The Hema Committee Report has led to a welcome flurry of feminist activism in Kerala, both among the mainstream feminists as well as others. All political viewpoints within Malayali feminism have stood strongly with the WCC and sought to further their fight, with the implicit agreement that the WCC should not perceived as responsible for all further work.

The mainstream feminists have been making demands through petitions to the government — they have demanded a capable and gender-sensitive woman to head the Kerala Chalachitra Academy; they have also demanded the resignation of the accused CPM MLA, Mukesh. Some of us who do not agree with the excessive deference that the mainstream feminists show towards the CPM have been working on expanding policy proposals aimed at ending all four kinds of violations that the Hema Committee Report identifies: discrimination, exploitation, sexual harassment/violence, and retribution while amplifying the voice of those who demand justice for all victims and the accused MLA’s resignation.

We have also publicly aired our concerns about the mainstream feminist demand to appoint a gender sensitive and capable woman as the Chairperson of the Chalachithra Academy. While we agree that this may be an important step, we feel that it should come only after a thoroughgoing democratisation of the Malayalam cinema industry. Addressing labour rights, we feel, is the first and primary step in this direction. If this is not done, we fear that we will end up placing an enormous, actually unbearable, burden on whichever woman who is chosen for the task. More worryingly, we would be participating in the masculinist fantasy of the super-man figure who appears out of nowhere and single-handedly rights all wrongs — indeed, the kind of hubris peddled by the likes of the now ‘deposed’ Ranjith, Mohanlal and others. We have also disagreed with the media’s relentless focus on sexual violence — again, while we totally agree that the perpetrators mentioned in the Hema Committee Report should be made to face the law without delay and the accused MLA Mukesh must resign at once, we do feel that we need to address along with it the structural conditions that enable and normalise sexual violence and harassment in the Malayalam cinema industry.

I genuinely thought that despite all our differences, the mainstream feminists and we were doing rather well, doing our own things but contributing to the common cause of the WCC’s fight. And our accumulated differences have not been minor. They have been about the degree of deference that feminists can or should show to the CPM and the state machinery in Kerala; about the relevance of unrestrained (unlike in the national/metropolitan contexts) carceral feminism at a time in which the welfare state is waning steadily in Kerala; about the kinds of solidarities that feminists should build (for example, can we build bonds with Islamicist women, dalit women who are not middle- or upper-class, or working class dalit men subjected to sexual violence by the police?). Those of us who are outside the mainstream have persistently argued that feminists should keep a healthy distance from the interests of the ruling power even as we continue to work with the government in matters regarding women’s welfare and livelihoods. We have also felt that thoughtessly-applied carceral feminism will ultimately undermine democracy itself, without denying the possibility of applying it thoughtfully. Finally, we think that feminist solidarities need to extend beyond middle-class educated privileged circles, else feminist circles will remain exclusive and feminists will be reduced to gate-keepers.

These differences burst out with unexpected violence in 2022, in the social media discussion on a sexual harassment charge against a leading civil society-based critic of the CPM, Civic Chandran. In that case, some of us differed with mainstream feminists on three things: one, that it should not be turned into a revenge-harvest for the CPM; two, feminists who CPM cyber-trolls accused of ‘whitewashing’ Civic Chandran should be given a chance to be properly heard before being condemned; and three, given the experience of repeated feminist failures in court in such cases (notably the Franco case), the focus of feminist work should be on preparing for a speedy and successful court battle instead of asking for the denial of bail (to an aged man with severe disability who had no means to abscond and was cooperating with the police), attacking his daughters online in the vilest possible way, twisting the facts in the interests of the survivor to gain mileage on social media etc. etc. In our view, not only was this unnecessarily strengthening the state and granting impunity to the CPM in its effort to destroy its critics, such tactics were sure to boomerang on the victim in court.

In the wake of these differences, a prominent voice among mainstream feminists, Binitha Thampi, wrote an article in her online magazine declaring that the contributions to feminism by the likes of me (and P E Usha) were now rendered ‘null and void’. Efforts to point out that the debate on the relevance of carceralism was internal to feminism fell on deaf ears. Instead, mainstream feminists joined the CPM cyber-trolls to wipe us out.

The experience of mob lynching, especially when enabled by fellow-feminists, is not exactly pleasant. Needless to say, we did not take it lying down. We pointed out in strong terms, the extent to which the mainstream feminists were behaving like old-fashioned Ladies Clubs, indulging mainly in gatekeeping at the expense of politics. And how, in their desperate fear of the Hindutva forces, feminists were turning to the CPM, effectively letting it behave like a protection racket instead of a political movement committed to democracy and accountable to women.

Anyway, we did not die; we regrouped and worked on our own, picking up and fighting issues including those of sexual harassment and gender insult at workplaces that women who lack the visibility of the WCC, face. We formed an old-style non-NGO feminist group which we called Althea — which means ‘Healer’. We built alliances with Islamicist women, spoke with men sexually assaulted by the police.

We have been clear-eyed in our choices. That is, we did not reject anyone just because they were allied with the CPM; we supported local level women leaders of the CPM who fought vested interests. Nor did we make all this effort public. For example, we had to be quiet in our support for these women leaders because we had to protect them. The WCC has worked very hard to build the image of being extremely close and committed to the CPM. And this was despite repeated insults from the latter. But we could see clearly what they were trying to do — turn themselves into a public attached to the CPM which the latter could simply not ignore. This was also their way of making sure that the cultural and literary figures who are the acolytes of the CPM, the women’s front, the State Vanitha Commission, and the mainstream feminists, would be on their side. Our support for the WCC is in full recognition of this strategy, which is completely understandable in the context of shrinking democratic space over the past decade in Kerala.

This moment opened up by the release of the Hema Committee Report, however, was a moment in which we thought we could pursue different possibilities with the same final end. The mainstream feminists have sought to ostracise us repeatedly : last year, when the All India Women’s Studies Conference was held in Thiruvananthapuram, we were completely excluded. A ‘Kerala Feminist’ panel was presented which the mainstream feminists monopolised. This had however stopped bothering us as we found our own feet in activism, acknowledged widely in Kerala and much more successful in feminist terms.

I have been outcast-ed a third time, dropped from a petition submitted to the Chief Minister demanding justice and action in the wake of the Hema Committee Report. By ‘I’ I mean not a person but a position that disagrees with mainstream Malayali feminism. Initially, I held Dhanya Rajendran through who both the invitation and the denial were communicated to me — simply because I could not believe, despite all our experiences, that mainstream feminists would stoop so low at a moment so crucial as this. I apologize to her openly and wholeheartedly, because she was only a messenger and probably had little knowledge of mainstream Malayali feminism’s determination to keep us outcasts.

I want to reiterate that none of this affects the effort we are making to support the WCC’s cause. I beg mainstream feminists to leave us alone. In the dandaneethi order of caste that was prevalent in pre-modern Kerala, you don’t need to pronounce the final outcast-ing Bhrasht (against elements that challenge authority) several times. You have already done it in 2022. And you can outcast someone only from your own space. You had no business doing it in the IAWS and now, in this petition endorse by many Indian metropolitan feminists (so it was never just your space). Much as I would have liked to just ignore this insult, I decided against because this is not a ‘family matter’. In ‘family matters’, the weaker party is expected to stay silent in the ‘larger interests’ of family honour, which is only a code word for the interests of the stronger party.

Please, now let us get on with our respective campaigns, both of which are desperately needed in this rare moment.