The Hindu : Women break boundaries for peace

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Oct 20, 2002

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Women break boundaries for peace

By Kalpana Sharma

BHUBANESWAR OCT. 19. Even as India and Pakistan move towards de-escalating tension along the international border, women from South Asia broke all boundaries to come together on a common platform today. On the penultimate day of the 10th conference of the Indian Association for Women's Studies (IAWS), women from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and India spoke out strongly for peace and an end to conflict in the region.

The conference, which has brought together women scholars and activists from around India and from several South Asian and other countries, has focussed on the theme "Sustaining democracy: challenges in a new millennium". But perhaps the discussion that had the greatest resonance in the face of the continuous state of "simultaneous war and peace" in the region, as described by Ritu Menon of Kali for Women, was the one on South Asia.

Khawar Mumtaz, a leading women's rights activist, from Pakistan spoke of the increasing challenges and difficult choices that the still embryonic peace movement faces in her country.

She said that it represented a coalition of a variety of emerging social movements ranging from the women's movement to organisations of peasants, of fisher folk and of trade unions.

"The State in Pakistan always colluded with the religious right and this has pitched us in conflict with the State and the religious right," she said. After the recent elections, and the victory of the fundamentalists in the North-West Frontier Province and Baluchistan, social movements faced an even bigger challenge.

Ms. Mumtaz said the first targets of the fundamentalist groups were civil society organisations. For example, when the U.S. began bombing Afghanistan last year, eight offices of groups working with women and on education in the NWFP were attacked and razed to the ground. There have also been attacks on schools run by women's organisations. Despite these threats, the peace movement in Pakistan, which stands for separation of religion from politics and is opposed to all forms of violence, continues to grow.

From Sri Lanka, anthropologist and feminist scholar, Dr. Malathi de Alwis spoke about the dilemmas facing groups that had argued for a political settlement to the violent conflict in their country but now had doubts about the process. "Peace is about compromise, it's a contract, it's about negotiation. Feminists have always asked for a political solution to the ethnic conflict but we must have peace with justice," she argued.

She suggested that even as peace negotiations were proceeding, there were violations of the rights of individuals and minorities that were being ignored.

Meghana Guha Thakurta from Bangladesh emphasised that no country in the region was an island and that what happened in one inevitably affected the other. She said that the minorities in Bangladesh had become increasingly insecure in the last year and had been targeted each time Muslims were attacked in India or Ahmadis were attacked in Pakistan.

For the Hindu minority, problems began after December 6, 1992 and the demolition of the Babri Masjid in India. Since then, each communal conflagration in India had its fallout on these communities in Bangladesh.

Kamla Bhasin, well-known women's activist, ended the deliberations by stating that we did not need "Bush-ful thinking — where you don't need dialogue, don't need to talk, but just decide who to kill."

The day ended with a special session on Gujarat, where activists narrated their firsthand experiences of the last months in the State following the communal carnage, and a silent, candle-lit peace march through Bhubaneswar.

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