 Good morning. Thank you everyone for coming to CSIS this morning and for joining us Today we're delighted to host Dr. Minakshi Gopinath, principal of Lady Sri Ram College, one of the most prominent institutions of higher education in India. Dr. Gopinath has held this position since 1988 and has worked to mold it as a center of excellence, training women to assume positions of leadership throughout society. She's also the founder and honorary director of WISCOMP, which is Women in Security, Conflict, Management, and Peace. An initiative begun in 1999 to promote the leadership of South Asian women in the areas of international politics, peace, security, and diplomacy. She has piloted and fostered confidence building measures through regular conflict transformation workshops and collaborative projects. Among intellectuals of the Sark region, and especially between Pakistani and Indian young influentials. She's a member of a multi-track peace initiatives such as the longest sustaining track to Nimrana initiative between India and Pakistan and the Pakistan India People's Forum for Peace and Democracy. She was also the first woman to serve on India's National Security Advisory Board from 2004 to 2006, where she sought to mainstream gender and human security concerns. She currently serves on the boards of the Sarvodaya International Trust, the Center for Policy Research, and the Regional Center for Strategic Studies, among many others, and Dr. Gopinath is a Fulbright scholar and in recognition of her contribution to the field of women's education and empowerment, she's received several awards, including the Padma Shri Award. We asked Dr. Gopinath to join us to talk about women's issues in India for a few reasons. First and most pressing and most depressing because of the distressing recent stories coming out of India recently about rapes of young women and small girls. Second, in response to these awful stories, the Justice Verma Commission issued a groundbreaking report and we hope to get some of Dr. Gopinath's insights as to what made it so groundbreaking and what can we expect in terms of implementation of the recommendations. Lastly, the protests that have taken place in response to the recent rape cases have really highlighted the anger of young Indians, men and women alike, I think it's fair to say. India's young urban middle class is often thought of as being politically apathetic, but this issue has revealed a strong sense of disgust with law enforcement, traditional patriarchal society, and an underperforming political class. The national discussion that is now taking place in the traditional media, social media, among friends and within families appears to be a break from the past. The issue is out in the open and doesn't appear to be able to be silenced again. We can hope. To hear more about all of these issues and more, I think, I'll turn it over to you, Dr. Gopinath. Welcome and thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Persis. I must confess, I didn't recognize myself in that introduction. You've been very generous, very, very generous. Distinguished visitors, members of CSIS, Nick Lombardo, of course, Persis and friends, thank you for taking time off this morning to be here. It's an honor and a privilege for me to be here and to open up this conversation. I recognize that the expertise in this room is formidable. And so if I carry coals to Newcastle, sorry, that's an anachronism. If I carry nuclear energy to Washington, DC, please forgive me. I will, I'm merely looking to gain from our interaction because I know there are many ideas that will come out of this that I can carry back home and attempt to draw from and put to practice in the small areas that I work in. My, the title that Persis suggested and I quickly endorsed for this, for my presentation today is called Beyond Silence and it's actually inspired by a poem that a student of mine wrote several years ago, which found its way into Hillary Clinton's book, by the way, and it's called Silence and if some of you have read it, I seek your indulgence. I'll just read it quickly once one more time. It's called Silence and it says, too many women in too many countries speak the same language of silence. My grandmother was always silent, always aggrieved, only her husband had the cosmic right or so it was said to speak and to be heard. They say it is different now. After all, I'm always vocal and my grandmother thinks I talk too much, but sometimes I wonder. When a woman gives her love as most women do, generously, it is accepted. When a woman shares her thoughts as some women do, graciously, it is allowed. When a woman fights for power, as all women would like to quietly or loudly, it is questioned and yet we must have freedom if we are to speak and yes, there must be power if we are to be heard and when we have both freedom and power, let us not be misunderstood. We seek only to give words to those who cannot speak. Too many women in too many countries. That was Anasuya Sen Gupta who wrote this poem a long time ago. Now, have things changed in India today? Are things different in India today? The answer would be, yes, as always in India, yes and perhaps no. You know that for every statement that can be made about India, the opposite is also true. I think it was Galbraith who made this, but there have been some very, very important movements which, in a sense, make us believe and give us hope as women in India. The women's movements had broadly five major streams and the women's mobilization into the public sphere began, as you all know, with Gandhi and he used two very important symbols which were the part of the warp and weft of women's daily existence, salt and khadi, homespun cloth, and these were bringing into the public sphere what were considered to be very much a part of the private sphere. So in that sense, the private public schism had already been broken and then through the years, up until the 80s, you had women protesting against price rise, in unequal wages, against prenatal sex determination tests, against dowry, and a whole range of issues and they had some successes. Some of their campaigns assumed very, very, shall I say, dramatic proportions, but by and large, they remained women-centered. As you know, the women's movement itself in India or the movements were determined by many of the changes that were taking place in the closing decades of the last century in the political and social realm. At first was the breakdown of the Nehruvian consensus on issues of state building, on issues of development and also the idea of secularism. There was also a broad thrust from below of the hitherto disadvantaged groups, the what we call the schedule cast, the schedule tribes, and the other backward castes who were seeking articulation on the firmament of India's noisy democracy in the making, if you want to call it that. And those assertions were met, were contested, they were both conflictual, they're not easy changes, they were difficult changes, but they began to become part of the mainstream discourse in India. But for women, the main issues was the slippage between what Amartya Sen has called Niti and Nyai, between law and justice. How do you bridge that gap? And that became a very important and important force. Many women in India recognized that there is a continuous peacetime war that they are confronted with in their everyday lives, that the nature of structural violence against women and even men is almost endemic. And very early, the movement itself realized that to make the distinction between sex and gender was very, very important because you had to talk about not just violence against women, but gender-based violence and these structures of patriarchy that were so, shall I say, pervasive within the context of Indian society. But the crux was the matter was, and I'd say the biggest challenge really was that India, being a multilingual, multi-religious, multi-ethnic society, is fractured around several fault lines of class, caste, ethnicity, religion, and gender in a sense becomes a cross-cutting issue. So to look at the idea of women as a homogenous entity and try and work out political mobilizations just around that category becomes extremely difficult and problematic in the context of India. As you know, the Indian citizen would respond to different situations from different identity points. For example, you could respond to a situation either as a Muslim or as a Dalit or as someone who belongs to the southern part of India or as a woman. And it's not necessary that the identity as a woman is always foregrounded in all our interactions. So there is a very complex overlay of several identities that are jostling for space and for articulation, and therefore the context itself becomes important. If we were to go back now to the events of December 16, why do they assume so much importance in the context of India? I know that the horrific violence against a young student of a physiotherapy student in Delhi and the gang rape that followed had really captured in a sense the moral indignation of several, several people the world over. But it had a significance beyond the particular event itself. If we were to look at two very important moments that happened for in the 80s, what we call the Shah Bhanu case, I don't know if many of you are aware of that. The Shah Bhanu case really brought to the fore the conflict that exists within our constitution between the rights of individual citizens and community rights. Shah Bhanu, an indigent Muslim woman, had appealed the Supreme Court for maintenance under Section 125 of the Criminal Procedure Code. The Supreme Court had upheld her claim and said that she was entitled to get maintenance because she had been divorced. However, there was a huge furory where minority groups asserted their claim for the sanctity of cultural community rights. Several women had been campaigning right from 1937 onwards for what is known as the uniform civil code because India, the Indian family, issues of inheritance, issues of rights for women are governed really by personal laws. So you have a Hindu code, you have Muslim personal laws, you have the Parthes, you have the Christians who have their individual personal laws on inheritance, on property, on divorce, on maintenance, the whole gamut. Now there is in the heart of the constitutional articulation a kind of tension between cultural rights and individual rights as citizens. And so capitulating to the huge political protests that happened, the Rajiv Gandhi government in 1970, sorry, 1996 passed the Shah Bhanu, sorry, passed Muslim women's rights on divorce and maintenance, which overturned the Supreme Court judgment, giving them maintenance because they said it was in conflict with the Sharia which is the Muslim personal law. And therefore women at that point of time felt extremely betrayed that the politics of exigency triumphed or trumped the issues of justice. But there was another reason why, subsequent to that, there was the whole issue of the right wing Hindu fundamentalism that was beginning to assert itself. And it had taken on board the uniform civil code as a methodology for what they call nation building. And to assert the fact that look, minorities are wayward, they do not give their women rights. But this is the case with across the board, across all communities that issues of patriarchy are pervasive in all the personal laws. And so the women's movement then nuanced its position on the uniform civil code saying that we don't want to go there at this point of time, lest it be used as an anti minority plank. So they moved away from the notion of the uniform civil code to a gender just civil code. And it's still being debated and discussed. Around this time you had another very serious incident of a woman called Rupkamar, 18 years old, who decided to burn herself at the pyre of her husband. Now Sati, as you know, was an old practice during pre-colonial times about women who burned themselves on the pyre of the husband. Now the state took very serious notice of that because it and the relatives of the marital family were arrested because they were abetting violence against a young woman. Again, the whole issue of cultural rights and the right to follow particular practices, no matter how obscurantist they are, were foregrounded in this particular debate. The state passed legislation prohibiting Sati, even though it was considered to be an age old practice. However, the 11 members of the family were subsequently acquitted for lack of evidence for being perpetrators of this crime. So this was again a huge setback and there was a huge protest movement against issues of patriarchy. A famous feminist scholar in India describes the modern Indian family as patriarchal, very local and patrilineal, which means that patriarchal, I don't have to describe, patrilineal where property passes from the father to the son and very local where the woman moves into the house of the husband. And this is the structure of the Indian family across all communities in India today. Now, to move to the unfortunate events of December 2012 and the implications that they have on the democratic aspiration of women's rights in particular and the contestations and cultures of silence and cultures of impunity that they really attack. There were three significant aspects of the protests and these stood out. One was there were more with more and more crimes against women coming to light. These protests were just waiting to happen because we didn't have gender just courtrooms. There have been a whole array of cases where judges themselves have taken extremely patriarchal positions when delivering judgments against the rights of women. So there was a new kind of political assertion that was happening and what was significant was that it was spontaneous. It was not piloted by a political party or a political formation. It didn't have a leader and people and parties that tried to hijack it under its plank were swiftly shown the door. And it was the first time that young people came out in large numbers on the streets on Rycina Hill, which is in a sense the symbol of the geographical symbol of political power in New Delhi. They gathered and they refused to be refused to leave the place. They were there for about five days continuously facing water cannons, latte charge, intimidation by the police and so on and so forth. And for the first time it was they were young men who were participating in what was Hitherto seen as a women's issue. All of the protests that had happened before this on women's rights had large numbers of women who were participants. But this was the first time that there was a public outrage, especially among young students, university students, young scholars, young society activists who said no more, we are not going to take this anymore. And therefore there was the issue of patriarchy and misogyny came very squarely into the public sphere. And some of the placards that they held are very, very interesting. I'm sure many of you understand Hindi, but for those of you who don't, one of them was it's I as a woman asked for the right to wear what I want, to go where I want and to get out at night if I seek to do so. Because immediately after the rape, one of the first things that happened was the police put out advisories. And you know what they said? Women should dress decently. They should not invite attention. They should stay away from going out at night. And this was also endorsed by a judge of the Karnataka High Court who said women who are not careful invite trouble. This was an articulation by a judge in one of our states. So one of the things they said was, and for those, I do want to say this in Hindi, because it has a certain flavor, that my voice, the pitch of my voice is higher than my skirt. And you can imagine what kind of, and sorry, I don't want to offend any sensibilities here. So I'll keep this only in Hindi. So basically the idea was reclaiming the night. They had a lot of walks. They had a lot of candlelight vigils. They used very, very dramatic methods of coming into the public sphere and articulating their grievance. This ideologically loaded expression of freedom offended many, many traditional male sensibilities. And so the primary issue was that the state was responsible for the, would I say, for the erosion of the rights of women and the inability to provide security. But the state actually responded in the conventional method. You see this really as a law and order issue and put out its whole police force out on the streets. These kind of advisories, for example, were torn down by a lot of young women, and I would say my college in some senses took the lead. And they said that we refused to have these advisories stuck outside the gates of our college. So they just tore it down. They said this is a violation of our right, our autonomy, and our freedom of expression. And now come, and then finally, after six days of deafening silence, some kind of conversation was opened between the government and the young people on the streets. And the Verma committee was established. With the entry of Justice Verma, the expected government script changes dramatically. He allowed, in fact, from the way in which he conducted the meetings of this committee, which was mandated to look into the problems of violence against women and to offer solutions both legislative and executive. He opened up the committee to all sections of society. He got something like 80,000 applications. And 80,000 by the 5th of January, the committee was established on the 23rd of December. And by the 5th of January, Justice Verma had got 80,000 applications and petitions. He met a thousand representatives of civil society and think tanks, and also members of the government. But what did he do? He actually got young women and men, young lawyers to man the committee who worked round the clock without no remuneration. And he submitted his report in 29 days, one day short of the stipulated time. It was it made history. And it was a 600 page document. He listened to every he and there was his colleague who was a fiercely 83 year old retired judge, Leela Sate, incidentally the mother of Vikram Sate, if you read any of his books. And Justice Verma himself, 80 years old, a kind of Abe Fortress of our times, but not quite so flamboyant. Here was a man who actually came from what you would call the cow belt of India, a conservative person from Alabad called to the bench at 23 became the judge of two state, the Chief Justice of two state courtrooms and till he became Chief Justice of India in 88 or 87, then went on to head the National Human Rights Commission, made several, several interventions against the treatment meted out to minorities post the Gujarat carnage 2002. So he was a he was not he didn't study at Yale or Harvard, very much home grown, but a man who was immensely ahead of his times with a twinkle in his eye too. So so what did the the important contribution of the Varma committee was the for the first time it evolved a bill of rights for women, something we had never heard before. Women's groups call it the Magna Carta for women in India, but it's a bill of rights which really talks about bodily integrity, the right to life, security and bodily integrity of women, democratic and civil rights, equality and non discrimination, right to secure spaces, special provisions for the elderly and disabled and the protection of women in distress. These kinds of provisions were never never articulated in the public sphere before this. He also looked made the government accountable by saying that basically patriarchal norms have invaded the the mindsets of the police and the administration and that the state oscillates between being predator and protector depending upon which group it is protecting or predating upon and the the refusal of the police to register complaints against violence against women was chastised by the Varma committee. It and for the first time it cognized marital rape, which you know in India is something that you do not ever talk about in the public sphere. He also talked about the LGBTs, which was again a path breaking and their rights against violence. You know, transgender, I don't have to explain that. In a country where you have laws which talk about colonial practices like the restitution of conjugal rights and it still is depending on which judge gives his final verdict, it is still invoked by men in order to persuade women who have left the sanctity of marriage to come back and to perform their wifely duties. In a country where restitution of conjugal rights is still somewhere written in the statute book, to have justice Varma talk about marital rape was nothing short of revolutionary. There are several maybe in the Q&A I could talk about this, the famous Rukhma by case of 1800 which really became in a sense a benchmark for this whole issue of restitution of conjugal rights. The other thing that the Varma commission did was that it made a whole list of graded offences other than rape as culpable and punishable. And these included other than rape and gang rape, sexual assault, acid attacks, which as you know are somewhat, well, say they are, they exist in India as acts of vengeance, you know, you throw acid on a woman's face and you've disfigured her for life and you've made her completely vulnerable to all kinds of other kinds of violence, stalking, voyeurism, cyber crimes, and of course sexual harassment in the workplace. Now all of this. And in addition to that, he also looked at a very, very, very vulnerable aspect of state power. And he said that the Armed Forces Special Powers Act that grants impunity to soldiers who are in, who are posted in places which are disturbed or have revolutionary activities should be looked into and amended. Now the Armed Forces Special Powers Act is something that women across India and especially in zones of conflict have been contesting for several years. I just want to give you an example. In 2004, in the troubled state of Assam in the northeast of India, which has seen several insurructions and many of you are aware of that, there was an incident where the Assam Rifles soldiers had raped and killed a young woman called Manurama Thangja. Now the mothers of Manipur who are a very venerated group of women because in Manipur in the northeast state, which is a matrilineal state, women are still held in high esteem. They walked, they processioned nude in front of the barracks with a huge banner which said, Indian army rape us. So it was a very potent and very loaded kind of protest. After that, you may have heard of the of the fast of Irom Sharmila, another young woman activist of that area who went on a fast until unto death or till the Armed Forces Special Powers Act was repealed. She went on a fast in 2001 and even today she has not broken her fast. She's kept alive by artificial, well, forced feeding by the state. Now what were these women doing? They were saying that women's bodies in India in a conservative patriarchal society are used as markers of community honour. Through this ritual of inversion, we are asserting our rights for control over our bodies and our autonomy. We are also protesting but nonviolently against the violence of the state. Now this is a very, very dramatic kind of thing. It's not that they are in that sense, formally breaking laws, but it's a kind of civil disobedience and for an Indian or for Indian women to do this kind of thing in the public space is a very, very potent, almost sort of electrifying kind of act of protest. It's hitherto unheard of. Now I just wanted to say that in this context, the Verma committee report pleaded that some sections of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act should be looked into and repealed. And you know that when we are talking about national security and most of you sitting here in CSIS know this, national security is a holy cow. You don't touch it. You don't do anything with it. You accept it. And this is what the Verma committee overturned. So what was he doing? He was listening to these large numbers of disobedient women who were bringing a kind of peacefulness, an alternative peacefulness, an alternative metaphor of power, trying to push it into the public domain. So he was he was absolutely committed to this. And I mean, there are then of course, he also talked about the Kappanchayats. Now, many of you know that in the, in the village context, there are these committees of elders that are called Kappanchayats that invariably end up doing some kind of moral policing. They also arbiter property disputes. They do that as well. But they are also very particular about the role of women outside of their home. Now, this is in a context where today we have 1.3 million women who are womaning or manning the local self government bodies. And that has brought amazing power of decision making and entering into the public arena by women. We have 59,000 heads of panchayats who are women. This is path breaking. It happened because of the 73rd and 74th amendment which Rajiv Gandhi had initiated and his successor brought to fruition. That is a huge democratic stride forward for women. And yet in some parts of India today, they have these things called Kappanchayats that engage in extensive moral policing of women. In the states of Haryana and Rajasthan, where the sex ratios are skewed against women, you have for example in Haryana a particular village that has only 10% of women. Why? Because they have the prenatal sex election and the boy preference, the desire for a male child is so overwhelming that they just don't allow these little women babies to survive. And so the men marry from outside the village and bring their wives in. Now, this is not, you have your row versus Wade in 1971 which was pro-choice. Am I right, 71? We had our version which was 1973. It's called the medical termination of pregnancy. Now, is it pro-choice? In a society where choice is determined by the fact that there is a preference for a male child, how pro-choice can this particular act be? I leave that to your imagination. Now, to switch back again to the Verma commission report, and I know I'm running out of time so I'll have to skip a lot. Did Justice Verma come to this amazingly revolutionary Bill of Rights and this committee report which has, I must tell, you shaken up the establishment in ways that it doesn't even envisage today because it has really gone to the root of the continuing structural violence against women. Now, did he come upon this all of a sudden in 2013? No, I want to share with you two quick cases and then I will try and wrap up. One is called the Bhaveri Devi case. I asked him, I said, sir, how did you manage to put out this amazingly progressive document? He said, I learned from the young people who were in my office working night and day to tell me about the realities of India. But my journey began with Bhaveri Devi. Bhaveri Devi, 1985, a woman who, poor Dalit, and Dalit, as you know, is what they call the lower caste woman in the state of Rajasthan in a small village called Bateri, she was a saathin. A saathin is a social worker that is appointed by the government to look at women's development programs in the village. So she was engaged with health issues, with women empowerment issues and she was paid a very small salary by the government to do this. Always going well, she was respected by the village elders, she did her work very well and very conscientiously. But in 1992 she made a big mistake. She took the government mandate for her work very seriously. The government had said that you have to stop child marriages in your area. And little girls used to be routinely married off, you know, in certain states. So she took a position against a child marriage in Rajasthan, in near her village, and stopped it, called the police and they came and arrested the family. Later that year, and of course this alienated all the panchayat, the community elders, it also alienated her own family who moved away from her, except for her husband. In 19, the same, later that year, in September, Bhanveri Devi's husband was beaten, brutally wounded, brutally beaten and wounded, severely wounded. She herself was gang raped by seven people. She went to the police station to register her complaint and they sort of gave her the run around. The policeman on the spot said, please leave us your skirt so that we can establish that you were raped. Bhanveri Devi was not a victim. She refused to be a victim like Rosa Parks. She said she was to be a survivor. And this whole business of shifting from victimhood to agency is part of the mandate of the women's movement today in India. She walked three miles to the, to the Nebering village and got her, got her complaint registered, wrapped herself with her husband's turban. I know this sounds gruesome to many of you, but I am sharing this for a purpose. And finally, when the courts, the district court had heard her plea, in the meantime she was intimidated. She was sought to be bought off. People said if she would draw her case, she could have a comfortable life for the rest of her life and so on, but she refused. And finally, when it came to the sessions court, they had five judges changed during the course of this so-called trial. The sixth judge pronounced, and hold your breath, that since she was a lower caste woman, she could not have been raped by upper caste men. And since the medical examination happened 58 hours after the event, it's impossible to establish that she was actually not speaking the truth. In this context, Justice Verma committee talks about very, very detailed protocols of medical examination, of the registration of witnesses and so on and so forth, and that again it's with. Banwari Devi's case, and therefore she lost, she lost in the courts, she, the law did not come to her aid. But the women's organizations were so incensed by this, that they appealed to the High Court, and the High Court, 15 years later, only held one hearing and that too inconclusive, in 15 years on this Banwari Devi case. But she went on relentless. Around this issue, women's organization got together under the banner of Vishakha, and appealed to the Supreme Court to say that when a woman is performing duty and she is violated, it is actually something like sexual harassment at the workplace. And who do you think was on that bench? Justice Verma was heading that Treep Judge bench, and he for the first time put your, a different Indian version of your Anita Hill story, and made sexual harassment in the, in the workplace a cognisable offence. Our legislature is still nuancing that bill, and I think it will today see the light of day in a very, in the meantime, there have been several committees in every, it's mandated in every organization that is supported by the government to have committees for looking into cases of sexual harassment. That was a major, major breakthrough, major breakthrough in India. So this happened. Now in the meantime, after he delivered the Vishakha judgment, you know for example, that the events that I told you in the northeast had taken place. He could not have been immune to that. I also want to tell you about 1947 when India was partitioned, it had the, you know, you know that there was a holocaust following the partition into two countries of India and Pakistan. And there was the largest ever migration of populations across borders, peacetime, I think it was close to one million people. Ten million, ten million people were displaced, one million people died and ten million people were displaced. In that displacement of course, as always, violence against women was rampant. In 1949, the Indian state, and I think similarly the Pakistani state, enacted a law which was called the recovery of abducted women's act 1949. And do you know that women who had gone over to the other side, sometimes abducted, but who had established relationships with men on the other side, had families, were forcibly brought back in the name of national honour. So you see how the complicities of the patriarchy's of family, community and nation play themselves out on the bodies of women. And many of them were not taken back by their families because they had been dishonoured. Many of them disappeared. Many of them just went into the oldest trade, the oldest profession and never to be seen or heard of since then. Now these were all very well-intentioned people because they felt that women needed protection, they needed to be protected, to be brought back and they had to be given their rights. Around this time, this particular event of the recovery of abducted women's act had not come to light. It was around the time of Vishakha that these were beginning to enter the public discourse. Now I've said all this and I do want to say that I would request you, if you have the time, the report itself is 600 pages, but please do look at the Bill of Rights for Women. It's a path-breaking document. It is, of course subsequently, I will be, I can answer that in the Q&A, the court, the bill amending the Criminal Procedure Act has been amended by both houses of parliament and now we do have a law that has taken several of Verma's recommendations on board and has now become law. Of course Marital Therapy is out. At so is the Armed Forces Special Powers Act is out. Those are not within the purview of the law and several other issues of compensation for women who are raped. And the word rape has continued to be there although there was an attempt to dilute it and call it sexual assault so that it could be soft-pedaled. However, what was important was that the word victim was removed from the committee and the word survivor was put in its place and you can imagine what an amazing ideological conceptual shift that is. Huge. We are not victims. We have agency and we are survivors and we will continue to go. But in case you think this is all very black and bleak in India, let me also tell you that there are some amazing movements of people, democratic movements that are now being headed by women in India. They've entered the public sphere as never before and they are heading movements not just for women but also for citizens and for democratic articulation across. They are the environmentalists like Vandana Shiva who was talking about food security. There are people like Meeda Patkar who are protesting large dams and displacement. There are women like the women engaged with the rehabilitation of people in the Bhopal gas tragedy. There are women who are protesting missile sites. There are and forgive me CSIS, I won't take very long. There are women who are heading or one particular woman Aruna Roy who has headed the Right to Information campaign in India and today it is a law. No government official can conceal information. Any citizen in India can put in a 10 rupee postcard and ask for information from the highest government official and he is obliged, obliged to reply in 30 days. That is the power of women. So women in India have begun to exercise power to enter the public sphere and to continue to challenge issues of endemic violence against both men and women and we need to recognize that the high thresholds of violence that we do in India has to be engaged with not piecemeal not just as women's issues but as why is it that in the land of Gandhi and Buddha we have such a high tolerance level for violence, endemic violence across society and therefore I would like to end by invoking the memory of Justice Varma, this amazing judge who who who crafted a humane jurisprudence who went out of the limits of law to look at justice. A man who said that while it is important to comfort the afflicted it is equally important to afflict the comfortable especially when they are complicitly, complicitously, comfortably, complacently wrong. A man who believed in the democratic demographic dividend of India that 50 percent of the population that is less than 26 years of age and above all when he met Nancy Powell over lunch two weeks before he passed on he she asked him judge what where should we go from here what do you think we need to do and he said you know I would leave it to the youth of India they have taught me so much and I think they have the power and the foresight to make India's voice truly a powerful one so the question is not whether India will become a great power but whether India's people will be a force more powerful so to to to justice Varma who made despair unconvincing and hope practical maybe just spend a minute in silence memory thank you thank you thank you so much Dr. Gopinath that was it was what we had hope to hear from you and much more it really is a truism that anything you say about India the opposite is also true and this issue is bleak and disturbing but it's also very inspiring to see the solutions that are coming up out of young India I'm sure there are quite a few questions we have about 10 minutes for question and answer can I just ask that before you ask a question you please just identify yourself and your affiliation I certainly have questions but want to give you all a chance first your work is very important so perhaps I should take away some some of your own experiences but let me just share with you I think the first responsibility of any women any of us women who are engaged in in in in the sphere of education is to allow or is to facilitate the women moving out from this whole issue of shame and blame that follows and guilt that follows any such acts of violation of bodily integrity now you will be aware that almost 70 percent of the violence against the girl child and women in particular happens within the home and there are cultures of silence around it the the the refusal to articulate sometimes the elder women in the family complicitous in cultures of silence becomes very difficult so in in in spaces such as universities and colleges it is imperative for us to have a conversation about what does it mean to be a woman in India today what does it really mean what how do we understand freedom and autonomy how what are the choices that we need to make and and you know we all work all our choices are constrained by certain frameworks whether it is in the united states or wherever there are certain societal frameworks and norms and some of them are oppressive and regressive but do we can we build the potentiality and the I hate to use the word empowerment but the courage to move out of those received paradigms of respectability this is a big question and I think this we need to women's rights are always contested we need to go back to them we need to reinvent them but I do want to say that the we have to also demystify this whole notion of sexuality that a person's being is not entirely defined only by sexuality and we have several traditions in the east that that can give it a much wider kind of a focus we the the university grants commission has now set up a task force where it which which it has mandated to look at how you remove cultures of silence and address rather cultures of silence and cultures of impunity on campuses we all know that the relation the power equations between professors and students are very often skewed against students very often how do we negotiate that how do we arrive at a space where notions of equality and justice and respect can enter this whole hierarchical power relations the whole idea is it's not just about speaking truth to power it is offering alternative metaphors for power and I think women this is really a century of women you know that you're not and in all campuses most campuses I think the demographic is tipping especially in higher education in favor of women so it's our destiny it's a role we have to we have to pick up that role and walk with it and stride with it you know Maya Angelou's famous poem phenomenal woman it's a beautiful poem it's so I think I think that's where that's what we could say it's very difficult for us to enter and break through the so-called sanctity of the private sphere the home because there is such a myth around it but I I don't want the other important shift that the Varma committee made was you know there is this obsession in Indian law which talks about outraging the modesty of a woman within quotes now the Varma committee sought to take that out of the law because what is outraging the modesty of a woman you wouldn't say outraging the modesty of a man would you so but unfortunately in the law that was enacted that was brought back because bodily integrity is also the honor of the community according to our norms now therefore it's like whenever you ask someone to I mean whenever you used to ask someone to write you a letter of reference in India at the end of the long paragraph you would say she also bears a good moral character and that was supposed to be a great recommendation now so therefore this means actually flipping or inverting all of these received notions it's hard work but it has to be done and we and women like you will do it thank you thank you I'm ambassador John McDonald the founder of the Institute for Multitrack Diplomacy in 1992 this is Gopinoth and I are old friends I'd like to welcome you to Washington and to thank you for your inspiring remarks I'd like to tell you a story about her and then we'll have a question in 1997 we started working with Kashmiris both on the Indian side and the Pakistan side and in 2004 we were able to raise money and we wanted to carry out the first ever training and conflict resolution in the peace building between Kashmiris and in in the Polka Mandu which was a safe space there was an NGO in Pakistan Islamabad who would help us bring together 10 people including two women but at that point in time no NGOs were allowed in Indian Kashmir so I approached Mrs. Gopinoth I'd gotten to know her because her nephew worked with me at the International Labor Organization in Geneva in the late 70s and he introduced me to her and I told her my problem that she have any contacts or friends who were Kashmiris who could attend this first-ever training and thanks to her diligence and her hard work she identified six terrific women over all Kashmiris and they became part of that 10 person delegation in Kathmandu so we had 20 people 10 from each side including eight women and she knows and I want to share with you that I know the women are the peace builders in the world the women are the peace builders they get it long before the men ever do that's just a fact of life anyway she we had a fantastic given time there together with those 20 people the first ever training between Kashmiris since the separation in 1947 and it was all thanks to Mrs. Gopinoth she's a great woman and a great leader now my question for the last 60 years the caste system has been unconstitutional today today there are 300 million untouchables or Dalit in India today 48 percent of the women of India are illiterate what can the government do about this and what can private citizens do to change the system asking Einstein to explain his theory of relativity in two minutes thank you ambassador mcdonald it's such a pleasure to meet you you've been a great inspiration for our work before I answer your question may I also add that in Kashmir you are aware and I know you raised your voice against it there was a a bill that came into their legislature luckily it didn't pass muster to deny Kashmiri women who married outside the state residency in Kashmir this is Indian Kashmir so that they could not own property and you know property is a huge issue in India and and the the justification that one of the legislators gave was well since our men will be marrying women from outside the equation will set itself off so it's not that we're denying women we're we are giving certain other women the right so but luckily it didn't pass muster to answer your question about the caste system at the at the political level as you know it's unconstitutional casteism is now unconstitutional but we also have affirmative action whereby 22.5% of positions seats in colleges and universities are reserved for members of the Dalit community now this does happen however prejudice does exist I think and I think people like Ambassador McDonald can make a huge impact by looking at issues of advocacy and and training and this is happening now it's for example there is a greater assertion among the Dalits of their rights you cannot at least in the metropolitan cities of India you cannot use unparliamentary language or you cannot you cannot refer to them as lower castes it's it they can there is a very strong commission that defends their rights but as you're right a lot more you're right a lot more needs to be done and I think educational institutions and the sphere of culture has a great deal to do with it the government alone can only be punitive it cannot change mindsets and I think for education there is a huge role huge role not just for the rights of women but the rights of all disadvantaged sections of community and for example in India because of the overlays of caste class religion and gender you would have you have something known as a category which is called a triply disadvantaged for example so so if you're a for example if you're a tribal woman if you're a tribal who's living in a poor belt of India and you also happen to be a woman you have three disadvantages laid against you so you're triply disadvantaged now how are those ruby cons crossed I think again young people today are the answer our demographic dividend we we have faith in them because they do not buy into casteist culture as easily as perhaps my generation and the earlier generation did and and we hope to see more of you in India more often than we have in the past the last year thank you Ambassador McDonald your generous as always I think we're running out of time so we'll take two quick questions here and then if you can actually three and then we'll if you can answer them all together that would be great my name is Dustin Smith I'm at the World Bank just up the street thank you for your talk and just very briefly I would like to ask what do you think is the future of the women's movement in India I was in Delhi during kind of the height of the Anahasari movement there was a lot of excitement particularly amongst young people that seemed to have faded out very quickly and so I think that while there's excitement I mean unfortunately after the incident in December and there's also a lot of I think legitimate skepticism over what will this movement turn into and what will come out of it so I'm just curious if you have any projections on that are you talking about the Anahasari movement I'm talking about women's about the women's movement but I'm drawing parallels is there skepticism Dustin right yeah is that did you find skepticism I have in fact I I have confronted a great deal of hope about the women's movement the only thing is I think it's important for the women's movements because there's several not to become ghettoized dealing only with women's issues I think it's important that we engage with wider issues that impact citizenship because we need to just not speak for women we need to speak for all our citizens men and women and not just the citizens of India but make linkages with citizens after all the world today is is a borderless state right it's like a metaphor for all of humanity I think in a sense so unless we we we make common cause across just the women's domain you know we will stay within what is known as the Lakshman Rekha you're aware of that and that's what we want to break so we must have a position on on the environment we must have the positions on our paradigms of development we must have a position on wage wages we must have a position on of course on declining sex ratios that's a different issue the women's movement in order to continue to be shall I say replenishing must re-examine its certitudes must put its own certitudes to scrutiny in a true Socratic sense and and also enlarge the compass of its engagement otherwise we tend to get you know and there will be a backlash like for a while happened in the United States and now the word feminist as you know is not a very fashionable word anyway because of the kinds of associations that have so we have to make sure that women do not become intolerant of other perspectives you know we we must engage more and more people to look at issues with different lenses and I thought if I could crave your indulgence for a minute there was this woman called Joe Wellakot I don't know if you've read she was a Quaker she was she she served as an Air Force engineer in the Second World War and gave it all up to join the pacifist movement and she said you know when she's to look at these three words women peace and power they sort of the interrelationships between the three became very confused for example when she looked at women and peace she saw a very sort of a pale pink pale grayish kind of color when she looked at women it was a question mark standing aside when she looked at women and power it looked scarlet and threatening and when she put women when she put power and peace together she said it was like two magnetized toy dogs who were sniffing suspiciously at each other's rear ends and and and she said she just couldn't understand this and she said then I changed the spectacles because these were worldly spectacles and then when I saw some when I put on my new spectacles I found something different so I think the women's movement needs to fashion those spectacles not just for women but I think for all citizens I don't know if I answered your question but you have thank you thank you Hi my name is Dilpreet I'm with the State Department my question is I'm interested to know what the reaction of the Indian public and particularly women has been to the government's response beyond the Verma committee and beyond the ordinance and then also an update on the nearby fund right sure shall I take that together yeah yeah okay thank you thank you very much madam my name is Liu Zunyi from Shanghai Institute for International Studies I'm a visiting fellow in CSIS now just now you I think you have mentioned allowed about because India is a society have many religions so and I think in these religions such as Hindu and Islam there are many places that is discriminated women so I think how the advancement of India women encourage the encourages the religious revolution or evolution or how how do you think India religions adapt to modern society thank you adapt to adapt to modern society yeah thank you the ordinance itself was changed by the legislation and women's groups are still engaging with some of those aspects as I mentioned marital rape is still outside the purview of the law and it remains in the private sphere the the whole issue of it has taken on board the issue of bodily integrity the armed forces special powers act is again and the impunities that I extended are again outside the purview of the law I think it's a work in progress women need to continuously engage and continuously revisits the revisit the fundamentals that are proposed to be the cornerstone of law in India as I said earlier the slippage between law and justice is something that women have to address so is justice being delivered it's not enough for it to stay on the statute books and to enable or to to ensure that there is swift executive action not just at the level at the highest levels but in the local police station how can these men who have probably grown up look grown up with domestic violence how can they turn into compassionate policeman how when they when they see violence day in and day out how can that they make that shift so that when a woman enters the police station to register a complaint they are already predisposed and understand where she's coming from so there are huge issues and they are societal we need to you know the work is never done as they say the work for freedom is never done and the field is never quiet so there's a lot of work to do and we do hope that the energies of young women such as you will be engaged also from here to push that agenda not just for India but for the world over thank you and you sorry I will respond it's a difficult question but I do want to share with you that it is not the it is the way in which rights within religious groupings is articulated and not per se either the book or the or the original vision of the founders of a particular you know in India we Hinduism is not a composite one religion it's a way of life we have several gods and we have many goddesses by the way you know in India we worship goddesses and we beat them at we beat up our women at it so there is this paradox as well and in China you have of course one Yuan Yi who was the goddess of Buddhist goddess of compassion you know Kuan Yi Kuan Yi I'm sorry so basically the idea is that the personal the personal laws that govern inheritance marriage adoption and so on somehow kept very tightly within codes that men are determining I'll give you an example it took a woman Mary Roy two decades and she's she was born into a Christian into the Christian faith two decades to petition the courts to make her right to inheritance to her father's property valid because the church resisted it in India she finally did and now she of course is but then what happens is you are entitled to your father's property but you don't want to take your brothers to court you see so on the statute you're entitled but do you want to many women will say well I don't want to fight him in court it's okay that's the way we've been socialized so when we talk about religions I would be a little more sort of gentle because it is the the political manner in which these religions are being interpreted through the centuries and we all know that that they've become institutionalized in very very closed ways so it's not the faith per se but the institutionalization and the whole paraphernalia of the faith and what it has done to keep women out for example in Islam the equality of women was very much there in the beginnings of Islam I'm sure there are many Islam scholars here Islamic scholars but what do we see today but even within Islam there are movements of reform that are happening so the thing to do is to get women and men to engage with reform within the communities even today for example in the way people in Washington will look at religion might be very different from the way in which people in the Bible belt in the United States would look at religion so how does one appropriate religion and what way is it being sequestered is the main is the question that we need to answer and yes we have to you know blind faith anywhere is not a good thing every open and engaging religion must encourage its followers to recontinuously reinvent the because religion is a way of living and it is it has to continuously grow continuously to have conversation with itself and with other faiths so unless that those doors open we may go back thank you for your question thank you thank you so much Dr. Gopinath can you please join me in thanking her