Blue helmets: come home

In 2007, the United Nations broke new ground. A contingent of 103 peacekeepers reached the capital of Monrovia in Liberia. Immaculate in blue, these 103 peacekeepers were all women. Indian women. Known as the "Blue Helmets", these women guarded the President office by day and patrolled crime-ridden areas by night. Their presence marked significant change. Trained in sophisticated weaponry and combat tactics amongst other skills, the Blue Helmets' foot patrolling by night reduced armed robbery by as much as 65 per cent. Local women felt safer; children felt safer; and men who were not involved in crime, felt safer. 

In India, we tout traditions of respect and equality for all mankind. In fact, that is how we explain namaste or namashkar, the traditional greeting with folded hands, which impresses the world. But it shames us as a people that, to protect our own women and children at home, the collective in this country fail. As a New Year’s wish, ordinary citizens in India would wish for the blue helmets to come home as soon as possible to work their magic on mounting gender-based crimes.  

Respect and equality for all seems to disappear rapidly in the case of females. Gang rape and murder of innocent women and girls is on the rise, not only in regions in conflict. It has naught to do with genetics, rather the social learning of gender inequality.  Assumptions of the old adage boys will be boys simply gloss over their loutish behaviour. Around the world, men club with the perpetrators to apportion blame onto the victims. Some women rape easy says a senate hopeful in US. In India, men in respectable positions wonder why, if they are “respectable”, the females are out at night with male companions not their relatives. 

A local politician declares: There's only one word – Limit. If you cross the limit, you face the same treatment that Sita faced in the Ramayan. If you cross the Laxman-rekha (i.e., boundary), Ravan will kidnap you like Sita. A godman advises women to address the predators as “brothers” and beg for their lives. The son of the highest incumbent of the land rubbishes the spontaneous demonstrations in New Delhi over the gang-rape and murder of a young paramedic trainee with: What's basically happening in Delhi is something like the pink revolution, which has very little connection with ground realities. Women who are beautiful, painted, dented, go to discos, give interviews, are not particularly serious about the protests for which they have come out on the streets.
 

The idea of masculine identity is testosterone fueled. Women’s education, women employment that become an affront to male dominance must be put down, and this aggression is rationalized as right. The continued practice of blaming provocation onto victims is shocking to the freedom loving sections. But shock we feel for all of a few minutes before things return to the way they have always been – to the status quo of powerlessness before learned patriarchal dominance.

An opinion in The Hindu explains the point in India:

It has become commonplace to understand certain spaces and institutions (say, the street and Parliament) as public, and others (say, the home) as private. The terms “public” and “private” have, in turn, become linked to ideas about the “proper” realms for men and women. Women are tolerated in public spaces and within public institutions but are expected to behave “properly.” Otherwise they suffer ridicule and violence. The media quite often provides accounts of public women (say parliamentarians) through describing what they wear, or, how many children they have; women’s primary identity continues to be defined through an implicit understanding that public institutions possess (and should possess) a masculine identity.

Fundamentalists point fingers at “decadent” urban culture brought on by the “depraving” influence of the West, which generally refers to women aspiring to equality. Others blame it on the traditions of male dominance formed with usurpation the position of women in an earlier era. Thus creates the legacy of confusion between progressiveness and orthodoxy that fragments society also on gender issues. But no, nothing and no one else is to blame for the ways things are today. The fault is ours; we who are global citizens of the structure that, on the one hand, unquestioningly carry forward ignorance and animosity of the past that festers gender roles, and on the other, takes freedom to the extreme of demolishing the very concept of family.

An opinion on the Daily Mail says of the West:

  

Our generation, who started to grow up ‘between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles first LP’ got it all so horribly wrong. We ignored the obvious fact that moral conventions develop in human societies for a reason. We may have thought it was ‘hypocritical’ to condemn any form of sexual behaviour, and we may have dismissed the undoubted happiness felt by married people as stuffy, repressed and old hat. But we were wrong, wrong, wrong. Two generations have grown up — comprising children of selfish grown-ups who put their own momentary emotional needs and impulses before family stability and the needs of their children. 

We have been unable yet to find common ground between antagonistic perspectives. In the resulting confusion, perhaps the collective stops thinking, as individuals and as groups. Our evolution then is measured on technological advancements and not the minds of people. India and Pakistan for instance are said to be traditional rivals. Not really, since the two were part and parcel of the same nation for thousands of years before the Partition tore them apart. Vested political interests have kept the animosity alive, and even six decades after their separation as two different national identities in the sub-continent, both countries bleed attitude. When their citizens meet in neutral settings, they relate as mature adults. However, there appears to be something in the sub-continent that keeps the same people sprouting vitriol from opposite sides of the fence, whichever that is. 

And thus follows the stress of paranoia, the fear of being overwhelmed by others. These make for self-centredness, pushing the conservation of resources, and protection of identity. The creativity in problem solving is lost, because the intent is to control by any means, rather than adapt to new realities.  It is time to change stagnative structures. Patriarchal hierarchy needs to give way to democratic spheres of influence. It is perhaps more than time for the women peacekeepers to make their presence felt back home.

 

In a blogpost about these warrior women, Kohli says of their effectiveness: 

Far from being "soft" which is what many expected an all women's contingent to be, the Blue Helmets endeared themselves to the local community. Their message was simple - you can trust us. They were perceived as polite and forthcoming in help, and did what they were meant to do - keep the peace.

In India, this we need today: the return of traditions of respect and equality in this new avatar – women in the role of protectors of the sisterhood of mothers, wives and daughters.