For example, parts of the trade came into the hands of women in the form of Women's Markets. The achievements of the Meira Paibi movement are now recognized as a lesson for the women's movement across the country and for the NO in particular, and for those who study this movement. 28 On the theme of macro-security and micro-uncertainties, see Ranabir Samaddar, “The Insecure World of the Nation” in R.
Paula Banerjee
November 7
The morning and afternoon were dedicated to the partners-only session (9.30 am – 3 pm) for presentation and discussion of the chapters for the forthcoming edited volume to be published at the end of the project on Making Women Count for Peace. In the evening, a panel discussion has been organized which will be held at the Presidency University (16:00 – 18:00). After a short welcome speech by Ranabir Samaddar, Åshild Kolås started the morning session and said it would be held in the form of a workshop.
Partners were asked to present their draft chapters and provide comments on each other's papers.
Papers on Nepal
Bishnu replied that it would be difficult to present the history of the movement because the plan was to focus on what was happening now, keeping in mind that it was not about women's issues but more about politics. Donor agencies prioritize and influence what women's groups demand and what is encouraged in legislation. It is a voluntary women's movement with many participants and leaders committed to social reform.
Bishnu Raj Upreti then presented his second paper entitled Women's Struggle and Political Participation in Nepal. The paper focused on the emergence of women as public actors (subjects) in efforts to build peace in the Northeast. He commented that the document covers many aspects and is very in-depth, but may not actually answer the question at hand: what are the structures that shape women's participation in the political arena and the struggle to end conflicts.
How does the government plant a myth about peacebuilding and how are women's activities and roles seen or depicted. A more relevant question would be to ask what women are doing: their participation in the labor force and women's health issues.
Papers on Northeast India
The presenter was also asked to take more of Paibes' role into account for her investigation. The paper argued strongly for the idea of women's agency and elaborated on how women took part in the current political situation in Manipur. Meira Paibes' protest was not against AFSPA, but against the masculine military machinery that rules the state in general.
The role of the state machinery is one that must therefore be emphasized more clearly. Finally, the whole issue of Manipur's political economy and its role in the inclusion of women in peace processes is missing. Women's personal space was dominated by patriarchal norms despite the success women experienced in the area of political participation.
Not even the state's liberal agenda could address the issue of women's agency and empowerment. The decade of the 1990s saw a change in the UN's approach to women's issues.
Gender, Sexuality, Dissent
The latest paper by Sucharit Sengupt, Research Assistant at the Calcutta Research Group, was titled Freedom from the Closet?: Voices of Sexual Minorities' in Calcutta. She tried to contextualize "sexual minorities" in India, keeping in mind that "minority" was a government category. This piece was written immediately after the landmark judgment of the Delhi High Court, which attempted, albeit for a short time, to find out, through interviews with community members and NGO/CBO workers, what changes they envisage after the court's favorable ruling.
However, after the Supreme Court undercut the earlier High Court judgment, a significant section of the LGBT community has questioned the validity of the legal framework and rights-based policy. In her discussion of the three papers, Samata Biswas noted that both Sucharita's and Bharti's papers invoked Foucault. Sucharita used the panopticon model to explore how "the implications of crime, the frightening silence and the piercing gaze were sufficient to push the sexual minorities to the edge and not so much the enforcement of the law itself".
Holding this power-producing capacity, she then found power in empowerment, to ask how in every instance of power functioning—for example, in interpersonal relationships—how empowerment became possible. She proposed: “I don't know if empowerment as a concept is available outside of statist discourse, and if one were to appropriate it, as Bharti does, then perhaps one should use different registers of empowerment that she is interested in, and those that are sponsored by the state. ‟.
Militancy, Autonomy, Experiences
The formation of solidarities around the idea of azadi, she observed, was indicative of the performative character of activist subjectivities. Her paper tried to establish that a study of everyday choices and needs can be useful to engage critically in the debates about forms and content of life practices, sociality of the language of protest and the debate about Azadi beyond Islam vs. life narratives of women, he provoked elements of resistance in the ambiguities and rhetoric of the everyday, the ordinary, the mundane, the scattered and the unconscious.
The third presenter Seema Shekhawat, independent researcher based in Jaipur, presented her paper on Condemned to be Invisible: Finding Women in the Kashmir Peace Process. She argued that the case of Kashmir provided ample evidence of the prejudicial nature of peacemaking, which praised women as the backbone of the independence movement from India, but later did not hesitate to push them to the margins of the peace process. She raised the question - where is the place of women in the process of peace building in Kashmir.
However, Seema's piece echoes a sense of betrayal when she articulates that the “face of militancy” was denied the opportunity to be the face of the peace process, women were completely invisible during the peace negotiations. She praised the lecturers for their rich ethnographic narratives of the everyday, dealing with the intersections of history and memory, which had not previously been adequately represented in any research on Kashmir.
Spaces of Citizenship and Creativity
Chair Meenakshi Gopinath closed the session reminding the audience that the key question that came out of the presentations was who defined the Kashmir peace process and how to understand the issue of action. More importantly, she noted, it would be extremely necessary to understand at what point the notions of agency and choice overlap. His paper The Geographical Significance of Khwairamband Bazaar: Rethinking the Emergence of Women's Movements in Manipur highlighted the symbolic value of the space of Khwairamband Bazaar, a women-run market, in enabling women's movements in Manipur.
In public memory, the market remains a place where various forms of women's movement originated, including Nisha Bandh (anti-alcoholism) movement, Meira Paibis (Torch Bearers), Nupi lan (women's war) etc. In such a context, the importance of a women's market lies in the fact that it served both as a space for economic existence of women as well as political mobilizations. Sanjay Barbora, the interlocutor, reminded Jayanta that it would be necessary for him to talk about the politics inherent in the literary works.
While speaking about the bazaars in Manipur, he again noted that the idea of the bazaar taking up a certain space in time was predetermined. He further suggested that it would also be critical to track the changes and transformations of the market area over time, rather than viewing space as a frozen entity.
Protest, Participation, Agency
Dolly Phukon, Assistant Professor, Dibrugarh University presented a paper on Contested Space of Democracy and Women's Movement in Assam. Her paper attempted to trace and analyze the nature and trends in women's movement in Assam within the larger rubric of the emergence of various social movements in India and their efforts to secure democratic spaces for women. She sought to find out how far women's movement in Assam was able to establish its own space in this functioning democracy.
First, she delves into the long history of the articulation of women's rights and the formation of women's organizations at various times starting from the reform movements of colonial Assam right up to the more recent forms of protest by Meira Paibis. By analyzing the trends in the women's movement and its nature, she raises the skeptical question of the extent to which the women's movement could contribute to creating wider shifts in women's awareness and mobilization around issues of gender and "re-democratizing our democracy". on gender boundaries, where most of the activities of women's organizations are fundamentally based on identification with traditional notions of femininity. In her conclusion, she suggested that the solution lay in reconfiguring the women's movement with an autonomous intellectual vision for women's rights, along with collaboration with other progressive civil society movements.
She reflected that Dalit women had never been part of any dominant discourse of women's movement in any meaningful way. Dolly Phukon, Assistant Professor, Dibrugarh University Contested Space of Democracy and Women's Movement in Assam 3.
LIST OF PARTICIPANTS
- Vaishno Bharati, Research Associate, Aneka, Bangalore (Human Rights Organisation)
Gurumayum Amarjit Sharma, Assistant Professor, North East India Studies Programme, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Neingulo Krome, Secretary General, Naga People's Movement for Human Rights Nergis Canefe, Professor, Department of Political Science, York University. Paula Banerjee, President, Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group and Associate Professor, Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Calcutta Prasanta Ray, Secretary, Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group and Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology, Presidency University.
Ranabir Samaddar, Director, Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group Rita Manchanda, Secretary General, South Asia Forum for Human Rights. Ruchira Goswami, Assistant Professor, National University of Legal Sciences Saayan Chattopadhyay, Assistant Professor, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, Baruipur College, University of Calcutta. Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhury, Vice Chancellor, Rabindra Bharati University Samir Kumar Das, Professor, Department of Political Science and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Commerce, University of Calcutta.
Sanjay Barbora, Associate Professor, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Guwahati Sarbani Sharma, PhD Student, Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, Delhi. Sibaji Pratim Basu, Treasurer, Mahanirban Research Group Calcutta and Associate Professor, Sri Chaitanya College, Habra.
