Activism-Praxis – Page 3 – Anasuya Sengupta

One small hour for us, one giant hour for Earth?

Ashwin and I observed Earth Hour last night. We shut off our lights for an hour, from 8pm to 9pm. Begun in Sydney in 2007, as a programme of the World Wildlife Fund, this year the event spread to other parts of the world, including San Francisco, where lights were turned off on the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges. Unfortunately, we didn’t see much of an impact in Berkeley (which is otherwise a city highly conscious of climate change as it is of everything else). On 31st March 2007, 2.2 million people and 2100 Sydney businesses turned off their lights for one hour, and according to the information on the website, if the greenhouse reduction achieved in the Sydney CBD during Earth Hour was sustained for a year, it would be equivalent to taking 48,616 cars off the road for a year.

I realise that there will always be a sense of so little, so late, so symbolic when participating in events such as these (I mean, we did the same thing with candlelight vigils against the war in Iraq and where did that get us?), but decreasing energy consumption has tangible results. And I do believe that symbolism is an intrinsic part of the process of material change. Now if only the American Presidential candidates would give us something tangible on withdrawing from Iraq…

Image by jeromeinsf, courtesy Flickr.

‘The mechanic with the oil can’: Baba Amte

Strange how death gives life to memories. I hadn’t actively thought of Baba Amte for some time, but he died yesterday at the age of 94. Suddenly, a collage of images starts putting itself together. In 1985, Baba Amte got the Magsaysay award, particularly for his work on leprosy. I don’t remember it clearly, of course, but I do remember, three years later, finding that my Hindi teacher was a cousin of his. I think she was surprised that I knew who he was, though my sense is that it had more to do with the news junkie I had begun to be, and less with any self-proclaimed activist zeal at the age of fourteen.

However, some time while I was in college in Delhi (if I’m not wrong; memories are images without accurate recall dates), I remember Baba Amte fasting in one of the first rounds of protest against the Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada. I remember going to sit on the margins of the crowd that had gathered outside Rajghat, watching this frail man (he was already into his eighties then) on a charpai, surrounded by those who admired him and who were inspired by him. Also surrounded – as usual – by the ubiquitous hangers-on who had come to see the tamasha, the incongruous sight of a brightly coloured pandal sheltering a sombre non-violent protest from the Delhi sun.

Why was I there? I suppose I was a hanger-on too, of a certain kind. Those years in college were signified by a painful, sometimes self-consciously intense need to find heroes for myself. I didn’t succeed; much. I think I came out of those years wiser, less pained, and able to make fun of myself, thankfully. And equally able to recognise that heroes are – in general – ephemeral souls, that inspiration is cut and paste: heroism and heroes are found in unexpected places. Yet there I was, watching Baba Amte, imagining Gandhi, juxtaposing one frail man against the other, one courage against another, one struggle for freedom against another. Somewhere, somehow, the cut and paste obviously turned into a collage. One that came back to me yesterday.

The Hindu’s obit quotes the Dalai Lama, calling him a man of ‘practical compassion’, but the description I like best is that by Baba Amte himself. In an interview to Graham Turner, he reportedly said:

I don’t want to be a great leader. I want to be a man who goes around with a little oil can and when he sees a breakdown offers his help. To me, the man who does that is greater than any holy man in saffron-colored robes.

The mechanic with the oilcan, that is my ideal in life.

Image from the Ramon Magsaysay Award website.

He had a dream

Monday (January 21st) was Martin Luther King’s birthday; it also happens to be the only public holiday commemorating and celebrating the life of an African American in the USA. It seemed appropriate for CommonDreams.org to publish his speech of ‘independence’ from the war in Vietnam, called ‘Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence’, delivered in April 1967. It speaks to all of us, across the world, as we watch this nation debate wars that affect us, an economy that affects us, and a future President who will affect us. Let’s hope they choose right.

An excerpt:

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. When machines and computers, profit and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look easily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: ” This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from re-ordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are the days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take: offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wombs of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.” We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to ad just to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.

We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us re-dedicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

Image from CommonDreams.org

Is there anything of cheer from 2007?

It’s been a rotten end of the year for us South Asians. Modi is back – and unsurprisingly – from all accounts of friends working on the ground in Gujarat. Most activists said that the Tehelka expose of the 2002 genocide – horrific, remarkable and courageous as it was – was bad timing; it polarised the polity further and strengthened rather than weakened Modi’s hand. However, Tehelka also explores what Modi’s victory might mean: for his party, his state and the rest of India. My 2008 hope: that Moditva cannot work anywhere else in the country. My 2008 worry that belies the hope: Can Karnataka be next on the hate list? There are many reasons to fear that it might well be, and I will explore that in another post (and one of my 2008 resolutions: when I tell myself I will do a blog post, I must *write* it, within… er… seven days??).

And then, in Pakistan, Benazir’s assassination. As Tariq Ali put it:

Even those of us sharply critical of Benazir Bhutto’s behaviour and policies – both while she was in office and more recently – are stunned and angered by her death. Indignation and fear stalk the country once again.

However, there is some cheer left in the year yet. As we look back, Medea Benjamin provides a list of ten ‘good’ things about 2007, which include the elections in Australia, where Labour Party’s Kevin Rudd beat the Conservative Prime Minister John Howard, and the one defiant stand of the Iraqi government and people against the US, which was to vote against its nationalised oil system becoming open to foreign corporate control.

She also celebrates – but not enough, methinks – my favourite politician of the year: the Papua New Guinea representative at the UN climate conference in Bali, Kevin Conrad. In the Telegraph’s account of it, the Indian ambassador (yes!) had begun by saying that the draft ‘road map’ did not clearly indicate the responsibility of industrialised nations to supply developing countries with clean technologies, finance and support to deal with the problem of climate change “in a measurable manner”. Paula Dobriansky, the chief negotiator for the US, replied that India’s proposed change was something “we are not prepared to accept”. With frustration mounting, the killer blow came from Kevin Conrad.

He used James Connaughton’s (Bush’s primary climate change advisor) diplomatic gaffe of earlier in the week to humiliate the Americans. Mr Connaughton had said: “We will lead. We will continue to lead but leadership also requires others to fall in line and follow.”

So therefore, at this impasse, when Papua New Guinea was called upon to speak, Kevin Conrad said this to the American delegates: “We seek your leadership. But if for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please get out of the way.” The audio of this remarkable statement is here.

Perhaps that is the wish we need for all politicians across the world in 2008: if you are not willing to lead with integrity, justice and courage, listening to the voices of your people, then please… Get out of the way.

Sarah Baartman Speaks

Last month, I sent this piece around by email, by facebook, by almost every method of communication, but not by blog post, strangely enough. However, it is well worth having up for transient posterity on these pages; to those who might be interested, this is an extraordinary and powerful challenge to the editors of the recently published Norton Reader on Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism, an ambitious work seeking to ‘trace the historical evolution of feminist writing about literature in English from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century’.

Pius Adesanmi asks the editors why – in an edited volume spanning over 100 contributors – they did not see fit to include an article by an African feminist theorist:

It is your awareness of these things that makes your excision of African feminist theories and theorists from your volume all the more alarming. Could it be that you imagined that the voices of the African American women you selected adequately speak for those of their continental sisters? Possibly. If this is the case, I must tell you that African American women cannot be made to stand in and speak for continental African women. According to an African proverb, the monkey and the gorilla may claim oneness, monkey is monkey and gorilla gorilla. Perhaps you imagined that African women would be better served to find some space inside the Third World/postcolonial/transnational feminist umbrella you represented with the voices of Gayatri Spivak and Chandra Mohanty? Possibly. Could it be that you are simply unaware of the considerable body of African feminist intellection, right there in your back of the wood in the US academy? Possibly. Could it be that you just simply elected to disappear them like you disappeared me? Possibly.

I think his challenge goes beyond that of acknowledging the critical presence of African feminist thought – though that is clearly the immediate provocation – and pushes us all to think about issues of inclusion, exclusion and legitimacy in academic circles. Important indeed.

Stand up and speak out against poverty… and for gender equality

Today, 17 October, is World Poverty Day, and the Global Campaign Against Poverty (GCAP) is marking it with ‘Stand Up and Speak Out’ events all across the world. More information on these events are at the StandAgainstPoverty site.

However, what really struck me amongst the various mailers I got for the event was the UNIFEM poster which calls for increased investment in women in order to eradicate poverty.

Please support democracy in Burma!

Another call from Avaaz.org:

After decades of military dictatorship, the people of Burma are rising – and they need our help. Marches begun by monks and nuns are snowballing: today 100,000 have taken to the streets of Rangoon.

When the Burmese last marched in 1988, the military massacred thousands. But if the world stands up for the protesters, this time it could be different. We will be sending our petition to United Nations Security Council members (including the dictatorship’s main backer China) and to media at the UN, while also alerting the marchers to our support: http://www.avaaz.org/en/stand_with_burma/

The feminots? The feminish? The feminitch? ouch.

Lisa Rundle wrote a brilliant column recently, reproduced in rabble.ca, called ‘The Feminots‘. She often writes stuff that I wish I’d had the gumption (or the grace) to do myself, and she clearly does it better than I ever could have.

Unashamedly, I quote:

A few weeks ago I was in the middle of a number of unfortunate situations with women, in these cases women older than I am, who identify as feminists but seemed to blithely treat other women like poop. I thought to myself: Ageism! I thought: Sexism! I thought: I’m going to write about these… these, these… feminots!

That was a few weeks ago. I tried the idea on a number of other women, older and younger, and everyone got pretty charged by it. “Yes, yes!” they’d say. “I’ve experienced that. The hypocrisy is infuriating!”

I found myself jotting notes and examples from my own life with fervour. I left myself voicemails while I was out so I wouldn’t forget. I began day-dreaming, tangentially I admit, about the sound-alike feminauts* — flying through space, boldly charting fabulous new feminist territory and wearing lots of shiny things, zapping feminots and hypocrites of all kinds with the light of truth and justice… Sigh.

But mostly I thought about the stark division between the women I know who live their politics, who inspire me and make the world better in so many quiet and unseen, super-local ways simply by the way they treat others, and those whose regular treatment of the women around them fails to live up to feminism’s most basic tenet—that all women deserve fair and respectful treatment. (And would a little appreciation every once in a while be so bad? But I digress again.)

So why is it that so many feminists don’t seem to walk their talk? Heck, those patriarchs walk their talk all the time! I mean, they don’t just walk; they strut, they swagger, they swivel their talk. Sigh…

I’ve decided now to call this phenomenon – inspired by Lisa – the ‘feminitch’. That urge to scratch away at the scabs of un-feminism, to peel away the withered wide-eyed-ness of my youth, those unsuspecting moments of being a feminist groupie… till I discovered backstage.

A friend and I spent a couple of hours the other day, standing outside a women’s shelter, feminitching away till we were bathed in a glow of righteous wrath (and pain). To be fair – both to ourselves and to those feminists we love to hate – we were honest enough to express human frailty, and to acknowledge the ultimate coping mechanism: cut and paste. Take what you will from someone’s her/history and present, admire it, learn from it, and leave the rest be. If you can.

Lisa goes on to say:

Maybe I should retract my new term. Fun as I find it, it might not be as helpful as it could be. Goddess knows I’m sick of the good feminist/bad feminist shtick. (Maybe something a little more open-ended would do the trick? Femiwhaaaat? Feminish…) I don’t want to imply that the poopers who inspired this column are all-round horrible people. Each of us can react in ways we sometimes regret. The trick, I think, is to diligently try to take responsibility for that. To question why we make this or that decision. To find out where the knee-jerk responses come from and to do better next time. To apologize.

Because our politics mean something. And the way feminists behave, particularly toward other women, has a real impact — both on what feminism is perceived to be and how women feel about themselves, which goes on to have a huge impact on this gendered world. As feminists, we need to keep opening conversations and talking about the insidious ways oppressions operate in our workplaces, families and organizations, and that includes our feminist workplaces and organizations.

And they all ain’t feminots. The person who sent me Lisa’s column in the first place was an older feminist whom I admire, respect, and… like. Enormously. As with so many others in my life. Bless ’em all. They make feminism worth living.

Lisa concludes by saying:

And, for something a little sweeter, let’s take a moment or two to really value all that unseen good work — the truly feminist workplace, the truly feminist counsellor, neighbour, friend, partner, sister. The ones who engage in those crazy ethical struggles, who own up to their mistakes, who are improving the world by the way they try every day. Here’s to you, you wonderful feminists you.

Here’s. To. You.

The fear of fundamentalisms

Open Democracy has set up a blog for women’s voices to be represented at the G8 summit, called ‘Open Summit: Women talk to the G8‘. They invited contributions (and are continuing to do so, for those who want to share); this was mine, cross-posted here.

Image courtesy Screen Sifar.

My day (and sometimes night) job is working with police officers in India on issues of violence against women and children; I coordinate a UNICEF partnership with the Karnataka State Police. One of the most critical aspects of this work is, as Anindita so succinctly described elsewhere on this blog, analysing the impact of our socially entrenched gender-based norms. The lack of value for our girl children – and if they’re lucky, for the women they grow up to be – has meant that we have lost, in our female population, the size of a small to middling European country.

But this post is not about genderocide. It is about that and more. It is about asking our governments – particularly the all powerful G8 – that in this context of ‘terrorism’, of an almost universal culture of production and consumption around ‘fear’ and ‘mistrust’, they analyse honestly and courageously their own contributions to a growing set of fundamentalisms: economic, religious, cultural, social and sexual. Women (and children) are often hit hardest by these fundamentalisms.

Identities are complex; we acknowledge that readily but seem willing to sacrifice that complexity for simplified categorisations and easy classification. More than ever, our language of ‘us’ and ‘them’ divides us over and over again, in the conversations we have, the advertisements we watch, the TV series we devour. And our politicians, our priests, our ulemas, our leaders – those who claim to represent us in all our complexity – speak the language of divisions, of fissures, best of all.

A young Muslim friend of mine lives in Gujarat, India. She explores, every day, what it means to be a woman, a Muslim, a young person, an artist, in the maelstrom of fundamentalism that is the Gujarat of today. She struggles with what it means to be a citizen: either of this country or of the globalised world. What does citizenship mean if you live constantly in the shadow of fear? Not just the fear of physical abuse, but worse still, the violence attached to labels? For her, wearing the hijaab is both an act of courage and an unintended performance: she is just never quite sure of her audience or its response.

There is complexity in hate-mongering too. In India, as possibly elsewhere, it seems as though the language of ‘empowerment’ for women has been claimed and reconstructed to mean ‘power’ rather than ‘dignity’ or ‘equality’ or ‘pluralism’. Not all our women politicians are feminist, and not all our fundamentalists are male.

These are not only issues of government. But they are issues for governments; our states are contributing, in no small measure, to these voices of fundamentalisms, of alienation. And worse still: sometimes it is they who create the vocabulary.

A message from Avaaz.org: 2 days to stop climate chaos

In my mailbox:

On Thursday March 15th, the environment ministers from the G8, the world’s biggest contributors to climate change, will be meeting in Germany. The outcome of this meeting will play a critical role in determining the world’s response to global warming–and the fate of the planet.

AVAAZ has been invited to attend this meeting to present our climate change petition. Help seize this opportunity to shape the G8’s agenda by signing the petition here:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/climate_action_germany

Continue reading “A message from Avaaz.org: 2 days to stop climate chaos”