2021: A year of quite a few silver linings
As the year came to an end, the flight out of Kabul brought the last remaining students of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, including its famed all-women Zohra orchestra, to safety in Lisbon on December 13. Through five airlifts that had begun in October, the 273 students, teachers, and their families were evacuated in what a spokesperson calls “the largest rescue of a self-contained Afghan community” since the Taliban takeover. In the New Year, they will rebuild their music school under the supervision of their founder, Ahmad Sarmast.
In a year of loss and devastation, the second wave and a new coronavirus variant, the flight of the musicians — many of the girls who had until 2010 (when the school was founded) never seen a musical instrument, leave alone touched one — was a silver lining. There weren’t a lot of these in the year that’s nearly done. Experts are still calculating costs in terms of education lost, and violence gained, spikes in child labour and marriage, trafficking and sexual abuse, and a dizzying fall in jobs for women, matched by a corresponding rise in housework and domestic violence.
And yet, the year had its undeniable hurrahs. More women judges in the higher judiciary, and the Delhi High Court, set to welcome its first openly gay judge, were a win for wider representation. The courts will now decide on the most fundamental idea of two people marrying for love. Not everyone was prepared to wait for the verdict on same-sex marriage. In Hyderabad, a gay couple went ahead with their wedding; no permission is needed for happiness, they said.
In many cases, the courts fell back on common sense: Consenting adults don’t need their parents’ permission to marry; sex workers are entitled to government-issued identity cards; child sexual abuse includes “skin-to-skin” contact even if not specifically stated by law. But the publication of a former chief justice’s memoirs with its rather odd title signalled how tone-deaf even the most privileged men could be.
“Women’s empowerment” was the mantra in Parliament. But not all new laws were designed to empower. For example, “love jihad” laws in several assemblies leave consenting adults vulnerable to punitive State action. And the latest bid to raise the legal marriage age of women to 21 has evoked strong reactions. Don’t criminalise these women, say experts, instead introduce policy initiatives such as incentivising education to enable them to continue with their studies.
In the end, it wasn’t institutions so much as women themselves who raised the greater cheers. Lovlina Borghain, Mirabai Chanu, and PV Sindhu went to the Olympics and showed what women are made of. India’s newest billionaire, Falguni Nayar, is entirely self-made. And, as the armed forces opened its doors to women, 178,000 women, a third of all candidates, sat for the National Defence Academy entrance exam in November.
Like the girls from Zohra, they were freeing the shackles of patriarchy and scripting their own success.