 I'd like to welcome you all tonight to this start of our two-day events on gender justice and neoliberalism in South Asia. Tonight's event is specifically focusing on gender violence, neoliberalism, and the Hindu right. I was about to say, turn off your phones, and mine is ringing. Tomorrow we'll be having a full-day symposium on gender justice and injustice and the neoliberal state in South Asia. Just to do a few housekeeping announcements before we begin, the first is to please turn off your mobile phones. We are recording, and we're recording not just the discussion and any kind of interactions that happen between our two speakers, but we'll also be recording the Q&A. So if you don't want to be recorded, then I suggest you don't ask a question. And if you don't want to be recorded, you might want to think of sitting in the back. We will have a link to that on the South Asia Institute website through the events page, and you can access it there. I've already started doing the housekeeping. I should also begin by saying that this event is being jointly organized by Freedom Without Fear Platform, the London School of Economics Gender Institute, and the SOAS South Asia Institute. So this is a very much a collaborative effort, and it's a very exciting time for us really to be able to put our energies and ideas together during times which I think are really in need of some critical discussion and reflection on the things and events that are going on in South Asia in the context of neoliberalism. Okay, so Kalpana Wilson and I will be co-chairing tonight's event, and I will, without going any further, I'll allow Kalpana to introduce our two speakers. Thank you. Okay, thank you, Tej. Well, as Tej has already said, we're very excited to be able to host these two speakers, and I'm going to introduce them in a moment, and I'm not going to say very much because I know you're eager to hear them, but I just wanted to say that this is a really important event for us, because in a way it's the first chance we're having here in London to reflect on the implications and specifically the gender implications of what has been happening in India since the Hindu right came to power at a national level through the victory of Narendra Modi and the BJP in the national elections last May. We're also, of course, coming up very soon to the anniversary of the genocidal violence which took place in Gujarat in 2002 against the Muslim minority community, in which, as we know, women were particularly targeted for the most horrific forms of violence. And the survivors of 2002 are still waiting for justice, and they and those who support them are continually facing attempts to silence them by the state. I mean, while we're seeing across the country in recent months attempts to replicate that violence in a number of different places, and this is something which both our speakers are going to talk about. Now, finally, before I introduce them, I want to just pass on to you a very brief message of support which the Freedom Without Fear platform received from Nighat Saeed Khan, who is a leading feminist activist and scholar in Pakistan. And she said in her message that the 12th of February is a very important day in Pakistan and celebrated as Pakistan Women's Day in honour of those women who came onto the streets and battled against the military government, the so-called Islamisation of Pakistan and women's rights. Fear kept everyone silent from 1977 to 83 when we broke the silence by demonstrating on the streets of Lahore. Most were beaten by heavily armed police. Many were arrested. Many hit by tear gas, but no woman left the battle. And she concludes by saying, I'm very happy to hear that this meeting in London is taking place on this day. So we're really extremely honoured to have with us today Professor Tanika Sarkar. She's Professor of Modern History in the Centre for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. And many of us here have been inspired by her really groundbreaking work, which for the first time made women's own voices in colonial India audible. She's published extensively on women and the Hindu right, on cultural nationalism and the politics of Hindutva, as well as social reform in colonial and post-colonial India and peasant and workers movements. Among her recent books, some of the most influential have been Hindu wife, Hindu nation, which appeared in 2001, and rebel's wife, saints, which appeared in 2009. And as I'm sure many of you will agree, her work has always made very strong connections with the questions and the struggles which we are facing in the present. And of course, this is very much the case with her work on the Hindu right. Many of us too will never forget her seminal article on the Gujarat genocide, semiotics of terror, Muslim children and women in Hindu rastra. So we're going to hear first from Professor Sarkar, but before that I'll briefly also introduce to you Kavita Krishnan. We're very excited to have Kavita Krishnan with us. Many of you will know her as a leading feminist and left activist based in Delhi. She was centrally involved in the anti-rape movement, which began in Delhi in December 2012, both as a participant as well as extensively writing and speaking about the movement and about the broader questions it raised about gender violence in India and the struggle against it. Kavita Krishnan is the secretary of the All India Progressive Women's Association APOA, which is an organisation active among women workers, among agricultural labourers and among other sections of poor and labouring women in rural and urban India. It's an organisation which has a record of resisting feudal violence and state repression against women. And Kavita is also the editor of Liberation, the monthly publication of the Communist Party of India, Marxist Leninist, the CPIML. So we're going to have the format where each of the speakers will talk to you and then following both of their talks we will be opening it up to questions for the audience. So I'd like to hand over now to Kalpana. Thank you, Kalpana, for your very, very kind words and thank you for having me here, especially with Kavita. It's a great honour and pleasure. And I would also like to thank Navte Jansana for their great help in arranging this. Now we have a very large theme here, something that embraces almost all the critical issues in society and politics in India today. So I can only make a few and extremely general points to start off the discussion. Now as I understand it and I'm not terribly clear about it, we are meant to consider a very highly pathologised situation shaped on the one hand by Hindutva extremism and on the other hand by neoliberal capitalism which misleadingly calls itself reform and development. Within this the specific focus is going to be on violence against women. Now tomorrow I'll say a bit more about possible links between Hindutva and neoliberalism. If there is an actual link or is it merely a contingent temporal coincidence, two different processes growing together within the same time frame but independently of each other. My own feeling is that they are connected especially in their effects, if not in their intentions. There are fractures within each and each has doubts about the other. The peasants and workers' wings of the RSS, Rashiya Swamseh Baksang, the apex organisation of Hindu extremism, they resent the some of the neoliberal aspects of the Modi governance. There are doubts about each other and I don't at all want to suggest a fully calibrated seamless conspiracy or something like that. But I do strongly feel that they sustain and reinforce each other and I'll give you a couple of examples how that works out. For instance, the embrace of reforms gains Hindutva, the massive approval of corporate powers who are not otherwise interested in the Hindutva agenda. And some of these sections, especially their representatives in the media, might even be quite uncomfortable about the violence involved in that. Hindutva, on the other hand, unleashes enormous Hindu popular energy and passion for a governance which is strongly inclined towards a form of developmentalism which is very strongly anti-people. Hindutva alone, and that's its greatest asset so to speak, alone provides a quote unquote moral frame for authoritarian governance which the standalone economics of neoliberalism had so far lacked. The economic policies of reform have focused on the economics of development without having the resources to whip up popular passions, especially the passions of those who are going to suffer from these policies. Hindutva provides that resource. Dalits and Adivasis, Adivasi tribals who are the worst victims of the neoliberal agenda, especially of the land acquisition processes, development by disposition, are especially recruited for Hindu violence. The vision of Hindu nation, powerful, glorious, and vengeful, distract them, fill them with dreams about a power that they lack but which the nation can have access to. It distracts them from material distress of their own and it promises a measure of upward mobility, of comradeship with upper caste in violence against Muslims and Christians. Which acts neoliberalism and Hindutva acts to justify the other and to normalize a general climate of coercion and dispossession. Dispossession whether of rights of religious minorities or of basic entitlements of subaltern classes and castes. Both legitimize in different ways assaults on vulnerable bodies. The present BJP regime of course is an explicit fusion of the two. Modi has more or less closed the gap between the two, Hindutva and neoliberalism. So I'll begin with the most extreme instances of gendered violence, the sensational series of rapes and killings that became global news since 16 December 2012. Maybe Kavita would say something about that. And these happen often in large cities in public places and I'll call them public rapes for lack of a better word. The events also produced and we must never forget this, waves upon waves of protest as tenacious and as continuous as the violence is. The extent of domestic and I call them public rapes because the extent of domestic abuse and conjugal violence, conjugal rape is never calculated. And in fact conjugal rape has not been named as a crime in our country despite years of women's struggles to name it thus. In the last few years of course, I don't even need to say this, there's been a massive explosion of popular rape, publicly rapes. It's uncertain. I'm sorry. It's uncertain if it's a case of better reporting or if there's an actual increase. I myself lean towards the actual increase thesis. It seems as if each day competes with the previous one to imagine and perpetrate worse and worse forms of abuse and brutality on women. And the form of violence is much more sinister than its scale. It's accompanied with a prolonged sexual torture, sexual mutilation and it concludes with brutal murder. South Asian feminists are divided about how to talk about the details of such horror or whether to talk about them at all. Would a focus on the horror not sensationalize the matter sunduly or would it not verbally repeat the rape? On the other hand, wouldn't keeping silence lose us the sense of shame and horror which may have mobilized valuable resources for sensitization. So this is a debate that goes on. Sexual violations of course are the limit case of a process that often begins before the birth of the woman in our country. India has the unique distinction of having the worst sex ratio in the world which Amatya Sen has called the story of missing women, women who should have been there but whose absence is not natural but is man-made, made in the bosom of her family with feticide, female infanticide and deliberate neglect. The very recent gruesome rotak gang rape and murder case happened in a state with an especially bad sex ratio even for India. Some of us here may have seen Nisha Paheja's documentary film about a beauty contestant and about a Vishwa Hindu Parishad Hindutva activist woman. One is a sophisticated urbanite, the other is a rather boorish small town fundamentalist not very well educated. What they have in common is a chilling familiarity with female infanticide as an established fact of life which doesn't even surprise them. The beauty contestant has a Bombay based highly educated middle class mother who was ordered by her family to kill off the second daughter and when she refused she was turned out of her home. The VHP girl on the other hand worships a father who beats her up regularly. Why? Because as she says, I am a girl and still he did not kill me. How can I not worship him? This is such a rare exceptional act. Our public rapes then a continuation and effect of usual patriarchal operations, you know, running from birth to death at the risk of sounding melodramatic. I'm more inclined to see it as Deborah Apostle sees it. As the emergence of a new realm of the monstrous quite distinct from the run of the mill patriarchy which nonetheless prepares the groundwork for it. A well known site for the monstrous are of course communal pogroms. We don't have riots anymore in the country. It's always pogroms. It's one way killing by a huge majority of a slender minority helpless people. Gujarat 2002 to which Kalpana referred being a very telling example at that time bodies of profoundly vulnerable Muslim women were freely available for gang rape, torture, sexual mutilation, killing sequence that I talked about at the beginning. In fact it went a step further sometimes, you know, wombs were particularly targeted and the unborn fetus would be hacked, you know, and it has something to do perhaps with the imagined Hindu worry about a rampant growth of Muslim numbers. In fact Gujarat I strongly feel rehearse the script for the later public rapes. Many of the features are absolutely identical. It created to perhaps an insatiable appetite for violent sexual acts even in non riot situations. One having once having done that once having told the world that this has been done. I think a lot of people all over the country would be ready for a replay even when there is not organized mass violence and hence the public rapes. There have also been grotesque torture and rape of Catholic nuns too. But somehow anti-Christian atrocities are neither reported very widely nor, you know, reacted against. I don't know why. The monstrous covers a large social ground too. At one social extreme at one social poll we had the bizarre Nithari killings in Delhi 2006 I think it was when a super rich employer's house revealed cannibalized and sexually abused or skeletons of cannibalized and sexually abused child domestic workers. A situation of extreme power and extreme vulnerability throws up bizarre aggravations of normalcy, even though normal power relations have produced them in the first place. It is as if the normal sees its own image through the glass darkly. I won't call them abnormal. They are a continuation of the normal but a horrible aggravation of it too. At the other poll we have the December 16, 2012 event whose rapists when rapists came from slums slums, which among other things, I mean, there has to be a, you know, study of Delhi slums, detailed, you know, new one studies but slums which oscillate between extreme insecurity and deprivations on the one hand and constant tantalization of senses and desires and aspirations for the rich man's world and for the rich man's commodities all the time made, which are made continuously available as spectacle or a spectacle of spectacle by the mass media. But which constantly elude the actual grasp of the slum dwellers. So you have the images of the rich man's life at your fingertip almost on your mobile screen, but you can't ever touch it. The ceaseless incitation and frustration of aspirations probably build up to a rage that seeks out bodies that are even more vulnerable. In the late 1980s, Saptar Hashmi, a CPM cultural activist who was later killed by Congress thugs devised what I think was a brilliantly innovative plan of taking theater to these slums, not taking, you know, not staging placed for the slum people but involving the people of the slum in the writing, production and acting out of place of their own. That would be would have been something that would provide absorbing and creative alternatives to the mass media that they passively consume and to Hindutva campaigns, which are rampant in the slums and about which I'll talk a bit tomorrow. After his death, sadly, neither his party nor the institutionalized commemorative events followed up on this. I think that was a great chance that was lost. Structural violence erupts into the spectacular, routinely almost in caste-related violence. Upper caste rapes are demonstratively public, deliberately public, especially in villages. I mean, they are almost like a village feast or a village festival watched by everybody. But they are rarely reported, soon forgotten, hardly ever there in the global media coverage, and they do not evoke, they do provoke activist protests, but not the kind of national upsurge that the 16th December rapes mobilized. The Kailanji massacre is a case in point. A Dalit woman had the audacity to build herself a proper house. And she and her family were tortured, raped, killed in unspeakably, unimaginably obscene ways. The normal pathology of caste does explode in occasional, unusual episodes of violence. But as Anupama Rao has remarked in another context, caste-related violence is usually classified as a category apart, away from gender violence, even when its form is explicitly gendered. So it becomes a case of caste violence, not of gender violence. The two are kept separate. There are, of course, multiple sides of what I called license violence. The amazing exemptions and protection for super privileged categories like the armed forces under the arms forces, Special Powers Act, okay? It's almost the Special Powers Act provisions are so wide, so all embracing, so tenderly protective of the armed forces that it's almost an invitation to violence of all sorts, including sexual violence, whether in Kashmir or in the Northeast. That too goes for violence against men and women in police custody, who are suspected of links with Maoist insurrectionaries. You know, any kind of suspected links would, you know, really be the end. Police custody is of course a place that is opaque and entirely unregulated. And laws against civil and human rights violations hardly operate there, even though there are very valiant civil and democratic rights groups, which do their best to uncover and mitigate them. Is there a problem? So I'll wrap up and give the floor to Kavita in a minute, because she's going to show a film, part of a film also. Of all the non-Western countries in the world, I think, I think India alone enjoys a rather good global press. Okay, I shouldn't resent that, but I do. She is seen as the world's largest democracy, which she is. I'm not knocking the democratic rights or the, you know, democracy in any sense, you know, I live through the emergency. She's celebrated as a modern country, yet with a great civilization behind her, as the home of Gandhi and Nehru, and as a most hospitable sanctuary for corporate investments, even at the cost of our, you know, even at the cost of the lives, livelihood, land and environment. On very rare occasions, the world is allowed to see something different briefly. Gujarat, 2002, Delhi, 16 December, 2012. Though never Kailanji, nor the rape and killing of Manurama in Manipur by army men. Still, when at last something horrible, something monstrous in India does appear on the global radar, I think it demands of us to explode the larger and everyday structures of coercion and power that nourish and enable such grotesqueness. Thank you. Thank you very much, Tanika, for that very, very thought provoking talk. And we will, of course, be having questions. But before that, we are going to hand over to Kavita Krishnan, and she's going to show a few things. Should I just speak a few words about... When you're setting that up. Yeah. I'm just going to start with showing two short clippings from a new film that has been made on the communal violence anti-Muslim program in Muzaffar Nagar in 2013 that basically set the stage for the Modi victory in a very big way. It accounted for a huge increase in the number of seats that the BJP won in Uttar Pradesh, which is one of the largest, which is the largest state in India. So I just want to start with showing those two short clips. The name of the film is Muzaffar Nagar Baki Hai, which the filmmaker has translated to say Muzaffar Nagar eventually, Muzaffar Nagar next, something like that. And the filmmaker is Nakul Sani. If this film is much longer film, I just wanted to show these two clips to start the conversation here. You can see in this film that the way in which the whole the language of honor, the language of protecting women and protecting the honor of the community by controlling women is something that was deployed to incite the violence, the communal violence in Muzaffar Nagar and to justify it subsequently and to harvest it for the elections. The person you heard speaking right in the beginning is Amit Shah, who is the president of the ruling Bharti Janta Party now. And you saw the language that he was using. And it's also quite clear that the women in Muzaffar Nagar are speaking so clearly about the fact that that violence did not, of course it involved violence, sexual violence of a very terrible kind against the Muslim women. There are seven women in Muzaffar Nagar who are still awaiting any kind of progress in their cases. They have filed cases of rape, but those cases are not moving anywhere because the entire state machinery, and this includes, I should say that here, this includes the state machinery in Uttar Pradesh which is not ruled by the BJP, which is ruled by the Samajwadi Party, where the police and the whole prosecution machinery is actually working to somehow silence and demoralize those women rather than move towards justice. But clearly the violence was not only the violence that happened in that particular moment of communal violence in Muzaffar Nagar. It's also a violence that has continued since then because it's had an impact on the lives of both Muslim and Hindu women in Muzaffar Nagar, which those women do talk about, that now in the name of protecting women, girls are being told that we can't let you move freely outside and so on. All that is also happening. And you think about it, basically when you think about the corporate and the communal agenda, or the development and the Hindutva agenda, and there's a lot of attempts, you can see a lot of people trying to make sense of this and write about it in India now. And you see people, as I said, trying to advise the present government that you need to tell your Hindutva lunatic fringe to stop what they're doing so that your development agenda can move forward so that the progress that you want to achieve for the country can go on and so on and so forth. You see a lot of liberal commentators trying to argue that. And I would say that it's interesting to me that one of the slogans that was raised in Muzaffar Nagar as a rallying call for the violence against the profiled Muslim community, which was accused of being the source of sexual danger for Hindu women. The rallying cry was, save your daughters. Save your daughters was the rallying cry. And these same slogan has now been issued by the prime minister himself as a slogan which is supposed to be the rallying cry against sex-selective abortion to correct the sex ratio, which is what Danika also spoke about. So what is the relationship between these two agendas? Is it that there is this progress and development and women's empowerment agenda which can move on if only the Hindutva groups that you see here were to be kept in check a little bit? Is that truly the case? And I believe that that is very far from the case because the way in which the BJP is making inroads in states where it has not had a presence. For instance, in West Bengal, I've come across West Bengal activists of the Hindutva groups boasting on social media about the fact that they have rescued a girl from a love jihad situation. And it's amusing them that they don't see any contradiction in writing that now we've rescued her and now the hard work begins of convincing her that she is a victim of love jihad. So they're actually writing about this on social media telling you which is which town they've done it in and all of that. And clearly this is a method of mobilization of mobilizing support that is very, very key, very, very central to the way in which the BJP is operating. And so the use of the slogan, you know the use of the Betty Bachao slogan, savior daughter slogan, I don't think it is coincidental then that it should appear in a different way and it should gain a different kind of legitimacy in the context of sex, selective abortion, in the context of India's progress, development and some kind of almost a feminist kind of framework which would be articulated by the prime minister. But instead of there being a gap between those two places where the slogan appears, I would say that we should look for the way in which, you know what that slogan ends up meaning on the ground and how it eventually ends up being actually a slogan that justifies the control, the surveillance over women, which is of course happening beyond the Hindutva groups which is a fact of life in the caste society that we live in which is, you know, that the denial of women's autonomy is I would say the big problem in India. You hear so much about the rapes and so on and so forth but you hear very little spoken about the whole question of women's autonomy and the denial of that autonomy which goes beyond, it's not that the Hindutva groups are the only institutions which are militating against that autonomy. You have the caste institution, you also have other structures which I will talk about, other circumstances in which the denial of that autonomy is there's a need to maintain the lack of autonomy to hold back that autonomy. So I will talk about that a little later. But one of the things which I was thinking about how we need to sort of widen the frame beyond the episodes of sexual violence or certain episodes of sexual violence that one has heard about. And I won't speak about those because I have spoken about them before and Tanika also touched upon them. But I would say that we also need to think about, you know, the other ways in which violence or repression is making itself felt. For instance, in just in recent times, you've seen, I would say that in this whole, in the way in which the development agenda is framed, there is an attempt to frame activists who are trying to talk about people's movements or the repression on people's movements or the denial of the violence done against people's livelihood, against and of indigenous communities of peasant communities, and especially of the women in those communities. Those activists are sought to be represented as the enemies of development. And for instance, recently a Greenpeace activist in India was denied the right to travel to the UK in order to canvas about the violent effects of a company with links in the UK of the SR mining company and the impact of their mining projects on indigenous people and peasant in India. So I think that the fact that that happened and then I would say that even those who are activists who are talking about issues of justice, it's almost as though the agenda of justice has to be jettisoned from the vision of development. And so justice is there when justice is translated to mean this kind of violence against certain profiled communities. So justice is being denied by the administration over some imagined instance of sexual violence against a Hindu woman. So you need a pogrom to avenge, to achieve justice. But when it comes to seeking justice for the Gujarat 2002 violence, for instance, just today one of the leading activists, Thista Sethalwar, was denied bail by a Gujarat court and she was on the brink of being arrested but she's secured a stay from the Supreme Court. We'll know what's to happen tomorrow. But on a concocted case of misusing funds that she received and so on and so forth. So this kind of very vindictive targeting of activists and I'm just naming two instances, there are several, there are any number of other instances of this that one could think of. But I would say that basically the very, on the one hand you have a vindictive sort of going after activists who are talking about justice. On the other hand, I would say that even in terms of the way in which politics is unfolding, it's almost as though in terms of the alliances made, in terms of what is considered acceptable in terms of political alliances and so on, it's almost as though there too, justice has to be jettisoned entirely. One of the instances would be, in my mind, is that we're yet to see what is to happen in the government that is to be formed in Kashmir. But if there is an alliance there between the BJP and the PDP, we are being told that what is being negotiated is what is going to be the BJP's position. Will it pursue through that government? What will they pursue is the Article 370 and so on. But there, the talk of the BJP's position on repression in Kashmir, on sexual violence in Kashmir, on the denial, on the systematic impunity of which the armed forces special powers act is only one instance there. These are things which it's almost as though they don't need to be talked about when an alliance is being contemplated there in the valley for there. If you look at Bihar also, where there's an attempt there for the BJP to manage to break the ruling Jantadal United party there, and they're reaching out to the Dalit chief minister there. I would say that when you have prominent leaders like Ramvila Spaswan, who claim to speak for the Dalit community, or even the present chief minister of Bihar, reaching out to the BJP, you wonder what happens then to the struggles for justice for the Dalit victims of massacres there. Because those who have been struggling for justice there have got very little from the courts. There's been a series of sort of serial acquittals, just like there were serial massacres earlier in the 1990s. You have serial acquittals now. And yet it's almost as though political contracts that are made there, the ways in which secularism is defined, the ways in which political alliance with the BJP is defined, all these can happen without recourse to, without any link with the whole question of justice. The other thing I think that I'd like to just touch upon is the other ways in which I would say that, if you think about moral policing or the whole question of protection of women and the ways in which that is used as a justification for control, increased control and surveillance and women and so on, I would say that we also need to see how that operates probably even beyond the framework of, the way in which it's usually understood. It's usually seen only in the framework of Hindutva groups doing violence against inter-community marriage or against Valentine's Day and so on and so forth. But I would say that again, it should be seen in a larger framework of how it operates beyond the Hindutva groups and beyond the framework only of choices in terms of marriage and in terms of how you dress or whether you celebrate Valentine's Day and so on. Because, and I'll be talking about this tomorrow at greater length, but I want to just touch upon it here today, that you see how in factories in India today, there are many instances where even recent, I'll just name a few recent instances where women workers in a factory in Kerala where strip search to check whether which of them was menstruating because in order to punish whoever had left a sanitary pad in the toilet. Now, this happened in an SCZ in Kerala and you have another instance in, you have a new report in Tamil Nadu which has talked about how women in the garment and textile factories in Tamil Nadu, many of them are rural migrants from Dalit households in rural Tamil Nadu and they live in hostels under extreme surveillance where they are denied the use of mobile phones, where they are denied, if they're found using a mobile phone, they can be publicly humiliated. One worker attempted suicide after such humiliation and being beaten up and humiliated in public after being found with a mobile phone on the factory premises. And one of the things is that, and they are prevented from speaking to outsiders, speaking to male coworkers. And in some factories, they're even discouraged from speaking to women coworkers. Now, what does this say? Because now all this is justified by factory management in the name of, we are in the position of the parents. We are, the parents are handing over their girls to us to work for us and we have to protect them. This is all for their protection. And these kind of restrictions in the name of protecting them is clearly something that is happening in a wider frame as well. And I would say that where the Hindutva agenda comes in here and where a Hindutva government in power, what does that mean? It also links up with, if you look at the BJP's election manifesto in 2014, they talked about the labor industry family. They talked about the industry family. So trying to redefine the space of industry as being not one in which the workers would be struggling for their rights against the management or against the factory owners, but as a family in which all could have a place. Of course, this is very much to do with the RSS agenda in which they try to redefine cast also, recast cast also in this language of family. They recast industry also in this language of family. The point is that that, given that these are already existing means in which women workers are disciplined in factory spaces, the very presence of a BJP government with an agenda where they have already, without any changes in the labor laws yet, the prime minister has just made an announcement that industries do not, they can just announce self-compliance with labor laws. They do not have to. There will be no state supervision of compliance with labor laws. So clearly it's exactly like saying we will not interfere in the family. Similarly, we will not interfere in the factory and self-compliance is good enough. And there are many other instances in which we can see, and I just want to very briefly touch upon before I end, to talk about, we should also think about what are the implications of the recent dilutions in the land ordinance, land acquisition ordinance. We should remember that it is women who have been at the forefront of struggles against land grab almost everywhere in the country that such struggles are taking place even today. And the very fact that a land acquisition law that was one with a great deal of struggle is being diluted so soon within the first six months of this government coming to power. The implications of that for women, the implications of that, the implications of the, it's just as factories are being told, self-compliance will do. Environmental laws are also, and regulations are also being similarly, we are being told that those will not be strictly implemented, and we will simply accept any compliance. You just have to say that you've done it and everything is in place and we will accept it, that kind of thing. And what are the implications of all of this for women? And the fact that we need to think about violence against women in these contexts as well. And I think that that is where the whole corporate and the communal agenda do meet. Because it is not that such violence has not existed when there has not been a communal government at the center. Such violence has been widespread and epidemic. But I think that the ways in which such violence can be justified, can be legitimized, can be normalized, and can become more legitimate tools of governance and tools of development, I think are what we are confronting today. And that is what as activists and movements do, we are confronting, we have confronted with the challenge of resisting. So I'll end there, I think. Okay, thank you very much for that, Kavita. I'm sure a lot of people are eager to ask questions to both the speakers. I just very quickly wanted to tell you, by the way, that the film which Kavita short clips from, which is called Muzaffar Nagar Bakhi Hai, is a very interesting film, very much worth seeing. She's actually brought a copy with her this time. And we are going to be having a screening of the full film on the 24th of February at seven o'clock and that'll be in the Vernon Square building, room number V211. So that's on the 24th of February. Okay, so I'm going to open up the floor for questions and we'll take three questions at a time. There are rolling mics, so please wait till you get a mic before you start speaking. And do keep your questions brief so that we can have the maximum number of people getting to participate in this discussion. Yeah, so yeah. I'm going to take three questions now, yes? It works, it works. Beautiful, sorry. So Dr. Sarkar, you said during your talk that it seemed like the real number of rape cases or sexual assault cases had increased dramatically. I was wondering what made you think so? I mean, what was the cause for your inference? Hi, yeah, I'll just try and make this really quick. So I was really interested in kind of what you were saying about the factory as a place to discipline women, the ways in which they women aren't allowed to talk to male coworkers. And that's a really interesting parallel to schools in India. And I went to school in Bangalore and a child in my school committed suicide recently because she was suspended for talking to a boy. And there have been several cases like that of child assault in schools, but also this enforcement of discipline of women within the school. And I was kind of wondering what kind of comments you might have on that. I think it's really easy to maybe apply a Marxist analysis and then say all the schools just are placed like breed workers and like instill the same sense of values of discipline in them. But a lot of these incidents have also happened in schools of the bourgeoisie like where incredibly rich Indians go and are disciplined to not talking to boys in their class, like not being able to use cell phones, having very, very strict codes of conduct. So I was wondering how that might fit into this overall picture that you're talking about. Yes? Then. Yeah, actually I just wanted to, since we mentioned... It's so fun. We can hear it. Okay, you know, since we mentioned 2002, I was just wondering in terms of the monstrous element of generalized gang rapes that you were referring to, Tanika, whether one should not be thinking of Surat in 1992 and 93, because that was one of the incidents which as you, you know, the late convert to Modiism, Madhu Kishwar's journal had, which is still available on the web, has an incredibly detailed account of what really happened there. If you remember also it was the first episode of large scale video recording of these things that was then passed around. So I think partly to understand how Hindutva and gang rapes came together, I think 1992 is a very key element in both in terms of the personnel involved and in terms of the technology involved and in terms of, as you said, the camaraderie that these episodes of mass violence afford to people across class divisions, which is possible to be, you know, done in this way. Okay, let's respond. Yeah, you're Anishinaabe. Yes. So I tried to sketch out a kind of general brutalization in society and polity and the tolerance level for brutality is going up in diverse directions, which has been happening, you know, it's not that it's ever been absent from any society or from any historical period, but it's becoming remarkably aggravated over the past couple of decades. And there is, I still do not want to say that it's all due to the combined operations of Hindutva come structural adjustments and neoliberal reforms, but there is a remarkable convergence in matters of time. And we need to explore how, you know, how we need to really patiently crack how these then translate how this broader context, each of which involves great violence, you know, the violence of neoliberalism is both structural, longstanding as well as spectacular when it comes to opposition to, you know, movement, social movements against land grab or, you know, strikes and factories and so on. And the, you know, the self-professively violent agenda of Hinduism, how this broader context through what mediations it translates into a very violent, vicious, obscene, sexual and social immaturity. So I try to show that in both or both in different ways, legitimize assaults on vulnerable bodies, vulnerable bodies of the poor, vulnerable bodies of Kotankotlokas, vulnerable bodies of women, vulnerable bodies of religious minorities. That may not be the entire reason why, you know, we hear so much or see so much of grotesque murders, rapes and so on, but it can explain part of it. But we can't sort of leap from one to the other. We have to see exactly how it works. And that's a long drawn out process. And Subhiyas had completely agree. I'm glad that you said that because Surat especially, I mean, it played out the entire scenario again and also an unborn fetus was involved, I think. Absolutely. So it goes back quite, and I don't know maybe in partition, during partition such spectacular violence became normal for a while, but during the Holocaust that we had. But afterwards there, I think till the early 90s, that kind of level was not reached. What's very frightening about today is that they are accumulating fast, if you'll please, and numbers are going up. You know, there seems to be a dissatisfaction with forms of violence. You know, you have to improvise worse and worse forms almost on a daily basis. And it's something just spinning out of control. You ask about, see I think, I mean that parallels also very much in my mind, not only in schools, but in colleges as well and all of that. And yes, the same thing had occurred to me when I read about the incident in Bangalore as well. How to explain it? I would say that in fact, you know, it is usually talked about in the framework which it's widely accepted, isn't it? That even in families and in homes across the class and caste hierarchy, control over women is quite central to the ways in which families are structured, caste is structured and all of that. That is kind of widely accepted. What is probably less widely accepted is that it is not only about disciplining women's labor inside the household. It is also about, you know, it's used quite explicitly. And I believe not only in India, but otherwise in, for instance, China as well in other countries too. As a tool to discipline a gendered labor force as well, a work force as well. I think, I mean, that's how I understand it now. I just would briefly mention in the context of what you said that not only Surat but also even the Badhani Tola massacres in Bihar, the Dalit massacres, which were also done by the Ranbir Sena which had a close link up with the RSS. Those two in a way foreshadowed what happened in Gujarat 2002 in many, many ways. Okay, we have a question here and Shanaz and, yeah. Yeah, and the next round, yeah. Hello. Yeah. Okay. I think it's ever since in the, in 1990s with the privatization, liberalization and globalization in India. The ordinary people of the working class has been attacked all the time, whichever party comes to power, whether it's Congress, whether it's BJP. Both of these parties are responsible for communalization as well as anti-worker laws in India. And for example, in 1984, when they attacked six in Delhi and also a golden temple in Amritsar, BJP promised to the people if it comes to power, it will punish the guilty. No more than 30 years have passed, nobody has been punished for that. If they had punished the guilty at that time, then Gujarat incident wouldn't have happened. And after that, whatever happened, wouldn't have happened if the guilty were punished in the first place. Now the Modi is doing whatever has been happening before him. He's carrying out the same policy. There is no difference between Congress policies or the Modi policy. Both of these parties are serving the agenda of the rich in India. They have opened up India for the Indian bourgeoisie as well as the foreign corporation to make it easier for them to make maximum profits. Sorry to interrupt, but can you come to your question, please? Question is how we can change the situation where people don't suffer. Thank you. Yes, Shanna has yet. Actually, I'm working. Yes, it's working. I would like to ask a question about this directed to both of the speakers. So we're speaking about an increase in violence. And I wonder if you might want to make the connection to media, particularly social media, the spectacle of the violence, the eroticization of the violence, and then building a community of would-be violators through social media. Because I want to just talk a little bit about, I live in Canada, and we're dealing with dentistry students who opened up a Facebook account. I don't know if you guys have heard of it. And they were talking about, at a particular university, and they were talking about what they would like to do to women when they are dentists, while they are under chloroform. So there was this whole conversation that was going on. So I was thinking of building this community of would-be perpetrators and the use of social media as activists are doing to challenge the violence. It's also happening on the other side. Okay, and we have one more person at the back there. Can you just wait a second for the mic, yeah? Yeah, I just wanted to, you know, build on the connection that was, I mean, what was touched upon in the last question with the social media, but especially the 2012 movement that happened in Delhi. I mean, and this whole connection of how liberalization and a certain kind of consciousness has built, I mean, post-liberalization, and a very grim picture has been drawn already here. But is there like a salvaging side to it? I mean, there is like, for example, this whole, I mean, the material conditions and to which there could be a breakthrough in an urban context today for such, we'll have to look at solidarity with the liberals, although, you know, it'll be uncomfortable after a point. But I saw when the whole movement was building up, that the liberal voice is so-called, which come, I mean, coming out explicitly in terms of how they define work or how they define, you know, this whole question of freedom of women. I mean, in the sense of, and if you see materially, the question of how it is important for corporations to have women working 24 hours at their beck and call, in call centers, you know, and having like, you know, this whole notion about fixing the problem of violence by providing, you know, cap facilities from pick and drop from your doorstep to here. So I mean, these are measures that have been taken in order to plug a gap, but it is also, as has been pointed out, kind of opened up gates to other kind of violences that we kind of hadn't been talking about yet. I mean, and that's in the same manner. So one example was, of course, the Bangalore, another example was, of course, in the Bangalore government sector, which is also a very recent, you know, exposition of how liberalization is actually playing in new manifestations, so in a comment on that. I could just, if your question was addressed to me, I don't know, or your observation. Real question, I don't really know, we'll all have to think together about how to get beyond what's happening. But about the Congress and the BJP, you know, you're quite right, absolutely right. The Congress has shown the way in many ways and the demise of the Congress is richly deserved. There's nothing to be said for it. But there's still a little bit of difference, okay? So the Congress will always practice soft and hard communism. I mean, Delhi, 1984 was very hard violence, but it had been preceded by the Nellie massacre in Assam, so it wasn't the first. It was Nellie massacre was a comparable scale. So the Congress would do all this, but this is not the Congress's USP, okay? The Congress does not sort of rise or fall by communism. It will do it when it suits it. It will practice it when it suits it, but that's not the only distinctive agenda that the Congress has, okay? It has neoliberalism, it has this, it has that, but prior to Modi, the BJP to distinguish itself from the Congress could only refer to communism. However, it governed the states under it. There was this that distinguished it from the Congress, that it was a constant. Making of the Hindu Rashtra through foul means and there was its USP, okay? The second thing is that we all thought that in terms of inviting corporate investment, in terms of very anti-people labor laws and so on, there's nothing that the Ban Mohan Singh Chidambaram government did or did not do. There was nothing left anymore. It had done everything that could have been done. But then the question arises, you know, what was the extra mile that Modi walked that gave Modi the incredible corporate support? That Ban Mohan Chidambaram did not do. Why did the media, sorry, why did the corporate sector wholeheartedly, single-mindedly and spectacularly put its weight behind Modi in a way it had never done in the Congress? Of course. Yeah. Because in Gujarat when Modi was chief minister, he said there's no need for labor department at all. So there you have your answer, that's the difference, which is something that the Congress government did not say. And the Congress government also, having pushed in, opening up land and so on, it also knew how to withdraw from a very tricky situation. When there would be a strong enough popular resistance, it would, you know, dampen the severity of the controls for the time being. BJP left no one in doubt that there would be the land acquisition ordinance, for instance. The new labor laws that had practiced in Rajasthan, Rajasthan is the laboratory and it needs to be watched very closely. So these are ways in which the BJP leaves the Congress behind a bit. It's far more ruthless in its neoliberalism as it's far more ruthless and so reminded. The second question. It's about social media. The social media, yes, that's certainly true and I think that cuts both ways. It's both a cause and a symptom. It also, and that is my response to the last question, it also allows people to mobilize against violence, against repression far more effectively perhaps than used to be done. And all the resistance has now become social media based except for December 16th, 2012 when there were massive street demonstrations. These days it's happening through social media really. So it cuts both ways and depends on who uses it how. But that, the case that you were talking about of imagining what can be done to women, that also happens, that it's aggravated as a result of the social media and- And copycatism. Copycatism and I remember, we all remember that after the Taj, the tax on the Taj hotel and the, you know, when the terrorists were caught, you know, when they were arrested, there was a lot of this going around how to torture them. Fivvid accounts of, you know, vivid descriptions of what the people would like to do to them. So it's insights there, what accumulates. Yeah. I'd also like to briefly respond to what you were saying and to add to what Tanika was saying about the Congress. I would say that, you know, I think that you're very right probably that in terms of what the Congress would like to do in terms of economic policy and to the poor and so on and so forth, there would be very little difference. But I think that what the corporates hope probably Modi can achieve, which they hoped Manmohan could do, but Manmohan did not. And the real hope from Modi, I think, is that they really hope from him what he achieved in Gujarat. It's not that in Gujarat there are not, there are powerful people's movements in Gujarat. There are peasants' movements in Gujarat. There are working class struggles in Gujarat. But those are not the stories that define Gujarat as the rest of the country or the world knows it, right? He has, he managed to use the whole Hindutva mobilization in a way in which the Gujarat story was defined centrally that way. And so the other stories could not become the center stage. They could not become political issues in the way that, say, a Singhura Nandigram did, you know, or they achieved that in Gujarat. And I think that is what the corporations hope Modi will achieve in the country. I still say it's not, he hasn't achieved it yet. Delhi's result is a reminder and a very nasty reminder to him that you can't completely, that Hindu consolidation in order to make all other issues take the backstage is far from being achieved or it is not already achieved. And, you know, some of that hubris probably will be restrained by recent developments. But I still think that basically that is the effort. That is what they hope will be achieved. What you said about social media, I think that another thing I'd like to add also is that the ways in which this whole, it's not just incidents of sexual violence that are certainly social media, the sharing of it, the participation in it, the voyeurism, all of that is of course very much enabled by social media. But I also think that in terms of building up this frenzy, for instance, this whole building up of frenzy over the Muslim aggressor, okay? Building up the, in all of this, I know that social media and the internet very much being used as vehicles and mediums for it. Probably just as much, if not more, than the protesters against sexual violence and sexual discrimination and so on are doing. So it is, I mean, it is after all a tool and could be used by anyone. What you asked, I'm not absolutely sure exactly what you had in mind, but I'll just respond briefly. See, you talked about, at least to the part about building, you said, building unity with liberals. You see, I don't think that the question of women's freedom and all of that was defined only by liberals in any way, in that way. I would say that really what I tried to say, what I feel and what I would elaborate on tomorrow as well, is that the whole agenda of women's freedom is actually something that should not be seen only as a liberal articulation or a demand for, by a certain class of women. It is actually, the protests against moral policing should not be just seen as the right of a certain class to be, to kiss in public. It is actually, the protests against moral policing are actually key to, and they should be, to the protests, to the efforts to mobilize even the working class, even working class women. The constraints on their freedoms are, and in the, using moral policing are just as severe and as much of a concern. So we probably need to redefine that. Okay, well, I know there are many more questions. Unfortunately, we are completely out of time, so I apologize for that. But I'd just like to say that this is a conversation which our speakers have begun today and which is going to continue in a series of events, beginning, of course, with the symposium tomorrow, but do also look out for other events on these themes. And I'd just like to finish by again thanking our speakers very much for one particular.