Gender sensitivity class was going well, until the murder
CHANDAN HULLA, India: Not long after counsellors started a “gender sensitivity” class in this urban village, groups of young men stopped hanging out in front of Mahinder Pal’s corner shop, where they used to ogle and catcall female day labourers who walked by in dusty saris.
Enrolment of girls in the local secondary school inched up. One mother asked for and received a small white Chinese-made mobile phone from her husband - and made her first telephone call. Others who had been confined to their homes in the strict Indian custom of purdah were suddenly allowed to venture outside the village boundaries for the first time.
The class was getting tangible results. And it was one of dozens of others that are happening across India in schools, police academies and villages, as the government and social service organisations team up to find ways to address the centuriesold patriarchal attitudes that still result in widespread oppression and violence against women.
In Chandan Hulla, about 30 young men - taxi drivers, shopkeepers and labourers - began gathering in July 2015 in the front hall of one of the village elders to snack on crispy samosas and ponder questions such as: What is masculinity? How would they feel if their daughters were abused or harassed? Are they threatened by the changing roles of women?
For a time, it seemed change was possible.
“I was an animal before, now I’m on my way to becoming a human being,” said Yunus Khan, 30, one of the class participants.
But on Aug 25, the village would be shaken by an unexpected death that would pit family member against family member and threaten to reverse the hard-won gains of the last year. A young woman was poisoned, and one of the very counsellors who tried to teach the men to change their ways was accused with her husband in the case, according to a police affidavit.
Police say the young woman died in a dispute over dowry, the coercive practice of giftgiving that some say subjugates brides. The couple has not yet been formally charged, although warrants have been issued for their arrest.
In some respects, this is not such an unusual case: In 2015, police records show, dowry disputes in India led to the murders of more than 7,000 women.
Ten years ago, there was no main road in and out of Chandan Hulla, no electricity and only two televisions. A decade later, even children have cellphones, and villagers who sold farmland to developers are tearing down their mud-brick dwellings in favour of multi-storey homes with balconies and deluxe kitchens.
Still, the village of about 5,000, nestled in between the gated farmhouses of Delhi’s elite and event palaces of the city’s booming wedding industry, still occupies a tenuous space between old and new. A young girl wanders its narrow lanes swinging silver pails for buffalo milk as a shiny black Mercedes jolts by, its trunk stuffed with fodder for cattle. It’s not far from the bustling shopping mall where a young student watched “Life of Pi” the night she was gang-raped and murdered four years ago - sparking a national movement for women’s safety and fuelling the demand for gender sensitivity training.
Villagers may have embraced consumer advances, but tradition retains its grip: The majority of women from both Hindu and Muslim families observe purdah - wearing a veil with older male relatives and when they step outside - and young women and girls are expected to act modestly and eschew jeans, residents said. “If my sister had a boyfriend, I would cut her,” one of the men outside Pal’s store said recently.
The village had a high rate of domestic violence, one reason counsellors from the Centre for Social Research were drawn to it.
The Delhi-based non-profit group dedicated to a “violencefree gender-just society” was one of the earliest to embrace sensitivity courses as a way to engage men and boys in societal change, founding its Gender Training Institute in 1997.
The group now runs programs for young men ages 16 to 35 in corporations, police academies and organisations such as UNICEF.
The first session last July got off to a roiling start when the counsellors suggested that the wives be present, too. The men - a mix of Muslims and Hindus - protested vigorously and said they feared the women would be “led down the wrong path,” as one of them described it, or would spill too much of their personal information in discussion sessions, particularly in regard to domestic violence.
“The law has changed so much now that if you slap your wife the moment you step out of the house there’ll be a bunch of cops standing outside your door,” said Yunus Khan. “This is women’s empowerment.”
Khan was full of bravado as he sat recently with other class members at the house where they had spent so much time together in the past year. He made his buddies hoot with laughter.
“Such change has come,” he said. “Earlier, a man would gesture to raise his hand against a woman and the woman would cower. Now a man raises his hand and the woman just stares him in the face. This is not a bad thing. I feel good about it. Women are not going to get beaten now without reason.”
Khan had more to say. “Earlier I used to beat my wife a lot. If she was late in getting my medicines or something, I would beat her. Now I don’t beat her to the point where she has to go to the doctor.”
Khan was far more mildmannered in a later interview with his family at his home, a oneroom dwelling at the edge of a wide field, with a tin roof and two buffalo tied out front. He spoke of his frustrations as an out-of-work tailor who shelved his dreams of becoming a fashion designer after an eye injury. Now, he devotes his attention to educating his three young children.”We will make our dreams come true through them,” he said.
His wife, Shalima, 25, quietly defended her husband, saying he was not abusive.
After the uproar, a compromise was reached: The women could come to class, too, but they had to sit separately from men. Zahida Khan and the other counsellor used a variety of discussion topics, parables and games to draw in the participants.
After a few months, a young electrician in the class named Mohammed Sagir, 25, got to thinking it was high time his wife began leaving the village on her own. She observed purdah and he had earlier nixed her plan of tutoring a group of Nepali migrant children at a nearby farm on the theory it would expose her to too much “free air.” But something inside him began to soften.
His wife, Rajeena, 21, resisted the idea at first. She had lived a sheltered life growing up in a village in a neighbouring state before she moved to Delhi - no school trips, no girlfriends, an education that ended at ninth grade. And she had visions of venturing out past the village boundaries and being kidnapped by human traffickers who would knock her out by covering her mouth with some kind of etherlaced cloth, something she had seen on television.
But nevertheless, about two months ago, she found herself walking to the busy main road and climbing aboard the No. 334 bus for her first-ever ride to a nearby commercial centre, where she went to a government office to order a copy of her youngest daughter’s birth certificate. The other commuters on the bus helped her figure out how to buy her 10 rupee bus ticket, she said.
“My heart was pounding the whole time,” she recalled, laughing at the memory. Scarier still was the walk to a market where she had to sort the family’s paperwork for a ration card, through a wooded area populated by nilgai deer, monkeys and python. Others on the path threw bananas for the monkeys and the animals tore into the fruit with such ferocity that she said, “I was afraid they would eat me, too.”
Home safely, Rajeena, who uses only one name, glowed as she recounted her trip.
“Now when there is any work to be done I can do it,” she said. “My husband doesn’t tell me not to step out and my mother-in-law doesn’t tell me not to step out. Earlier, I used to be scared. Now I feel a sort of freedom.”
Despite her prominence, many in the village knew that Zahida and her husband had a complicated relationship with their daughter-in law, Arisha, a 19-year-old with hauntingly large brown eyes and dreams of becoming a model. She had eloped with Zahida’s son Saif in 2012, when she was only 15. Her parents opposed the union in part because of the income disparity between the two families - Arisha’s father owned a copper smelting business, and Saif’s father was a taxi driver. — Washington Post