All her life, Amandeep Kaur (no relation) never even glanced at a police station, a place for men (this was a marker of her family’s honor). At least not until the summer of 2011. That’s when her village of Gobindpura, in southern Punjab, was declared the chosen site for a new thermal power project that required the acquisition of the villagers’ ancestral farmlands. She decided to participate in a protest, which resulted in five arrests and detentions at the police station, several beatings, sexualized taunts and severe threats.
Amandeep’s story, captured in a November 2011 Youtube video that is gaining popularity, reminds us of the simple truth: women’s rights are, simply put, human rights. “Women’s rights” are often conveniently seen as “special,” thus softer. A preoccupation with women’s bodies sadly determines, for some, which issues are labeled as “women’s issues” and generally often include rape, domestic violence, and reproductive oppression. Removing this “special status” around women’s rights is necessary since it comes with the patronizing presumption that women are weak and need generous protection, the nature and scope of which is not determined by women themselves. Removing the special status acknowledges that women, like all humans, have the right to freedom from vulnerabilities—to their bodies, their livelihoods, their day-to-day living. And women themselves are at the forefront of this rights-based work.
In Amandeep’s village, basic rights were threatened by a power company and its nexus with the state forces. Poena Power, is no foreign agency, but rather a reported subsidiary of the Indian conglomerate Indiabulls. Just last month, India was rated as an “extreme risk” country on the Women’s and Girls’ Right Index (WGRI), by Maplecroft, the UK-based risk analysis company that warns global companies entering such “extreme risk” emerging economies of the danger of possible complicity in “violations [against women] committed by state security forces or other actors.” This might be especially relevant in light of the late November changes to Foreign Direct Investment and further opening of the Indian retail business sector to multinational companies. However, the struggle in Gobindpura illustrates how women’s security is also at immediate risk because of the growing gulf between the poor and the rich within India and the insecurity faced by a majority of rural families.
On top of the grotesque treatment meted to female protestors, there has been commentary chiding these women for not “staying in their place.”
Braving imminent risks the villagers of Gobindpura protested through Summer 2011, almost at the same time as the growing Occupy Movement on the other side of the globe, but with less media attention. The slogan “We are the 99%” represents the chasm in the U.S. between the wealthiest 1 percent and the rest of the population, and the Gobindpura protestors were fighting similar inequality in wealth and power. While the Western protesters are occupying public spaces in protest, the Gobindpura farmers are protesting to reject the occupation of their private property. Gobindpura’s women and girls made the conscious decision of protesting alongside their men, for the lands at risk were as much markers of their ancestry, identity, and livelihood as of their male counterparts.
Beginning in June 2011, women sat and marched in protest, knowing that many of the village men had already been arrested, thrown in jail, and tortured. The women were treated no differently. Their clothes were torn, their hair pulled, and they were caught in clouds of red, as cannons sprayed water mixed with red chili pepper. As they were arrested and detained, police officers reportedly told them that their only way out was to accept the compensation checks from the company.
As the agitations in Gobindpura caught the attention of other farmer and labor unions, police forces blocked all traffic in and out of the village. The police then proceeded to fortify their constant presence by converting the sole village health dispensary into a police camp. Given its pre-election season in Punjab, the Gobindpura issue was also ripe for selective attention from opposition political-parties-in-waiting, but in the face of government and corporate pressure, no real alternative existed for the villagers.
Gobindpura is not a lone example of land acquisition or the agrarian neglect in Punjab; farmer unions and NGOs have reported over 50,000 debt-induced farmer suicides over the last two decades in what is often dubbed as the “bread basket” of India. However, while other places that remain obscure, Gobindpura’s recent fame means that relief in the form, of whether alternate government jobs or negotiated higher settlement seems more likely there. Nonetheless, for all the action in and around Gobindpura, the power company has begun construction of the plant, mostly unfazed.
It was in an attempt to oppose this foisted and exclusionary development, that thought nothing of the poor and the vulnerable who were going to be uprooted by it, that the women of Gobindpura entered the larger male-dominated spheres with intensity and at great personal cost. Yet, this bravery has largely gone unrecognized. Since the protestors lacked profile and were up against powerful forces, their behavior seems to have been criminalized with little debate.
On top of the grotesque treatment meted to female protestors, there has been commentary chiding these women for not “staying in their place.” This incident should give us pause to re-examine our assumptions about women’s rights and empowerment in Punjab and beyond. Amandeep and her friends remind us once again that women ask for no special treatment, but only, as the Sikhs of Punjab say, for sarbat da bhalla, the welfare of all. For this, we must focus economic and social programs that take everyone into consideration; inclusive development is an imperative and not an option.
A previous version of this piece appeared in the Tribune.
