Voices from Kandhamal: The life-shattering impact of communal violence on women

Last week, an extraordinary book was released in Bhubaneswar and Kandhamal. It was commissioned by the National Alliance of Women - Odisha, after every visiting fact-finding team post the Kandhamal communal violence mentioned sexual and gender-based violence but was unable to document its occurrence. Breaking the Shackled Silence: Unheard Voices of Women from Kandhamal does that in two ways —​ by letting us read extracts from interviews with women who witnessed, experienced and survived (barely) the gruesome violence that took place in 2007 and 2008 and by listing 41 verified incidents at the end, an indicative and not exhaustive list, the author points out. But the report’s great contribution is that it does not limit women’s experiences to violence, but in its assessment of a gendered impact, also seeks to learn about their trauma and concerns about livelihood, displacement and accountability.

A small reminder of what happened in Kandhamal: The Christmas eve communal violence in Kandhamal, Odisha, in 2007 was followed by a second round in August 2008, when Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati was killed. The violence raised questions about conversion (and re-conversion) activities in the area as communal politics.

For this report, the author, law and human rights researcher Saumya Uma, reached out to more than 300 women through Focused Group Discussions, and the book contains extracts from 17 one-on-one interviews with Kandhamal women - 14 Christian and three Hindu. Three threads run through these stories. First, all of them witnessed cruelty and unrelenting violence being inflicted on their families and others around them. Second, the threat or experience of sexual and gender-based violence was definitive. Finally, most of them are struggling to make ends meet and loss of livelihood has resulted in a loss of dignity and self-esteem for some.

An older report on post-traumatic stress disorder in women from Assam and Nagaland identified several causes of trauma, including the experience of violence, the anticipation of violence, witnessing violence and remembering violence. There is evidence of that in the accounts of women from Kandhamal as well.

Several women interviewed in this study recounted the death of their family members vividly. One woman whose son defended the Christians in the village narrated:

“The mob got angry and warned him that if he came in their way, he would be get killed too. Due to his continued opposition to the violence, and support to the Christians, the mob got angry. They cut his legs, hands and penis, and left him in a pool of blood. I was with him at that time… I sat with his body for three days, safeguarding it from dogs.” 

The threat of sexual violence pervades individual accounts, although only a few really speak about it. A dalit Hindu woman was raped because someone else in her family was a Christian. The clinical use of sexual violence is illustrated by this sentence in her account: “Four-five men raped me after discussing with each other as to who will rape me first.” One woman describing the gang-rape of another woman 50 metres away from where she was experiencing the same thing, asks: “Men—when they are handling women—do they have any sense what they are doing and how they handle them? They were playing… as if she was a football. They did the same with me.”

One question that has begun to haunt me in recent months is, are those of us who write about these topics beginning to reduce gendered impact to the threat or experience of gender-based violence in every context? Women’s accounts, whether from Kandhamal or in the Nagaland-Assam report cited earlier, or in conflict zones in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India (including Kandhamal by the same author) show that their experiences, priorities and concerns are not that narrow. Livelihood and life-chances loom large in their worries. In the Afghanistan and Pakistan studies, for instance, young girls spoke about the hardships they willingly underwent just to go to school and college. Women spoke about anxiety when anyone left the house, fearing that they would not return - either being caught in the crossfire, or being targeted for some reason, or because of the rumours of forced disappearances. The women in the Kandhamal study said in so many words, “Livelihood is the biggest concern for me.” The report writes about a “financial quicksand.”

In the interview extracts, women speak about the experience of violence, but reports from the Focused Group Discussions centre around how people have reconstructed their lives—perhaps a more comfortable topic to discuss in a larger group. Displaced during the violence, some women lost their homes, family members and documentation, including identity documents such as a voter ID or ration card. “Many have not applied for a new ration card, BPL card, voter ID card or health card (after their old ones were destroyed during the violence). The procedure requires that they return to their area of origin to obtain a replacement of these documents, which the women are fearful of doing. For this reason, they have waived their entitlements under government schemes.” The symbiotic economic relationship between people living in the same area has been rent by a few days of intense violence. For instance, women are not able to collect leaves to make leaf-plates because the other community controls access to the forest, and no one is willing to buy the plates, either.

Although communal violence has an episodic quality, it has a long-term impact on people’s lives.

- “After the violence, due to mental trauma, I fell severely ill. I have lost a lot of weight; suffer from gastric problem, stomach ulcers, diabetes and pancreatitis. I have spent more than Rs. 1.5 lakhs on my medicines.” (page 23)

- “In the place where I live, I do not mix with the neighbours, as I am worried that they would communicate with my husband’s murderers and tell them where I live, and they would come to attack me.” (page 13)

Accountability for violence has been impossible to ensure. First, the attackers were from the same village, making it hard or intimidating to file and pursue complaints. Second, neither law enforcement nor the judicial system showed any inclination to help the survivors of violence. Women’s accounts include statements about the police standing by as mute witnesses or prosecutors that harassed them. Finally, the delay in justice has made it very difficult for them to rebuild their lives. They remain displaced:

- “I am not able to return to my village, as the villagers are angry with me for having lodged a complaint in the police station for the killing of my husband, and for pursuing the case in court.” (page 12)

- “If we are alive, we can do something for our survival… By returning to Kandhamal, we would be risking our life.” (page 57)

Years after the violence, Christian and Hindu women defined peace differently. A Christian woman told the author that there was no peace for women, within or outside the home. The demands of children and violence from the husband marred domestic peace while the fear of violence by the Hindus dimmed its prospects outside. To Christians, after the riots, peace meant harmonious coexistence in society. For Hindu women, it was freedom from domestic violence and in particular, “the absence of alcoholic activities in the village.”

In 1995, the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action first put women in situations of armed conflict on the world’s agenda for the first time. In these 20 years, we’ve walked a great distance but an overwhelming amount of work on every level still lies ahead of us. Studies like this, that patiently and quietly write down exactly what real people experience and how they cope, ground us in that work. The outreach and the solutions we devise come more from empathy and understanding, and less from our theoretical or polemical positions on a particular problem. Therefore, reports like this one need to be supported—especially financially, but also in terms of access and outreach. Listening attentively is the responsibility of a compassionate citizenship, and also the first step towards real justice. To start with, do take the time to read this 103-page report.

Swarna Rajagopalan is a political scientist based in Chennai. She is grateful to Saumya Uma for permission to write about this important report.