Authors: Sally Armstrong
These strictures have to change, Clinton argued, for reasons of survival: “When we liberate the economic potential of women, we elevate the economic performance of communities, nations and the world.”
She cited a Goldman Sachs report that shows how reducing the barriers to female labour force participation would increase America’s GDP by 9 percent, increase the eurozone’s by 13 percent and Japan’s by 16 percent. The same report claims that unlocking the potential of women by eliminating the gender barrier in the workplace would improve economies, including those of China, Russia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and South Korea.
It seems to be working in the United States. In her book
The Richer Sex
, Liza Mundy, an award-winning
Washington Post
reporter, refers to “breadwomen” as the new normal and says that, today, 40 percent of American women earn more than their male
partners. She estimates that within a generation this percentage will grow, until for the first time in human history women will earn more than men. She charts not only why this is inevitable, but also why it is a state much to be desired, by both women and men, because to quote from her subtitle, “the New Majority of Female Breadwinners is Transforming Sex, Love and Family.”
Research on women and the economy shows that women save more money than men, that they use their money to feed and educate their children, and as a result their families are healthier and better educated. But in many countries such statistics fall on deaf ears. Despite Jeffrey Sachs’s analysis that the status of women and the economy are directly linked, there are countries, such as India, where the economy is red hot and the status of women deeply unacceptable. India can boast that some of its most prominent people are women political leaders and bankers and investment company chief executive officers. But as Isobel Coleman cautions, “Look at the local village level, where women are bought and sold like chattel, honour crimes are promulgated by local unelected leaders, female fetuses are aborted at high rates. There’s little value on the girl child or on women.” Indeed, a country that’s now described as an economic powerhouse can be medieval in its social practices.
Hardest hit among India’s women are the Dalits, formerly called untouchables. In 2004, I went to India to research an article about how those women were managing in the midst of the fastest-growing economy in the world. What I found was the intractable face of poverty. I started my quest in a village near the bustling city of Bangalore. There in southern India, I met a woman named Gowramma and saw first-hand how the cycle of poverty is reinforced.
It’s the water pumps that I remember most powerfully. Soon after I arrived, Gowramma walked me to a roadway that was maybe a hundred metres from her home and explained how that dusty dirt road, which she did not dare to cross, separated her from the water she so badly needed for her six-month-old baby daughter, Dikshitra. On the other side of the road, in the village of Etangur, there was a tap in every house with fresh cool water twenty-four hours a day. On Gowramma’s side, there were three water pumps for two hundred families. The water was turned on every three days. That was not enough for her needs, so when the pumps weren’t running, she had to risk the two-kilometre walk to another village that would allow her to have water, a walk that took her past jeering men who threatened her with rape and worse.
The word
dalit
is Sanskrit and means “broken people.” Like two hundred million Dalits in India, Gowramma lived outside the mainstream Hindu society, according to the abusive unwritten rules that have governed her people for centuries. The caste system in India is the largest hierarchical system in the world today with roots that trace back to between 1500 BCE and 1000 BCE. The idea and practice of ranking people according to their caste still exists in many countries in Southeast Asia, including Japan, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal, but the vast majority of untouchables live in India, a country where birth status condemns almost 20 percent of the population to poverty and abuse.
In Indian society, Hindus are stratified into four varna, or caste categories: the Brahmin, the priestly caste; the Kshatriya, warriors; the Vaisya, trading and artisan caste; and the Sudra, manual labourers. The rest of the population is outcaste—literally untouchable to the four castes.
Just forty kilometres from Bangalore, the centre of India’s high-tech industry and often referred to as Silicon Valley East, Gowramma and her daughter were living in appalling conditions. She was forbidden to walk on the street of the Hindu village across that road, enter the temple, drink from the same well as the upper caste or even eat the same food. She and her kind could not hold marriage processions or carry their dead on the streets as part of a funeral. Village flourmills would not provide service to them. Like many other Dalits in India, Gowramma’s family was kept by the upper caste as bonded labourers. They were forced to do jobs such as cleaning latrines and removing dead animals, sometimes with their bare hands, as they rarely owned gloves. In some villages in this state of Karnataka, Dalit girls as young as seven and eight were designated as the village concubine. To defy this ancient system was to invite brutal revenge from the higher castes.
Police files are full of atrocities. In 1995, Bhanwari Devi, a worker in the Women’s Development Program in Rajasthan, reported the child marriage of a one-year-old girl to the authorities and was gang-raped by friends of the man she accused. When she reported the rape, the police said she was too old and unattractive to merit the attentions of young men and ignored her case. When she finally managed to get charges laid, the judge acquitted her rapists, reasoning, “Since the offenders were upper-caste men, including a Brahmin, the rape could not have taken place because an upper-caste man could not have defiled himself by raping a lower-caste woman.”
When I was there in October 2004, a thirty-eight-year-old woman from Keela Urappanur village in Madurai district spurned the advances of an upper-caste man and was forced by a mob to
drink excrement mixed with water. Then the crowd threw a bucket of excrement on her children, who were watching. In another incident that October, a sessions judge in Uttar Pradesh murdered a Dalit and wasn’t even suspended from his duties, never mind charged. He continues to function as a judge.
In India, you’re born into your caste; it’s predetermined and immutable. Although the minority populations of Christians, Muslims and Buddhists are considered outside the system, everyone else’s caste is stamped on their school ID card, which is then used for identification, education and job applications. If you’re born a Dalit, you die a Dalit.
In 1950, the newly independent India attempted to deal with the malevolence of the caste system, not by annulling it but by giving the untouchables a new name: “the Scheduled Castes.” At the same time, the government allocated 17 percent of civil service jobs and 17 percent of parliament seats to the Dalits. The practices of untouchability were forbidden by law and made punishable under the Indian constitution. Moreover, the new laws said the state had to protect the Scheduled Castes from social injustice. The government also created scholarships for Dalit children so they could get an education. Although some Dalits prospered—K.R. Narayanan became president of India in 1997 and Bhimrao Ambedkar wrote the new constitution—the government’s experiment in emancipation failed. Ninety-nine percent of Dalits are still living the lives of untouchables.
Even though the Dalits who live in India’s teeming cities are relegated to slum living, low-paying jobs and discrimination, they do have more access to the laws designed to protect them. But 70 percent of India’s 1 billion people live in villages, far from the magistrates and urban courts, and it is there, out of the sight of the
lawmakers and among traditionalists, that the ancient indignities heaped on the outcastes, particularly the women, flourish.
Back in Etangur, Gowramma’s baby was fussing because she was thirsty. A twenty-five-year-old mother of three, who’d been married at the age of thirteen, Gowramma couldn’t leave on her trek for water until Dikshitra fell asleep: she couldn’t carry the baby along with the heavy water jugs. She pointed to a pathetic collection of vessels hooked over the dry spout of the water pump in her village. Everyone was waiting for water.
Eventually, a neighbour came by to watch over Dikshitra, and Gowramma began her dreaded walk for water in the heat of the noonday sun.
Gowramma’s husband works as a bonded labourer because they once needed to borrow money from the landlord for food. He earns about 25 cents a day, barely enough to repay the debt and provide a low-calorie cereal that his family eats three times a day. As she walked, Gowramma shared a dream with me: “We have two cows. I want to start a dairy. I could provide milk to the people, earn enough money to get us out of bondage. But the upper castes won’t allow me to do that.” Gowramma’s plan to sell milk would not only get their family on its feet, it would also contribute to solving the problem with food shortages in the region. But she couldn’t make it happen.
When women such as Gowramma are confronted with barriers limiting their right to start a business, it has the same negative effect as when women elsewhere are denied access to markets, social networks and credit: everyone loses. Even in high-income countries, social norms and market barriers still contribute to keeping women away from opportunities that can move them into better-paying jobs. When Hillary Clinton addressed the
economic summit on women, she raised the issue of women farmers with a view to explaining how, if given a chance, the women can reduce food shortages and boost nutrition levels. “Take just one sector of our economy—agriculture—to illustrate what I mean. We know women play an important role in driving agriculture-led growth worldwide. They sustain every link in the agricultural chain: they plant the seeds; they care for the livestock; they harvest the crops; they sell them at markets; they store the food, and then they prepare it for consumption.”
Then Clinton drew the big picture: “Despite their presence in all of these kinds of jobs, they have less to show for all of their work. Women farmers are up to 30 percent less productive than male farmers, and that’s not because they are working less or are less committed. It’s because women farmers have access to fewer resources. They have less fertilizer, fewer tools, poorer-quality seeds, and less access to training or to land. And they have much less time to farm because they also have to do most of the household work. When that resource gap is closed and resources are allocated equally—and, better yet, efficiently—women and men are equally productive in agriculture. And that has positive benefits. In Nepal, for example, where mothers have greater ownership of land because of their inheritance rights, there are fewer severely underweight children.”
Clinton outlined the consequences of ignoring women farmers. “Close the resource gap holding women back in developing economies, and we could feed 150 million more people worldwide every year according to the Food and Agriculture Organization, and that’s in addition to the higher incomes for families and the more efficient markets and the more agricultural trade that would result.”
One of the organizations working to alter Gowramma’s situation is the National Federation of Dalit Women, which seeks to educate and organize women like her. They are pursuing legal action against caste-based atrocities. They seek political empowerment for Dalit women and plan to get it by building self-confidence in women, sharing knowledge of the law and developing leadership. “The government of India has failed in its responsibility to almost 20 percent of the population,” said its leader, Ruth Manorama. “This level of human rights deprivation is worse than racism.” Manorama was the sort of woman they needed to upset three-thousand-year-old traditions. Feisty and in-your-face, she had a lot to say. “Despite the benefits promised by the government, there’s an unholy alliance between the state and the upper castes that perpetuates a shameful level of apartheid. Police actively collude with the upper castes to perpetrate violence against Dalits.” The superiority of the upper castes is so entrenched that the abuse is sometimes no more than sport but always a reminder that in India status overrules human rights. Manorama also started another organization, Women’s Voice, to reach out to women in the slums and the villages. One of the women in her program was Gowramma.
But nasty habits die hard. A stunning report first written by Smita Narula for Human Rights Watch in 1999, and updated in 2011, exposed the Dalits’ situation to a worldwide audience. Narula found that sexual abuse and other forms of violence were used to crush dissent within the community. Women such as Gowramma, who dream of change, and other Dalits who contest political office in village councils and municipalities, vying for seats constitutionally reserved for them, are threatened with physical abuse if they persist.
It’s not as if the state is unaware of the ongoing problems. Consider the wording of the Prevention of Atrocities Act, passed in 1989, which lays out punishments “for offences such as: forcing a member of the Scheduled Caste to drink or eat any inedible or obnoxious substance; parading a person naked or with painted face; assaults on women with intent to dishonour their sexuality.”
As for the international community, even in the recent past, many development programs were designed without consulting women or considering the crucial role they played, whether it was funding agricultural training initiatives that targeted men, even though women often represented the majority of small farmers, or building wells in areas where women could not go, never mind that women were the ones responsible for fetching water.
Gross inequality is a reality in the lives of Dalits. Clearly, the caste system has to go. But unless the upper castes face real consequences under the law, they are not about to give up their power and privilege. They live in a country that not only has one of the fastest-growing economies in the world but the second-biggest population after China. Wealth is increasing in India, even as Dalits suffer in poverty. In July 2003, India even asked twenty-two countries to stop sending foreign aid, in an attempt to better its chances of joining the G7 group of countries with major economies.