India's Gender Justice Gap, Part II

Greeetings all!

After some much-needed R&R in Rajasthan, it's back to business as usual here in Kadod. I last left you with what, for me, was a thought provoking article about the so-called 'Gulabi gang' of female vigilantes who are literally tackling India's timeless patriarchy head-on, one flogging at a time. Writing for Slate magazine, Ms. Amana Fontanella Khan queries, (almost rhetorically, I might add):

"Why aren't they turning to political activism as opposed to vigilantism?"

At least one explanation is intuitive enough: The Gulabis are symptomatic of a larger pattern in India's State-society relations in which the contemporary State has a nearly-uncontested grip on political authority while, at the same time, a great deal of society (especially disenfranchised groups) is pessimistic regarding politicians' capacities to effectively govern - to say nothing of nearly ubiquitous doubts over the veracity of leaders' commitments to legitimacy.

Naturally, periodic features of the news cycle send moonlight politicos into fits of jingoistic saber-rattling and partisan flag-waving. Today, for example, the verdict to a centuries-old-dispute between Hindus and Muslims was conclusively adjudicated by India's Supreme Court. Electricity grids and cell-towers were down throughout our (majority Muslim) district for the better part of the day. (Tangentially, some have speculated that this was a ploy to disrupt communications-technologies which would have been critical for organizing an impromptu riot-turned-bloodbath, of which nearby Surat has painfully recent memories). At any rate, so far as I know, all's quiet on India's western front. Still, party leaderships were quick to chime in on the ruling and what has for centuries been a matter of faith and decades a matter of litigation, finally died a matter of party politics in the course of a few hours.

But back to the issue of gender justice, why indeed do the Gulabis lack a legitimate political parallel? To my thinking, it's because, like many Indians, they tend to see the politics of the State as an obstacle to (not a source of) social progress. Their very existence is proof enough that the India's legal system of protecting equality-between-genders (or lack thereof) is fundamentally broken. Noting that, the Gulabi movement is expressly invested in compensating for, rather than fixing that system. While state leaders use party lines to dither about oughts, Gulabi women use their homemade cudgels to point to what is. But are they a reasonable, or even sustainable vision of what could be?

I don't think so, but absent a legitimate (preferably nonviolent) alternative to improving what is now a decidedly bleak outlook shared by most of India's nearly-60,000,000 women, one can only fault the Gulabis to the extent that s/he believes that justice only trickles down from the Law, rather than surging up from the people who follow it.

It can be difficult to imagine for those of us who hail from a government which self-consciously purports to be "of the people, for the people, and by the people;" but at least here in rural India, there's enough of a vacuum between the government and the people that groups like the Gulabis have more than enough room to do something like lynch a rapist without legal consequences. This same political vacuum exists in India's neighbor to the west - to the effect that Taliban and al-Qaeda cells have established a virtually impregnable outpost in South Asia. So, given the dramatic contrast of terrorist training camps in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, shouldn't we be relieved that India's legitimation crisis has taken the form of women banding together in the face of a cruel and oppressive patriarchy?

Maybe so.

When it comes to women's issues, the Indian State is a broken record (and to their credit, these Gulabis are doing one hell of a job to put a spin on "revolutions per minute"). They're bold beyond convention and assertive to the point of violence. They are, in the truest sense, radicals. Historically, they remind me less of early 20th century America's legions of flappers and feminists as they do later 20th century America's radicalized civil rights activists. Lamentably, it took more than their tragic assassinations to clear (or at least mildly polish) in America's history books the names of Malcolm X and Huey P. Newton. In spite of that - perhaps in part because I'm writing to you on the last day of September, a month as auspicious for American social justice in 1862 as it was in 1957 - it is my suspicion that more traditionally celebrated and relatively moderate agents of change (most notably Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.) may not have been given their national platforms but for the much less palatable picture of radical alternatives cropping up in mainstream America's headlines.

Whether we like it or not, the attention it's garnering from the international media is itself a testament to the hypothesis of the Gulabi experiment: that when the oppressed contend with their oppressor, a sharp blow from a bamboo stick may now and again leave a deeper impression than a manifesto of words.

Unfortunately for those of us who hold stock in Mahatma Gandhi's cautionary truism that, "An eye-for-an-eye leaves the whole world blind," Indian political leaders have yet to give meaningful evidence of both the depth-of-insight and range-of-foresight necessary to (legally) close India's gender justice gap.