Rebels, Feminists, 'Bad Girls': Women and Nation in the Time of Insurgency

About the Speaker

Rakhee Kalita Moral teaches at Cotton University, Guwahati where she is Associate Professor of English. Her recent works have been at the intersections of culture, gender and conflict. She has edited At the Frontier and Beyond (Macmillan 2005) and Gender and Society in Northeast India ( 2010). A former Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (2013-2015), New Delhi, she completed a project there on Women and Insurgency: The Case of ULFA and has several publications on the subject. These include 'Living and Partly Living: The Politics of Freedom and the Women of ULFA' (2013); 'Rumour, Rhetoric and Rebellion: Negotiating the Archive and the Witness in Assam' (2015); and more recently, 'Demobilised, Dispossessed, Disappeared...? In Search of the Former Women Combatants of the ULFA in Assam' (2017), among many other essays and articles in journals (EPW etc.) and books. Her latest monograph, Arms and the Woman: The Politics of Gender and the Myth of Power (Routledge) is forthcoming while a short introduction to The Ulfa is also under preparation. Dr Kalita Moral, is also affiliated to the Humanities Across Borders Mellon Program 2016-2020 (IIAS, Leiden), an Asia- Africa research initiative. She is working on 'Women's Mobilisations in Nagaland and Everyday Lives: Word and Practice', where she is supervising the Northeast India projects of the Mellon program.

Abstract

In the 80s the separatist guerrilla movement led by the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) swept Assam in India’s northeast engaging civil society and the ordinary Assamese in its demand for sovereignty. While the men of ULFA turned heroes overnight, its women members were rarely visible or vocal. Thirty years after their entry into and exit from the rebel outfit, the women find themselves in various states of subjectivity and are a category that is neither wholly accepted nor accommodated, remaining at the edge of the social and cultural life of the communities they belonged to. Often stigmatised by a patriarchal outlook, these combatant women are considered immoral, promiscuous and ‘bad’ examples for independent young women even as many of ULFA’s men have not only been coopted into the government but have also assumed legitimacy and can be heard as voices from civil society . My discussion will center around responses by the state and the community to this group of women whose rights and claims as individuals and citizens constantly need reification. In asking what the nation and the law does to such women, I shall have occasion to use interviews and personal conversations with them to suggest how many of these former rebels have had to turn their lives around and have adopted various modes of agency to survive their “post conflict” lives.

Report

The organisation Sanjukta Mukti Bahini Asom or ULFA, has been in conflict over a struggle for sovereignty and economic liberation. It was formed in April 1979 and has had an approach of unethical modes of violence which caused disconnect with Assamese society. The men of ULFA turned heroes overnight, but the histories and silent narratives of the women cadre were left unheard. ULFA women are rarely the centre of action and there are extremely few references to them in the media. The talk broadly focused on how the entry of women into violent political movements in the Indian scenario is part of a larger process of popular mobilisation and more specifically how the specific ways in which women got transformed into political subjects has not been analysed closely. Furthermore, the lectured discussed about the afterlife of these women rebels or ‘bad girls’.

Despite a rich history of the women rebels, in many armed conflicts occurring in India’s North East, there is little or no information about how women involve themselves in these long-drawn struggles and much of the discourse on these rebellions identifies men as the sole actors of the insurrections and wars against the state. In the struggle that has ensued for more than three decades between Assam’s insurgent outfit, ULFA and the state, the lives of several key players and ordinary participants of the war, direct and indirect, have been affected. Flung into the throes of militant violence, men have disappeared, hundreds of youth have lost their lives or become decrepit, and women have been devastated and displaced forever.

ULFA women constituted a mix of women from young high school dropouts to collegiates, wives and girlfriends of cadres, sympathisers, and even widows. Starting as couriers, many of them later enlisted as members of the village councils. The women of ULFA wore the same uniform as the men, were imparted equally rigorous training and performed the same chores as the men. In ULFA’s records, several women cadres have been declared martyrs. ULFA’s women in the recent times have broken out of the mould and some former cadres of ULFA have joined the Asom Mahila Sachetan Manch, a progressive women’s collective while some others have been accepted into the Nari Adhikar Suraksha Samiti. Both of these are considered women’s rights organisations and have consistently reinvented their roles in society. Among other more politically resurgent moves after the negotiations for peace got underway was the strong and loud demand by a major civil society initiative in Assam for the inclusion of representatives of former women combatants and members of women’s organisations in the peace negotiations with the Indian state. 10%-12% were women members at the time of the disbanding of the ULFA camps in the borderlands. Some of the cadres who Professor interviewed after they were released and who continued to trek from their villages to the various courts at Guwahati for judicial hearings, had appalling stories to recount of the treatment meted out to them during custody.

By Aditi Mishra, Undergraduate Class of 2020