a structure, a building of sandstone and mortar seems somehow remote and irrelevant.  

Yet it is women, South Asian women, Indian women, Malayali women  who have taken no role in instigating and carrying out acts of political violence who now must speak against political violence that endangers our hard won democracy and our democratic institutions.  An attack against the Lok Sabha is an attack on you and me, the women, half the body politic, the electorate,  the voters, banner makers, ballot casters, poll watchers, the ones in the minority in all elected offices at all levels of government, the ones who have to work harder to be equally represented in the public offices of the greatest democracy in the world. The attack of December 13 was a body blow to the aspirations of women who seek to represent themselves and their sisters and their sons and daughters. The attack of December 13 was an attack on those millions of unseen and silent women who refuse to be limited by prescriptive patriarchal rules that seek to limit, restrain and constrain women’s right to choose their own path and follow their own dreams. 

Indian democracy is largely an unfulfilled dream for the majority of its citizens.  Indian democracy continues to fail to provide the most basic amenities to a majority of its people. But half of the job of making Indian democracy happen is the responsibility of Indian women. And part of that responsibility is to speak out against the political violence that threatened the House of Democracy.