Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

76 NEERA M. SINGH
their protest as being the first of its kind. Hence, they felt that they had to
have something to tell back home.
WOMEN’S PARTICIPATION AT THE
COMMUNITY LEVEL
In MMJSP, women’s participation at the block and cluster levels has increased
over the years, while it still remains difficult at the community
level. For example, consider the case of Mardakot, a small village with
tribal and Dalit hamlets. In Mardakot, women play a leadership role in
the forest protection initiative; and in the vicinity, there are other examples
of women leading forest protection efforts. The area also has an all women
cluster committee comprising of five villages. Bisika Jani from Mardakot
is a prominent woman leader, who presides over the CWC meetings. She
talks animatedly of how she called a village meeting to discuss some important
issues related to the participation of Mardakot in forest protection
currently being done by Dengajhari village. However, in the same village,
‘village’ meetings are an all-men affair. On seeking clarification, we found
that the village meeting that Bisika Jani convened comprised only of
women. She referred to this as the ‘village sitting together’, and while we
sat talking thus, the other half of the village, the male village was having
a ‘village meeting’. The village remains clearly segregated along gender lines,
even while women’s action in community affairs appears far more active
when viewed from the outside.
At the community level, the barriers are more difficult to surmount
in many respects, with caste and gender identities being more deeply
ingrained than at other spatial scales. While Bisika Jani is a leader at the
MMJSP meetings in her own right—she is probably viewed as a tribal
leader—in her own village, she is also so and so’s wife, sister-in-law, et cetera.
Another active member of the cluster-level committee said shyly that her
son was the secretary of the Village Committee, and ‘if I walk into the
village meeting, he will say that my mother has become very modern/
aggressive’. There were also fears of being labelled as someone who picks
fights by raising issues or asking questions in public spaces.
On repeated probing into what hinders women from attending the
village meeting while they go all over the state and meet all kinds of