Asian women speak
We reprint below the text of a speech to a workshop organised by the Asian Women's Research and Action Network (AWRAN).
VIBHUTI PATEL
The decade has witnessed increasing violation of democratic and human rights in Asia. While accepting that both men and women are victims of it, we would like to emphasise that women suffer even more.
Growing militarisation in the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia, jingoism in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have their own implications on the lives of women. Conditions for women political prisoners and under trial is shocking. Heinous tactics of rape and other perverted forms of sexual abuse and torture are used for humiliation and terrorisation of women in these countries. Nepalese women fighting against the monarch are brutally tortured and abused by the state. It is not an exaggeration to say that the states in Asian countries have institutionalised violence against women. Mass rape of women by military-men in the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia; police atrocities against women in India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan are glaring examples of this phenomenon ...
During the decade, because of pressure from women's groups in some of the Asian countries, liberal legislation on questions like equal pay for equal work were granted on paper but at the same time basic democratic and trade union rights for women workers were taken away as a result of establishment of free trade zones nd an expanding informal sector. During the decade most of the trade nion struggles have been defensive truggles - employers close down etories and treat women workers easily replaceable commodities. Women workers are expected to fer in silence inspite of getting carious wages and deteriorating physical and mental conditions due to occupational diseases and hazards.
The state has double standards as far as women's struggles are concerned. If the middle class women demand liberal legislation, preferential treatment, reserved quotas, the state, at least sometimes, obliges. But if the toiling women start organising themselves the state ruthlessly represses them. In Pakistan, when martial law was declared in 1977, Zia-ul-Haq took it upon himself to bring about the new Islamic Order and the women of Pakistan bore the brunt of the Islamisation policies regarding punishment to "adulterous women", rape victims etc...
All states in Asian countries grant personal laws based on religious codes and customary laws. The laws are not only discriminatory against women, but have a deeprooted prejudice against women. None of them recognise women's individuality in its own right and they see women as dependent on fathers, husbands or sons. Because of personal laws, legal status of women in different religious groups is not the same. Women's groups in Korea, the Philippines, Ceylon, India have demanded abolition of personal laws and formulation of uniform civil code.
Asian women don't have landrights. Even land reforms have deposited landrights in the hands of men. As a result in many countries agrarian women's struggles demanding landrights have emerged.
The worsening economic crisis has given rise to religious fundamentalism and ethnic revivalism that has culminated in religious, caste and ethnic riots
International Viewpoint 16 September 1985
YOUTH