Dear friends,
Forwarding you a letter from Namma Manasa, a Bangalore-based
autonomous women's group, to Population First, declining the
UNFPA-Laadli award.
Thanks and regards,
Anivar
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Dear Ms Chamundeshwari,
Thank you for selecting Namma Manasa for the UNFPA-Laadli Media Award
for Gender Sensitivity 2006-07, being organised by Population First.
Thank you also for all the efforts you have personally made to reach
out to us. However, we regret to inform you that we would like to
decline the award and take this opportunity to explain our reasons for
doing so.
Namma Manasa, as you are aware, is a non-funded women's collective,
bringing out a monthly Kannada-language magazine on women's issues for
the past 23 years. As part of the autonomous women's movement in
India, we have a strong critique of the politics of funding. In our
experience, donor aid creates unfortunate divisions within movements;
co-opts and blunts the radical edge of struggles; and leads to a
narrow single-issue focus where, typically, the issue is stripped from
the larger context. We regret that the last point is particularly
evident in the approach advocated by Population First.
Although your website states that "population is not an issue of
numbers alone", contradictorily, a key objective of Population First
is listed as "reaching the goal of family size of two children per
couple". You would no doubt be aware that women's groups have
consistently denounced the dangerous elitism of the two-child norm. In
a context where the majority of women are totally marginalised from
decision-making processes, the two-child norm is an added tool of
oppression. It leads to the abandonment of women and children
particularly among the most vulnerable sections, and forces
sex-selective abortions. We cannot see how you can reconcile this
objective with your simultaneous call to "save the girl child".
The elitism, we fear, is also manifest in the central message of your
Youth Campaign: "The enormous Indian crowds reduce the quality of life
and cause ecological and social problems in the country." The
"enormous crowds" that you speak of are the poor of this country: the
poor, who no doubt have more children but do so to meet basic survival
needs; to deal with higher infant mortality and almost non-existent
health care; and also because of patriarchal control over
reproduction. Avaricious resource consumption and monumental waste
generation are not, however, by the poor but by the profligate elites.
The highest income group in India, merely 1.44 per cent of the
population, typically consisting of families with one or two children,
are the consumers of 75 per cent of the total electricity, petroleum
products and machine-based household appliances: products that have a
particularly pernicious global environmental impact.
We are also alarmed to note that Population First takes no stand on
hazardous contraceptives. Today, a range of long-acting, hormonal
contraceptives are available off-the-shelf. Promoted as "spacing
methods", these in fact have the potential to permanently destroy
fertility, to create birth defects among future offspring, to lead to
cancers and a range of other health problems among women. Undoubtedly,
effective contraception is a burning necessity but not at the cost of
women's safety and wellbeing. We fail to understand how your
population-related advocacy and communications can ignore this
critical point.
>From "family planning" to "family welfare" to the more current
"reproductive health", India's population reduction programme has
always savagely targeted the poorest and the weakest. It has diverted
attention from the real reasons behind poverty, environmental
destruction and social unrest, which include the lack of genuine land
reforms, of equitable resource distribution, of basic services and
social security. There is nothing to suggest that Population First is
in any way, working to change this unfortunate reality: a core issue
of the women's health movement in India. In the circumstances, we
would find it difficult to accept your award without compromising our
basic beliefs and politics.
With kind regards,
Champavathi
(for Namma Manasa Women's Collective, Bangalore)
Bangalore, 26 March 2008
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