Resilience is what defines Indian rural women
I noticed Bimola as soon as I joined a women’s group at a village just outside Imphal, Manipur. Bimola caught my eye because of her direct gaze. There was, I sensed, nothing polite or patient about her. In a supreme twist of irony, these women were described as ‘Positive Women’, referring not to their outlook on life, but to their HIV status.
Each had lost a spouse to the disease, most were infected themselves, many had been abandoned or evicted by their families and struggling to ensure the survival of their children, many of whom were infected too. A positive woman While the other women discussed, then presented, their ideas on things they could do to help themselves and the need to activate the government school in their village, Bimola demanded answers. She was reconciled to fact of dying soon, she said. Her two infected children would probably die too. Could we help her ensure at least one of her two uninfected children survive? If not, we should stop wasting her time, which could be more productively spent scrabbling together something to prevent starvation killing those whom AIDS did not. Women like Bimola and their children in Manipur are victims of the Indian State’s bizarre AIDS Control policy. The policy provides free ART (anti-retroviral therapy) to intravenous drug users and commercial sex workers only since they are more likely to transmit the disease than children or women like Bimola. In a further cruel irony, the treatment is limited to those who can afford the Rs 1,500 test that establishes their low CD count, thus ensuring that those who needed a free treatment most are least likely to get it. And true to the blinkered, scheme-based approach that characterises so many government policies, it failed to address the rampant unemployment and lack of livelihoods that are at the root of the problem. As one has now grown to expect, it completely ignores children. Children who escape being infected or orphaned by HIV/AIDS in Manipur will likely fall victim to either, abduction by insurgent groups, or atrocities the Indian Army perpetrates using the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. Should they somehow evade both insurgents and army, they are threatened by child trafficking and a jobless future. Those who do not leave Manipur to make a living in one of India’s bustling metropolises will, almost inevitably, become victims of the hopelessness and rampant drug addiction that grips the entire region. A bicycle rider In Jharkhand, a few months later, I met Amita. Several days a week, this frail-looking, 23-year-old student mounts a bicycle that’s almost as big, and certainly as heavy as she is, and rides out to remote tribal villages to mobilise groups of children. The rutted tracks she travels couldn’t be termed roads even by the most euphemistically inclined. Yet neither the poor roads nor the elephants that occasionally rampage the area as their forest habitats are depleted, pose the greatest risk to Amita’s work. Far more frequently she is harassed and threatened by the timber mafia, their unscrupulous contractors and the forest guards in cahoots with them. I watched Amita speak at a public gathering of over a thousand tribal men, who had traveled many kilometres on foot to hear about the new Forest Act and its impact on their communities. The meeting had been organised by Jharkhand Jungle Bachao Andolan (JJBA), the Child Rights and You (CRY) partner Amita works with. Her voice rang strongly out across the market area where they had gathered as she explained the new law. She told them of the minor concession they had won after their long struggle to claim their rights to the forests their ancestors have inhabited and protected for centuries. Those families who had agricultural plots within the forests would be granted title to them, provided they could navigate the bureaucratic paper chase that would require days of travel to district headquarters, interminable negotiations with corrupt officials and so on. But without that effort nothing will prevent them from joining the ranks of the 7.5 million tribals in what is now Jharkhand, who have been displaced from their lands over the past 40 years by so-called development projects. Less than a third of whom have received even the paltry compensation the law entitles them to. It was only the next day when she asked to be dropped at a village we were passing to visit her sister that I learned of the nephew and niece she had just lost to cerebral malaria. Malaria is only one of several threats to the lives of Jharkhand’s children. According to the latest National Family Health Survey, a rural child in Jharkhand is half as likely (28.7%) to be taken to a health facility for diarrhea treatment as the average rural Indian child is (55.6%). Her mother has half the probability of being attended at birth (21%) compared to the average for rural India (39%). Almost two-thirds (63%) of rural children under the age of three in Jharkhand are underweight compared to the national rural average of 49%. Completely unsurprising in an area where a visit to a functioning health centre would involve at least two days of subsistence foregone for the entire family. Where a family’s net assets typically comprise a few cooking utensils, a few garments, an axe or bow and arrows and the collection of bamboo sticks they call home. A courageous dalit woman I was too intimidated by the wizened dalit woman I met in Telgaon, Marathwada to ask her name. So I’ll call her Aaji. I have no idea how old she is. She looked ancient. Thanks to the relentless struggle she and her community have waged over the past decade, Aaji now has the dubious privilege of being paid Rs 300 for each grandchild she takes care of when their parents migrate outside the region in search of work as agricultural labourers. Despite the fact that it means extra work, Aaji is thrilled. For the first time ever, no child in her village has dropped out of school this year. Their hamlet, perched on the edge of the Maratha village that houses their employers, is regularly subjected to violent attacks by their neighbours. I met villagers whose hands had been lopped off with swords. Whose faces bore the scars made by sickles. I heard how they almost starved to death during the economic boycott, which was retribution for their temerity in taking a procession bearing Ambedkar’s picture through the village. But surviving all that has forever changed their lives. As Aaji told me, her eyes shining and her bony chest swelling with pride: “Now they get out of my way when I walk through the market.” Yet, in the 48 hours I spent in the area, an 8-year-old dalit girl was raped and killed. Her mother was beheaded when she tried to defend her. In another incident, a dalit man was beaten to death for allegedly stealing mangoes. In Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Manipur and 17 other states across India, CRY is witness to the incredible courage and sheer resilience of women like Bimola, Amita and Aaji. Source: CRY |
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