Evvalo thimiru irundha pombalenga rottuku vandhu poraaduveenga!’ screams the recent cover of the Junior Vikatan magazine. Roughly translated, the sentence means, ‘What arrogance must you women have to take to the streets and protest.’ These were the words doled out to the women from the Sivarajapuram fishing hamlet, as the police dragged them out of their houses and hit them with lathis.
In its latest issue, the magazine has broken down what transpired during the police excess on dalits, fishing communities and protestors in the aftermath of the jallikattu protests on Marina beach. Recounting what happened that day, Geetanjali, one of the protestors, is quoted as saying that policemen touched women in all the places that they shouldn’t have dared to, at the same time hurling verbal abuses. She says in the interview that the policemen asked her, “Pombala pillenga adangi veetila irukkama veethiku varuveengala?” This means, “How dare you women and girls come on to the road instead of staying put inside your houses?”
One can only imagine the trauma that women protestors went through as they were mercilessly hit, kicked and chased by the police. But what one does immediately discern from the abusive language and the molestation is the psyche of the police force. While protestors at large were targeted, looks like women were targeted for just being women out on the streets, isn’t it?
This is not a first, and neither is it unexpected. Remember the Salem girl who killed herself because urgent action was not taken when her morphed pictures were leaked? Remember every patronising, protective, ‘well-intentioned’ ‘women should stay safe’ or ‘boys will be boys’ comment that has been made by senior officers after nearly every incidence of violence against women? There have been numerous instances where women have been lectured on their choice of clothing, advised on their lifestyles, harassed for being out too late than what suits the police force and counselled from filing cases.
The fact remains that there are some in the department who will insist that the kitchen, not the road is a woman’s rightful place and that if women are out on the streets, then they must take what they get. Worse, a lot of them sincerely believe that crimes against women will reduce if women are not around in the first place. That’s probably why the Nirbhaya Fund for schemes to ensure safety and security of women in public spaces remains grossly underused by successive governments, ministries and police departments.
Well too bad, then, because we aren’t going to take it sitting down. Women go out, sometimes because they must and sometimes because they want to. Women have a right to public spaces and protests — a right that is equal to every citizen. The world over, women are taking to the streets. Here too, we will. We will loiter, protest, take to the roads, and fight for all that we want. More importantly, we will stick together for each other and ourselves.
We will demand access and safety, and reclaim our right to be outside, and elsewhere that we’d like to be, when we want to be. We will raise our voices till policemen really become our friends instead of the ‘protectors’ that they think they are. We will go out till it is understood that a woman’s place is not in the kitchen, it is in the resistance. We will be heard till reality is defined and this becomes our world, too.
(The writer is a Chennai-based activist, in-your-face feminist and a media glutton)
Archanaa Seker
seker.archanaa@gmail.com