Never before in the last 75 years have Indian women been so celebrated and at the same time, publically so degraded. In her poem, ‘There are no honest poems about dead women’, Audre Lorde asks a crucial question for our times: What do women want after they have told all their stories? Do we want a safe space for an individualistic telling of the stories of our lives or should we now look beyond ourselves towards a collective movement that will redefine and reshape democratic India, through our lived experiences? Should we begin to work systematically towards a new theory of the state that will guide life and law in India at 100?
In societies like ours, Manipur defines to what extent the male viewpoint has come to dominate a community with a strong matriarchal past, its politics, administrative system and local legal ecosystem. Visuals of Meitei men dragging disrobed Kuki girls in public dispelled the lustre of early feminism in Manipur where women fought two wars (Nupi Lan) against the British in 1904 and 1939 and later led strong movements against alcoholism and drugs and the AFSPA. Family and kinship rules now guarantee reproductive ownership and sexual access and control to men as a group.
No law guaranteeing gender equality will succeed in an unequal society. If we want true equality in the next 25 years, let’s begin here. Whether it is rape or a uniform civil code, we must first talk about how our present laws, shaped from male perspectives, have been used to argue cases, mostly by male lawyers. They have also been adjudicated upon by mostly male judges, resulting in judgments that created precedents for combining coercion with authority….
After the truth-shower 