Daily Times

Sir: We, as a community of scholars, activists, artists and members at large of the South Asian Feminist Caucus, National Women Suffrage Association (NWSA), US, write this to express our robust support for the editorial work of scholars Angana P Chatterji, Shashi Buluswar, and Mallika Kaur, who have just released a monograph titled Conflicted Democracies and Gendered Violence: The Right to Heal, sub-titled Internal Conflict and Social Upheaval; Examples from India (October 27, 2015). The monograph is produced by the Armed Conflict Resolution and People’s Rights Project, Centre for Social Sector Leadership-Haas, UC Berkeley. The October 2015 publication is a limited paperback edition. The monograph will be published by Zubaan Books, Delhi, in December 2015 in paperback and as an Ebook, while the PDF version will remain available free of cost online. Any profits will support the work of redress for women victim survivors of sexual violence in conflict and social upheaval in India.

Endorsed by Navanethem Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2008-14 and Veena Das, Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, this much-needed publication attests to the failures of the democratic state in addressing long-standing issues of sexual and gender violence that have tragically proliferated in South Asia over an extensive colonial and national/post-colonial period. In identifying India as a conflicted democracy, the esteemed team of contributors that include Angana P Chatterji, Mallika Kaur, Roxana Altholz, Paola Bacchetta, Rajvinder Singh Bains, Mihir Desai, Laurel E Fletcher, Parvez Imroz, Jeremy J Sarkin and Pei Wu, draw urgent attention to deep-cemented structures of democracy that limit the rights of its minority and/or targeted peoples, suspending civil rights in an eternal state of emergency. This effectively maintains an impermeable status quo between the abominable levels of everyday violence against people and the intractable monumental violence of belligerent states. The aforementioned editorial team deserves gratitude for a work that highlights quotidian violence against marginalised people by the constitutions that claim to endow them with rights and privileges. This work opens up a remarkably different perspective on mainstream narratives of democracy’s ascent and popularity in South Asia.

The work supported in our letter pays close attention to dimensions of internal conflict and social upheaval as witnessed in Gujarat (2002) and Odisha (2008) along with entrenchments and displacements in the inter-state dispute over Kashmir, and the conflict in Punjab (1984-95). Please support our efforts in increasing the visibility of this provocative work that compels us to rethink the status of the “democratic state” as an untrammeled benefit to those trammeled in very real ways by its categorical territorial assertions.

FAWZIA AFZAL KHAN

Via Email