The Women on the Frontline of India’s Resistance to Modi
India's farmer protests have caught international attention in recent weeks – but from environmental and Dalit activists to those resisting Islamophobic laws, women are leading the resistance to Modi's reactionary government.
While largely ignored by the mainstream media, the Indian farmers’ protests seem to have finally caught the imagination of the British Left. This is, of course, as it should be, since as Claudia Webbe MP emphasised in a recent interview, this is not happening ‘in a faraway land’ but one where the UK is deeply implicated through its sale of both weapons of repression as well as dangerous pesticides banned in Britain.
But activists in India, while welcoming this interest, are beginning to wonder why other earlier and still ongoing movements and struggles have been met by silence in progressive circles in the UK and US. These struggles and movements too involved hundreds of thousands of people and occurred in vast swathes of the country, and as International Women’s Week draws to an end, it is worth remembering that these movements too have women on their frontlines.
Many in the UK first heard of two brave young women allied to the farmers’ protests—climate campaigner Disha Ravi (charged under the colonial-era sedition law for the ‘crime’ of sharing a toolkit for online campaigning) and Dalit Labour Rights activist Nodeep Kaur (accused of attempted murder and extortion for demanding workers’ rights and back pay)—as a result of tweets by Greta Thunberg, Rihanna, and Meena Harris – but not many of us have heard of anyone else. By focusing only on Nodeep and Disha, we risk trivialising their experiences by taking them out of context.
Broadening our focus would reveal to us the wide vista of movements, both in India and in occupied Kashmir, which form the backdrop to the farmers’ protests – and examining the experiences of women within them would help us realise that Nodeep Kaur’s experiences of violence and sexual and casteist abuse in custody are not an aberration in a country where feudal violence and Brahminical patriarchy are deeply embedded in the structure of neoliberalism.
Let us look briefly at just three struggles and the women involved in them, who today are among the thousands of political prisoners of the Modi regime.
The Adivasi Struggle for Land, Livelihood, and the Right to Life
Hidme Markam is an Adivasi (indigenous) environmental and human rights activist and anti-mining campaigner from Chhattisgarh state in the mineral-rich central belt of India. This region of forests and mountains is facing a massive land grab by mining companies – Tata, Rio Tinto, BHP (Billiton), Jindal Steel, and the notorious Adani, which are devastating the environment, polluting the soil and water, and acting hand-in-glove with the Indian security forces to target the Adivasi population.
Thousands of Adivasi youth have been arrested, accused of being violent Maoists, and incarcerated indefinitely. Adivasi women are targeted for horrendous sexual violence and often murdered.
On 9 March, while attending an International Women’s Day event to mark the sexual torture and death in custody of two Adivasi women, Hidme Markam was abducted by the police. She has since been accused under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA)—a colonial-era anti-terrorism law—and is currently in prison. Her real ‘crime’ is challenging the lawless police and security forces and powerful corporate interests in Chhattisgarh.
Hidme’s case and those of the two women who died in custody brings back memories of the experiences of Kuni Sikaka, another Adivasi woman who was associated with the people’s movement opposing Vedanta PLC’s bauxite mines in Odisha state. She was dragged out of her house at midnight, illegally detained, and forced to go through a charade of ‘surrendering’ as a Maoist before being released.
The Shaheen Bagh Movement
Student human rights defender Gulfisha Fatima, feminist activists Devangana Kalita and Natasha Narwal, and municipal councillor Ishrat Jahan are in prison in Delhi along with a number of others charged under the UAPA on the basis of a range of trumped-up charges (from giving provocative speeches and causing unrest to criminal conspiracy). Their real crime in the eyes of the state is their solidarity for the Shaheen Bagh protests of last winter.
Those protests—against Modi’s fascistic and unconstitutional citizenship laws, which potentially disenfranchise India’s Muslim population—inspired a nationwide movement which was, in many ways, a precursor to the farmers’ protests. They involved a similar occupation of public space, in this case by Muslim women, and a similar concern for political education, art, and care and comradeship for all who came to show their support.
The Shaheen Bagh protests faced constant threats of violence from BJP-sponsored goons, some with guns, who threatened the women with death and accused them of being funded by Pakistan – just as today the farmers’ movement is being accused of Khalistani separatism. The occupation was brutally shut down in March last year, its artwork defaced, and sculptures demolished.
This was preceded by a pogrom against Muslims led by BJP politicians and their storm troopers in Northeast Delhi. Muslim homes and shops were burnt down and people going about their daily business killed in cold blood. More than 50 people, the vast majority Muslims, lost their lives. Not long after, a large number of people who had shown solidarity for Shaheen Bagh and its sister protests were arrested under the UAPA.
Ishrat Jehan was viciously beaten up by inmates in Mandoli jail, who regard her as a terrorist. Gulfisha Fatima, Devangana Kalita, and Natasha Narwal are in the notorious Tihar jail, where violence is also commonplace, and where Gulfisha has faced Islamophobic abuse.
The Bhima Koregaon Case and Dalit Rights
In January 2018, Hindu right-wing terror groups carried out attacks on thousands of Dalit families who had gathered at Bhima Koregaon village in Maharashtra to commemorate the 200th anniversary of a battle central to Dalit identity. Instead of arresting the key organisers of this violence (one of whom is a close associate of Modi), the police carried out a witch hunt of Dalit youth and children.
A few months later, the police began to pick up a series of human rights activists, lawyers, and others fighting for Dalit rights under the UAPA. Among those arrested in the summer of that year were 60-year-old Sudha Bharadwaj, a trade unionist and lawyer well-known for her commitment to fighting for the oppressed, and 63-year-old English professor and democratic rights and feminist activist Shoma Sen. Both have serious health problems.
The arrests have continued. In September 2020 Jyoti Jagtap, a member of anti-caste cultural organisation Kabir Kala Manch was picked up again on terrorism charges. Her real crime was singing against caste and Hindutva fascism.
If we are still wondering what these women’s experiences have to do with the farmers’ protests, the farmers themselves provided a vivid answer. On 10 December, Human Rights Day, last year, thousands at the protest sites—young and old, women and men—held up photographs of the political prisoners of the Modi regime. The message was unity against fascism.
Speaking last week at a webinar titled ‘No Tyrant Can Endure the Curse of the Young’, marking six months of the incarceration of Umar Khalid, Nodeep Kaur repeated this message: unity is our way ahead, and that is what the state fears.