Monday to Thursday, she’s busy in court. On
Saturday and Sunday, she’ll be in Chennai, delivering a seminar about women’s
rights. There’s a small window on Friday morning, the 76-year-old Indira
Jaising tells me. I snap it up.
When I get to her office, she is poring over
a draft report that her NGO, the Lawyers Collective, is about to publish about female genital mutilation. “Tell
Masuma that in my opinion, there are no voices of women in that report, and she
needs to bring them on board,” she tells one of her junior colleagues. From the
very beginning of her 52-year career this is what Jaising has fought for – the
victim’s voice.
Over half a century, Jaising has forced
systemic changes in India’s slow, trundling legal system, and provided legal
representation to the poorest in the country. She has been a powerful insider,
becoming the country’s first female additional solicitor general in 2005, the
third highest ranking government lawyer in the country, and regularly advising
politicians. She drafted India’s first domestic violence act, allowing
thousands of women to bring civil and criminal suits against attackers for the
first time ever.
But more often, she is the outsider, hurling
down embarrassing challenges to the government and the establishment, leading
commissions in Punjab to investigate the extra judicial killings, police
brutality and disappearances in northern India in the 1970s and 80s, or taking
up the cause of the Muslim victims of the 2002 riots in Gujarat, a case that
has grave implications for the current Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi,
who has been accused of bearing
some responsibility for the
violence that resulted in over a thousand deaths.
She has fought some of the most high-profile
legal cases of the last half century, such as the case for compensation for the 1984
Bhopal gas tragedy, considered one of the world’s worst industrial disasters.
And her NGO has provided advice and legal counsel for many of the poorest, most
dispossessed people in India. On the wall behind her desk is a framed
photograph of herself taken by Raghu Rai, a famous Indian photojournalist. “I
don’t know how he got me to laugh in this picture,” she says, looking up at it
and smiling. “I never laugh.”
Jaising was born six years before partition,
a period of mass tragedy and bloodshed after the British finally withdrew and a
border was created between India and Pakistan. Her own parents had already
relocated to India, but much of her family were forced to migrate as refugees
from Sindh in modern-day Pakistan, and scattered around India.
Born in Bombay, now Mumbai, Jaising always
had a strained relationship with her mother. Looking back, she believes her
mother was pressured to marry and have children. This created resentment
between them, but also gave her a deep personal sense of what being trapped
felt like. “I think [my sense of morality] comes from memories of being a woman
and what it means in Indian society, seeing my mother going through the
ignominy of being married without consent, and having to live in a joint family
with no autonomy.”
In her 20s, her parents started groom
hunting. But Jaising refused to hear about it. “I said ‘what are you talking
about? I’m not interested in this alliance.’ I turned off. I thought, this is
not my life, I don’t want it,” she says. She had already begun dreaming of a
career in law while sitting on her uncle’s balcony, overlooking a law college.
Her parents, unlike many Indian families, expressed their reservations but did
not restrict her.
She turned out to have an exceptional natural
talent for law. Despite poor attendance, she breezed through her examinations
and got a prestigious job at a commercial firm called Mulla & Mulla in
Mumbai. “I have always considered the fact that I didn’t have anyone in the
legal profession a big advantage. I had no role models to emulate and I could
fashion my own way.”
Breaking into the law, one of India’s most
elite-driven and nepotistic industries, was no small feat. As a young woman in
newly independent India, though highly educated, every freedom had to be fought
for. When she announced that she would be going to London to do a year-long
fellowship at the Institute of International Legal Studies, her parents were
deeply unhappy. “In my community a girl only leaves home after marriage,” she
explains. But despite their worries, her parents did not refuse.
And in 1970s London, surrounded by a society
caught up in protests and strikes, Jaising caught a fever for activism that has
stayed with her throughout her life. “We were on the streets all the time. It
was a fun thing to do, you could abandon other commitments and be free. But the
impact never left me.” For her generation in India, children of the freedom
fighters and martyrs that had won India’s independence, living in a free
country was never thought of as a luxury. “We were midnight’s children, and
this was our inheritance,” she says.
Jaising studied the British legal and social
system closely, and was particularly inspired by the council-funded community
law centres. There, she felt, “you could dream of equal justice. In India, you
can’t even dream of equal justice. Not at all.” It was the final inspiration
that would set her on her lifelong mission to provide at least some kind of
justice for the poor in India.
By 1975, then aged 35, she had set up an NGO
in India, then called the Workers Law Centre, and taken on the case of the
railway union workers who were carrying out national anti-government strikes
that had created panic and were being brutally crushed by the authorities.
Thousands were sent to jail or fired from their jobs. The strike provoked prime
minister Indira Gandhi to call a three-year emergency.
The world watched as India succumbed to what
felt increasingly like a dictatorship. The suppression of dissent, and the
flagrant human rights violations galvanised new anti-government activism, which
was already familiar to Jaising. “I knew my contribution would come as a
lawyer, to build a legal framework within which democracy could be defended,”
she says. “Of course, the emergency was evil, it had to be fought, but we were
in our space.” Jaising took on the railway workers’ case for free, which led to
the NGO’s offices being raided. In 1984, as tumult began to engulf India,
Gandhi was assassinated by her own Sikh guard. But Indians would continue to
feel that democracy was failing as they watched Gandhi’s own son, Rajiv, take
the role of prime minister.
The Bhopal disaster would become both a
national issue and a personal challenge. In 1984 a toxic cloud of gas from a
chemical plant, owned by American firm Union Carbide, spread across the city of
Bhopal. No one knows exactly how many died, ut the Bhopal Memorial hospital and
research centre estimates that more than 10,000 people lost their lives, and
500,000 suffered painful injuries.
Jaising got involved in the proceedings when
she heard the government of India planned to take over responsibility of
representing the victims. “I thought there’s something very wrong about this. I
felt that you can’t disenfranchise the victims, where is their voice?” She felt
the government would never get justice for the victims of the tragedy. “The
government was complicit. They had a lot to answer, such as why did their
regulatory mechanisms fail? What were they doing when laws were being violated
all the time?” Jaising won the right for the victims to have their own
representation.
But it was a tiny victory against the larger
reality; Union Carbide paid a small amount of the requested damages (thousands
of the victims say they have still never received a penny of that money) and
were then sold on to Dow Chemical. Dow argues that they never owned or operated
the plant. This bleak reality of inequality in the justice system, seeing poor,
underprivileged people getting a lesser justice than wealthy individuals in the
Indian legal system is the most disheartening thing about working as a lawyer,
says Jaising. “It’s one of the things that makes me really sad. The one big
thing that could make me drop out is this.”
1984:
Firemen hose water over canvas screens at factory boundaries to prevent the
spread of dangerous fumes at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India.
Photograph: Peter Kemp/AP
In India’s sluggish judicial system, many of
the battles Jaising has taken on have stretched for years, even decades. Her
attempt to get justice for the two British Muslims who were killed in the 2002
Gujarat riots, is still held up in the courts. Her case for gay marriage won in
Delhi’s high court but was overturned last year in the supreme court. Victims
of Punjab’s extrajudicial killings are still fighting for justice in the
courts.
And yet she retains a passionate love for the
law. “The law is like plasticine in my hands and I can shape it and mould it
the way I want to,” she says. “The whole aesthetic value of being able to
create something out of the law is completely all-encompassing. The outcome of
anything you take to court really depends on what you put into the
argumentation, what you put into your understanding of law. Very often laws are
written in a way that they allow you to interpret them in a very contemporary
context. Law is creative, it is not set in stone.”
She has also wrestled, right from the
beginning, with being a woman in a world dominated by men. In the early days,
“of course, all the judges were men. They couldn’t quite figure [it] out, ‘what
is this? Where is this woman coming from and why is she here in the first place
and why in a field like labour law which is so all-male?’” But Jaising
dismissed them with insouciant defiance. “I knew what I wanted to say. I would
argue my cases in court with great abandon,” she says. “It didn’t occur to me
that I was doing something that was not done.”
Over the years, Jaising has noticed the small
courtesies offered by men to other men: the chance to have their cases heard
first, the relaxed, friendly body language of male judges when speaking to male
lawyers, the sporting laughter at their irritating jokes. “It gets to be depressing
not to have a community to bond with. [Women] are increasing now, but they’re
also not very bonded, they are isolated.”
As a result, she explains, women’s power
within the legal system is restricted. She has spoken out about facing sexual
harassment in the corridors of the supreme court herself, the unwelcome touch
of a colleague, disguised as innocent brush of the hand. Though she immediately
confronted the man about it, her seniority and his insolence were shocking.
This sort of thing is a widespread problem in India’s courts, one that keeps
many women away. “Women don’t have the ability to lobby for themselves the same
way, they’re not part of an old boy network,” she says.
And now she is fighting Modi’s government.
Last year the government cancelled the foreign funding licence for her NGO,
which has cut it off from important funding sources, such as grants that
supported her human rights work. Jaising believes the government’s actions were
a deliberate attempt to squash dissent. “Maybe like the rest of the world,
India is also going through a terrible crisis at this time,” she says.
Under Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP
government, there is a palpable rise of sectarianism and anti-leftist vitriol.
Jaising has frequently been a target. But she is just not the type to back down
from a fight. “Today you’re in a situation where your right to free speech is
being challenged, your right to association is being challenged. The core of
your being is being challenged. You’re being told whether you’re a patriot or
not a patriot, which I will never allow anyone to tell me. Your lifetime of
work is being questioned and this is something I think is evil. And you
suddenly find yourself in a space where you realise ‘My god, this fight is
going to go on’.”
This is the first in a
series of interviews with women who have changed the world. Please get in touch
with globaldevpros@theguardian.com and tell us who you think we should speak
to.
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