Category: Uncuff India

Uncuff India Episode 4: Invisible Wars and Vulnerability in Kashmir

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Episode 4: Invisible Wars and Vulnerability in Kashmir

This episode examines the nature and sites of warfare and the changing definitions, experiences of war itself. The hosts and the guest also discuss the diverse ways in which the State encourages and benefits from gender minority groups becoming agents of war. The episode also looks at the role of women in peace building movements or as peacemakers. The perceptive Dr. Ather Zia features in this episode.

Ather is a political anthropologist, poet, short fiction writer, and columnist. She is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology and Gender Studies Program at the University of Northern Colorado, Greeley. She has published a poetry collection, The Frame, and another collection is forthcoming. Ather’s ethnographic poetry on Kashmir has won an award from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. She is the founder-editor of Kashmir Lit and is the co-founder of Critical Kashmir Studies Collective, an interdisciplinary network of scholars working on the Kashmir region.

Dr Ather Zia, the guest for this episode

We are again accepting submissions for the Uncuff India Prize, a creative competition where listeners can submit creative pieces basis the theme of the episode and they stand a chance to win a cash prize of INR 1500. You can find more information about the competition here. What are you waiting for?

Transcript

[Intro]

 

Sanchi

Hello everyone and welcome to our podcast,  Uncuff India by One Future Collective. My name is Sanchi and my pronouns are she/her. 

 

Uttanshi

My name is Uttanshi and my pronouns are she/her. We are your hosts today and it’s so good to have you all listening in. 

 

[Intro ends]

 

Uttanshi

In this episode, we will attempt to understand the gendered notions of State sponsored violence in the form of war, particularly through an assessment of the ways in which it affects different genders, particularly gender minorities -as both victims and agents of this violence. We will also discuss the role of gender minorities in peacemaking and in peacekeeping. 

 

Sanchi

Yes, thanks Uttanshi. We know that States and State agencies are ultimately drawn from, and therefore, extensions of existing unequal social systems. In practice, this can look like heightened forms of violence, which stem from the socio-political and cultural sanctioning of the actions of these agencies. In these circumstances, what does it mean for people with multiple vulnerabilities to challenge perpetrating agents? It is these themes that we try to understand today. 

 

Uttanshi

To discuss this and to share their insights because of their research and in the context of their own background, we have with us Ather Zia.  Ather is the author of Resisting Disappearances, Military Occupation, and Women’s Activism in Kashmir, which won the 2020 Gloria Anzaldua Honorable Mention Award; 2021 Public Anthropologist Award and the Advocate of the Year Award in 2021. She has been featured in the Femi List 2021: a list of 100 women from the Global South working on critical issues. She is the co-editor of Can You Hear Kashmiri Women Speak, Women Unlimited 2020, Resisting Occupation in Kashmir and A Desolation Called Peace. She has published a poetry collection, The Frame, and another collection is forthcoming. Ather’s ethnographic poetry on Kashmir has won an award from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. She is the founder-editor of Kashmir Lit and is the co-founder of Critical Kashmir Studies Collective, an interdisciplinary network of scholars working on the Kashmir region. Ather, thank you so much for taking the time out to be able to have this extremely important conversation with us. We are very excited to learn from you and to hear from you over the course of this episode. And we really want to welcome you here. 

 

Ather

Thank you so much, Uttanshi  and Sanchi for inviting me. I am really glad to be in conversation with you and looking forward. Thank you. 

 

Sanchi

Thank you so much, Ather. Thanks a lot for making the time to join us today. We are absolutely delighted to have you for this conversation. And let’s begin right away. To understand the gendering of war, Ather maybe you could first have us look at warfare itself. So, can you tell us a bit about the nature of warfare and shed some light on maybe the sites where this can occur? What is a state of war and how has what we define as war changed over the decades? And can we necessarily see war and peace as strict categories anymore? 

 

Ather

That’s a very important question, Sanchi. I think, especially in context of Kashmir, we really need to see where the battlefield begins and where the sort of like, you know, the home and the hearth starts; or are they just meshed into each other. So, if you think about Kashmir from 1947 onwards, I’m going to talk about the case study of Kashmir. If you look at what’s been happening after 1947- when the two countries were created and when Kashmir emerges as a dispute between the two countries, but also through the eyes of its own people who wanted self determination and when this issue goes to the United Nations, what happens after, inside Kashmir, also forces us to think in the larger context of when we think about war and violence and battlefronts. It really forces us to think about what does war look like – especially in the modern, what is known as the “post colonial era”. Is it just soldiers? Is it just, you know, battles between two armies or does it really spill into civilian populations and does it spill into everyday life? And I think that’s what’s happened in Kashmir. You know, a lot of people, when they think about Kashmir or they talk about Kashmir, they’re like everything was good before 1989. And most of the times, you’ll see that a lot of people make 1989 a milestone year for the armed violence (which started in 1989)and then it kind of became, what they say, “violent”, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. And that makes us think about the idea of peace as, is peace absence of immediate and direct state and military violence? Is that what we call peace? And also the fact that, you know, what was happening inside Kashmir after 1947 was also the utilisation of or the weaponization of democracy or democratic symbols, especially electoral: the process of elections and all of that. So, I’ll try to talk a little bit about that because that gives us a perspective into how you can have a war happening and this can be so invisible and people are not even going to fathom what exactly is happening to these people who kind of rise into this armed struggle in 1989. And with most of the political analysts, especially in India, saying everything was good before that. So that’s something that we need to understand. So, right after the creation of two countries- In 1947, Kashmir emerges as a dispute between the two, of course, but also through the eyes of Kashmiris, who had seen themselves as part of some sort of a sovereign democracy where they probably had some kind of a deal with the monarch who was ruling them, but they were also a separate nation. So what happens in that moment is very important because we also see right from the get go, the weaponization of democracy that India did and for the next 74 years it was able to tell the rest of the world, and it still is, that we are doing or “we are being very democratic inside Kashmir”. Despite the fact that there is, there are several laws in place that suspend the civilian administration, which for all practical purposes is a client politician administration. So, what happens in 1947? Let’s kind of jump to 1951, when India decides to hold the elections with the help of client politicians. At that moment, the United Nations says that you can’t hold elections in a place that is disputed and that is subjudice, but India goes ahead anyway, says that we’re going to do the plebiscite. Now the people have been forced into partaking in the elections and the client politicians are the nominees. They are the ones who are going to be the politicians of the future, but all of this is done in the name of governance: that these disputed territories, both of them, need elections and they need to be governed and that’s when the actual violence starts happening. No one really talks about elections as violence, but I think when you think about Kashmir, the very weaponization of democracy and symbols of democracy, they become very violent. When you ask people who, for all practical purposes, are living in disputed territory, to partake in elections and telling them that this is going to be for governance – your politics of self-determination still stays, but the moment those elections happen, the moment “the government is elected”, something else starts happening, which is coups and, you know, rigging starts happening. The people who took part in elections, the client politicians, are thrown into jails. So, that is Kashmiri destiny with India from 1947 – through the 50s and 60s and early 70s and you see this politics of coercion happening. And you see on the other side, the civil administration also utilizing symbols of not just democracy, but also feminism as state feminism. And then bringing that all together and telling the rest of the world that we are actually conducting and we are executing democracy inside Kashmir because we are holding elections; and not making it seem like the battlefront it is because now they’re playing with the hearts and the minds. They are trying to win people onto their sides and that’s kind of the battle that India was fighting, but it also had military inside Kashmir, which was already doing the direct military aggression. It was already occupying lands. In fact, from 1947 onwards, till this present moment, the amount of land that is occupied by the Indian military, it’s the size of Dallas and the entire Kashmir is the state of Utah, slightly smaller and maybe, you know, as big as Britain. So you can kind of guess how much land is occupied by the army and that’s something that we really need to consider like- how does a battle look like inside a situation like this. And I think the bigger question there also is what does post-colonialism look like for places like Kashmir? I think that’s the bigger question. Does it even hold? Is it even a valid school of thought for places like Kashmir? Because when we talk about post-colonialism, I think one of the most violences that has occurred to people like Kashmiris is that post-colonialism hasn’t even talked about them. So, it’s completely quiet about such situations. So, should we say before 1989 that there was peace? What kind of peace was it? If you are doing this with the people, you’re steadily criminalising the movement for plebiscite or self determination. At the same time, you are engineering consent and you’re putting laws into place that is going to be, right from 1949 itself, even 1947 itself, put them behind bars for even asking the questions about plebiscite or self determination, but you’re not actively seemingly battling them because they haven’t taken up arms. So, in 1989, when Kashmiris actually take up arms also because of a lot of geopolitics that’s happening and they also took up arms in the 60s, but that movement was kind of suppressed within a decade. Are we saying that the armed violence is now erupting and Kashmiris are violent? Or are we saying if we look at it through the lens of what was happening from 1947 onwards, is this something that they have been pushed into a corner? And now they are taking up arms? So, I think when we look at war and battle and violence through such a lens where a democracy, “India”, is trying to coral these people into consenting for integration: how do we see pre 1989 and how do we see from 1989 till this point in time? I think there’s a lot of questions that arise as to what violence is, and how violence can look like. Sometimes the absence of direct violence might be construed as peace and quiet and calm and normalcy, but it is not because you’re doing violence by other means, while having a direct military aggressor in the region as well. I know that’s a long answer, but nothing is short about Kashmir. When we talk about Kashmir, you really have to talk about a lot. 

 

Uttanshi

Thank you so much for that, Ather. And just while you were speaking, I’m really interested to hear more about how the definition itself has changed over the years and how, you know, and I’m just thinking as someone who’s done law as well, is just how this also becomes a way for us to move away from the protections available under, which can be available under, a “wartime situation”. When the meaning of war itself changes, and when what war itself looks like changes, these protections also become very difficult to be able to grasp and to imply and to ask for as a matter of right, which then also makes me think, you know, war is generally seen as a larger universal phenomenon. Do you think that these situations also affect people of different gender identities differently? Women, queer folks – do you think that there is a difference in how we perceive it and how it impacts us? And is there a difference in the public sphere? Is there a difference in the private sphere of how different genders experience and deal with the impact of war? 

 

Ather

I think the impact of war on genders, definitely, all genders experience it in a different manner. Because of the political, social, intellectual, economic status that the genders inhabit, they are different. Mostly women are the most vulnerable, old people are very vulnerable, children are very vulnerable in a war. So, I can again, you know looking from the lens of Kashmir, I do want to just flag this answer that I’m about to give, by saying that the Eurocentric academia or the Eurocentric school of thought often pushes us to think about gendered ways or gendered impacts of war as if the genders are, you know, inhabiting different spaces. Even though they are at different social, political hierarchies, but at the same time our societies, you know, I’d like to see our societies as South Asian societies. I think even if we are different countries, we are different peoples and cultures, there is a rubric that we share. The close knit communities, where men and women – they exist and coexist in different ways. Of course, there’s a patriarchal structure where the men, hierarchically, are stronger and they have a lot of power over women, they have a lot of power over old people and children and that is true for all our societies. So in that sense, yes, the impact of war and the way war is felt and experienced is different, but we also have to understand – when war comes to a certain community, like it did in Kashmir: the first victim and the first discrimination that it did bodily was against men. I’ll give you the example of the disappeared, the forcibly disappeared in Kashmir, we have more than 10,000 disappearances currently and these are mostly men, majority of them Muslim men, who were bearded from 8 to 35 to 40. So, what you see there happening is that these men left early in the morning. Some of them were commutants, most of them were non commutants. They left in the morning, never returned, maybe detained, jailed, killed, imprisoned. We don’t know.  So, I get asked this question a lot. There’s this movement called Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, which was founded by a mother and a human rights lawyer. The mother whose son Parveena Ahanger, whose son was disappeared by the Indian Army and it’s been a strong movement for the last 33 years and the question that gets asked about is the gendered resistance and the gendered impact of violence. Women suffer a double bind, you know? They have to fight the occupation, they have to fight the patriarchal military industrial complex, which is disappearing them in; and then they also have to fight the society because they have to push through certain societal norms to really become active and become these activists, which they have in the last 30 years. But at the same time, I always remind people, and my students, and whoever I’m talking to, that we have to understand that societies in South Asia, we experience war as communities – which is also true for other places. It’s the men who disappeared and women who were pushed into public. So, the first and foremost impact is kind of like the men were taken away. So, a lot of people are like, “so this is not a feminist movement, APDP, because these are women, they’re looking for their old patriarchal structures to be back, like their husband to be back, their father to be back”. So is that what it is? It’s not a feminist movement? And that kind of pushes us to think further. Like, what does feminism mean for our societies? Because I think for a long time, and not for the lack of decolonial literature that has been making rounds in the last 10-15 years, where we are thinking through our own cultures as to what feminism means for our culture, as what decolonization means for our culture. I think if you look through those lenses, there is a lot more generative debate that can occur and also we can kind of think through our own cultural problems because war also is a cultural problem. You might use the same technology that the Israeli settler state uses in Palestine as India does in Kashmir. You might use the same war technologies that, you know, American imperialism uses in the rest of the world: more than a 100 conflicts and violences and wars that it’s been part of. But at the same time, war is very cultural. How do people experience war? War also becomes culture. It’s like in Kashmir – war has become an invisible war. It has different names. People call it an unconventional war. They call it a low protracted conflict. They call it conflict, they call it dispute. But I really like to see it as a war that’s happening. It’s an everyday war. It’s not very new, but a very cultural notion of war, where people prepare for the war every day. They go out of their homes, they know they are facing a certain situation, they know they can’t move freely, they have bunkers, they have checkpoints. So it’s a very sensorial way of understanding war, in which women do suffer differently, men suffer differently, and other genders also suffer differently – not talked about – and in the end they all suffer together. So, I think because these are South Asian cultures, no doubt, you know, different cultures, different religions, different ethics and people. But at the same time the way war comes to Kashmir, the way people are experiencing war – that’s really nuanced, that’s really cultural, that’s also in ways fought back through religion as well. Like people are very religious, how prayerful they are. I’m not talking about the other aspects, but people have a different way, like women have a different way of fighting this war. And in my case study, which was the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, I really saw the different hierarchies that women inhabit. How they become active against the occupation; how they even implement the politics that they have garnered and gleaned in the last 30 – 33 years, which is based around mourning. So, it’s basically the politics of mourning. How they utilise the social norms and kind of like make them into activist norms; how their feminine consciousness becomes feminist consciousness; and also how their feminine consciousness is a feminist consciousness in the first place. So, I think while we need to pay attention to the gendered impacts and gendered experiences, I feel like our South Asian contexts would also be benefited if we did not pit men against the women, even inside the situation of war. If we really took them as part of the same fabric and how the dynamics they share and kind of began from there, which is not to say that we have to negate women’s very special double buy-in situations, but these have to be parallel processes. 

 

Sanchi

Thank you so much for bringing out all those brilliant points, Ather. I think I have learned so much from the last 10 minutes that you have spoken to us. I think the perspective that you offered is so nuanced and it makes me think of so many things that, like you said, does a postcolonial theory even apply to a context like Kashmir for us? How in different contexts, for example, if we talk about the global north, then the gendering that might happen in wars there is so different from our South Asian societies and we indeed face wars as communities and other communities also might face this. But your whole contextualization of how a South Asian society faces war, it’s been so insightful to listen to. Something that you said really stood out for me, which was, yes, genders suffered differently in a warlike situation and, especially, when you talked about Kashmir – but they ultimately suffered together. And I was just wondering if you would like to talk to us about how then does the state encourage and benefit from different genders and how do different gender minority groups, but also like you said, men, become agents of war and how does the state actually benefit from it? 

 

Ather 

I think that gendering really, really benefits the State, especially if the state is also portraying a sort of a feminist consciousness, if it can be called consciousness. I remember there was this one incident in around 2007 – 2008. I think the listeners are going to benefit more from concrete examples than theory. Sonia Gandhi came to Kashmir. And she actually addressed women separately, and she talked to them as Kashmiri sisters who had withstood the violence of the Kashmiri armed violence, which we call armed struggle- it has a definite colloquial name for it, which is tehreek, meaning revolution. But the Indian states portray it as terrorism to the rest of the world. And then Sonia Gandhi had this very specific speech that she talks to – I forget, I’m just summarising – but she was addressing Kashmiri women. She was telling them that you have suffered for the last so many years through this armed violence and she wasn’t talking about military violence. She wasn’t talking about the Indian states’ violence. She was talking specifically about how women in Kashmir have suffered their own men. So it was 2007 I think, and that made me think about brown imperial feminism. And brown imperial feminism is essentially-I know that you inhabit Indian identities, and I have complete respect for that as people belonging to a certain nationality. Of course, you should be proud. You should be who you are. But of course, we also have to be humanists more than we have to be patriots in that sense.  So that made me start thinking about brown imperial feminism that a lot of Indian feminists were bringing into Kashmir. That also made me think about state feminism, the history of state feminism in Kashmir. So, when I have been part of a lot of feminist collectives, especially those that emerge from India. And when I was younger, I used to be part of these conversations where we thought that, you know, as feminists, as women, we have some solutions. We’re going to think about this and then I had some senior activists who would say that this is to no avail, what you’re doing with these Indian feminists. But I had to have my own experiences, right? So, what they meant was that there’s going to be solidarity, but the solidarity is going to be very selective. It will not go beyond a certain point, but I was young and I thought maybe, you know, we can make a difference. These are different feminists. These are not feminists from the older generations, but a decade later I realised that Indian feminists did really have a very selective solidarity with Kashmiri feminists – and that was that until the point you called the Kashmiri problem and the Kashmiri issue as a human rights issue, it was all good. And the human rights violations don’t occur in a vacuum, they’re symbolic of the political dispute because Kashmiris are demanding certain things. That’s why they’re being abused. So the moment you talked about political dispute, your paths would become different because they did not want to talk against their own state. 

So, that became very palpable early on and that’s where you can kind of see where the State kind of makes inroads. And I’ll give you this very important example and I think that might tie this answer together. And that is when the Indian State de-operationalized and militarily took away Kashmir’s autonomy, one of the reasons that they told the rest of the world is that the special status of Kashmir has discriminated against women. It was actually able to get away with it and it told the rest of the world that Kashmir has become this virulent autonomous patriarchy, which is cracking down on its women and it told brazen lies to the rest of the world because one of the things that was happening inside Kashmir for a long time was this debate-what if Kashmiri women married non Kashmiris? What happens to their residency? Because you know Kashmiris had a permanent residency under the autonomy. They were citizens of Kashmir, then they also had a citizenry with India – they had sort of a dual citizenship. So, from the 60s onwards, what was happening was that women had to produce an unmarried certificate if they had to get a job or something, to prove that they were not married to a non Kashmiri. So what happened in case they married a non Kashmiri? So, a lot of people were under the impression that if they married a non-Kashmiri, they lost their dominion, they lost their domicile status, but that was not the case. They still retain the right to property, they still retain their right to franchise. And in 2002 there was a case, and the judgement said very categorically and clearly that women do not lose any domicile status. They still retain their permanent residency and of course the husband also becomes party to the permanent residency, but the only thing that was unresolved, which was done case by case basis with property rights. Like who gets that woman’s property? that couple’s property? It also depends on where children are. There was a committee that was educating this problem on a case by case basis and because of red tape there was no law coming through fast enough and I don’t know if that was even by design. So then the Indian government uses this very thing and dismantles the entire state and says, “there is discrimination against women”, and it’s on record. 

There is a public repartee happening between Indian Prime Minister Modi and the ex-chief Minister of Kashmir, Umar Abdullah, where Umar Abdullah’s sister has actually married an Indian, a non Kashmiri. And Modi tells the Chief minister of Kashmir that “your sister has gotten married, we will take away Article 370 and she can have her rights”. And the ex-chief minister, he talks back, publicly of course, through the media and he says “no, no, no such thing has happened. She hasn’t lost her status”. So, you can actually see the fudging that is happening between these two very prominent politicians and the Indian media is actually running with Modi’s version. I am, by no means, in sympathy with a current politician from Kashmir, but I’m just kind of like using this as an example. So, the “gender discrimination” was actually used as a straw man argument and this entire state was dismantled with the help of Indian feminists, who did not raise any question. And I’m using Indian feminist, the phrase very loosely. I don’t mean a particular group. There have been sympathetic feminists who have looked at Kashmir through a lens of political dispute and not just as a human right dispute. Of course, that goes without saying. But the majority of people, of which you women are also a party, and different genders are also a party: they saw this as gender discrimination. So that has been used. State feminism has been used. A lot of times you see historically people are like, “but women, they have like 42% – 50% literacy rate in Kashmir, so how is it even possible? Which means that everything good has happened from 1947 onwards; women are now in the mainstream and all of that. State feminism was deployed by client politicians in their manifesto. They were actually creating a constituency through women for the Indian government and for integration. So while women were pushed towards literacy, it was like – they could be doctors, they could be teachers, but they were not encouraged to think for themselves. Like if someone would think for themselves, if someone would question the Indian government, that was pure becoming a dissident, and they were thrown in jail. There was a solid, concerted criminalization. That’s not feminism! That’s not feminist practice! So we see state feminism in effect from 1947 onwards, which kind of helps them strengthen the idea of democracy. Which actually is not democracy but weaponization of democratic elements like elections. And then in 2019, we see this brazen use of gender discrimination. And now we see pink washing happening inside Kashmir, as if, you know, the rest of India or other parts of the world are better off than Kashmir and Kashmir is the only virulent patriarchy. And what’s also worsens Kashmir’s argument is the fact that it’s portrayed as – for lack of a better term – Islamic terrorism, which is such a misnomer: that it’s Muslim men who have gotten together, created a patriarchy and they’re cracking down on their women. And it becomes very easy in an anti-Islam, in an Islamophobic world, for the rest of the world to buy it. So I think that’s something that we need to consider about how state feminism, how feminism and how gender discrimination has really been utilised by the Indian state as weapons against Kashmiris. 

 

Uttanshi

Thank you for that, Ather. And I think that just brings me to my last question for you, which is what do you see the role of women, particularly as in the peace building movement, as peacemakers in such situations as well? What do you think is that role? How has that been shaped? How has that influenced situations of violence in the past but also now?

 

Ather

I think after 2019, so women as peacemakers and peace builders again, I think it really takes a society a long time to realise that, especially in Kashmir- I call Kashmir a working class patriarchy, and I think most of South Asia is a working class patriarchy, where women actually are working alongside men, you know, they’re selling fish, they are baking, they are street food vendors. So it’s not as if our women, you know, that’s where I kind of push people and push myself to think with less eurocentrism, because our societies have never been different in that sense, where they have kept women from the public life, women have been part of the economic strata all along. It’s just that socially they have inhabited a place where they were always secondary, always a lower rung, which is also true for the West. But going back to your question – how do we see women as peacemakers in a situation like Kashmir? I would say-I really don’t have a clear cut answer for that because I feel like women have been trying inside Kashmir for the last 74 years be side by side with men and have an equal say. Even if not an equal contribution and an equal share at the table where the negotiations happen, but they have been trying to be in a supplementary role, in a complimentary role, in the role of even playing chaperons to men because, you know, men disappear or are killed immediately. And the women in Kashmir, for the last 33-34 years have been chaperons of their men: if a man goes out, a mother or a sister will go along so that he’s not immediately killed. If they’re walking in the streets, they’re seen as a family, which also is not a guarantee of safety. You know, women are raped, women are killed. So, they have other issues that occurred to them. So, women’s movement or activism or role in peacemaking, I don’t really see it separately, but I do see women getting together and forming a movement, of which the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons is a great example, but again we can’t really look at it only from the lens of being a woman’s movement because these are mothers and these are wives who are called the half widows, for lack of a better term because they didn’t know whether their husbands are dead or alive, whether they’re going to turn up or what. So they’re called half widows. This movement has become formidable, even if after 2019 they’re not able to protest much because protesting has been criminalised inside Kashmir. We see a lot of support that men gave them so that they could form this movement. The co-founder of the movement is a pro bono human rights lawyer. The men from these families help women with paperwork. They help women with learning the legal ways and courts and police and whatever the processes were. It was just that they could not come to the forefront and protest like the women were, because the women were initially allowed to protest because they were just seen as women. You know, they also do not, they don’t inhabit an equal hierarchy with the occupation forces – because they see them as just women so they can gather together and do a sit-in and do a small protest because they’re just seen as mothers. They’re just seen as wives. What are they going to do? But the moment it’s a group of men who are protesting, they’re seen as a threat. So there have been several massacres where men came out in protest. Gaukada massacre from 1991, which was actually done to protest sexual molestation and rape. And so, you kind of see them being directly, becoming a massacre – they were directly shot at and the soldiers surrounded them and killed them, killed a lot of men in that protest, but with women it usually became this kind of a thing where they would get together and they would protest and then they would raise a little hue and cry. Do politics of mourning, basically mourning and crying and utilising the symbols of their social mores that were already present, which was mourning and kind of fashioning their protests like that. 

So in that again what we see is that women are protesting, they are being activists, they are trying to push the social envelope as well as deal with the politics of occupation. But at the same time, I would remind the listeners and I would also try to just stand in the fact that we are close knit societies. We can’t really have our movements separately. And I think that’s what I think of, when I think of peacemaking in Kashmir. And again, what does the word peacemaking do in Kashmir? There can be no peacemaking unless the political dispute is gone. A lot of people say, “Oh it’s a post-conflict society” – No! It’s not just conflict, because conflict is ambiguity between 2-3 people; no, this is a dispute – a territory, where people have their own demands, and you have to listen to them. It’s not just something that’s happening between two countries. So how do we think about peacemaking when we think about Kashmir without thinking that the political dispute has to be solved? And if we do not have 100% genuineness in solving the political dispute, we are paying merely lip service to settling women’s issues and to settling men’s issues, and to settling the issues of other genders on the gender spectrum. So that’s something that I would really foreground. 

 

Sanchi

Thank you so much, Ather. I think it’s been incredible listening to you talk about all things from weaponization of democracy, about situating war and peace, and community in our South Asian societies. And also assessing the situation of Kashmir over the past decades. I think we are all taking a lot, and I think I’ll speak for our listeners as well, that it’s been a truly insightful experience to listen to you today. Thank you so much for that. And before we close, I would like to ask you if you have any closing thoughts on the conversation that you’d like to share with us. 

 

Ather

Yeah, I don’t know what I have to flag, but I do want us to kind of take this moment, this conversation when we’re thinking about Kashmir, per se. I also want to draw the listeners’ attention to the fact that from 1947 onwards, most of us have been quarrelled into following a pattern of living, whether that be political, cultural, or economic. This was left to us by the fleeing colonial powers and I do want us to think through the lens of neocolonialism. When I think about India, I don’t really think through the lens of post colonialism. I think it’s a neocolonial power and not just think, I know it behaves and it has the heart of a neocolonial power. It’s an imperial power that was left in place and not just as countries as, “democracies” that have been imported to our places. These are settler democracies because if we think about, let’s say, the United States – it’s a democracy to whom? It’s not democracy to indigenous people, whose genocide is still so unknown to people in our part of the world – that we still come to America thinking this is the bastion of democracy, but this is a democracy for a group of people, for the white settlers who came here. This is their democracy, but not the indigenous peoples’. And this is the democracy that is imported to the rest of the world, which is why you see so much dispossession happening in India currently: of the indigenous people, of Dalits, of the marginalised, of, “minorities” who are not minorities – Muslims are not minorities- 200 million people, how do you, of course like relatively, but you don’t call them minorities and push them into ghettos and say that that’s where you stay. 

So I think when we are thinking about Kashmir, I would urge your generation, I would urge the generation that’s listening to podcasts and the generation that is coming, I would really urge us to look at not through post colonialism but through the lens of neocolonialism and neoliberalism. And then think about issues like Kashmir and see how simple they are. They’re not intractable problems. They’re really solvable problems. If you get out of the mindset, like, what if Kashmir is granted independence? What happens after that? I mean, nothing is going to happen. And then start thinking about extractionism and thinking about neoliberalism, which really wants Kashmir for all the resources – the water and all kinds of minerals and now you also have lithium mines. And what is what has been happening after 2019 is really, really an extractionist economy that is cracking down on Kashmir. It has less to do with nations and nationalism, it’s more to do with neoliberal, extractionist policies, which is creating ecocide. So, I think that’s something that I would ask us to keep in mind. To broaden our horizons and not just look through issues of prestige and Kashmir being the crown of India and all of that, but really look at it through the eyes of the future rather than the past.

 

Uttanshi

Thank you so much Ather for taking the time out to have this conversation with us. I definitely feel like you’ve given us a lot to think about, a lot of thoughts to go back and to be discussing in our micro communities with each other. So from my end just a very big thank you for taking the time out to do this. 

 

[Outro]

 

Uttanshi

Thank you for tuning in today. Please leave us any questions you may have as voice notes on Anchor or in our DMs. We would love to hear from you. This podcast is brought to you by One Future Collective.

 

Sanchi

Yes, thank you so much. And don’t forget to follow us on Instagram and Facebook at onefuturecollective and at Onefuture_India on Twitter. And keep an eye out for future episodes out every second and fourth Thursday of the month. Until next time!

 

[Outro ends]

Mapping and negotiating power

Uncuff India Episode 10: Dimensions of conflict and peace: visioning a utopian world

Uncuff India Episode 9: Civic space and dissent: A pathway to social justice

Uncuff India Episode 3: Protection and Power: the values of the Indian Police Force

by admin ● Posted on

The third episode of the series examines the perceptions regarding the police and its relationship with different individuals and groups on the basis of their social identities. The police system is slowly becoming a weapon of choice for ensuring discipline and the episode dives into the values that guide this. The episode also delves into the messaging around the police force and the multiple ways in which it is expressed and/or experienced.

We are joined by the passionate Neeraj Shetye in this episode. Neeraj is the Partnerships and Communications Manager at the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development (OICSD) at Somerville College, University of Oxford. Prior to OICSD, Neeraj worked at the Oxford Internet Institute as a Research Support Officer.  Neeraj consults grassroots collectives in India on program design and outreach.

 

We are again accepting submissions for the Uncuff India Prize, a creative competition where listeners can submit creative pieces basis the theme of the episode and they stand a chance to win a cash prize of INR 1500. You can find more information about the competition here. What are you waiting for?

Transcript

[Intro]

Sanchi

Hello everyone and welcome to our podcast Uncuff India by One Future Collective. My name is Sanchi and my pronouns are she, her.

Uttanshi

My name is Uttanshi and my pronouns are she and her. We are your hosts today and it’s so good to have you all listening in.

[Intro ends]

Uttanshi

In today’s episode, we will unpack police brutality by situating it in the context of the Indian socio economic and political context. It will also explore whether police brutality and the institution of law enforcement are characterised by any notions of toxic masculinity.

Sanchi

Yes, thank you, Uttanshi. As we know, police brutality has, over the past years, become a weapon of choice for many states to douse or weaken any protests or unrest. Not only has the regular recurrence made it normal but it has also begun to be glorified as a desired medium for ensuring law and order. The perception of the police force as a means of protection is rapidly changing in how only a very select few are protected at the expense of others and it can now then be argued that the police has become a mere symbol of state power.

Uttanshi

To discuss this and to share their insights on the topic with us, we have with us Neeraj. Neeraj is an aspiring public policy researcher with an interest in Indian social policy and its social justice approach. He is currently working as the Research Support Officer at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. Most recently, he graduated with an MSc in Politics of Conflict Rights and Justice from the School of Oriental, Asian and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. At SOAS, he was affiliated with the Center on Conflict Rights and Justice as a graduate Research associate and worked as a SOAS Digital Ambassador. At SOAS, he co-curated a three-day conference celebrating 75 years of Indian independence with a progressive critique of the system ‘India at 75 in Review’. He has been involved with grassroots initiatives in India since the COVID-19 pandemic such as Khana Chahiye Foundation, a hunger relief operation in Mumbai, and Eklavya India Foundation in Central India. Thank you so much Neeraj for taking the time out to be able to participate in this podcast and to share your really valuable insights. We’re very excited to hear from you and learn from you over the course of this episode.

Neeraj

Thank you Uttanshi and thank you Sanchi for the introduction and thank you for this opportunity. I’m glad to be connected with One Future Collective today.

Sanchi

Thank you so much, Neeraj. And yes, thanks for joining us today to discuss this extremely pertinent topic and we are really looking forward to hear from you on it. So let me start straight away and ask you- what are your own thoughts about the police. How do you perceive the police system and if this perception has changed over the years?

Neeraj

To be frank, I think I need to clarify my positionality and that’s very important because when one talks about police brutality and one talks about the perception of police, it’s important to know the socioeconomic background of the person who’s speaking because that affects a lot of how people view the police. Over the past few years, I’ve realised that my positionality, of course, comes from a much more privileged space where police as a protector was the only way that we saw the police and that’s how it was described in, say, family drawing room discussions that we had and growing up, I mean, some of my family members were a part of that institution. So that created this perception of police being the protective force for the general population, but over the past few years, I realised that, you know, with my work on the field and with engaging with initiatives on the ground, the perception is different and not everyone looks at the police with the same mindset and that has led me to question the whole idea of whether the police force is merely a protective force. Can it be an oppressive force, and if yes, then what are the ways in which we can sort of reform it? But yeah, my perception has changed over the past years and that is only due to my engagement with activists and grassroots collectives and communities on the ground.

Uttanshi

Thank you so much for that, Neeraj. I feel, you know when I was listening to you speak, even I was thinking about what my perception initially was given my background, my family, and similar to you what I heard my parents describe the police to be and how it has changed. Do you want to share a little bit about- what do you think led to this change in perception for you and what do you think forms the core of the police system? And do you think that the messaging around the police itself is reflective of, or you know, or believes in this core themselves? What are the agents from which this messaging is received about the police, what they do, who they are, what is their role in the society, etc.

Neeraj

Right, so I’ll answer your first question. I inherently see like multiple questions in this one conversation. So, the first question is about perception and how it changed and for me it was during the pandemic, the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 when I started engaging with Khana Chahiye Foundation, which was a hunger relief operation, and we worked on the ground and it was a civil society led initiative which was of course, had to be in tandem with the local government body, the police system and all of that. We reached out to communities in Mumbai specifically and around Mumbai who were absolutely in distress, and these were communities who had lost their only source of livelihood. And for us, COVID-19 was not like, for us who were on the ground, COVID-19 was not just a health emergency; it eventually became like this livelihoods emergency because people often said on the ground that, you know, COVID might not kill us, but hunger will, because there was people didn’t have the basic necessities for themselves. And in this whole situation, you could see people doing the absolute, you know, people resorting to absolutely desperate measures to ensure that their family is supported. They would go out. These were daily wage earners, right, so, they used to go out, try, to like, sometimes beg but also sell stuff on the ground and this was during the lockdown, so of course they were not met with the empathy that they deserved. And police became that force that was tasked with ensuring discipline on the streets and they would often, you know, resort to violence, straight up violence in these communities and their only explanation to us was that, you know, if you don’t instill this kind of discipline with the lathi, people wouldn’t listen to them. So, it was almost like they had infantilized the whole population and that was like the beginning of how I started viewing the police not just as the protective force, but also like this patronizing force that was trying to instill, that was apparently tasked with instilling discipline in the population, which is, which I feel is should not be how the police system functions because that’s not their responsibility to instill this certain idea of discipline into the population. The idea is to ensure that there is law and order and to ensure that you know things can things are moving swiftly and smoothly as possible but resorting to violence for towards the general population is not the way to go and that doesn’t create a very, that doesn’t help the police perception to be very honest. What are the core ideals now? I believe that I don’t know what forms the core ideal, of course, violence might be one of it. Discipline, as in a certain idea of discipline also forms this core idea of the Indian police system. But I know for a fact that empathy doesn’t form, empathy is not a part of those core values. And of course, that doesn’t mean I’m generalizing. There are, of course, I’ve come across police officers who have been quite empathetic towards, you know, but those are as individuals outside, sometimes even outside the police, outside the police uniform they have been empathetic individuals. But in general, I don’t feel empathy is a part of the police system and there are a lot of problems to that. We can discuss it later, but I feel, yeah, that’s the problem. The core values are very rigid. There’s a certain idea of, you know, control that the police resort to and that is, I feel, not so relevant into this society.

Sanchi

Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing that with us, Neeraj and something that you mentioned really stood out to me that how violence may be seen as a core value of the police system, especially in India, but empathy unfortunately is not. And taking from that, you have also already mentioned right in the beginning the importance of looking at one’s own positionality when thinking about what our perception of the police system is. Taking on from that, I would like to ask you how do you think different people perceive or experience the system of police and how different it is for different people, how does it happen or what do you think forms the basis for this difference? And I think the core values that we just spoke of may have a lot to do with it, so I’m curious to know your thoughts on it.

Neeraj

Fundamentally, I feel the way police as a unit is even looked at changes a lot of things and this is rooted in the socioeconomic backgrounds of individuals, communities in spaces like metropolitan spaces like Mumbai and I can speak for Mumbai, but I know a lot of these factors might be the same in other parts of the country, might not be the same- again, there are other factors. There are other social factors such as you know, the religion of an individual, caste identity of an individual, all of these factors do contribute, but in urban spaces like Mumbai also like economic factors, right. Your class background matters and that generally shapes the opinion one has of the police, so you would see like, I mean the bottom strata of the society, the lower class, the working-class communities of the city is often scared of the police in a way. I mean there’s a certain form of fear which is not the same among middle class or upper middle class or upper even the upper class of the society, right, the economically well-off class of the society. They look at police in a very different way and I’ve engaged with all kinds of people in the past few years, and I’ve noticed that the way police exert their power also differs. They know for a fact that working class communities are easy targets, working class communities can be ‘disciplined’, can be used, you know, can be dominated through their perception. So that affects in the way we view the police and also police view themselves, right? So, they are, certainly, like I’ve seen police members, police officers, change their demeanor over time when they move from neighborhood to neighborhood. So, you’ll have, like someone being excessively dominating in a very, you know that masculine kind of a way in a working-class neighborhood but that same person would be extremely quiet, in a very quiet demeanor in like you know, in an upper middle-class neighborhood. And that’s, I mean that also shows how police view themselves, where and how they operate in certain spaces, so I feel socioeconomic factors do contribute to a lot of perceptive reality. I mean, of course middle-class background, I mean people coming from the middle-class often have representation in the police force, so they have a very different way of looking at the police. They look at them as a fellow community member, but that’s not the case for people coming from working-class neighborhoods. A lot of them do not have that kind of representation in the police force so they often look at the police as like a danger more than more than someone that they can look up to for protection. So yeah, that, I mean that’s the way I think socioeconomic factors contribute a lot.

Sanchi

Yeah, I think it is. That highlights very well how the class background of a person might so deeply affect how they view the police and I was wondering if you’d also like to shed some light on how a person’s identity markers such as caste or gender might also play into this perception.

Neeraj

Absolutely. I mean, as I mentioned before, when we work in the working-class neighborhoods of the city, now who is the working class, right? A majority of the working-class neighborhoods that we have worked in came from religious minority backgrounds, especially Muslims and also oppressed caste communities. Now these communities haven’t had that kind of privilege where they could participate in the labor force in the same way that other communities have and a lot of these communities are Dalit Bahujan. Communities who have settled in these certain, you know, ghettoized neighborhoods, and that’s an offensive word in a way, but I mean, social scientists tend to call them these ghettos around the city, and communities here have clustered themselves in and these are specific neighborhoods. Anybody who works on the field knows for a fact that this is the reality on the ground and anyone who disagrees with it clearly hasn’t is clearly intentional or doesn’t know how to look at the society in a general way. So, if you look at Indian society, of course most majority, I mean most metropolitan cities would have these clusters which are deemed to be dangerous, right? And we have noticed that they are given some very offensive slang terms which I do not want to repeat them on today here, but I think people would know what those slangs would be and those are very offensive, often associated with religious minorities, often associated with oppressed caste communities. This idea of criminalization is imposed on these communities and that’s the reality. I mean it’s time for, I feel people coming from privileged backgrounds, social scientists coming from privileged backgrounds to accept that reality, acknowledge that there is something fundamentally wrong with their own communities and start reflecting on those values themselves rather than, you know, preaching some form of ideas onto the already oppressed community. So, I think those ideas matter, those identity markers are exceptionally important when one analyzes police in general, policing forces in general, yeah.

Uttanshi

Thank you so much, Neeraj and while I was listening to you speak, there’s just so much to, I think think back to you know and while you were speaking, I’m thinking where are these ideas of violence, disciplining, protection, etc. coming from, right, and how do they drive or shape the police person’s behavior or their actions? And you know, and I know that this is something you study very, very fondly and you know, you’ve been very interested to understand this phenomenon as well but, you know, tying back to the point about what you said, right, almost clearly that came out of what you were saying was empathy is not a part of the system, maybe as part of an individual person when they are not wearing their uniform, but there is a certain level of violence, a certain duty towards maintaining discipline, a certain level of harshness, if I may say so, that gets associated with the identity of a police person. What do you think drives that identity and what do you think, you know, is there something that drives that identity at all? And if yes, what according to you, is that?

Neeraj

Of course, there is this idea, this very idea of masculinity that drives it, that you know someone has to be more assertive, someone who has to be physically, you know, in a particular shape, of course has to be like this macho person, if I can use that word, and should have that certain idea of confidence and harshness as Uttanshi said. These ideas are stemming out of this idea of masculinity that has been normalized and this masculinity has taken different shapes over time. And in today’s time, we see a different kind of like a Hindu nationalist masculinity that is being portrayed in a particular way, but of course, there are other forms of masculinity as well. But this core idea of masculine identity, which is considered to be, you know, with this particular idea of voice, tone, physical demeanor, all of these things together form this idea of what ideal policemen or ideal protective force should be. And this comes from a larger idea of defense forces, I feel, so police force is just like the localised form of protection service, but then the larger idea of the military and the defense forces that are there and the way they are shaped right, that inherently also contributes to how localized protection forces or localized even vigilante groups see themselves. This whole idea of ‘hamare Jawan’ (our soldiers) right, I mean ‘Jawan khade hain sarhad par’ (the soldiers guard the borders) and this whole idea of exerting force, dominating and constantly being aggressive and that aggression gets translated into very localised formats. So when I for example, worked on the local right-wing groups in India, I noticed that their idea of masculinity is also stemming from this idea of how the protective forces see themselves, these defense forces see themselves and they would try to nurture it. I felt that these were people who had aspirations to join these forces but never got through, which is why now they are victim of this whole idea of this whole notion of Hindu nationalism and dominating certain other oppressed groups. So it’s very, it’s not that complicated, but at the same time it is, and the nuance is necessary and we haven’t been able to sort of like, you know, dissect that nuance that well. But it definitely stems from a very aggressive personality that forms the whole idea of Indian masculinity today.

Uttanshi

Yeah, and every time I watch anything to do with, you know, police representation, even in pop culture, for example, there is a very streamlined understanding, appearance, behaviour, you know that that they depict and just thinking back to a few of these shows that you know have aired for I think years now and have been fairly popular, it’s not just to say that you know, only the male police officers behave a certain way. This movement and this reliance on aggression, this reliance on I have more power than you because I am in a certain uniform and I have a certain level of state backing, I think, permeates across genders who serve on these forces as well. This is, of course, not to generalize and to, you know, to echo your point earlier about how it is something that everybody within the forces do, but as a system, it is something that really encourages it that hinges on these. Do you have anything to add to that as well? I’m just curious to know because you know, often when we talk about toxic masculinity, there is an association of genders as well and how it may be useful for us to perhaps think of it as a set of behavior patterns, perhaps a set of, you know, beliefs and attitudes that can permeate across genders as well.

Neeraj

No, I absolutely agree because this idea of masculinity has been so deeply rooted in the police system and as I said before, empathy doesn’t form the core value of it because generally in our Indian understanding, empathy is associated with femininity for some reason, right? I mean, you are not that harsh or you are not a decisive person for some reason and your heart bleeds for somebody constantly are these ideas. I’ve noticed that when you talk about empathy in the context on the ground, you’re often associated with, like, you know not-so-masculine ideas, I don’t want to say exclusively feminine ideas too, but again, not-so-masculine ideas. It doesn’t have a space in toxic masculinity. The only way you show empathy is like towards your family but your masculinity in public arena does not have empathy driving the way you function. And I honestly believe, of course, pop culture has a lot to blame, but then again, this is coming from someone, like for myself, I have distanced myself from engaging with pop culture that much. So, if you ask me, the last film I watched, of course I haven’t watched films in the past, like I haven’t watched a film where they would show something like this in the past year or two. I do watch some documentaries, but that idea still permeates. I mean, I realized that there was some conversation among my friends about Pathaan, a more recent movie also carrying this idea of, you know, this really masculine portrayal of a defense officer and a policing officer, all of that. So, our pop culture has portrayed those values, but how much of it has already been in our system is something that we need to reflect on because, of course, these ideas are coming from somewhere. The pop culture hasn’t really just written it by themselves; there were these ideas already, of course pop culture has exaggerated it now and that kind of creates a pressure on say, women who want to be a part of the policing force, right? I mean, even today, like I don’t think Indian army allows women in combat forces and why doesn’t it allow it? I mean this whole idea that women can’t be violent, or women can’t be associated with anything remotely related to violence and that’s a very, I mean you can see how toxic masculinity there engages with and shapes really, the social fabric of even femininity. What is Indian femininity? What is, I mean who gets to be a part of it, so all of that. So of course, I mean it is does have an effect on gender per se and pop culture does play a big role in shaping how those narratives are portrayed.

Sanchi

Yeah. Thank you so much for bringing up all those very important points, Neeraj and what I’m hearing a lot is about how hegemonic masculinity actually affects the police force and how we’ve been talking about empathy, we’ve been talking about the gendering of the police forces and how that’s so detrimental to everybody involved in the process. And we have understood that it is toxic masculinity that affects a lot of our perception or how the police force itself is constructed, but I want to understand why is that a problem? If that is something, if that is the ethos of the police force, then why do we think that it is a problem that is the core value? And if you do think that it is a problem, then how can we imagine alternatives for it?

Neeraj

I mean, this is so like, this is like asking someone to change the social fabric of the country because that’s the understanding we are rooted in, that understanding of what masculinity is so much that, an alternative to that would be a more empathetic police force and that can only happen, I believe, and this is my personal opinion, of course it can change and people might have different opinions is by two ways, is that you counsel the existing police force into dealing better with, you know, with the constituents, with the communities that they’re dealing with, right. So, if a police officer is posted in like a working-class neighborhood in an urban space, of course they have to be mindful of the power dynamic they have and they share with the community because, of course, it’s not going to be, it’s not that straightforward and it’s going to be a bit, I mean, it’s unbalanced, right? I mean, and the working-class communities will look at the police officer not just as a protective force, but sometimes also as an oppressive force and this is what I’ve seen recurrently on the ground- that people are scared. People are scared by these officers who are expected to serve them, right, by the force that was expected to serve them. So that counselling has to go through. Secondly, I feel recruitment matters a lot because who forms the police force, how many of them are given responsibility in a particular area, all of that matters because the conversations I’ve had with existing police officers, especially even like some of my family members, not my close family, but of course my extended family members, is that there’s a lot of stress and workload on these police officers to solve a certain number of cases every month. And this is again with the fact that they have to appease the politicians, the local politicians, the national politicians, all of these people. So that stress gets added on and all of this comes out when they work and this comes out in a very harsh way on the people unfortunately, on the communities that they’re serving and say, for a fact that if you are posted in a community where you can show that kind of dominance, it just ends up becoming a toxic cycle because then you exert that force on that community, the community doesn’t look at you very nicely and there’s again the problem and that cycle continues. So, I believe recruitment again, there are two aspects of recruitment. One is the number of police officers that are being recruited, the number has to increase for a fact. I know for a fact that Mumbai is, I mean in Maharashtra, the police recruitment was stalled for a couple of years and people were waiting for that and that still didn’t, I mean that didn’t happen and then when it happened, they had fewer seats as compared to the applications that they had. So that’s one problem. Secondly, who constitutes, what is the socioeconomic identity of police officers who are recruited? Because let’s not forget the fact that defense and the police force or these State sponsored roles were a form of social mobility for a lot of oppressed groups. So of course, like people coming from oppressed caste backgrounds, they had their own regiments after a point in the military and that was a form of social mobility because you get certain benefits, you raise your living standards and that has helped a lot of communities come out of absolute poverty and helped with representation. And I personally feel that when the police officer has a lived experience of living through an intimidated environment, they are much more approachable when they are police officers because I’ve worked with, like I’ve seen police officers in action who came from oppressed communities and they knew the realities on the ground. And they, of course like, I’m not saying that they were all innocent or at the same time very violent, but they had a better balance of this, right? I mean for example someone’s a police officer coming from say my community, who is relatively privileged, would not have the same perception towards, I mean, of course they will not have the same perception towards the working-class neighborhoods of the city or the oppressed communities in the city. But if a person is recruited from that community or if young people from there are given an opportunity to be part of police force, not only will they be more approachable to the general populace, but they’ll also be, I mean they would know how to be vigilant without being oppressive. So, I think that kind of reform, there has to be a balanced reform. I mean, I am not someone who would say completely defund, that we don’t need the police force and let the communities do whatever. But at the same time, I wouldn’t say that, you know, you task the police force with every single responsibility. They shouldn’t be in charge of, I mean, we have seen in the past few years how police officers have dealt with, say, victims of sexual assault and victims of rape and they are not the right, they are not the right entity within the force. So, I feel representation as a whole matters and within representation again, I mean this whole idea of who is forming the police force decides how the police force is going to function in a particular neighborhood.

Uttanshi

You know, something that you said that really stood out to me and I that was actually something I wanted to ask you anyway and it seems like a good setup for the follow-up is just, you know, what do you think is the relevance of the police today, especially in the context of police abolition movements? And you know, you’ve already said you’re not in favor of completely defunding the police system and you know, for the communities to be in charge overall and not to have police systems at all. I think at the root of their belief is also the fact that reform is not something that’s possible and realistically doable. But I’m very curious to know, you know, what your thoughts are on that.

Neeraj

As I mentioned before, I mean, of course reform can come in many ways and one way is to have that kind of counselling, training and you know that psychiatric support to the police that is needed that would ensure immediately that can be looked at as a potential solution. But I also don’t understand the abolition movement in India because this is a very US centric approach. I mean when the George Floyd thing happened suddenly there were conversations about police reforms and that showed how little do Indian Liberal activists who started this whole conversation knew about what’s already happening. So, if you speak to organisations who are working with say criminalized or Denotified Tribes and have at the like, I fortunately I could like, I’ve spoken to lawyers, I’ve spoken to activists and development researchers on the ground and their reality is that it’s been happening for every day. Like there’s a George Floyd kind of case happening in India every single day but that never gets any attention from these constant liberal circles of activism which is needed. I feel like you don’t need for a George Floyd thing to happen in the US for a conversation to start in India, it’s very different. Police brutality is a daily occurrence for a lot of communities here and it’s important like when I say I don’t completely believe in defunding the police again it’s a very let me just acknowledge the fact that it’s an opinion coming out of privilege. I mean, of course there are communities who would completely detest for that statement to come in because for them police is an oppressive force and this is more and more real and I think the police force knows about it, but that’s the way they have been trained to function. So, I believe the immediate solution to this problem would be one counseling the police force in a much better way, creating more empathetic police officers who are more understanding in their approach while, I mean, there’s there has to be a balance between instilling whatever the idea of discipline is, but at the same time not go around hitting the lathi to people who are on the ground sometimes even earning their daily wage right. So that kind of empathy is important and secondly I believe representation has the key to at least to solve some of these issues like. If members of the communities that have often been on the oppressed side of the cycle get a chance to be represented in the in the force, in the in the police force, I believe that could change a lot, change police’s perception in general in India in a lot of areas. So that is the solution. So, I don’t completely believe, I don’t buy this whole American idea of you know what is defunding the police because it’s relevant there because the police forces are already getting like they’re overfunded. But in India that’s not the case. I mean I believe a lot of police departments are still underfunded. I mean the more you go towards the grassroots, you realize that police absolutely have not even the basic necessities to support the communities. So sometimes it’s like victims come to them for help, they don’t really have the measures. In general, I mean, cyber cell, the Nirbhaya cell, all happened after major incidences, so we are a very reactionary democracy, right? So we wait for a major incident to happen, after which we start introducing reforms. But that shouldn’t be the case. I think the pandemic was a good learning opportunity. I believe major police forces like Mumbai police force would take that into consideration when they design their training programs, right? They should have more, I mean better training programs, mental health support, maybe for police officers, also for the victims that that are coming to them for seeking help, and let professionals, more and more professionals be integrated into the system who know how to deal with the situation more effectively because a police officer is not a psychologist, not a psychiatrist, is not someone who can provide overall support to anyone. Their job is to ensure law and order, which I think they should be tasked only with that, not with like other responsibilities that would take that time out from here and create newer problems for the society.

Sanchi

Yeah. Thank you so much for bringing that up, Neeraj and I think it’s been very interesting listening to you share this perspective. And of course, nobody has to agree on anything, but it’s been very enlightening to hear your perspective on why you think cultural context matters so much. And something that might work in the US or in Global North countries might not work in our country or in the Global South countries as a whole as well. So, thank you so much for sharing your insights on that. I think it has been really good to listen in to you today and I think our listeners would agree to that as well. But before we close, I was wondering if you have any last points that you want to share with us.

Neeraj

No, the only thing I would say is I mean we need police reforms in India. It’s a deeply tainted sector which needs support not just from, like the government because they fund it, but it also needs there has to be better ways for the police to engage with the community. I mean civil society needs to play a role in this matter and make sure that civil society is not demonized for helping out the police force in any way. So yeah, I think, there are some really good, I’m not some major authoritative voice to speak on this, but there are some phenomenal organizations and individuals working on the ground who need to be consulted, who can be better, I think better voices for the police force to work with. So I believe that every state has it, every district almost has it or at least the major ones. So I think the police forces can use these resources in improving because this would help the communities better, this would help the police better, this would help the communities to look at the police in a better way. So yeah, that’s the only closing thought I have.

Uttanshi

Thank you so much, Neeraj. It’s been really great listening to you, hearing from you, learning from you. And I really do think that our listeners will have a lot to take back with them and to you know continue thinking about this particular conversation that we have had. So, thank you so much for taking the time out to come and speak to us today.

Neeraj

Thank you for the opportunity. I’m glad that One Future Collective has started these conversations and it’s important that we take these ahead. So thank you for the opportunity and thank you for having me.

[Outro]

Uttanshi

Thank you for tuning in today. Please leave us any questions you may have as voice notes on Anchor or in our DMs. We would love to hear from you. This podcast is brought to you by One Future Collective.

Sanchi

Yes, thank you so much. And don’t forget to follow us on Instagram and Facebook @onefuturecollective and onefuture_india on Twitter. And keep an eye out for future episodes out every second and fourth Thursday of the month. Until next time.

[Outro ends]

Mapping and negotiating power

Uncuff India Episode 10: Dimensions of conflict and peace: visioning a utopian world

Uncuff India Episode 9: Civic space and dissent: A pathway to social justice

Uncuff India Episode 1: Violence and the Role of the State in India

by admin ● Posted on

In the first episode of this season, we examine what state violence actually is and how it plays out. The episode sets the context for what State violence looks like in India, and who the stakeholders involved/impacted by it are. We investigate this with the wonderful Chandni Chawla, a human rights lawyer in Mumbai who represents a variety of clients charged with criminal offences. Join us as we break down the fundamentals of state violence with Chandni Chawla and our hosts Sanchi and Uttanshi of One Future Collective!

Content warning: Mentions of violence, physical assault, custodial torture.

A patchwork design in the background. A white square in the centre with OFC's logo, the title Episode 1, name of the episode and guest (Chandni) and Chandni's photo.

Transcript

[Intro]

Sanchi

Hello everyone and welcome to our podcast, Uncuff India by One Future Collective. My name is Sanchi and my pronouns are she/her.

Uttanshi

My name is Uttanshi and my pronouns are she/her. We are your hosts today, and it’s so good to have you all listening in. In today’s episode, we will unpack the meaning of violence in the context of state agencies and explore whether states can be perpetrators of violence themselves. If yes, we will also explore how this violence can manifest and discuss whether and how accountability from the state can be demanded.

[Intro ends]

Sanchi

Yes, States and State agencies are rarely seen as perpetrators of violence and harm, especially against their own citizens. They are, in fact, often seen as agencies which protect and act in the best interests of their citizens, which is how we might want it to be. However, this may not always be the case. It is possible that the State engages in covert forms of violence against their citizens for many different reasons.

Uttanshi

To discuss this and to share their insights on this particular theme with us at One Future Collective, we have with us the lovely Chandni Chawla. Chandni is a human rights lawyer from Bombay, who practises criminal law at the Bombay High Court and the lower courts as well. She represents a variety of clients from those accused of charges of terrorism as well as towards bodily offences. She also focuses on providing legal aid to women under trial prisoners, who are unable to afford legal representation, and to survivors of gender based violence. Thank you so much Chandni for taking the time out to join us today. We’re very excited to hear from you and learn from your insights.

Chandni

Thank you Sanchi and Uttanshi. Thank you very much for having me. I am very excited for this podcast as well, and this is a great topic to have a podcast on.

Sanchi

Lovely. Thank you so much. Thanks for joining us, Chandni. And let us dive right in and begin dissecting the topic at hand. Chandni, let us first talk about what you think of State violence. Do you think that states can engage in committing violence against their own citizens? And if yes, then what different forms can such violence take place in?

Chandni

I think my answer is an absolute yes. I mean, especially with my experience as a defence criminal lawyer. In the work I do, especially we engage with the State every day. it’s our every day. The opponents are the State; and the different kinds of violence we see is just rampant. So, I think State violence can definitely be in the form of physical violence and that’s very obvious. We see it in our everyday lives, we see it when we open the newspaper; but I think it can also take the form of other violence, which are non-physical. So, I would first like to talk about the physical forms of violence and especially speaking from my experiences, the physical forms of violence which I see around me everyday is custodial torture. It’s violence which takes place within the four corners of the police station. It’s violence which takes place the moment somebody is accused of a crime, and the entire process which goes in the interrogation of that person, right? And violence is used, and even though it is physical violence, at many times, that physical violence cannot be seen. And that is why to prevent that kind of physical violence, there are various Supreme Court judgments which say that there have to be CCTV cameras installed in every police station. This is to ensure that there is no custodial violence, but despite this, custodial violence is very rampant and I definitely see it in my experiences as a lawyer. But moving on, apart from violence perpetrated in custody, we also see violence on the roads, right? For example, if there is a policy., if there is a document which people want to oppose and they want to take to the streets — they want to protest — we definitely see at many times that the State, in the form of the police or other forces, perpetrates violence against students, against protesters. We see them getting lathi-charged, we see people opening tear gases. So, definitely we see physical forms of violence, especially when somebody is opposing the State and the State policy. There is also other forms of violence we see, which I call violence. It’s in the form of intentional spreading of misinformation. We see that happening a lot by the State agencies. We see a lot of trolling on Twitter and other social media platforms. We see a lot of misinformation being spread by popular media, which is controlled directly or indirectly by the State. So, I would think that this is also definitely a form of violence. We definitely see violence where people want to speak out against the State and when they try to do that, when they write against the State, their voices are suppressed- they are either accused in false cases, they have to be imprisoned for those cases for many, many years. So I think to answer your question, yes the State is one of the biggest perpetrators of violence in my mind.

Uttanshi

Thank you so much Chandni for that. And while you were speaking, I was just trying to understand, you know, how wide the meaning and scope of something like violence can really be. Traditionally, we’ve only understood that to be physical forms of violence, but hearing you speak, I’m also realising that there are sometimes non-physical types of violence. Sometimes, you know, violence that we can very easily look against, or look past, or ignore because we’re not seeing it cause direct physical harm onto anybody. So, thank you for sharing these different types of violence. It is definitely making me think in a certain direction that is quite helpful to get a sense of how we should be thinking when we’re talking about State violence, and how it may not always be as easily detectable as it may be in some other spaces. While we’re talking about this, do you think that it’s important for us to be able to address and call out such violence that the state engages in? And by us, I mean us as citizens, but also as activists, as human rights organisations, any other stakeholders involved in the process — anybody that’s not the State. Do you think it’s important for us to be able to call it out?

Chandni

I think absolutely. I mean non-state actors have a huge role to play when it comes to calling out violence perpetrated by the State. This is actually a very difficult process, but I think it becomes very important to have checks and balances in place. So, the State as a machinery does have checks and balances in place. For example, the judiciary is a check & balance, right? But apart from that, as citizens, I think civic participation is extremely important in any democracy. We say that the State is by the people, for the people, and of the people, right? And how do we hold them accountable becomes a very important question. But before that, it’s very important to do that because if we say it’s the State by us, for us and of us, so they are supposed to be accountable to us, right? So I’m not sure if you’ve heard of the Jawab Dehi Andolan, which is a movement which is taking place in Rajasthan. Some of the people who are involved in this — I mean I work with them. So, this is a movement to press the government to come up with an accountability bill, right? As we are talking about accountability, as we are talking about calling out State violence, I think this is an extremely important step that through the legislature we are trying to bring about a law for accountability of the government towards its people. And why is this important, right? For any good governance, for any State to observe human rights, where they are signatories to so many treaties on human rights. I think it’s important, it’s a role of every citizen to hold the State accountable. And I think we, as say civil societies, activists, students are very privileged in some sense or the other because we do understand how the State machinery works. And I feel it is our responsibility not just to hold the State accountable, but to spread awareness among the other population who do not know how the State works, right? So I think it becomes extremely important because, you know, the movement from democracy to non-democracy, to other forms of government, to fascism is extremely slow and we might not even be aware that it might be taking place. So to prevent that, the only way is taking small action every day, being aware of our rights, making others aware of their rights and just calling the State off if we feel that there are any policies, if there is violence which they are perpetrating, whether it’s physical violence or non- physical violence. So it is extremely, extremely important to call out state violence, especially in a democracy.

Sanchi

Thank you so much for bringing all those very pertinent points, Chandni. I think through what you’ve shared we have now clearly established that the State can and does in many, many different ways inflict violence against citizens. And we’ve also seen through what you shared why it may be important to call this out, and what might happen if this goes unchecked. Thank you also for giving us the example of the Jawab Dehi Andolan and for us to be able to see how this might be done in action-what are some ways through which we can call out such violence that the State is engaging in, but I want to go a little back to something that you pointed out and discuss more about that. You said that it might be difficult for us to at first recognize and call out this violence. So I’m just wondering what makes it so difficult to address this violence that is perpetrated by the State?

Chandni

Thank you for that question. I think it’s a very pertinent question. And the answer to that is not a straightforward answer because the State is such a powerful agency. So there is a huge power imbalance between the States and its citizens. And in such a scenario, when there is a huge power imbalance, calling out the one which has the most power is going to be difficult and it is always difficult. And, you know, there is an innate sense of legitimacy which the State gets because of its nature of being the State, right? And in such a scenario, addressing, acknowledging that the State can perpetrate violence and calling out the state violence can become very difficult. To give you an example, we can see what’s happening in the past couple of years, right? People who are calling out state violence, they are being accused in false cases. The biggest case which comes to my mind is the Bhima Koregaon case, where so many activists, lawyers, students, journalists, who are working in their individual capacities, who are trying to hold the state accountable, are now presently in custody for the past almost four years. We’ve lost one of them because he was 83 years old. There are many more who are still very old and are suffering, and it’s only because of speaking out against the State that they are in custody today. And it’s not just them, right? There are many journalists, many whistleblowers, who have to face the blowback only because of speaking. So when this happens, when we see this in our everyday life around us, when we read about this in newspapers, it creates a fear-psychosis. I mean, I feel it today that students, for example, today do have a sense of fear if they feel that they need to speak out that they are being extremely cautious. I’m not saying it’s not good to be cautious — it is extremely good to be cautious, but at the same time, why should one feel the need to be cautious to call out the State? So, I think it’s firstly the fear-psychosis. People feel that there might be consequences for speaking out against the State. For example, there might even be consequences for holding this podcast. I mean, I don’t know! We never know, right with the kind of surveillance which is taking place in today’s country? And this makes it extremely difficult to speak out against the violence perpetrated by the State. This makes it extremely difficult for people. For example, when we go to different areas and try to mobilise people, you can sense that fear, psychosis, you can sense that, you know, ‘if I speak out, there might be consequences, there might be other consequences which I might face because of speaking out against the State’. So that is something which makes it very, very difficult to speak out against the State- there’s also majoritarian support, which the State naturally enjoys being the State. So, speaking out against the majority is always going to be difficult and has always been difficult. So, I think these are some of the reasons which make it very difficult to speak out against the State.

Uttanshi

Chandni, as you were speaking, I was also thinking of another point that was coming up while you were sharing your reflection — is that, there is also so much attached to the State, right? So many of my welfare schemes, so much of my documentation. It is not just, I think, the fear that I will get arrested or I will get beaten up, but then it goes back to the previous conversation we were having about how this fear of violence, this fear of being treated differently by the State can manifest in other forms as well, which takes away from my ability to lead a life — where I still continue to have access to welfare schemes, where I still continue to have access to some services which are attached to the state government by virtue of it being the government itself. And while we’re thinking about all that, and I think you’ve already given us a few examples of State violence in the Indian context. But I was thinking it may be useful for our listeners and for us to set some more context for the conversation we’ve been having so far by you sharing with us a few examples of what does state violence look like in IndiaAre there any examples of it? Or would you like to elaborate on the examples you’ve already given — just for us to develop their understanding?

Chandni

Taking my example of, say, custodial violence forward, I only spoke about it broadly, but it’s very important to understand that there are various intersections involved and there is intersectional violence which the State perpetrates, right? We’ve seen violence against minorities, violence against the disabled, violence against the LGBT population, violence against transgender, which is much more rampant as compared to violence against an able-bodied upper caste person. At least according to my experience, it is very important to keep intersectionality in mind when we speak about violence. So, I’ll just give you an example of a state policy. So, for example, the Kerala government came out with a policy. They advertised for the post of a female housekeeping staff. There was a separate advertisement for male housekeeping staff, and separate advertising for female housekeeping staff. So, a trans person who identifies as a woman applied to the post for the female housekeeping staff, but the Kerala government refused to give them that post. So, when this went up to court and this was challenged, the court recognized that this is an exclusionary policy that you only have advertisements for the post of a female and a male housekeeping staff. The court in this case — it’s a very recent case, it was only like 10 days ago — acknowledged and went on and quashed this policy and said that the trans person who identifies as a woman can definitely apply to the post of a female housekeeping staff. So, this policy in my mind is an example of violence, right? It is a form of violence. It might not seem like violence because as we spoke that what comes to our mind when we talk about violence is only physical violence, but exclusionary laws are the biggest, biggest, biggest example of the State perpetrating violence. A couple of years ago, we saw the entire debate which was taking place around CAA and NRC, right? And at that point of time, we could see the impact of these laws on the minority community. We could see the impact of these laws on people who are disabled, on trans folks — nobody spoke. I mean, people spoke about it, I’m not saying they didn’t speak about it, but I think it’s very important to identify intersections when it comes to violence and understand the impact of violence on people who belong to marginalised communities or belong to minorities. As I was speaking, we’ve also seen violence against students, against protesters. I’ve seen it during my college days. I don’t know if you both have seen it during your college days, but I’ve definitely seen it rampant when students take out rallies, when they do come out and oppose laws- they do face backlash, not just from the state, but from their university itself, right? And where is that coming? That’s coming because the university is fearing the State. If the university is a public-funded university, the university will fear that the State might stop funding them. When we spoke of welfare schemes, when we spoke of policies, if I go to a slum today and try to mobilise them to speak against the State, they might feel that ‘no, tomorrow, probably the water will get cut out in my area; I might not get my ration from my kirana shop’. So, this is the impact and this is the fear which makes it extremely difficult to speak out against the State. And as we spoke that, you know, spreading misinformation is the biggest, biggest form of violence which we see in today’s world and that is happening all the time. I mean, in the way people are calling it WhatsApp University, but I do see that fake information is spread about different policies, about different schemes of the government,which are circulated on WhatsApp to various people. So, this in itself is also an instance of State violence. We, at least, to add on, I mean in my experiences as a criminal lawyer, we do see State agencies which go ahead and plant evidence against the accused all the time. We see it all the time. So, if they can go to the extent of planting evidence, the instances of wrongful prosecution in the country are extremely high. So, as I was saying, right, that if the State can go to the extent of planting evidence and that happens, I mean, I see it in practice almost every day. So, you can only imagine the other forms of violence which the State is perpetrating, and we’re not even aware of that, right? And I think invisible forms of violence are also which exist and it is extremely difficult to even understand that this is a form of violence that is taking place against us. So as I was saying, right, like at least physical forms of violence, I see it around me as a practitioner all the time and as I spoke about exclusionary laws, about exclusionary policies, welfare schemes, means other forms of violence which we do need to speak out against. So yeah, these are some of the examples of violence which come to my mind.

Sanchi

Thanks so much for taking us through those extremely important manifestations of State violence in our country, Chandni. I think I’ll also speak for our listeners when I say that listening to you today has really broadened my understanding of what violence itself can look like and what are the different ways in which it comes out through the State agencies. And I think, especially, the examples of exclusionary policies that you shared, of how the law itself functions in such binary ways and how that becomes a tool of violence — I think that has really got me thinking and it has definitely given me lots to think about more as well, even after our conversation ends. And how just exclusionary policies then as tools of violence ensure the marginalisation, or the further marginalisation of already marginalised groups. Like you also shared how the CAA & NRC at that time, how we weren’t really looking at the impact it had on already marginalised groups such as people with disabilities, as trans people, and how much this really matters and the weight of this has really got me thinking and I’m wondering about possible resolutions for this now. So Chandni, what do you think? What does accountability look like in such cases and how can it be made possible?

Chandni

I think that’s a question we all need to keep discussing to come up with practical solutions, right? I mean, it’s a question to which there cannot be a concrete answer, but it should be an ongoing debate. So, the first step, according to me, is at least starting a debate and to have an ongoing debate on this particular question on how do we make the State accountable and that will only happen through mobilisation, through spreading awareness, through holding, for example, workshops, through holding awareness sessions, especially for people who do not have access to information right? As I was speaking, that we are all very privileged because we have access to information, but there are a huge list of citizens who do not have access to information, who do not have access to enough news. So, if we are able to reach that population of the country and if we are able to spread awareness — just awareness about State policies to people and I think just start questioning each policy: ‘Do you think this policy is exclusionary? Do you think this policy is inclusive? How does this policy benefit you? Does this policy harm anyone?’ If we are able to start these discussions and debates, I think we will move closer to accountability in the near future. For example, the movement for RTA, right, the Right to Information was in my mind, one of the biggest movements for accountability. And it’s only after years of struggle, years of mobilisation, that today we do have a law of RTI and we do have the right to collect information. And that’s only been possible through mobilisation, through spreading awareness. The other thing which comes to my mind is, as I was saying, that it becomes extremely difficult to speak against the State because of the power structures, right? So, if we are able to break these power structures, if we are able to get power into our hands as citizens — and that will happen only through changing vote bank politics, right? That will happen only when more and more people realise the value of the vote, the value of their vote. It is only then that the power imbalance which exists between the State and the citizens today, will reduce. So, participation in democracy, participation in democratic processes, is also very important to demand accountability and make sure that the State is accountable to its citizens. So I think, yeah, these are some of the instances which come to my mind and, definitely right, it is extremely important to challenge exclusionary policies. For example, the Kerala example I gave you: if the trans person wouldn’t have challenged that policy, that would just go unnoticed. So it becomes very important that — where we feel that a certain policy is exclusionary or biased or discriminatory, it is very important to challenge that policy in courts. And we do have a separation of powers within how the State functions today, right? We do have the judiciary, which is an independent body, which can look into State policies and mechanisms. So, it becomes very important, according to me, to keep questioning and to keep challenging State policies wherever we feel they are exclusionary and discriminatory.

Uttanshi

Thank you so much Chandni. And I fully agree with you when you said that, you know if we start talking about this, it’s a conversation that can go on for as long as time. We are really thankful to hear from you to learn from your everyday experiences and your expertise in this matter. Thank you so much for taking the time out to be able to have this conversation with us. Once again, we’re really thankful, very grateful for you and to be able to have this conversation with you. Before we close, do you have any closing thoughts on this entire conversation? Anything you would like to share with our listeners for them to take back home? Anything that’s coming up for you?

Chandni

Yeah, thank you, Uttanshi. Firstly, thank you for having me over. As last thoughts, as I’ve said throughout this podcast, right, that I feel it is extremely important to keep questioning and it is extremely important to keep the debate alive. So, my only last thought is that whatever you see around yourself, which relates to a State policy, which relates to any state action, I think it’s very important for everyone to question and to challenge the State policy, if you feel it is exclusionary. So, questioning will only make you think more and which will only take you closer to understanding the internal biases you carry, right? Like, as we said that we feel the State, because of its nature of being the State, cannot go wrong. So, it is very important for each one of us to challenge these notions and it’s only then I think that we will see true change, and we’ll be able to challenge State policies and understand violence a little better. So yeah, I think these are my closing remarks and thank you very much for holding this podcast. And I do hope that OFC keeps hosting such podcasts in the future. And this is one of the ways where OFC is conducting these debates and which is one of the ways to actually keep the State accountable. So this is, I think the podcast in itself is an example of demanding accountability from the State, which is great. So thank you very much for having me.

Sanchi

Thank you so much for joining us today, Chandni. And I think that I will speak for everybody who’s listening in to say that we have indeed learned a lot and we are very, very happy to have had you today. And, as Uttanshi said, thanks a lot for your time. Thanks once again.

[Outro]

Uttanshi

Thank you for tuning in today. Please leave us any questions you may have as voice notes on Anchor or in our DMs. We would love to hear from you. This podcast is brought to you by One Future Collective.

Sanchi

Yes, thank you so much. And don’t forget to follow us on Instagram and Facebook at OneFutureCollective and at OneFuture_India on Twitter. And keep an eye out for future episodes out on every second and fourth Thursday of the month. Until next time!

[Outro ends]

Leave us your feedback on the episode as DMs on our social media or as voice notes on Anchor.

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Mapping and negotiating power

Uncuff India Episode 10: Dimensions of conflict and peace: visioning a utopian world

Uncuff India Episode 9: Civic space and dissent: A pathway to social justice