BehanVox: Life Of An Internet Discourse
This week in BehanVox: feminist analysis of Keralam and Assam's manifestos, women's reservation bill re-enters the Parliament, and more
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Hello Behans!
We usually do not crowd our calendar because we like the idea that our readers take time to savour and think through our stories. But this week, there was no way we could ignore the many feverish developments that needed the BehanBox lens – three state assembly elections, political manifestos and questions of women’s participation and of course, the furore over the Life of Pujaa debate which has spawned many smaller skirmishes on the side. It meant hectic days of work for our small team of six but we put together some sharp analyses and a fabulous essay for you.
Also: census is happening (at last), and it’s going digital. The official portal is open for phase 1, people can submit their details online before an official house enumerator visits in person. Check out the full schedule and our primer on how to do this!
Story So Far
Our Feminist Election Newsroom published analyses of the manifestos for Keralam and Assam, both high-octane elections. In Assam, predictably and evidently, the discourse is mainly spinning around questions of identity and religion. The incumbent NDA government’s priority, it has time and again stated, is to expedite detection and pushback of ‘‘illegal immigrants’’ to “protect the land and dignity” of indigenous people and provide land rights to “genuine citizens”. Other issues that parties are focusing on include youth unemployment, flood mitigation, recognition and welfare of tribal communities, women-centred cash schemes. And the collective grieving over star singer Zubeen Garg’s untimely death has found place in all manifestos – from justice to cultural centres and film city named after him.
In Keralam, where the BJP has mounted a vociferous campaign to widen its base, the incumbent left and Congress-led centrists are debating a number of issues – among these are health, employment, agriculture, and women’s empowerment.
Another subject that has become a fractious poll point is the rehabilitation of the survivors of the catastrophic landslide two years ago in Wayanad, Rahul Gandhi’s former constituency and a Congress bastion. The state Congress said this week that it had mobilised Rs 5.38 crore for rehabilitation works and that all transactions were transparent and that the various allegations of the CPI (M) in this regard were unfounded.
But we focus this week on a story from Wayanad that is neither about the state government, the Congress or the NDA. Because all of them failed to resolve the financial crisis the region’s women faced in the wake of the disaster – massive loan burdens. It took a women’s collective spanning three of the worst affected wards to persuade the Kerala high court and subsequently the state government to provide them loan waivers.
In a deeply reported story on this collective, Liniya Babu explains how the disaster never really ended that terrible monsoon night when entire villages were buried under mud. Most women there had internal and bank-linked loans facilitated by the neighbourhood groups of Kudumbashree, the state’s acclaimed employment and empowerment network. Offered at small interest rates these loans fund almost every aspect of their lives from cattle rearing to personal consumption. The women’s homes, businesses and savings had been washed away, but worse, they were left with no assets or jobs to repay the loans. As Wayanad limps back to normalcy, the women are asking for total loan waivers which they have been partially granted. All this while the Centre excused itself from any intervention and the state pleaded helplessness.
Read our story here.
What happens when a woman from a village or small town in India who draws attention online for her effort, inspiration or charm starts to show increased fluency, support, ambition, and self-possession? The fascination then turns to suspicion if not outright hostility of the kind that influencers from big cities rarely deal with.
It happened with Pujarini Pradhan, an influencer from rural Midnapore who posts in unapologetically accented English from the kitchen of her small home on an array of subjects. “Here was a woman speaking about books, films, feminism and ordinary struggles with a composure that felt lived-in and unapologetic. And just like that, the conversation moved from listening to measuring — from hearing what she said to testing whether someone like her could possibly say it. The voice, the polish, the pace of her success — everything was folded into a quiet plausibility test. It happens with such ease that it chills,” says Prerna Subramanian in a wonderfully argued essay for BehanBox. An Assistant Professor at the OP Jindal Global University and a Fellow at the Center for Women’s Studies, JGU, Prerna writes and talks incisively about popular culture.
This backlash against Puja – and others like her – raises questions around the platform culture. But the most important of these is this – why is it hard to reconcile the possibility that the kitchen can carry labour, repetition, time, and care but it can also carry thought? Why do we find it so hard to let a woman sound completely at home in her own mind?
Read the essay here.
Talking Point
Massive SIR Deletions: Over 90 lakh names, or 11.85% of the pre-SIR Bengal electorate, have been deleted from the electoral rolls, The Telegraph reports. In seven districts that have considerable Muslim presence, 17,10,764 names have been deleted following adjudication. North 24-Parganas and Nadia which hold substantial Matua (scheduled caste migrants from Bangladesh), too have seen massive deletions, leading to allegations of discrimination.
Reservation Bills: In a special parliament session starting April 16, the government will introduce draft bills for amendments to women’s reservation laws. This will make way for the implementation of the 33% reservation for women in the Parliament from 2029. It will increase the number of seats from 543 to 816 with 273 seats reserved for women. But this requires the delimitation exercise to be completed on the basis of the 2027 census, as the opposition has pointed out.
Electoral Patriarchy: In the US, where the discourse in the ultraconservative quarters is increasingly sounding like something out of The Handmaiden’s Tale, the latest buzz is that women should give up their right to vote, reports the New York Times. The household vote should be entirely ceded to the husband, this lot says, and unmarried women should ideally be represented by fathers, brothers and uncles. The problems, they say, are two fold – one women’s suffrage “divides” families and two, that women’s “natural tenderness” would make them susceptible, heaven forbid, to supporting liberal policies.
Mano In Africa: Guardian reports that manosphere, having taken wings in Europe and the US, is now spreading fast across Africa. “The ideas that shape the manosphere are linked to those of men’s rights organisations like Maendeleo ya Wanaume. Its big argument was that men and boys were being left behind as a result of all of the investments that had been made around girls’ and women’s rights,” says Awino Okech, a professor of feminist and security studies at Soas University of London. The conversations in this sphere are standardly and uniformly nauseating.
Anti Auntie: There was a time when being called “auntie” was considered ageist, lookist and sexist. Then auntie-hood was reclaimed because it represents the woman who doesn’t care how she looked or what she wore and most importantly, spoke her mind bluntly. Last week, however, an employment tribunal in the UK ruled in favour of NHS worker Ilda Esteves who alleged that she was subjected to harassment from coworker Charles Oppong who repeatedly called her “auntie”. He claimed it was a term of respect but she countered that she asked him to stop but he did not. He also apparently suggested that an older colleague would be a “good match” for her.
BehanVox Recommends
The Invisible Lives of Carers: It is ultimately a problem we will have to confront with–caregiving. Yet, states are thinking so little about it. Through this deeply personal account, Minreet Kaur lays bare the invisible lives of caregivers and the structures that are not equal to the burden of caregiving.
It was Never About The AI: Is AI the problem? Every generation has faced a version of the moment, argues Eric Markowitz. It is not just the AI but a mirroring of a society that treats human value as expendable, he says. Do read this article and let us know what you think of it.
The Disappearance of Lilac Tiger: This week, our visual journalist, Urvi Sawant, has a podcast recommendation. A five-part story, set in the city of Nice, it is about memory, love, loneliness, shady millionaires, an eccentric old lady with a farty dog… and the disappearance of the Lilac Tiger.
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