When women choose to protest, they face forms of
harassment to break their spirit.
Road Roko:They know what’s in store.Photo:
A.ShaikMohideen
When you enter Idinthakarai village, the epicentre of
the storm swirling around the controversial Kundankulam Nuclear Power Project
(KNPP) in Tamil Nadu’s Tirunelveli district, everything appears calm but also
quiet in an unreal way. Where are all the people? It is only when you go a
little further that you see the shamiana erected in front of the Lourde Matha
church and the hundreds of women and children sitting under it. For more than a
year now, these women have made the shamiana their home. They sleep, eat, fast,
sing songs, raise slogans and each day renew their commitment to the protest
against the KNPP.
Until September 10, they did not think twice about the
discomfort and hardship. Many of them are from villages some distance away. How
do they bathe? Where is the toilet? Some of them say they eat and drink very
little through the day so that they can avoid going to the toilet. But they have
to feed their children.
To do this, some of them get up before dawn, prepare the
food in their homes, and then come back by sunrise to sit in the tent the rest
of the day and the night.
On September 20 and 21, when I met some of these women,
their spirits were high but their bodies were wounded. Women were in the front
row of the protest on September 9 and 10, on the beach of Idinthakarai
Did these women not expect the police to react and break
up the protest, I asked Ritamma, a 43-year-old single woman. They genuinely did
not, she says. On the 9{+t}{+h}, many of the protestors had felt sorry for the
women police who were practically fainting in the heat. They had even offered
water.
But on September 10, the story was different. Despite
the presence of so many women and children, there was a lathi charge and tear
gas shells were thrown into the crowd. Men and women ran into the sea to escape
the police. But there was no escape.
As a result, scores of women and men, including old men,
have been wounded by the lathi or have burns caused by the explosion of the tear
gas shells. With these wounds has come the realisation that in a democracy, even
a peaceful protest is not tolerated. The women are puzzled about this. What did
we do wrong, they ask? Can we not ask questions? Why does no one listen to our
questions and talk to us directly?
No simpletons
these
Indeed, why does no one listen? You hear words like
“misled”, or “instigated” by representatives of the police, the government and
the nuclear power establishment. What they are suggesting is that these women
lack intelligence, that they are simpletons who can be “misled”. It is assumed
that if people are either poor, or unlettered, they have no ability to
understand “complex” issues. But for the women in Idinthakarai there is nothing
complex about the problem they are facing. Their future has been tied to a
technology that has been proven to have devastating consequences in the event of
an accident. And an accident can occur from a natural disaster – like a tsunami
about which they are well aware, as they were affected in 2004 – or human error.
No one can guarantee that there will never be a human
error.
That is one side of the story. The other is the specific
impact on women when they join a struggle and risk the wrath of the state law
and order machinery. Men are beaten, or locked up. But for women there are
specific forms of harassment to break their spirit.
Woman after woman spoke about the
sexist and abusive language used by the policemen, virtually suggesting that as
they were willing to have sex with the leaders of the movement, they should
offer the same to them. Some mentioned actual
physical molestation. Lavinia, a 29-year-old woman disabled by childhood polio,
narrated that she tried to run to save her five-year-old daughter when the lathi
charge began, when a policeman grabbed her arm and began dragging her away. When
she resisted, he physically molested her. She fell at his feet and begged and
was saved when another policeman intervened. “I feel so sad and angry when I
think of it”, she says.
That is what all of us should feel – sad but also angry.
Why, if women choose to resist, to protest, should they be sexually targeted?
And that too by the very people who are supposed to be our
“protectors”?
Despite the events of September 10, and the personal
humiliation and taunts that these women heard, they remain resolute. You can
“mislead” someone for a day. But will anyone volunteer to go through all this
for over a year without understanding what she is
resisting?
Email:sharma.kalpana@yahoo.com
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