BehanVox: Yes, Trump’s Tariffs Hurt Women More Than Others
This week in BehanVox: the rise of feminist street theatre, Nepal's anti-corruption protests, and more
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Hello and welcome to BehanVox.
This week we bring you a book excerpt on the rise of feminist street theatre in India and why its early messages are still relevant. Also a sharp analysis of why Trump’s skyhigh tariffs of India are anti-feminist. Starting this week, BehanVox will include Data Drop, your weekly dose of data on gender, health, and more, worth pausing over.
We’re also following the political reckoning in Nepal, where at least 50 people have died in the anti-corruption protest. On Friday, Former Supreme Court justice Sushila S Karki was sworn in as Nepal’s interim Prime Minister, after protesters cast an informal vote in her favour on Discord. This moment has also become a test for the Indian media, whose injudicious coverage so far has erased decades of resentment against the Hindu monarchy and trivialised people’s demands. It is incumbent on the media to document resistance movements, and to do so with reporting that respects context and agency. We urge readers to approach this moment with empathy, and to read history as a key to understanding the present discontent.
Story So Far
Two weeks ago, in a wonderfully reported article we had delved into how Trump’s sky high tariffs are already bringing distress, debt and joblessness into the lives of women workers in Tamil Nadu’s textile belt. We had also argued that this crisis can be resolved, at least partially, with some proactive steps by both the employers and the government. This week, we took the story further to analyse why these tariffs are a feminist issue.
We find that countries facing the highest reciprocal tariffs are major exporters of labour-intensive industries such as apparel and textiles to the US, where 80% of the workforce in the industry are women in low-paying jobs. And from the consumer perspective too, tariffs impact incomes of poorer households, who tend to pick cheaper imported goods.
The spurt in Indian exports was largely driven by the electronics and ready-made garments sector in 2024 respectively. Leather and fish products exports contributed less but the US is a significant market for these industries. For instance, over 80% of leather products in India are exported, close to 22% of which are sent to the US. Frozen shrimp accounts for 66% of India’s seafood exports with 34% of the revenue coming from the US market.
And it is women, often from the most marginalised communities, make up for a significant proportion of the workforce in these industries. The leather industry is one of India’s biggest non-farm employers with 4.5 million workers, 40% of whom are women. And in the frozen shrimp industry, women constitute over 70% of the 8 million workforce, and they perform low-end processing jobs such as deheading, peeling and sorting shrimp in cold processing plants. In apparel and textiles, they make up almost 70% of the 45 million workers, while the electronics industry is known to largely hire young women because electronics manufacturing needs “small and soft hands for small pieces”.
In these sectors that feed the global supply chain where labour conditions are exploitative, so economic shocks like high tariffs will cascade into unforeseen short and long-term impact, say researchers. This will push them into debt, lower their employment opportunities and reduce wages in the long run.
“Across global supply chains, the US tariffs will make women workers vulnerable. Women are concentrated in labour-intensive, low paying, precarious jobs, whether it is processing or assembly line and men dominate more capital-intensive, technical and leadership roles in these spaces,” said Ashmita Sharma, executive director at Society for Labour and Development, a labour rights and support organisation. She pointed out that women have no financial cushion and will deal with the shock personally, by stretching food and taking on even more poorly paid, even more informal jobs.
Read our analysis here.
In the 1970s, when dowry deaths – bride burning as it was then called – were so routine that they did not even make it to the front pages of newspapers. For the police and communities, it was ‘ghar ki baat’ even when sights of horrific burnings, passed off as cylinder explosions kerosene combustion, and suicides, were obvious cases of homicide.
Cut to the last couple of years, it would seem that very little has changed despite the laws and heightened awareness. Not just in the case of Nikki Bhatti, but in several other cases reported from across the country, you hear conversations that hark right back to those dark days. From ‘miya biwi ka jhagada’ tropes to the ceaseless demands for money to feed the lives and businesses of husbands and their families, it brings a sense of deja vu.
We at Behanbox were cogitating on how to take note of these horrific crimes when we chanced upon one of Zubaan’s latest releases, Walking Up, Speaking Up: Feminist Street Theatre In India by political scientist Deepti Priya Mehrotra. As it chronicles the rise of feminist street theatre, it looks at its earliest years and the events that spurred its growth.
The story starts with Stree Sangharsh, a feminist collective formed in Delhi in 1977 by a small group of academics and activists. They were among the first to raise awareness about the rising tide of dowry deaths with street protests. They followed this up with an initiative in mid-1979 to do a street play on the subject.
“Stree Sangharsh had an extraordinary set of thinkers, active in workers’, human rights and peace movements: including Radha Kumar, Amrita Chhachhi, Gita Sahgal, Urvashi Butalia, Ayesha Heble, Subhadra Butalia, Gouri Choudhury, Bharati Roy Chowdhury and a few others,” writes Deepti. The collective invited theatre-persons, Anuradha Kapur and Maya Rao, to write and direct the play. “Stree Sangharsh invited many more people concerned with women’s issues to participate in the process of devising a play. Thus, Om Swaha was developed by a fluid collective…”
Om Swaha was first staged at Indraprastha College in Delhi in late 1979 and kicked off a historic theatre movement. We run an excerpt from the vivacious book and will follow it with an interview with the author.
Read the excerpt here.
Talking Point
Big Fight: ‘If a man has a little fight with the wife they say it is a crime.’ The ‘little fight’ US President Trump was alluding to were figures of domestic violence that he claims are being used by the opposition to undermine his work to reduce crime. As Guardian reports, this is despite the fact that at least 24% of American women deal with “severe physical violence” by an intimate partner. Not just that, the Trump administration has also moved to cut grants to non-profits that work, among other things, on domestic violence.
Screen Solidarity: Songs of Forgotten Trees, directed and written by Anuparna Roy, won the Best Director award and a long standing ovation at the 82nd Venice Film Festival recently. The film centres around the lives of two young women battling the odds to survive in Mumbai, one a sex worker and the other a call-centre worker. As in Payal Kapadia’s highly acclaimed All We Imagine As Light, the film too is about the burgeoning of a solidarity between the women and the bond that develops between the two. Anuparna also spoke up on the plight of Palestinian children as she accepted the award.
Gaza Pledge: Over 1,300 Hollywood professionals have rallied together undre the banner of Film Workers for Palestine to to boycott Israeli film institutions that may be “implicated in genocide and apartheid” against Palestinians. This includes Olivia Colman, Mark Ruffalo, Ayo Edebiri, Riz Ahmed, and Tilda Swinton. “As filmmakers, actors, film industry workers and institutions, we recognize the power of cinema to shape perceptions,” reads the pledge, led by the organization. “In this urgent moment of crisis, where many of our governments are enabling the carnage in Gaza, we must do everything we can to address complicity in that unrelenting horror.”
BehanVox Recommends
Nepal’s Reckoning With its Political Class: The youth led protests in Nepal or ‘Gen Z’ protests as they’ve come to be known that saw the upturning of those in the government shows a wider discontent with the political system and the inequity it has spawned. But is it Southasia’s ‘Arab Spring’ equivalent? Himal editor Roman Gautam’s commentary offers a necessary and sobering perspective.
The Last Days of Social Media: Once built on the promise of genuine connection, social media is throwing us into exhaustion. “These are the last days of social media as we know it,” argues scholar James O Sullivan in this long read.
Extreme Wealth is Toxic: Extreme wealth is a threat to democracy – which is predicated on the simple truism: democracy demands an equitable distribution of power and resources. A new book by Ingrid Robeyns makes the case for limits on wealth. Read Jean Dreze’s review.
Data Drop
Chronic illness can drain a family – of human energy, financial resources and quality of life. And yet, there is very little in policy and practice on palliative care. A new study documents the financial hardships and the impact on women caregivers. It also shows how home and community-based palliative care is possible if the government actively involves medical colleges, covers outpatient medicines, trains ASHAs and caregivers, improves social security coverage, and ensures access to essential pain relief.
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