Month: February 2017

Like Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela represented the best version of who we are as human beings: People who could be imprisoned but never diminished. People who never allowed themselves to become caricatures of how they were viewed by their oppressors. People who retained dignity despite systemic attempts to belittle them

Fired with idealism and passion, I had chanted Free Mandela, Nelson Mandela along with hundreds of other students. The Rev Jesse Jackson was leading the protest at the American university where I was then studying. We sang We shall overcome. Because, of course, we knew we would.

We are young — at an age that believed in possibility. On February 11, 1990, when Mandela walked free, after spending 9,377 days in jail, that belief was vindicated.

By some karmic quirk, I am in Cape Town nearly 27 years to that historic date. To not visit Robben Island where he spent 18 of those 27 incarcerated years seems like sacrilege. “A triumph of the human spirit over adversity,” you are reminded as you step off the ferry onto the island that once housed lepers, the insane and, later, political prisoners fighting apartheid; some now serve as guides to visitors.

Read | India donates about Rs 98 lakh to Mandela Foundation in South Africa

Its most famous prisoner’s cell is locked. Through the bars, you see a sleeping mat, a blanket and a red tin bucket — same as in the other cells. There is no photograph or plaque to indicate the presence of prisoner 466/64. Apparently, the cell was opened for Barack Obama who, during a 2005 visit, stepped inside to take a photograph. Would there have been an Obama if there hadn’t been a Mandela? Hard to say, but Obama did make his first public speech at a 1979 anti-apartheid rally and would later say that Mandela’s release gave him a “sense of what human beings could do when they’re guided by their hopes and not by their fears”.

Apartheid ended in 1994. But I am struck by the fact that the customers at every restaurant and every hotel I visit are nearly all white while those who serve and clean are nearly all black. “There is no racism,” an independent art consultant I meet at the Cape Town Art Fair tells me. “But the economic disparities are huge.” My taxi driver, Sean tells me that college education was beyond his family’s means, and so now he drives.

To my first-time visitor eyes it seems that the black population still fuels the labour requirements of a white-controlled economy. I am surprised that such pervasive visual evidence of it seems to cause no discernible discomfort.

Read | Obama gone, his smiling face too removed from popular mural

Blacks make up 79.2% of this country’s 51.8 million people but earn one-sixth of what white households earn, found South Africa’s 2011 census.

Mandela’s African National Congress is, today, in a shambles. Mired in corruption, it lost most the country’s biggest cities in elections in July. Within the party, there are calls for President Jacob Zuma to step down. Student agitation, which began in 2015 with the removal of a statue of British coloniser Cecil John Rhodes from the Cape Town university campus, continues with a demand for free higher education. Some see the #FeesMustFall movement as a precursor to an inevitable social revolution the country will face unless it fixes its social inequality problem.

This angry rise in black identity politics follows global trends of political binary extremism, us versus them, writes Suntosh Pillary in Mail & Guardian. “Mandela’s politics of hope is now firmly replaced with a politics of radical dissent and anger.”

Read | The idea of Gandhi is universal and immortal

Does Mandela remain relevant to a changed South Africa, and a changed world?

Like Mahatma Gandhi, Mandela represented the best version of who we are as human beings: People who could be imprisoned but never diminished. People who never allowed themselves to become caricatures of how they were viewed by their oppressors. People who retained dignity despite systemic attempts to belittle them. But, perhaps, most important, unifiers who could bring their country’s diverse and fractious groups together.

Standing on Robben Island near the limestone quarry where Mandela did hard labour, I realise why this pilgrimage is significant. It is, in a sense, homage not just to youth gone by but also to a world gone by, to leaders who stood like giants but are no more to be found.

Namita Bhandare is gender editor, Mint

The views expressed are personal

@namitabhandare

How the urban local bodies qualify as “customary” institutions is anybody’s guess. But in the past 16 years there has been no election to them. The women’s groups insist on reservation. But the tribal bodies remain adamant about not sharing power. Without reservation, women will simply not be given the opportunity to compete

The Kohima Municipal Council office was set ablaze by Naga tribals during their protest, Kohima, February 3.(PTI)

For a state that prides itself as amongst the safest for women, Nagaland’s record in electing them to office is an embarrassment. There has never, in the 53 years since it became a state, been a woman MLA and only one woman, the late Rano Mese Shaiza, has ever made it to Parliament, back in 1977.

Nagaland’s tribal bodies — male-dominated obviously — say it’s not their “culture” to have women in public life. “We respect our mothers and sisters, but as per our customs, we don’t allow them to have political powers,” Vekhosayi Nyekha an activist who is spearheading an anti-reservation movement told Hindustan Times correspondent Utpal Parashar.

Nonsense, says Rosemary Dzuvichu, an adviser to the Naga Mothers Association (NMA), the state’s largest grassroots women’s organisation. “We were very supportive of the Naga movement and played an important part in the peace process.”

Read | Nagaland civic polls, opposed by tribal groups, declared null and void

Dzuvichu points out that the NMA is only asking for 33% reservation while the rest of the country is already talking about 50%. “Naga women are ready for electoral politics. But the men are unwilling to see that.”

Nagaland enjoys special status under Article 371(A), which ensures “no Act of Parliament shall apply to Nagaland in relation to religious or social practices of the Nagas”. In other words, the 74th Constitutional amendment, under which 33% seats in panchayats and local bodies are reserved for women, has never applied to the state because it apparently goes against Naga custom.

How the urban local bodies qualify as “customary” institutions is anybody’s guess. But in the past 16 years there has been no election to them. The women’s groups insist on reservation. But the tribal bodies remain adamant about not sharing power. Without reservation, women will simply not be given the opportunity to compete.

Read | Men are afraid of us: Nagaland’s mothers body fights for survival amid quota clamour

Why not? Because, says Monalisa Changkija, a poet who is the proprietor, publisher and editor of Nagaland Page, sharing power will give women a voice in how development funds are utilised. In a state that does not allow women to own or inherit land, how will this play out? “Empowering women has an economic connotation. This is what the men fear,” she says.

With neither side willing to concede, the women went to the courts. In 2011, the Kohima bench of the Gauhati high court ruled in favour of reservations — a judgment upheld by a 2016 Supreme Court interim order, directing the state to hold the elections with 33% reservation.

Elections were announced for February 1 and 30 women were set to contest unopposed with another 100 women declaring their intention to fight, says Dzuvichu. Then the protests began.

Read | Clash of traditional values and women empowerment

Two men dead, several more injured, government buildings burnt and an indefinite bandh is what remains. Internet services are down and government has not functioned since the unrest began. The elections are on hold and the tribal bodies want the state government to pressurise the Centre to exempt Nagaland from reservation.

There is also, says Dzuvichu, pressure on the NMA to withdraw the court cases. “I have received death threats and am in hiding,” she tells me on the phone from an undisclosed location.

How does such blatant patriarchy and obvious injustice pass without much comment in a world where every sexist utterance by male politicians sparks social media outrage? In many ways, the tragedy of Nagaland is the fact that this incredibly brave fight for gender justice remains largely ignored by the rest of India, as if somehow Naga women are lesser citizens, less deserving of the rights and aspirations being articulated throughout the country by women fighting triple talaq or for their right to enter temples.

Read | Nagaland to miss out on central grants to the tune of Rs 140 crore for not holding municipal polls

It will be a travesty of our democratic values if Naga women do not get what is guaranteed to women elsewhere in India. It will be a mockery of rule of law if muscle and lumpenism is allowed to prevail. Tradition and custom can never be an excuse to deny citizens their due. If Nagaland is an integral part of India, then the rights available to the rest of us apply there too.

Namita Bhandare is gender editor, Mint

The views expressed are personal

@namitabhandare