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	Indian women are asking for more autonomy and freedom by Amartya Sen, Sen Lam, LSE, Radio Australia, agencies   13 June 2014   As the global summit on sexual violence in conflict wraps up in London, we speak with a woman who"s one of the leaders in India against such crimes.   Kavita Krishnan has long championed the rights of women workers and labourers, and of Dalit women in India. She says capitalism has alot to answer for.   Reporter: Sen Lam Speaker: Kavita Krishnan, secretary, All India Progressive Women"s Association and a leader in India"s Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)   KRISHNAN: I think capitalism defines much of the societies in which we live all over the world. We need to really examine the ways in which that sets the perimeters in which violence occurs. For instance, capitalism itself, does unleash a lot of violence.   If you think of the Bangladesh factory fire, women worked in factories in those conditions, imagine what they were subjected to in their daily lives, the extreme insecurity and exploitation to which they were subjected. And in the era of austerity measures, think about what that"s doing to women"s lives, because there is far less support that women are able to draw upon. The state doesn"t own up its responsibilities to women and it tells women that taking care of children, taking care of the poor, taking care of the sick and so on, is their job.   LAM: So, can you set this in an Indian context for us?   KRISHNAN: Yes, even in an Indian context we find that Indian governments which have embraced the whole new liberal paradigm of economic policies, they speak about women"s empowerment, but in actual terms the kind of work which women are getting is extremely insecure, extremely casualised, contractualised. And the minute women ask for the most minimal of human rights at the work place, even the right to visit the toilet as often as they need, they might lose their jobs for doing so. Especially if they are single mothers, battling everyday misogyny inside the home, you can imagine that this makes their struggle much harder.   Capitalism takes advantage of the misogynists that we have. Women in the government schemes for rural health, thousands of women are employed in these schemes and they are not paid a wage, they are paid a small pittance, which is called an incentive money and when they demand wages, when they say we are government employees pay us, the government says well, you serve your family for free and in the same way, you are volunteers, you are serving society for free.   Clearly, the idea of male entitlement, masculine entitlement, which is at the root of violence is something which is not unique to to India, it takes different shapes across the world.   And India, what we are trying to expand the conversation to not remain focused around violence alone, but to actually talk about the kinds of ways in which we teach entitlement to men and what is at the bottom of that entitlement, because essentially, the kind of discipline which we use inside the home, to ensure that women perform what are called "women"s roles" properly. This is something which is actually needed by the kind of exploitative society we live in, the capitalist society we live in.   LAM: The people of India certainly have put huge faith in the new Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, to turn their lives around for the better. I get the impression that you might not be so sure?   KRISHNAN: I think that we have good cause to be quite apprehensive about this government and its policies for many reasons. As women, particularly because he enjoys the support, the active support of a whole lot of right wing organisations, whose everyday practice and ideology revolves around telling him what women can and can"t do, what kind of clothes they"re allowed to wear, who they"re allowed to marry. And also in inciting violence against men of the minority community, of the oppressed cast, because they have supposedly ventured beyond they"re role and they might be having a relationship with a Hindu woman and so on.   LAM: And yet, recently, the Modi government was quite swift in responding to the rapes and murders of two young girls from a lower caste, that there will be zero tolerance. Is that at least a step in the right direction?   KRISHNAN: Well, you know, in responding in that particular instance was not very difficult for them (the BJP), because that was a state government ruled by another party. And I think that they reduced the whole issue to the issue of availability of toilet. And those women were not strung up from a tree because there was no toilets, you know. This is an issue of caste hierarchy.   Indian women are asking for more autonomy and freedom and none of these things bodes really well for that.   LAM: Every northern winter, we process stories of the homeless, dying in the cold, especially in cities like Delhi. Give us your take on homelessness in India, what"s the cause of it?   KRISHNAN: I think that when one talks about poverty and homelessness, we tend to talk about it in the frames of charity or the lack of it.   And I really think that we need to turn that around and we need to talk about in terms of the priorities of a government. We need to ask why is it that governments in their spending priorities can"t make housing a priority for spending. How is it that they cannot ensure that people have a home to live in and that people have hygienic water supply, electricity supply. These are basic necessities, as is education, as is health and I really think that our priorities are skewered.   If I speak about India, if you look at budgetary spending, our successive governments have given away millions and billions of rupees in tax breaks for big corporations, the richest corporations we have and I think this would be the same story across the world.   And really you need to ask why is that you afford that and yet you say, you don"t call those subsidies, those are actually subsidies for the rich. And yet you say we don"t have money to subsidise the poor. If you don"t like the word socialist, that"s no problem, but actually examine the system you live in.   June 2014   Inequality: Amartya Sen says Thomas Piketty is Right.   In an interview with LSE’s editor Joel Suss, Amartya Sen discusses Thomas Piketty’s recent work, the consequences of widening inequality, and his views on India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose BJP party won the country’s 2014 general election.   Thomas Piketty and other academics have documented the growth in income and wealth inequality in many countries around the world, however the repercussions of widening inequality are perhaps less well understood. What are your thoughts on the consequences of inequality?   These are good questions. Inequality has to be viewed not only in terms of its consequences, but also as something that we have reason to disapprove of in its own right. So you have to go beyond the consequences. There’s an increase in inequality in many countries in the world and we should be worried about that.   You’ve mentioned Piketty’s work, and I know that there’s a debate over this subject, in any study of this kind you have to use diverse sources of data, and it is inescapable that you have to establish certain linkages on which it is possible to have debates. Are the conclusions drawn from them fairly robust? I believe they are. I think that Piketty’s conclusions stand to many countries which he discusses – they certainly apply to the United States very well. So I think that the summary story that inequality has been growing quite sharply in recent decades, and in recent years in particular, is true. We therefore have reason to worry as to whether this is acceptable socially, and also what the consequences are.   Now coming to the consequences, these very much depend on what kind of inequality we’re discussing. If you compare for example China with India, the inequality level judged in terms of income distribution is no less in China than in India – according to some measures it is even higher in China. But the fact that despite the inequality in China there is close to 100 per cent literacy and nearly 100 per cent health coverage – at least of some kind — in a way that doesn’t exist in India – means that inequality has had a more severe effect in India than it has in China. On the other hand, if you were to leave economics to one side and look at the distribution of political power, then of course there you could identify some advantages on the Indian side: namely that because of democracy and multi-party politics, people have more opportunity to express their views and to choose among many different parties than they have in China. So you really have to look at the nature of the inequality we’re examining to be able to assess what its consequences should be.   You have criticised Narendra Modi, the recently elected Indian Prime Minister, and his party for their Hindu-nationalist outlook. Did Modi’s decision to quickly invite the President of Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif, to his inauguration surprise you?   Was it a good move? Yes indeed, it was a very good move. Second, did it surprise me? No, it didn’t surprise me because it’s an intelligent move of a kind that Modi should be able to think of. Even though I’m critical of his tendency to favour the majority Hindu community compared with minorities, and I am critical of the fact that, at least in the past, he has tended to neglect – judging by the record of Gujarat – education and healthcare and has concentrated only on physical infrastructure, I’ve never thought that Mr Modi isn’t a very intelligent man and capable of being pragmatic.   The third point concerns a more difficult issue and is, in some sense, a more profound point to consider. When India was partitioned, it was the Congress Party (and the Indian secularists) who claimed that there was no difference between Hindus and Muslims – that there wasn’t going to be a Hindu country and a Muslim country. The claim of the great leader of the Muslim League, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was to say that there would be a Muslim Pakistan and there should be a Hindu India. So if India moves to become more of a Hindu India now, then that would be something which is quite acceptable to the Pakistan tradition of ‘we are Muslim Pakistan, you are Hindu India’. Modi fits into that pattern much more easily.   So in some ways, at that level of the Indo-Pakistan relationship, there isn’t any great problem in thinking of India as a Hindu India coming to terms with a Muslim Pakistan on an equitable basis. In the past, of course, the Indian position has always been that they are not on a symmetric footing: that India is a secular country in a way that Pakistan has not tried to be. In Pakistan a dominant self-perception is that of being a Muslim nation in a way that India’s perception is not that of being a Hindu nation. This is something that even Modi cannot change, and if he’s pragmatic (and he can be expected to be that), he wouldn’t try to change that.   Regarding the Indian relationship with Pakistan, I don’t expect a great tension there. However, India becoming more militaristically inclined may be a problem because that is certainly more of a BJP line. After all, it was they who blasted the nuclear bomb in 1998 even though India had already done testing before in the mid-70s. There was no particular need for India to do new detonations in 1998, but it gave Pakistan a good excuse to have their own – first time – blasts (not just on paper) citing India’s new round of actual testing.   I hope this time, the BJP will be more careful with the relationship between India and Pakistan. The mere fact of a new view of a “Hindu India” meeting Muslim Pakistan is not going to be a problem in itself in terms of Indo-Pakistani relations.   The real issue concerns what happens inside India. It is not easy to make India – with its multi-religious mix, its secular constitution – into just “a Hindu country.” There is a Supreme Court, a secular constitution, a media, a general public. Even though Modi and the BJP were very successful at the 2014 Indian general election, achieving victory with over 50 per cent of the seats, they only received 31 per cent of the vote. The majority of Indians are not clamouring to live in a majoritarian Hindu country. That’s a very serious diagnosis to bear in mind.
	We need to tell the truth by Danny Sriskandarajah CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation   Global wave of protests driven by national and international governance failures, says new report''Mass public protests that have grabbed headlines around the world during the last few years reflect a failure of governance at the national and international level, says a new report by the global civil society alliance, CIVICUS.   “In many countries around the world people see formal democratic processes and party politics as failing to address the issues they care about. Instead these systems are seen to serve the interests of political and economic elites,” said Dr Danny Sriskandarajah, the CIVICUS Secretary-General on launching the organisation’s 2014 State of Civil Society Report.   “One would hope that those being repressed, marginalised or excluded at the national level would be heard and protected by institutions at the international level – but global governance is not working either. Many of our international institutions and processes are out of date, unaccountable and unable to address present-day challenges effectively. International governance institutions with limited scope for people’s participation risk becoming irrelevant.   “To make matters worse, the things millions of people are expressing their anger about – inequality, lack of voice, low wages, unemployment – are not being tackled by international institutions, and in some cases they are complicit in promoting the interests of global capital.   “Millions of citizens are therefore facing what we call a `double democratic deficit’: at both the national and international level citizens are not heard and their voices not taken into account,” said Sriskandarajah.   These are the findings of the CIVICUS State of Civil Society Report 2014 which draws on contributions from more than 30 of the world’s leading experts on civil society. The report also contains the results of a pilot project, based on research conducted by CIVICUS with more than 450 civil society representatives, which assesses how intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) engage civil society.   In reviewing `the year that was’, the report shows that the latest waves of protests are taking place all over the world, including in countries like Brazil, Turkey and Venezuela that are democratic on paper and have had high economic growth. The report also shows striking commonalities across countries and regions, including the escalation of protest from an initially local grievance, to broader issues of dissatisfaction with the behaviour of the economic and political elite, corruption and rising inequality. Often the spread of protest is unintentionally encouraged by heavy-handed state responses to largely peaceful dissent.   CIVICUS says that in many cases, governments respond to the rising tide of citizen action by stepping up efforts to further close down already diminishing civic space. This is being done through a combination of dubious legislation, the demonisation of protest movements and direct harassment of civil society activists and their organisations.   With regard to global governance, the report finds that there are huge disparities in who gets to have a say: with the wealthiest states and corporations disproportionately influencing international agendas and norms. Global governance remains remote and often disconnected from the people whose lives it impacts and therefore needs to be democratised to support greater participation of citizens in decision making, and to create an environment that enables civil society to substantively engage in these processes.   The report provides several recommendations for governments and intergovernmental organisations, among them arguing for a need to move away from the state-centric model of international governance towards a citizen-oriented model. There is a call for exploring radical new forms of representation and oversight, such as citizens’ panels and assemblies that have real power. International institutions are urged to make their decision-making processes more open and democratic. The notion of promoting equality between states and removal of arbitrary veto powers by some states is emphasised.   There is a call for greater parity between official and civil society delegations and a need to address imbalances in access between Northern and Southern civil society actors.   The CIVICUS State of Civil Society Report also has recommendations for civil society. Civil society organisations (CSOs) are encouraged to deepen their understanding of the impact of global decision-making on their local conditions, create linkages with new protest movements and build coalitions and networks that enable the sharing of resources and the connection of diverse parts of civil society.   Larger, better resourced CSOs that have an established presence in international forums are encouraged to democratise the space and share their access with a wider range of civil society groups.   “We in civil society have our work cut out. We need to both drive and be the change that we want to see,” said Sriskandarajah.   http://civicus.org/index.php/en/media-centre-129/press-releases/2057-global-wave-of-protests-driven-by-national-and-international-governance-failures-says-new-report http://civicus.org/index.php/en/media-centre-129/press-releases   Put People Power back at Center of Citizen Action, by Danny Sriskandarajah. (CIVICUS)   A few weeks ago, I co-signed perhaps the most import open letter of my career. It was an open provocation to my fellow activists and colleagues, to the members of our organization, and to all those who, like me, earn their living in the civil society sector.   CIVICUS, the organization I lead, exists to strengthen civil society and citizen action throughout the world. Yet, I signed my name to an open letter that is critical of civil society; that says that our work has begun to reinforce the social, economic and political systems that we once set out to transform; that we have become too institutionalized, too professionalized, co-opted into systems and networks in which we are being outwitted and out-manoeuvred.   This issue of civil society “co-option” matters so much because we are losing the war – the war against poverty, climate change and social injustice. Many courageous, inspirational people and organizations are fighting the good fight. But too many of us – myself included – have become detached from the people and movements that drive real social and political change.   “Our work has begun to reinforce the social, economic and political systems that we once set out to transform; we have become too institutionalized, too professionalized, co-opted into systems and networks in which we are being outwitted and out-manoeuvred.”The corporatization of civil society has tamed our ambition; too often it has made us agents rather than agitators of the system.   Our intention in publishing this letter was not to berate, but to spark a debate; to challenge all of us to engage in re-configuring, re-imagining and re-energizing civil society. A first and small step was to host a Twitter conversation, calling for responses to the ideas expressed in our letter. And it would seem that many civil society activists around the world share our concerns.   As a result we will be devoting as much time as possible during the International Civil Society Week that will take place this November in Johannesburg to discussing the issues raised in the letter. We are expecting more than 500 activists from all over the world to come together to discuss, analyse, challenge, learn and share experiences to tackle the obstacles we all face worldwide.   The week will take the theme ‘Citizen Action, People Power’, and feature more than 40 events – covering topics from good grant-making to new ways of promoting people-powered accountability – that are being organised by our members and partners from around the world.   The week will culminate in the CIVICUS World Assembly and close with the Nelson Mandela-Graça Machel Innovation Awards ceremony.   I still believe passionately in the power of civil society to change the world. Only we can formulate a new set of global organising principles, a new paradigm and an alternative model to the current narrative.   But, in order to do so, we will need to put the voice and actions of people back at the heart of our work. The global partnership that will make up the International Civil Society Week will be bound by this common aim – centred on the voices and actions of the people.   Our primary accountability must be, not to donors, but to all those struggling for social justice. We must fight corporatism in our own ranks, re-connect with the power of informal and grassroots networks, tap into the wisdom of diverse activists, and re-balance our resources. This should not entail abandoning the organisations we have created; but evolving them to be truly accountable to those we seek to serve.   My hope is that the dialogue we have begun will help to re-connect us to an understanding of civil society as a deeply human construct, as a facilitator of empowering social relationships. In this, it will be crucial to reflect on the role of our own organisations. For only solutions that are at once pragmatic and radical will be sufficient to meet the challenges we face.   http://blogs.civicus.org/civicus/2014/08/06/an-open-letter-to-our-fellow-activists-across-the-globe-building-from-below-and-beyond-borders/ http://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/people-power-what-do-we-know-about-empowered-citizens-and-development/ http://blogs.civicus.org/civicus/   The Global Day of Citizen Action on 7th June 2014 is part of the Be The Change campaign to raise awareness about `civic space’, why it’s important, and why we need to protect it.   Civic space exists when individuals and organisations have the freedom to speak out, organise and take action. In other words, to freely express, associate and assemble.   Sign up and add your voice to that of thousands of others around the world: letting the world know what you think about your rights in your country.   Be The Change is a new global public awareness campaign around citizen action and `civic space’.   The Be The Change platform seeks to connect people from across the world, through the sharing of stories, skills and lessons learnt. We invite you to share stories of campaigns from across the world and become part of a growing global movement for positive social change. You can also offer skills to help other campaigns or find people that can help you!   Be The Change seeks to inspire and celebrate citizen action and thereby raise awareness about `civic space’, the importance of it and our need to protect it.   The freedom to speak out (freedom of expression), to organise (freedom of association) and to take action (freedom of assembly) are all part of what is called `civic space’ and no one has the right to deny you these rights.   In many parts of the world these rights are being reduced or interfered with but thousands of people around the world are speaking out, organising and taking action and we aim to celebrate that and create awareness about the need to protect these rights.   How the platform works   You can get involved either through sharing a story of actions or campaigns that you or someone you know have undertaken, or that you find inspiring, that has successfully led to positive social change. You can offer help to other campaigns or seek help for your campaign – or, simply just browse to get an idea of the inspiring things that people around the world are doing to make a difference.   Through the platform you can share photos and videos; comment on, like and share your own posts and those of others (like you would on social media) and you can browse the `lessons learnt’ by others around the world as they play their part in being the change.   http://www.civicus.org/bethechange/ http://civicus.org/bethechange/gdca/ Visit the related web page
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