The Jagrata Samithis for faster justice to women in Kerala

Taking justice to women's doorstep in Kerala

Sun, Sep 28 10:29 AM

Kozhikode (Kerala), Sep 28 (IANS) 

The Jagrata Samithis (Vigilance Committees) in local administrative bodies is slowly turning into sanctuaries of justice for them. The committees have come up in 832 local administrative bodies out of around 1,200 in the state.

.A committee that is led by the panchayat president has nine members, including women panchayat members, a sub-inspector from the local police station, women social workers, a woman advocate and the doctor from the village health centre.

The State Women's Commission is the apex body which monitors the functioning of the committee. 'The Jagratha Samithis are the eyes and ears of the women's commission. It brings the services of the commission to the grass root level,' says K.B. Madanmohan, the programme associate at KILA (Kerala Institute of Local Administration), which works closely in implementing the scheme in the state.

One of the villages where the scheme was pioneered is Pananchery in Thrissur district, where it was implemented as a pilot project in 2005.

'In the last three years we could settle around 600 cases,' Lissy Chacko, a nun and the woman advocate on the committee, told IANS.

Though the committee entertains all complaints, those connected to crime are referred to the police. 'Police also refer cases to us for settlement,' says Lissy.

When the committee takes up a case it studies the issue in depth. 'We had a complaint from a woman saying her husband has ditched her and is planning to marry another woman. Relatives cited many reasons for their discord. But after three sessions of counselling it became clear that some sexual incompatibility was the real issue,' said Vasu.

The commission is also in the process of installing a software to closely monitor the work of the committees across the state.

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: Women Buried Alive in Pak Balochistan

Prominent civil rights activists are demanding that the government act against those responsible for the burial alive of five women in Balochistan, in July, that politicians from the province have defended as an age-old custom. 

On Jul. 14, in the remote village of Babakot, 80 km from Usta Mohammad town in Jafferabad district, three teenage girls and two older women were buried alive, allegedly on the orders of Abdul Sattar Umrani, brother of Sadiq Umrani, a provincial minister belonging to the ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP).

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Women Buried Alive in Pak Balochistan

Women Buried Alive in Pak Balochistan

 Women Buried Alive in Pak Balochistan

Women Buried Alive in Pak Balochistan

RIGHTS-PAKISTAN: Live Burial of Women - Activists Demand Action By Zofeen Ebrahim Protests against live burials at the Karachi press club. Credit:Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS KARACHI, Sep 15 (IPS) - Prominent civil rights activists are demanding that the government act against those responsible for the burial alive of five women in Balochistan, in July, that politicians from the province have defended as an age-old custom.  On Jul. 14, in the remote village of Babakot, 80 km from Usta Mohammad town in Jafferabad district, three teenage girls and two older women were buried alive, allegedly on the orders of Abdul Sattar Umrani, brother of Sadiq Umrani, a provincial minister belonging to the ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). According to the version released by the Hong-Kong-based Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), the victims were taken to Nau Abadi, in the vicinity of Babakot, where Umrani and his six companions dragged the three younger women out of his jeep and beat them up before shooting and seriously injuring them. The girls were reported still alive when Umrani and his accomplices hurled them into a wide ditch and covered them with earth and stones. AHRC said the two older women were an aunt and the mother of one of the girls. When they protested at the treatment meted out to the girls, they were also pushed into the ditch and buried alive. Apparently the teenagers were being punished for asking to be allowed to marry men of their choice. When the matter was raised in on Aug. 30 in parliament by opposition senator Yasmin Shah -- who accused the government of turning a blind eye to the killings -- a senator from Balochistan, Israrullah Zehri, retorted: "It is part of our custom". Zehri was supported by Senator Jan Mohammad Jamali who said the incident was being ‘’unnecessarily politicised.’’ Ali Dayan Hasan of the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) told IPS that he found Zehri’s comments "sickening" and "reprehensible". "Arguing [in parliament] that it should not be raised because in doing so tribal customs are being politicised is dishonest and contempt of the Senate and the Constitution under which it has been elected," he added. "These beasts in human form have no place in a modern society," said Pervez Hoodbhoy talking to IPS. An internationally-known peace activist, Hoodbhoy said senators Zehri and Jamali were "Neanderthals whose mental framework is that of cavemen’’. Samar Minallah, who has long been fighting against cruel tribal practices in Pakistan, said there are many Zehris and Jamalis in parliament who shared ‘’the same mindset that has more to do with perpetuating the status quo of powerful against weak, man against woman’’. She said the only difference was that the two legislators were honest enough to speak "their minds". Hasan has demanded Zehri’s immediate resignation. "As things stand, he is propagating criminality in the name of tribal custom." "By supporting the unspeakably cruel acts, they [Zehri and Jamali] have shown themselves to be violent, aggressive, and dangerous fiends who should be removed immediately from every public post," said Hoodbhoy. "That there are people in this society who commit multiple murders and then get away with it using their political influence draws a huge question mark on our civility," said A.H. Nayyar, an Islamabad-based academician and rights activist. "Our heads hang in shame for being a part of a nation that tolerates such barbarism." Nayyar recalled that this was not the first time such heinous crimes have been justified in the name of tribal traditions. "Some of our exalted senators from the North West Frontier Province had also justified the cold-blooded killing of a woman by an assassin hired by her parents in the office of her lawyer in Lahore." He was referring to the 1999 murder of 29-year-old Samia Sarwar, who was shot dead for attempting to divorce her husband. Pakistan’s constitution allows a woman aged 18 and above to marry of her own free will, but in practice women are often severely punished or even put to death for straying from tradition. According to the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, in 2007, as many as 636 deaths were attributable to honour killings. Many more such deaths may have gone unreported. Honour killings were banned in 2004 and made punishable with the death sentence, but the law is weak and culprits rarely face justice. "He (Umrani) is going about life with the same pomp and show with armed guards surrounding him, without a fear in the world," a political worker from the Baloch Republican Party (BRP) told IPS over telephone. Speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, the BRP representative said: "The bodies of the three girls have been dug up and buried somewhere else so that the police cannot complete their investigation." He also said that it was a well-known fact that Sattar had killed over two dozen people, mostly over land disputes, but no case has been registered against him. "If you think he will be caught this time, you are mistaken. This is Pakistan, the influential can truly get away with murder, not just one, but scores!" he said. Link

All India Democratic Women’s Association’s (AIDWA) Report by T. K. Rajalaksmi in the Frontline

The Frontline
Volume 25 - Issue 19 :: Sep. 13-26, 2008SOCIAL ISSUES

From the margins

T.K. RAJALAKSHMI
in New Delhi

The AIDWA’s convention calls on the government to do its duty by India’s Muslim women.
THERE were stories of exploitation and neglect, first-hand accounts of mindless violence, and resentment at government apathy and injustice at the hands of community elders. And, of course, there were the familiar stories of police harassment after every terror attack.  Over 800 Muslim women from across the country attended the All India Democratic Women’s Association’s (AIDWA) national convention of Muslim women on August 27 in New Delhi. Their testimonies defied stereotypes of the passive victim as they spoke of neglect by government agencies, of their appalling living and working conditions and of the experience of living in a patriarchal society that is insensitive to their concerns.


The convention’s charter of demands sought recognition for India’s Muslim women as equal citizens with adequate access to education, health care and employment and asserted that their welfare was the concern of not just the community but the government as well. AIDWA president Subhashini Ali said that while Muslim women felt insecure in the context of rising communal violence, there was also an increasing awareness of their entitlements as citizens.

Among the delegates were elected women representatives, home-based workers, self-help group (SHG) workers, victims of riots and of dowry harassment, and women who had had to deal with police harassment after terror strikes. There were, too, women who had been the victims of decisions made by their own community leaders.

Shakeela, whose seven-year-old son was shot in the head by the Gujarat Police in 2002, broke down as she spoke. Mujibibi, 35, from Davangere in Karnataka, had worked for 20 years as a beedi roller, and very little in her life had changed in these 20 years. She rolls out about 1,100 beedis along with the others in her family in a day, makes Rs.45 for more than 12 hours of work, and enjoys no benefit under the special statute for beedi workers. In Harapanalli taluka, her hometown, scores of Muslim families are engaged in beedi-making. She often gets a “burning” sensation in her face, eyes and chest, an occupational hazard associated with tobacco. “I have to do it, otherwise how will I survive? I do not want my children to go through the same thing, so I have to work,” she said.

Ishrat, from Kanpur, broke down several times while narrating her story. Her husband, a former textile worker, was jobless. Like many other poor Muslim women, she lives in a cramped two-room tenement. Municipal workers, she complained, never visited “Muslim” areas.

Increasing poverty levels among Muslims in the country have led Muslim women to explore avenues to supplement family incomes. However, it is home-based work that most of them are forced to take up. This unorganised employment makes such women dependent on middlemen and a chain of employers. Naseem, a resident of Old Delhi, has worked as a handicraft worker for 22 years. In every other household in her neighbourhood, there are women trying to make a living out of zardozi work and by making envelopes, rachis, bindis and even machine parts. She herself works eight to 10 hours a day. “There are women who have been working for 35 years, and now they earn about Rs.300 a month,” she said. (The minimum daily wage in Delhi is Rs.140.) Malka, a zardozi worker from Lucknow, said she was unable to afford an education for her daughters because of the dwindling returns of the trade. “The chikan kurta sells for thousands of rupees, but we get next to nothing,” she said.

In Tripura, things were slightly better as Muslim women had formed SHGs. Rehana said that of the 20,000 SHGs in the State, 17,000 were run by women from the Scheduled Tribe, Scheduled Caste and Muslim communities.

Among the elected representatives who attended the convention were Mahira Khatun and Sarwar Jahan, both elected members of the Kolkata Municipal Council. Sameena Afroz is the chairperson of the Khammam Municipal Corporation in Andhra Pradesh. Nearly 20 per cent of the population in the Khammam Municipality area is Muslim. Ever since she became the chairperson, more and more Muslim women have been coming out with their problems, according to Sameena. “I fight with my government to give more funds for my municipality. I have succeeded in getting health cards and BPL [below poverty line] cards for the poor,” she said.

Naseem from Jaipur was angry about the way the police harassed Muslims after the blasts in May. She said that the police barged into homes demanding to be shown identity cards of young people. “If we give them the green notes, then there isn’t any problem. If we do not, then we are labelled as Bangladeshis who should be deported,” she alleged. She received applause from the audience when she asserted: “As Hindustanis, we have every right to live in any part of the country just like anyone else.”

Kaifi from Delhi was a dowry victim who had realised that her liberation lay in financial independence. She broke down while narrating how she lost her nine-month-old daughter to pneumonia. “She died in my arms. I did not have a single paisa to get her treated. My in-laws refused to help me because I had given birth to a daughter,” she said. Determined not to look back, she trained as a beautician and has decided to devote her life to helping other Muslim women in distress.

Najma from a village in Bhadrak, Orissa, described how she stood up to community elders who insisted that she was divorced after her husband pronounced the triple talaq one night in a drunken state, only to retract it the next morning. Finally, she secured a court order that restored the couple’s right to live together. Qamar from Hyderabad, an AIDWA activist, had spent a week in jail following an agitation for housing rights. “We were told that stepping into a police station or a court was a gunaah [crime], but if we have to do that for our rights, let us do it,” she said.

The convention came up with a charter of demands that asked for a “sub-plan for the socio-economic, educational, health and other development of the Muslim community in India”. It demanded a 15 per cent allocation of the annual budget under various Ministries for the community and sought an “equitable allocation” under the sub-plan for specific schemes for Muslim women. The charter demanded recognition and support for Muslim minority educational institutions, facilities for the formal education of Muslim girls and women, and upgrading of madrassas, following the West Bengal model, to provide modern education and vocational training. There were also demands for more health centres and ICDS (Integrated Child Development Scheme) centres to cater to the needs of the community.

The charter demanded that 15 per cent of bank loans should be provided to Muslims “in priority sectors as well as commercial and business sectors”. It asked for easy credit to SHGs, craftswomen and women involved in petty trade and commerce and sought training centres at the district level to nurture skills in the unorganised sector. The charter also called for the enactment of the Bill giving 33 per cent reservation to women in the legislatures. It sought reservation for Dalit Muslims and adequate representation for Dalit Muslim women. It called for justice to riot victims.


Brinda Karat, Member of Parliament, said that while the condition of women in India was generally bad, that of Dalit and Muslim women was worse. “It is strange that a country that is ready to spend on imported nuclear reactors should have no money for meeting the minimum needs of poor women,” she said. The convention was a call for change, with the broad understanding that the issues confronting women in general could not be dealt with if specific problems that women of the more marginalised sections faced were not focussed upon.

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Ten things about Sarah Palin

It has been a week since Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was catapulted from relative obscurity to centre stage as US Republican John McCain's choice for running mate. Here are 10 things we now know about her.


1. Her five children are named Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper and, last but not least, Trig Paxson Van Palin. According to the Washington Post newspaper, Track was named after the course of the sockeye salmon the family fishes off the town of Dillingham, while her eldest daughter's name comes from Bristol Bay, an area known for its salmon fisheries. The name Willow relates to the state bird, the willow ptarmigan, and a nearby town, the paper says, while daughter Piper shares her name with the family's small plane. Trig is the Norse word for "brave victory", the Post adds. More from BBC

Record number of women to attend the Catholic Bishop's Synod

Church in the World
13 September 2008


Robert Mickens


A record number of women will participate in next month's Synod of Bishops on the Word of God. Pope Benedict XVI has named six female scholars as "experts" and 19 women as observers, making it the largest group of women ever appointed to a synod assembly.

There were no women among the experts at the 2005 Synod on the Eucharist and just one at the Synod on Religious Life in 2001.

The women figure in the list of papal appointments to the forthcoming synod published on 6 September. They are among a total of 41 experts and 38 "auditors" or observers.


The women experts include three scripture scholars - Professor Bruna Costacurta and Sr Nuria Calduch Benages, both of whom teach at Rome's Gregorian University, and Sr Mary Jerome Obiorah, professor at the major seminary in Onitsha, Nigeria. Also appointed was Sr Sara Butler, professor of dogma at St Joseph's Seminary in New York and one of only two female members of the Vatican-sponsored International Theological Commission. The other two women experts at the synod are Marguerite Léna, philosophy teacher at the Madeleine Daniélou school for girls in Paris; and Sr Germana Strola, a Trappist nun in Italy.

The lone female among 16 experts at the Synod on Religious Life was Sr Enrica Rosanna, who has since become a co-undersecretary of the Congregation for Religious.

"The Vatican is to be congratulated," said FutureChurch, a US-based reform group that has been lobbying bishops around the world over the last two years to include more women experts at the synod. "We look forward to the day when half of the designated experts are women, rather than 15 per cent," the group said in a statement.

Among the other experts appointed to the synod are Br Enzo Bianchi, founder of the Bose Ecumenical Community in northern Italy; Fr Stephen Pisano, rector of the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome; Fr Klemens Stock, secretary of the Pontifical Biblical Commission; and Fr Giorgio Zevini, dean of theology at the Pontifical Salesian University in Rome and author of the Synod's working paper. Experts take part in small group discussions and assist the Synod officers on technical and theological questions. Neither they nor observers have a vote. Only bishops and representatives of male religious orders may vote. More

Transgenders, transvestites, eunuchs

NEWSMAKERS

On the frontline

VAISHNA ROY
As Rose, the host of ‘Ippadikku Rose’, fights to realign rigid notions about gender and sexuality, it’s worth asking if we know what tolerance really means.
As Rose says: “What about my hobbies, my friends, my skills? There’s so much more to me.”


Transgender: An umbrella term that represents a whole range of people from drag queens to transvestites to eunuchs. I am headed towards my first social encounter with one. But I am not yet sure just what Rose is. All I have is a woman’s name, a man’s voice and a celebrity status as talk-show anchor.

I am curious but also wary, a fastidious shrinking from meeting another tedious exhibitionist. Aravanis are characteristically loud, aggressive and lewd. Rose has chosen to challenge this stereotype and her on-screen personality is intriguing, which is why I am in this narrow street in the bowels of West Mambalam, reluctant to ask for directions.
At any rate, the auto driver has guessed and is leering. Then I find the number, look up and see Rose on the balcony.

Gender identity
First, let’s settle the pronoun. Rose is ‘she’, a woman. This means she is neither a transvestite, someone who dresses like a woman; nor a eunuch, usually a castrated male.

She is a transsexual, someone born male with male genitalia, but who identifies strongly as a woman, including in her sexual preference for men. This is a gender identity disorder, where your body is one gender but your head disagrees.

And what you can do is try to make your body more sympathetic to your mind by using hormonal therapy and sometimes surgical procedures to become physically a woman or, conversely, a man.

Rose takes hormone pills but hasn’t had surgery yet. She explains her identity to me with infinite patience and grace. I am touched by how untiringly she handles the probing. Talking to her, I realise that anything I write about Rose will also necessarily be about reactions to her.

Because these reactions have traditionally decided that Rose and her ilk do not belong. They have decided that there are only two genders into which you can be born, and that leaves a considerable number outside the pale.

What do you do with transsexuals, homosexuals, or hermaphrodites, to name just a few? The last are born with characteristics of both genders, named after Hermaphroditus, son of Hermes and Aphrodite, a handsome man who the gods fused with a nymph.

For now, we have conveniently lumped them all together as ‘aravanis’, ‘hijras’, ‘chakkas’. This effectively means we don’t have to understand how or why they are different; we know they are and we can therefore shunt them into life’s sidelines, from where they impinge on our consciousness every now and then as nuisances, beggars or prostitutes.

Rose refused to be shunted. Born Ramesh into an ordinary, middle-class Tamil family, the boy from the first preferred the company of girls: “I was a softy who liked Barbie and found boys aggressive.” A class-topper, the chubby boy was teacher’s pet and life wasn’t tough yet.

Then came +2, a boys’ school, and the start of bullying and name-calling. The boy realised he was different but wasn’t sure why. Evidently, his assigned sex at birth was male but he ‘felt’ female, so who exactly was he? “Boys called me gay, I thought I was gay.”

Struggles
Gay is a bad word in our rigidly bi-gendered society. It is the stick with which you beat the faintest hint of femininity in a male and vice-versa. It is enough to frighten most transgenders into a perpetuity of deception, where they marry heterosexuals, dress for their assigned gender, and stay safe.

Rose didn’t want safe; she wanted a life, and on her terms. She struggled to discover herself through visits to psychiatrists (who dismissed her as ‘confused’ or ‘misled’) and to dingy gay spots (where she had unsatisfactory sexual encounters with homosexuals), until finally an Oprah Winfrey show on gender identity crisis showed her a glimmering of the truth.

But that wasn’t the end, it was the beginning. For Ramesh to become Rose in a society where even women cannot tackle their sexuality or identity comfortably takes incredible courage. Today, the West has counsellors and help groups, and parents who join support rings to help their transgendered children.

It’s a small island of acceptance in a sea of hate crime and extreme prejudice, an island India is struggling to create. For now, much like women, transgenders here are seen as willing male tools, there to be raped, marginalised and criminalised.

I remember a highly educated friend dismissing homosexuals as freaks and mutants. Well, a transgender is as much a freak as a blind person, or anyone an accident makes paraplegic. But in a Photoshop world where everybody has perfect smiles, sculpted bodies, eats Big Macs and uses fairness creams, how can you tolerate difference, especially when it is ugly and incomprehensible?

The 29-year-old Rose is no freak. She is charming, articulate and completely comfortable with who she is and how she got here. Thrown out on the street by an orthodox family, a victim of rape, fraud and abuse, she has clawed her way up. Armed with a Masters’ degree in biomedical engineering from the US, she wanted more. “I wanted media success as a transgender.” That happened when “Ippadikku Rose” was launched on Vijay TV, and a star was born.

Celebrity tag
The decision to join media is smart. Fame and glamour can make you heard like nothing else. It was the celebrity tag that got her and her friend Kalki, who started the Sahodari Foundation for transgenders, the tiny flat they call office, because people don’t let houses to transgenders, just as they don’t give jobs.

To survive these petty indignities and taunts, that’s the challenge. And to fight the assumption that there is only one dimension, the sexual dimension, to your entire life. As Rose says: “What about my hobbies, my friends, my skills? There’s so much more to me.”

For now, she knows she is on the frontline, paving the way for others. Of the quantities of fan mail she gets, the most satisfying are the ones from other transgenders, thanking her for giving them the courage to fight on.

The author is a freelance writer/editor. E-mail: vaishnaroy@yahoo.com.

PHOTO: K.V. SRINIVASAN

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Equality for Women Moves at a Snail’s Pace

A snail could crawl the length of the Great Wall of China in the 212 years it would take, at the current rate of progress, for women to be equally represented in our parliament. Snail would have to crawl to Venus and back before we see women priests in the Roman Catholic church, let alone bishops -- Read more from the report from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC)

To Be A Woman, To Be A Christian And To Be Prophetic Are Interlinked

Thursday, September 4, 2008
LAHORE, Pakistan (UCAN) -- Christian women are doubly marginalized in Pakistan, because they are women and because they belong to a religious minority, says Sister Zakai Jamal.

One aspect of this marginalization is the violence and discrimination that Christian women face, given the intolerant attitude to openness and modern values that is part of the "Talibanization" of Pakistani society, says the nun, who belongs to the Sisters of Charity of Jesus and Mary.

More than 95 percent of Pakistan's 160 million people are Muslims, while Christians account for less than 1 percent.

To be a woman, to be a Christian and to be prophetic are interlinked realities here. Each can produce similar consequences.

Youhanabad is a thickly populated Christian colony in the outskirts of Lahore where most of the women work in factories and in the houses of rich Muslims. Of course they get minimum wages, but they also are often harassed, disgraced and ill-treated. Most of these cases are never reported.

Quite often young girls go missing or are kidnapped, raped or killed in this locality. In other cases, acid is thrown on their face. The highest degree of their suffering is that however hard they work, they get very little to provide sufficient food or security to their children. The daily rise in the cost of basic commodities -- flour, rice, sugar, milk -- is a heavy burden on their minds. Though outwardly fit, due to malnutrition and hard work they are victims of tuberculosis, typhoid, scabies and hepatitis.

Among the various categories of women, Religious women have more space to breathe and are given some recognition in society. What affects nuns most is the Islamic rejection of the vow of chastity. According to Islamic tradition, it is unacceptable because it is against the plan of God for human beings.

Another threat is the growing Talibanization of society. Terrorist groups influence the minds of simple people as well. For them, women are not human beings, just articles of daily use to be hidden within the four walls at home. The Taliban movement involves the destruction of all that promotes life, love, beauty and healthy relations among nations. About 125 schools have been burned and bombed by militants so far this year in the troubled districts of Swat and Dir, in North West Frontier Province. Some are occupied by militants and some by security forces. Bombing of girls' schools and threatening letters sent to them have driven away both the teachers and female students, making the attendance drop more than 50 percent. Read more