Author: Brinda Karat
Publication: The Hindu
Date: February 11, 2003
URL: http://www.hinduonnet.com/stories/2003021100481000.htm
Introduction: Month after month
tribal women activists in the Tripura Nari Samity have been in confrontation
at the village level, challenging the terrorist dictates.
Their Deaths barely merited a mention
in the papers. Yet they have a significance that goes far beyond the borders
of the small State of Tripura where they lived and died. Anjali Pal was
blind when she was born 19 years ago in a lower middle class Bengali family
settled in the northern district of Tripura. Ask anyone who knew her and
they would tell you that she could see better than most what was right
and wrong. Premlata Tripura was about the same age and equally spirited.
She was born into a poor tribal family and lived in the village of Jamircharra
in the Dholai district of Tripura. They did not know each other yet the
common thread that bound them together was that they were both members
of the Tripura Nari Samity, a branch of the All India Democratic Women's
Association. On January 12, a squad of the banned National Liberation Front
of Tripura kidnapped Premlata, raped and then killed her. Two days later,
Anjali's house was attacked. The terrorist group called her father out
and shot him dead for being a communist supporter. Anjali, unable to see,
hearing the gunshots ran out calling to her father. She too was shot down.
There are many such chilling examples of terrorist violence against women
in Tripura.
The immediate context of the increased
violence by terrorist groups is the coming State Assembly elections. They
want to repeat the cynical strategies of violence and intimidation adopted
when they subverted the elections to the Tripura Tribal Autonomous District
Council in 2000. In Kashmir, the agenda of the ISI-backed groups was to
prevent free and fair elections. In Tripura, the terrorists, with similar
international contacts using over 53 bases in Bangladesh for their activities,
have similar aims, but in addition, and this is the most significant difference,
the major target is a political one, the annihilation of cadres of the
Left and in particular tribal activists. Of the 23 people killed by terrorists
since the announcement of the elections, 21 are CPI(M) cadres or members
of Left- oriented mass organisations. One third of those killed are women.
For national women's movements,
the experience of women in Tripura adds a new dimension of understanding
the way that the politics of terrorism and violence impacts on women and
in particular the most marginalised sections such as the tribal women of
Tripura. There is a fair amount of literature that documents women's experience
in what is termed in U.N. language as "conflict situations" such as war,
ethnic strife, terrorist attacks, state terrorism and so on. It is known
that in such situations women often become targets of sexual assault, suffer
long lasting mental trauma with serious consequences on their health including
weight loss and insomnia, face homelessness, loss of work and income. As
mothers, sisters, wives or daughters of those who have been killed or reported
as "missing", women have not only had to deal with their own grief at the
loss of loved ones but have had to shoulder economic responsibilities of
families.
In Tripura, the impact of violence
on women means all this and much more because unlike in other terrorist-affected
States, in Tripura there is a vibrant women's movement. An AIDWA booklet
entitled `Women against Terrorism' details the added dimension when women
become targets because of their activism and their courageous refusal to
surrender to terrorist dictates. While in the rest of the country women
struggle for an increased role in public life, in Tripura, unlettered tribal
women are showing to those willing to listen and learn, a different aspect
of that struggle.
Tribal women have been negatively
affected by the brand of identity politics imposed by terrorist groups.
In the name of preserving tribal culture, a dress code is prescribed for
tribal women to wear the tribal "pachra", tribal women who wear sarees
or sindhur are often attacked. A circular has been issued forbidding family
planning and Rs. 1,000 announced as reward for every child produced. The
influence of "ojhas" or "witchdoctors" and their right to identify witches
is backed with the gun. Women activists like Lakshmi Deb Barma, a tea garden
worker and member of the union who refused to accept the terrorist orders
to disassociate from the union, are declared witches by an ojha and killed
in the dead of night by an NLFT squad. Terrorists have tried to prevent
fraternisation with non- tribals. Last year, Bengali and tribal women travelling
together in a bus to an International Women's Day meet were attacked with
bombs that killed Begiran Reang and injured two other women. Marriages
between tribals and non-tribals have been banned. Month after month tribal
women activists in the Tripura Nari Samity have been in confrontation at
the village level, challenging the terrorist dictates. They have been threatened,
attacked, intimidated, their children threatened with death if they did
not leave their work with the Nari Samity. The women arrange their own
meetings secretly, sometimes at the village wells, sometimes in the village
markets where in the crowds their talk would go unnoticed. After one such
meet of women of both communities, an activist, Shanti of Tajarkala, was
picked up by a terrorist squad and made to stand in cold water for several
hours as punishment for talking to non-tribals. Today she is active in
the election campaign. Among the Bengali community also a terrorist group
called the United Bengal Liberation Tigers has threatened women activists
in the same way. What a different connotation the term women's unity has
for activists in Tripura who defend that unity at extremely high personal
cost.
If there is any State in the country
where there is political resistance to divisive politics and terrorist
attacks at the grassroot level, from house to house, from hamlet to hamlet,
from village to village in the most remote areas where it takes over a
day to reach from one village to the next, it is in Tripura under the leadership
of the Left.
For all its tall claims about its
fight against terrorism, the truth is that where the battles are being
fought, the BJP is nowhere in the picture. On the contrary, RSS groups
work to further divide the tribals on religious grounds. As far as the
Congress is concerned, to its utter shame, in its desperation to grab power
it has openly allied itself in the elections with the political front of
the banned NLFT, a recently formed outfit calling itself the Indigenous
Nationalist Party of Tripura. The grotesque nature of the alliance was
seen in the recent massacre in Bikramnagar when terrorists attacked a hamlet
predominantly of CPI(M) supporters, killing eleven persons, four of whom
were women and two of whom were children, three houses which belonged to
known Congress supporters were left untouched.
It would be entirely wrong to reduce
or limit the issues in Tripura to an analysis of an electoral battle between
parties. Such an analysis would conceal how the current offensive of terrorist
groups and the alliance of a mainstream national party like the Congress
with them, affect basic issues concerning democratic rights and governance,
issues of national unity and integration, peoples and particularly women's
participation in decision making processes; how it affects the rights of
deprived and exploited communities; how it affects struggles for gender
equality and advance.