Hope amidst indifference

As I sip my Sri Lankan tea and take a quick bite of crisp lakhamari, my daughter walks in with her white bareeze shalwar kameez in one hand and my meticulously ironed tangail cotton sari in the other. "Mamu," she says, "we've got tickets for Khuda Key Liye at Satyam Theatre in Nehru Place!" Great! We drive down the busy streets of New Delhi listening to Geeta Dutt, Ghulam Ali and Narayan Gopal from yesteryears on my iPod, and get increasingly excited at the thought of watching a Pakistani movie in a Delhi theatre – the same movie that received a standing ovation at the recent Goa Film Festival.

Come to think of it, my life has been so interwoven with the colourful threads of Southasia that, at times, I forget whether I belong just to Nepal, my native country, or to Southasia itself! Having lived in Pakistan for four years, in India for 14 years and having travelled to all of the SAARC member states on work innumerable times has given me the pleasure of understanding the joy of celebrating Diwali and Holi in Delhi, Chaand Raat in Islamabad, Eid in Dhaka, Poya in Colombo and of course, Maghe Sankranti and Dasain in Kathmandu. The rich traditions, the vast canvas of cultural heritage that has been passed on through the generations, the ancient Indus Valley civilisation, the vibrant classical music and dance, the colorful tapestry of festivals and the interconnectivity of people living in the region – these are all fascinating facets of Southasia. In fact, new reality shows such as "Junoon Kucch Kar Dikhana Hai" and regional episodes of "Sa Re Ga Ma Pa" are actively crossing national boundaries, enabling increased harmony across the region.

In the larger context, my work in the grassroots of Nepal for three decades as a gender advocate, and working for 18 years for the empowerment of women of the Subcontinent, has given me several opportunities to thank my stars for being born a Southasian – with all its diversities and complexities, its paradoxes and contradictions. The region is truly a kaleidoscope of opportunity and challenge. This is a region with a strong women's movement seeking rights-based solutions. Yet, simultaneously, one sees the embedded discrimination that women continue to face from womb to tomb. Against this background, it has been my privilege to work on cutting-edge gender issues in the region, and to have been able to witness real transformation over the years. In fact, it was the contradictions that have presented many of the opportunities.

Collective resilience
Several memories float in my mind's eye: the confidence and strength of the rural women with whom I walked from all over Southasia to the presidential palaces in New Delhi, Islamabad and Kabul; the 300 traditionally dressed women whom I accompanied to Beijing for the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995, debating how to negotiate their own spaces; the thousands of women and men who descended on the streets of seven Southasian countries simultaneously at 10 in the morning on 10 December 1998, to demand lives free from violence; the misery of trafficked women, while listening to their stories of coercion and deception as I walked the streets of Sonagachi and Kamathipura in the early 1990s; the joy of celebrating International Women's Day in Kabul, after 23 years of war in Afghanistan, with 2000 Afghan women from all the provinces; the 160 Sri Lankan women who came to Colombo to voice their concerns and needs, overcoming their trauma after losing family members and livelihoods following the tsunami of 2005; and the solidarity of women from all over Southasia, relating to each other and collecting more than one million signatures to demand strong gender architecture in the UN. All of these are moments that affirm the strength and resilience of the women of Southasia.

One must understand how SAARC has served as a progressive incentive for people in the development field, particularly on issues of gender. For instance, SAARC has come up with crucial action in the area of human trafficking, with a Convention having been signed in 2002. With the recent adoption of what is called the SAARC Gender Database, also by all eight member states, the region has confronted the challenge to obtain validated data on violence against women (especially trafficking), health (including HIV/AIDS) and other issues. A vibrant accountability mechanism in Southasia has also been established, called the South Asia Biennial Ministerial-level Meetings, to trace international gender-related promises made in 1995. These have become a dynamic forum providing space for governments, the SAARC Secretariat, civil-society members and gender advocates to review progress on gender concerns, identify gaps and chart the way forward.

Not everything about Southasia is a bed of roses, however, and therein lies the challenge. I have worked with women who have lost their identities by being forced to become 'non-citizens' in countries other than their own; even within my own country, many still do not have citizenship and all the rights it guarantees. Indeed, my work in migration and anti-trafficking has taught me what it is to be a non-citizen in Southasia. In such conditions, women's vulnerabilities are heightened, their rights are violated and they are dramatically disempowered, as they fall prey to abusive and deplorable situations.

The Southasian identity is very important when it comes to addressing crucial issues collectively. If we are proud about being Southasian, we also share common statistics about which we should be ashamed: astounding levels of violence against women in the region; the horrendous cases of female foeticide and infanticide, with an estimated ten million female foetuses aborted in India alone during the last 20 years; and the dangerously disproportionate sex ratio all over Southasia. Such data hits straight at our collective and individual consciences, and any thinking person can hardly refrain from thinking critically about both why and how these things are still taking place.

In the work against gender-based violence, one particular debilitating factor is encountered time and again, more than anything else, perpetuating discrimination and its ugly manifestations. This factor is the 'indifference of society': the indifference that has nearly dulled and sanitised the response of the educated opinion-making class to gross human-rights abuses. This inevitably urges us to ponder whether enough effort has gone into forging collective action on these very vital issues, or whether we have become satisfied with being armchair critics. I wonder!

~ Chandni Joshi is the Regional Programme Director of the United Nations Development Fund for Women, South Asia.