Kavita Krishnan - Fearless Freedom

In October 2017, when women students at the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) demanded safety and freedom from the discriminatory rules that apply to the womens hostel, the then vice chancellor, Girish Chandra Tripathi, said that, after all, it was girls who got raped, not boys, and so girls require more security than boys. By demanding freedom to roam, he said, girls first put themselves in danger and then start complaining. Tripathi knew his framing of the issue would resonate with the widely held common sense in India, which accepts the notion that it is more important for women to be safe than to be free; and that freedom invites danger. If you want to be safe, why do you demand freedom? is a familiar question faced by Indian women.

What Tripathi underestimated, however, is the determination of young women students of BHU, and women all over India, whose movements have been striving to create a new common sense that refuses to separate the goals of safety and freedom for women.

On 19 December 2012, just days after the woman we now know as Jyoti Singh was gang-raped on a Delhi bus and left to die, we were demonstrating at the then Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshits house. There were angry young women around us, holding handmade placards that said, We live in a society that teaches women not to get raped instead of teaching men not to rape. A journalist came up to me just then and asked, Some politicians and police officers are advising women not to go out at night as a precaution. But some women, such as nurses and journalists, have to work at nightwhat are they supposed to do? Something about the question made me feel a red-hot, searing rageand in my mind, its flames illuminated the problem with stark clarity. Here we were, again, asking women for alibis and defensive explanations and justifications for their movements, their timings, their clothes, instead of holding rapists accountable for their conduct and their disrespect for womens sovereign ownership of their own bodies.

In a speech I made a few minutes after I was asked that question, I said:

Why should women provide justifications if they want to walk out on streets alone, even if it is late at night? Why do we need reasons such as she has to work late or she was coming home from a BPO job or a media job to bolster such decisions? Is it a crime for women to want to go out at night, buy a cigarette or go for a walk? We do not want to hear the defensive argument that women only leave their homes to go to work... We believe that regardless of whether she is indoors or outdoors, whether it is day or night, for whatever reason, whatever she is wearing, a woman has a right to freedom. And it is that fearless freedom that we need to save and protect, that we need to safeguard. The word safety is overused and tired. Each of us women knows what safety means, we hear it from our parents, from our hostel wardens, from our communities. It means that as a woman, you must behave yourself. You should stay at home, not dress in a particular manner, it means that youre safe if you dont live with freedom! A huge pile of patriarchal laws and institutions are served up to us as safety and we reject this plate of protection. We dont want it... Whenever anybody speaks of womens safetythe government machinery, the police, the judiciary, the political parties (barring the womens movement and the left movement)theyre talking of a patriarchal definition of safety and protection. Theyre not talking of protecting or defending womens fearless, unqualified freedom. We need to tell them: if you want to protect anything, protect our fearless freedom, our bekhauf azaadi!

In that speech I had also asked if advertisement campaigns by governments against sexual violence, which asked men to be real men and protect their sisters, were really a solution, or part of the problem. I asked how it was helpful to ask men to be manly and brotherly towards women, when society saw violence by brothers against sisters as honourable , manly and brotherly?

A friend and comrade, Vijay, had videotaped and uploaded the speeches made at that protest. And in the next couple of days, I slowly woke up to the fact that my speech had gone viral. The messages from unknown women, and several men, flooding my Facebook inbox showed me that the speech had touched a chord with many. I realized that what I had said about safety was felt very deeply by manyand that these people were frustrated at the fact that their concerns were made to disappear in the dominant discourse around womens rights, which coded womens safety as curtailment of womens mobility and autonomy, confinement of women to homes or hostels, and subjection of women to a relentless regime of surveillance and control.

In the years since 2012, movements asserting womens rights to autonomy and questioning the packaging of restrictions on autonomy as womens safety have grown, especially among women students and young women in cities and towns. At the same time, the organized ideological and physical offensive against womens autonomy has grown bolder, basking in political approval and patronage. This aggressive patriarchal politics threatens, over and over, to submerge and overwhelm the issue of womens autonomy, to drown out or discredit the voices of women asserting and demanding autonomy.