WOMEN, PEACE AND SECURITY:
INDIA

"It began with the realization that we were suffering a shared injustice. The holding back of facilities like water, electriciy, etc. was also hitting us hard. While in the slum, we could collect water from another tap if one did not work, but in a building we cannot carry buckets of water up several stories to our houses. [...] We came into contgact with an ngo worker who was involved with the womens groups in the neighborhing area. With inputs from her, some of us were able to come together and uncover the legal discrepencies and social justice in the existing situation. However, we wondered how we could convince the larger community to act as one. It took us another year to boster morale and additional support."

Indramati, displaced woman Shivaji Naear, India

"Last March, in the state of Gujarat, two thousand Muslims were butchered in a State-sponsored pogrom. Muslim women were specially targeted. They were stripped, and gang-raped, before being burned alive. Arsonists burned and looted shops, homes, textiles mills, and mosques. More than a hundred and fifty thousand Muslims have been driven from their homes. The economic base of the Muslim community has been devastated. While Gujarat burned, the Indian Prime Minister was on MTV promoting his new poems. In January this year, the Government that orchestrated the killing was voted back into office with a comfortable majority. Nobody has been punished for the genocide. Narendra Modi, architect of the pogrom, proud member of the RSS, has embarked on his second term as the Chief Minister of Gujarat. If he were Saddam Hussein, of course each atrocity would have been on CNN. But since he’s not — and since the Indian "market" is open to global investors — the massacre is not even an embarrassing inconvenience..."

Arundhati Roy, 28 January 2003

"…women are in the peace process because of their own initiative. When the state initiates to involve them, it is really to be go-betweens, to play the role of the “healer” or the “pacifier.” There has been no effort on the side of the state or non-state agencies to involve women in actual negotiations. This merely goes to re-emphasize the lack of understanding of peace in terms of mutuality and equality, and of viewing the peace process as a kind of “settlement.” Furthermore, the non-participation of women in these processes has resulted in de-focusing the fall out of armed conflict on women and in marginalising women’s needs and aspirations."

Roshmi Goswami, a founding member of the North East Network, 1999