At BehanBox, Here Is What Stood Out to Us In 2024
Team BehanBox parses through the news and noise of 2024 to find tales of caution, care, and hope.
Violent, tumultuous, absurd at times. How do we remember 2024? For the unfolding conflicts, ongoing genocide,the unprecedented climate records? There was much to be documented in between. Election pundits failed to sense the pulse of the moment. Leaders globally in fear of ‘childless cat ladies’ launched an assault on people’s reproductive rights. Big Tech’s dominance ushered in the era of the ‘enshittocene’. Resistance movements stood up against ‘development’ projects. And elsewhere a lone woman fought systemic patriarchy.
Team BehanBox parses through the news and noise of 2024 to find tales of caution, care, and hope
Women Wield Political Clout
This was a surreal year for Maharashtra’s political landscapes, resonating with what was happening in the rest of India: in the Lok Sabha polls, the Mahavikas-Aghadi-India triumphed and then the BJP-led NDA swept to power in the state election, defying all predictions. In the implementation of the anti-defection law we saw the cornerstone of ethical democracy reduced to a mere mockery. And in the flurry of hate speech, unprecedented communal polarisation.
But in the midst of this cynical poll play, what stood out was women’s engagement with politics. As we reported, women academics in western Maharashtra were targetted by right wing groups, but many of them also collectivised against the communal agenda.
Electoral politics everywhere this year was manipulatively focussed on women voters and Maharashtra was no exception. Buoyed by the Madhya Pradesh experiment with the Ladli Behana scheme, Maharashtra hastily launched the populist Ladki Bahin scheme in the run-up to the elections. While over 2.5 crore women enrolled, making them a key factor in BJP’s landslide victory, the scheme reduced women to mere beneficiaries rather than active citizens with agency.
No political party addressed the pressing need for women’s employment before or after the elections. A similar cash transfer scheme was introduced in Jharkhand ahead of assembly elections. In Maharashtra, the Mahayuti is now reconsidering its promise to increase the benefit from Rs 1500 to Rs 2100. Madhya Pradesh is now talking about. There have also been reports of delays in the payment of the Maiyya samman scheme in Jharkhand.
Post-election, MVA supporters and sections of the media blamed women voters for the defeat, ridiculing them as politically ignorant for falling for the cash scheme. This shifted the focus away from the leadership failure.
– Priyanka Tupe
People vs Might of the State
Big “development” projects vs environment and people. It is clear to me this year that the government would rather prioritise corporate interests, forsaking the rights of the people it represents.
After three decades of protests, the government approved the Vadhavan port, touted as India’s largest, at an offshore site of Dahanu, one of the first talukas in the country to win special environmental protection. In the Great Nicobar Island, a 166-sq km mega-infrastructure project will likely uproot one crore trees, destroy local biodiversity and hit the lives of the uncontacted Shompen community. Around 95,000 trees have been cut in Chhattisgarh’s Hasdeo Arand forest, one of India’s largest contiguous forest tracts.
Bastar was likely the most acute example of how the government backs corporate interests while forsaking people and environment – the region witnessed one of the bloodiest years in recent history: it began with the killing of a 6-month old baby while still cradled in her mother’s arm, at a community protest against tree felling. Since the BJP government took power in Chhattisgarh in December 2023, there has been an increase in illegally set up security camps and encounters.
As of late November, the police said it killed over 207 “Maoists” in encounters. But as our investigation found, these include innocent villagers, including a young deaf Adivasi woman. A fact-finding report released in August found how the wide roads being built in the region have not led to public transport and how its layout is more conducive to mining operations.
There was also increased repression of those using democratic methods to resist these illegal diversion of land. On June 3, the Chhattisgarh Police arrested young Adivasi activist Suneeta Pottam and in October, the home ministry declared the youth-led collective she co-founded illegal.
– Shreya Raman
Every Scroll and Click Should Matter
With their words of the year, Oxford and Macquarie dictionaries have made official what we sensed all along. We as a generation are living during the Great Enshittification; on “degrading” platforms that “abuse” users to “claw back all the value for themselves”; enabling a brain rot that “deteriorates” our mental state. To me, 2024 feels like an inflection point, where we’re coming to truly feel the irritation and aches of living in an attention economy regime.
To look away has always been a political choice; only now, attention is not squarely ours to waste. With Elon Musk’s X takeover and Big Tech’s censorship of human rights violations, attention is being gradually captured and commodified, reduced to a currency that serves only profit-driven interests. In this ‘enshittocene’, as the author Cory Doctorow termed it, platforms serve us “giant piles of shit” while incentivising people to feel helpless, to attend to individual needs, and find comfort in their role as passive consumers–never engaging, never feeling. ‘Taliban has become a giant prison…and the world couldn’t care less’, reads one headline. But still, we rot, turning our gazes away as mosques are vandalised, war-stricken people search for refuge and dignity, authoritarian regimes fall, and people’s resilience yields results against all odds.
I believe we have a choice to make. We can choose to get lost in a scroll and enclose ourselves in our little “enshittocene” bubbles, or we can hold our attention steady. We can choose to not pick comfort over curiosity; to not withdraw from the world; to not be complicit in this digital decay; and to not let our hopes and humanity rot.
– Saumya Kalia
Not a Handmaiden's Tale
“Your body, my choice”: a 26-year-old white male supremacist with half a million followers, sneered online, perverting a dearly loved feminist slogan. He was not the only one or the most powerful – women’s hard-won rights to sexual and reproductive autonomy have been under attack this entire year, especially by the strongmen of the world.
From Vladimir Putin to Elon Musk, Mohan Bhagwat to JD Vance and Naoki Hyakuta, they all believe that the modern woman has been shockingly lax with her responsibility of preventing a demographic and economic crisis by not reproducing fast and often enough. In this clamour that multiplied this year, there was one voice that was missing – that of women.
The conservative all-male league has no interest in asking the crucial question – why are women opting out of large families or motherhood altogether? They only have ideas on how to armtwist women into complying: forced hysterectomy at age 30 to hasten motherhood, using lunch breaks for ‘procreation’, enforce early marriage and penalise divorce, incentivise men to have more children. And of course make abortion next to impossible.
No one it seems wants to address the real issues here – the disproportionate burden of childcare shouldered by women, workplace challenges, livelihood issues, economic constraints, and the possibility that women might actually choose to be Vance’s worst nightmare – ‘childless cat ladies’.
If all that regressiveness was not enough, ‘tradwives’, aproned and pinafored like the 1950s cliche, became a thing online.
One bleak winter evening, a friend, deeply troubled by this global surge in misogyny, remarked: “It is as though entire decades of work at claiming feminist means nothing. Scratch the surface and everyone wants us to be characters out of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaiden’s Tale.”
It is a depressing thought, yes. But if the fierce pushback against abortion bans and the growing political clout of women in India are indicators, I would like to believe that the fight is far from over.
– Malini Nair
When Shame Changed Sides
“Shame must change sides,” she said. And with that one line, simple yet compelling, Gisèle Pelicot redefined that burdensome word and feeling — ‘shame’. The 71 year old former logistics manager from Provence, France, waived her right to an anonymous trial accusing her husband and 50 other men of drugging and then raping her over a period of nine years. Her fierce courage led to questioning of the French rape laws.
“I wanted all woman victims of rape – not just when they have been drugged, rape exists at all levels – I want those women to say: Mrs Pelicot did it, we can do it too. When you’re raped there is shame, and it’s not for us to have shame, it’s for them,” she said in court.
It is a statement that has become a feminist slogan and made Madame Pelicot, a feminist hero. Her chic clothes, her walk in and out of the court with an air of defiance while gracefully acknowledging the women who would clap for her, has provided intergenerational solidarity. She was taking on a system for all of us. That one line ‘shame must change sides’ was comforting, like a feisty feminist foremother telling me to claim my space in the world. How many times have we not minimised ourselves because of shame? This is not always easy, especially if women and girls belong at the extreme margins of society, as our series Marginality and Justice shows.
To me, Madame Pelicot’s trial and statements in court signify two things. First, the power of one. In India, Bhanwri Devi, in her act of defiance against her upper caste rapists, compelled the state to think about workplace safety and bring in the Prevention of Sexual Harassment (POSH) Act. Second, words have the power to shapeshift entire histories. They feed movements, rally people, sustain solidarities and sisterhoods. Slogans become mascots like Jin, Jiyan, Azaadi (woman, life, freedom) borrowed from the Kurdish feminist movement. Other times, they are coined out of rage like the Chilean protest song “The rapist is you”.
Madame Pelicot called it a trial of society’s “cowardice”. For me, it was a trial of courage. Of one woman who dared to stand up and speak out. Gisèle, les femmes te remercient. Gisèle, women thank you!
– Bhanupriya Rao
Illustrations: Mugdha Tewari and Urvi Sawant.
Concept: Saumya Kalia
Editor: Malini Nair
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