Vol. 6: Politics and Power Among Diaspora Women
The rise of Kamala Harris and female politicians in the South Asian diaspora
For our sixth issue, we touch upon the news in South Asia, the rise of South Asian women in American politics, the role model effect and why “firsts” matter. In our postcards of courage where we highlight South Asian women’s achievements, we talk about Bengali writer and educator Begum Rokeya. We also provide a list of interesting things to read and listen to on women in South Asia.
Lastly, the Newspaperwali is looking for writers and editors who are interested in covering gender and South Asia. If interested, send an email to feministnewspaperwali@gmail.com.
Love and solidarity,
Bansari Kamdar
P.S. If you enjoy reading about South Asia from a gendered lens, you can subscribe below to our bi-monthly newsletter. (Yes, it is free!)
News from South Asia
A 50-year-old frontline healthcare worker was gang-raped and brutally murdered in a temple by a Hindu priest and his two disciples in Uttar Pradesh’s Badaun district. In a media interview, Chandramukhi Devi, a member of the Indian National Commission for Women (NCW), blamed the victim and said, “a woman should keep track of time, and should not venture out late. Perhaps, had the victim not gone out in the evening, or gone along with a family member, she could have been saved.” No action has been taken against the NCW member.
Pregnant women in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, who are exposed to poor air quality, may be at higher risk of stillbirths and miscarriages, according to a modeling study published in The Lancet Planetary Health journal. Improving air quality in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh could prevent 7 percent of pregnancy losses.
Recent evidence shows that the Himalayan mountains are warming faster than the global average and rural women in Nepal are more vulnerable to the changes brought by the climate crisis. Out of Nepal’s seven policies related to climate change, only three acknowledge gender issues, with only one of them suggesting adaptation measures specifically targeted at women.
Zakia Herawi and Qadria, two of Afghanistan’s 200 female judges were shot down and killed on January 21, 2021. Freshta Kohistani, Afghan woman activist and a pro-democracy advocate, was also gunned down in Kapisa province. Journalists, politicians, academics and rights activists have increasingly been targeted by extremists as violence surges in Afghanistan, despite peace talks between the government and the Taliban.
In its World Report 2021, the Human Rights Watch stated that the Maldives authorities responded to the Covid-19 pandemic by cracking down on peaceful protests and compounding threats to migrant workers and other vulnerable groups. It added that the President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih administration failed to adequately investigate extremist Islamist groups for targeting social justice activists and women’s rights organizations like Uthema.
Deep Dive: South Asian Women in Diaspora Politics
On January 20, 2021, Kamala Devi Harris, an African-American and Indian-American daughter of an immigrant, became the first female Vice President of the United States of America.
In her acceptance speech after the election, Harris recognized her unprecedented election.
“While I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last,” she said. She acknowledged “the generations of Black women, Asian, white, Latina, Native American women who throughout our nation’s history paved the way for this moment.”
Harris is joined by 20 other Indian-Americans in Biden’s cabinet - 13 of whom are women. These include Neera Tandon, nominated to the high-ranking position of the Director of Management and Budget; Vanita Gupta who is set to become the Associated Attorney General of Justice; Sameera Fazili nominated as the Deputy Director at the White House National Economic Council; Garima Verma, named the Digital Director of the Office of the First Lady; Sabrina Singh nominated as the White House Deputy Press Secretary; Aisha Shah as the Partnerships Manager at the White House Office of Digital Strategy and more.
Biden’s team to the White House also includes Sri Lankan-American Rohini Kosoglu who is set to become the Domestic Policy Advisor to the VP among the high-ranking female picks; and Bangladeshi-American Zayn Siddique nominated to be the White House Deputy Chief of Staff and Pakistani-American Ali Zaidi who will become the Deputy National Climate Advisor among men.
Desi political activism in the United States is not a new phenomenon. From Indian freedom fighters like Kamaladevi Chattopadhayay, K.A. Abbas and Rammanohar Lohia speaking up against racism and colonialism in America and the radical politics of the Tarakhnath Das and the Ghadar Party in the early 1900s, to the close correspondence between Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. and the ties between the Dalit Panther movement and the Black Panther and Black Power movement. However, it was only in 1965 with the passage of the Hart-Celler Act that South Asians mass migrated to the United States.
The Pew Research Center projects that Asian Americans will be the largest immigrant population by 2065. South Asians are a fast growing sub-group among them. Nearly 5.4 million South Asians live in the US, according to South Asian American Leading Together (SAALT). The community grew roughly 40 percent between 2010 and 2017, according to the Census 2010 and the 2017 American Community Survey.
South Asian Americans, particularly Indian American who make up 80 percent of this group, are slowly flexing their political muscles. A recent survey by Sara Sadhwani and Manish Arora, before the November 2020 elections, found that most Indian Americans said they would feel better represented with more Indian Americans in elected office. Desi Americans are voting at high rates and running for political offices.
Women make a big proportion of these firsts. Kesha Ram, youngest Indian American to serve in a state elected office, became the first woman of color in Vermont Senate.
And, it is not just Indian American women. Less than two years ago, America also got its first female Muslim mayor, Sadaf Jaffer, a Pakistani-American who became the mayor of Montgomery Township, a town in New Jersey. Five Bangladeshi-American women are also making history by running for office across America.
While half of the South Asian countries - India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka - have had female heads of state, political representation on a national level remains low across the region. Among the American diaspora, these women are playing a major political role and one that seems to be growing with time. In the 2020 elections, all four Indian-origin lawmakers in the US Congress were reelected and 12 new Indian-Americans were elected to state legislative positions.
These are not women just for the sake of representation, they are active political actors with strong convictions. Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, the first South Asian congresswoman elected to the House of Representatives, was arrested in 2018 for protesting against Donald Trump’s child separation policies at the US-Mexico border. Seattle city council member Kshama Sawant, a Pune-born former software engineer and economist, won re-election in 2019 after taking on Amazon in its own backyard. Amazon spent an unprecedented $1.5 million to unseat the progressive due to her push to tax Amazon.
While South Asians are more likely to vote and run as Democrats, these firsts by South Asian women are not just limited to one side of the aisle. Republican Nikki Haley was the first female governor of South Carolina, the first Asian-American female governor, the youngest governor in the country and the second governor of Indian descent. She went on to serve as an ambassador to the United Nations in the Trump administration.
Other South Asian women who worked in high-ranking positions for the Trump administration include Neomi Rao, who served as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), Manisha Singh, who was the assistant secretary of state for economic and business affairs, and Seema Verma who was the the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
Political “Firsts” and How They Can Influence South Asian Women
In the United States, political scientist Michele Swers finds that women in Congress shift the focus on bills and policies that relate to women, like increasing paid leave or prosecuting violence against women. Political leaders tend to bring their own experiences and backgrounds into policymaking. Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal was instrumental in introducing and passing the South Asian Heart Health Awareness and Research Bill in 2020. South Asian Americans are four times more at risk of developing heart disease than other ethnic groups in America, have a much greater chance of getting a heart attack before age 50, and have the highest prevalence of Type 2 diabetes, a leading cause of heart disease.
A study by Christina Wolbrecht and David E. Campbell found that young girls were more likely to discuss politics with friends and plan to participate in politics as adults in places with more female parliamentarians in European countries.
Lori Beaman, Esther Duflo, Rohini Pande, and Petia Topalova’s seminal paper on the impact of quotas for women in India also showed a similar effect of women leaders on career aspirations and educational attainment of adolescent girls. They find that the gender gap in aspirations closed by 25 percent in parents and 32 percent in adolescents in villages assigned to a female leader for two election cycles.
Research by Maria De Paola, Vincenzo Scoppa and Rosetta Lombardo on female representation due to quotas in Italy shows that women themselves were more likely to run for political offices even after the quota program ended in their municipality.
Another experiment by Ioana M.Latu, Marianne Schmid Mast, Joris Lammers and Dario Bombari exposed students to pictures of male and female leaders and then had them give public speeches. They found that women showed a significant increase in the length of their speech and its quality when exposed to a female role model compared to a male role model or no role models. Women also gave their own speeches higher ratings after exposure to female role models. Latu et al. concluded, “subtle exposures to highly successful female leaders inspired women's behavior and self-evaluations in stressful leadership tasks.”
Research finds that in both STEM fields and Economics, women’s enrollment and aspirations were positively affected by exposure to successful female role models in that field.
After Obama’s election, researchers found a noticeable “Obama Effect” where the former President Barack Obama had a positive impact on reducing racial stereotypes about Black people. A similar role model effect has also been noticed in reducing unconscious gender biases and stereotypes. A field study by Nilanjana Dasgupta and Shaki Asgari found that the more students encountered course instructors who were women, the less gender stereotypes they expressed implicitly. Additionally, female students who encountered mostly male faculty showed more gender stereotypes favoring male leaders over female leaders.
As of yet, we do not know the form the “Harris Effect” will take but past research suggests that seeing women like Harris, Jaffer and Jayapal in prominent positions could help reduce bias against South Asian individuals, particularly South Asian women and encourage more South Asian and Black women to run for office.
Some scholars have also expressed concerns about the weight on female leaders to be the “firsts.” Vice President Harris represents the Asian, Black and Indian community - an impossible burden where she is bound to disappoint some of them at some point. Her identity can also overshadow her work.
Claire Cain Miller of New York Times writes that this burden can reduce with more women of color running and being elected for office. Few people batted an eye when six women ran in the Democratic primary for President after Hillary Clinton’s run in 2016. Nonetheless, breaking the glass ceiling is not enough. It also requires a change in institutions and structures that make it more difficult for women, especially women of color to run for office.
In the “most diverse Congress” in American history, the Reflective Democracy Campaign finds that 58 percent of the 117th House of Representatives and 67 percent of Senators are White men despite making up just 30 percent of the US population.
Gender and race continue to be major roadblocks for women of color. Sarah Bryner and Grace Haley’s study of the 2018 Midterm elections found that the average black female candidate raised 46 percent less than the average white male candidate, and 55 percent less than the average white female candidate in the midterms.
The election of Kamala Harris and numerous other women of color, shows that these women leaders, women of color leaders, are not a historic aberration in the United States, not just a first. Harris’ election shows that the American people are ready for leaders who look like the and who share their experiences and perspectives.
The Feminist List
READ: Rameeza Ahmed writes in the Digital Rights Monitor on how anonymity in online stan spaces empowers women in Pakistan. Ahmed explores how anonymity on these platforms allows women to escape male gaze, create public space and be themselves.
“In Pakistan, women are not afforded too many freedoms and being on the internet as yourself is one of the liberties that is routinely denied to them... Stan Twitter culture in Pakistan is a way of defying these restrictions and having some sense of freedom in a virtual public space. A lot of people I talked to were mainly women in their early 20s who shared that they were not ‘allowed’ by their families to post pictures of themselves on social media much less have public accounts, and for them Stan twitter was a place they could exist without worrying about the retaliation from their families.”
LISTEN: In The Feminist City, Sneha Visakh explores why we should look at cities from a feminist perspective and provides a gendered perspective to public spaces and urban planning in India.
[Bonus: it has a stellar reading and references list for every episode]
READ: Rebecca Traister interviews Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal for the CUT on the violent 6th January insurrection at the US Capitol.
“I think we all understand, but particularly as a woman of color and an immigrant woman of color, what happens when you have white nationalist, armed, violent individuals. The threat is extremely real.”
Postcards of Courage: Begum Rokeya
Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain was was a Bengali feminist thinker, writer, educator and political activist from British India (present day Bangladesh). The pioneer feminist of Bengal, she often wrote about social prejudice, adverse effects of the purdah system and women's limited mobility due to veils, women's education, social repression on women and women's rights. She also wrote against the tradition of childhood marriage and polygamy.
Despite her father's restrictions on formal education for women, Rokeya spoke Bangla, Urdu, English, Persian and Arabic and published short stories, poems, essays, novels and satire in Bangla and English. Her seminal work Sultana's Dream (1908) was a feminist science fiction novella set in Ladyland ruled by women.
“Why do you allow yourselves to be shut up?
Because it cannot be helped as they are stronger than women.
A lion is stronger than a man, but it does not enable him to dominate the human race. You have neglected the duty you owe to yourselves and you have lost your natural rights by shutting your eyes to your own interests.”Begum Rokeya, Sultana’s Dream
Alongside her writing, Rokeya founded a girls’ school, and an NGO named Anjuman-e-Khawatin-e-Islam (Islamic Women’s Association). She inspired the Bengali Muslim women to wake up from the patriarchal slumber and created a slogan, “Jago Go Bhogini.”
Her death anniversary is commemorated as Rokeya Day on December 9 in Bangladesh. Bangladesh also launched a national honor titled Begum Rokeya Padak given to 39 women till now for their exceptional work to promote women rights.
Read Rokeya’s book Sultana’s Dream: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/sultana/dream/dream.html
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Bansari Kamdar is an independent journalist. She works in research at the Gastón Institute for Latino Community Development and Public Policy and communications at the Center for International Development at Harvard Kennedy School. Kamdar is also pursuing a post-graduate degree in Applied Economics and has a Master’s degree from Boston University in International Relations and International Journalism. She reports on gender, immigration, security, and political economy in South Asia. Her work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Diplomat, Huffington Post, CNN-News18, and more.