BehanVox: What Homes Means To Women, From Kashmir to Karnataka
This week in BehanVox: the anxiety of Kasarkod’s women fishers, Trump's unproven claims on autism and tylenol, and more
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Hello and Welcome to BehanVox! This week we bring you two stories from two ends of the country but both focussed on one theme – the idea of home and how tenuous and precarious it is for many women for different reasons. One story is from Karnataka’s coastal villages and the other from Kashmir. Plus, gender news nuggets from across the world.
Story So Far
The idea of a home is very precarious and tenuous in Uri’s Kalgi village that sits just 10 km off the Line of Control. With every distant rumble, fears return that the tensions that have always teetered on the edge of a war will escalate. That violence will return, shells will fall, the carefully constructed homes will collapse and there will be no place to hide.
As India and Pakistan faced off over four days that threatened to spiral out of control, Kalgi had been hit by a shell. Just 10 minutes before their home was wrecked by it, at 2am, Zahida Bano had managed to escape with her 16-day-old baby, the stitches she endured after childbirth still raw.
Along with her family of 32, Zahida sought refuge in a bunker the family had built in their backyard. Measuring 10×8 feet, it was the only bunker in the village. It took them more than a year and their life’s savings to build it. That night, among those holed up there were 17 children– the oldest was 13 and the youngest, 16-days old.
Three hours later, the family had to flee the bunker that too had been hit. “All we wanted was to save the children,” Zahida said, recounting the one kilometer trudge through treacherous terrain to reach the main road as shells fell all around them.
The family moved to the Tourist Reception Center in Salamabad, 20 km from their home. Rebuilding their home seemed like an insurmountable challenge – none of the promises made by the local politicians had been fulfilled. The compensation — Rs 30,000 for partial damage and Rs 1.5 lakh for full damage – is just not enough, say survivors.
“It’s not easy to rebuild what took us years to create,” said Zahida’s brother-in -law. “In the city, you might build a house for Rs 20 lakh, but here, it costs double because of the rough terrain and high transport costs. How can we rebuild with just Rs 1.5 lakh?” In that one week, the family had lost its sense of calm, peace, and their carefully constructed lives.
Home is a fragile and tenuous idea for many Kashmiri women who live in vulnerable districts that can be shelled out of existence in seconds, reports Safina Nabi.
Read our story here.
Across the country, in a southern coastal corner, another kind of displacement threatens the life of Gangi Ramachandra Tandel, 80. It was a life built with immense hard work and love in the fishing village of Kasarkod in Uttara Kannada district. A single mother of five, she has done it all: sell dry fish, load and offload fish from boats and even request fishers for some fish that she could sell.
At this age, she should have been able to put her feet up, watch her grandchildren run in and out and chat with neighbours who walk in all day. Instead, she is dealing with the risk that she could lose it all to an upcoming port project, planned just about 400 m from her home.
About a two-foot pole smeared with red paint now stands in her verandah as a daily reminder that she could lose her house any day. It is one of many houses marked in Kasarkod Tonka 1 and 2 during a survey conducted in February this year. They will all be hit when the four-lane road connecting the port to National Highway 66 comes up.
In a two-part series, we have been looking at why fishers are resisting the construction of this port at Honnavar that will disrupt their business, environment and homes. In this, the second story, we report on how women’s lives have been upended by the constant uncertainty and anxiety that this impending disruption brings, focussing particularly on their mental health.
“We knew then the port would destroy our lives, and now my grandchildren are still fighting the same fight,” says Gangi.
Despite being at the forefront of this resistance against the port for years, women fishers have been excluded from the discussions on the project by the State, court, port authorities, or even people’s representatives, says Vidya Dinker, a social activist and director of Growthwatch, a voluntary research and advocacy institution. “They have been erased even though they are the most affected,” she says.
As the protest intensified in the last year, women fishers, had, in a desperate move in February, jumped into the sea. One of them, Rekha Tandel, was hospitalised and has suffered significant health impacts, including memory issues, as we reported. Now, many of them complain of exhaustion, precarity, and a loss of agency over their lives.
Read our story here.
Talking Point
Capital Concern: Delhi’s sex ratio fell to 920 females per 1,000 males in 2024 from 922 the year before, per the latest annual report on Registration of Births and Deaths in Delhi. The national average is much better, at 940 females per 1,000 males. In 2022, we had earlier analysed the reason why the capital, home to the second highest number of wealthy households in the country, has been unable to improve its gender equity in this respect. The answer, demography experts had told us, likely lies in its location, right in the middle of a “cultural and geographical continuum” where gender preferential practices are rampant.
Boxing Gold: Minakshi Hooda snatched an impressive 4-1 victory from Nazym Kzaibay of Kazakhstan in the finals of the Boxing World Championships at Liverpool this week. She joins an impressive line of Indian women who have dominated the lightest weight class – Nitu Ghanghas and Mary Kom are among them. Minakshi’s father, Srikrishan, is an auto driver, and the family had few means but she had the unflinching support of her coach Vijay Hooda, she says.
Poor Conviction: At a workshop organised in Trivandrum by the Centre for Public Policy Research, analysts pointed to data which indicates Kerala has the poorest conviction rate for gender crimes among all the states for 2022. “While higher reporting of cases can be seen as a positive sign of awareness amongst women in Kerala, the low conviction rate of crimes against women is highly discouraging; only 8 out of 100 women actually achieve convictions in the end,” an analyst said. It was noted that its robust legal frameworks and dedicated institutional arrangements were failing to protect women from violence.
BehanVox Recommends
Why Strongmen Need Women: Authoritarian movements tend to politicise motherhood, positioning it as women’s sole or most important purpose. The right wing regime in the US today is pushing these same tropes, says this essay in The Guardian.
Map Room: Here is a reading list that celebrates humanity’s fascination with maps — maps as instruments of power shaping reality, systems of knowledge and objects of fantasy.
In conversation with Rohan Kanawade: There is a lovely queer film that is taking the world by storm. It is called Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears). In this interview with Queerbeat, director Rohan Kanawade talks about the film, his thoughts and the process of his film and some unique ways of community engagement with the film.
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