Indira Jaising, 73, is India’s top female federal legal advisor and co-founder of the Lawyers Collective, an advocacy group focusing on the rights of women and minorities

December 16, 2013, 8:30 AM

Q&A: No Time Like This Since the Emergency

JOANNA SUGDEN

Indira Jaising, 73, is India’s top female federal legal advisor and co-founder of the Lawyers Collective, an advocacy group focusing on the rights of women and minorities. A year after the Delhi gang rape, Ms. Jaising, who is India’s additional solicitor general, spoke to The Wall Street Journal about the discrimination she faces as a female lawyer and discusses what the legal system needs to effectively deal with crimes against women as well as the challenges in store for the women’s movement. Edited excerpts:

The Wall Street Journal: Have you known a year like 2013?

Indira Jaising: It’s quite exceptional, I haven’t seen a time like this. Perhaps in 1975 around the Emergency, the kind of activism and public consciousness of an event, you can compare this to that time. People are growing up to the fact that women’s issues really matter. [Note: Political unrest engulfed India in 1975 after then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency and dissolved parliament]WSJ: You’ve worked on women’s issues throughout your career as a lawyer. Why?

Ms. Jaising: As a woman, I do experience discrimination in different spheres of my life, so it’s too close to my own skin.

As a lawyer, because day in and day out we quote the Constitution of India, and you do feel that if you don’t live up to the values of the Constitution, you feel like a hypocrite. You can’t just go on quoting the Constitution all the time and not be affected by it.

In every sphere you are discriminated against. Your word counts for half the word of your male colleagues or the kind of importance that is given to male colleagues.

People don’t want to see the substance of what you’re saying. They will first see you as a woman and then see the substance of what you’re saying, which is ridiculous because it makes you feel humiliated.

WSJ: How do you operate in that environment?

Ms. Jaising: Fortunately for me, I have good interpersonal relationships.  We work on women’s issues and 99% of the people working in the office are women, so we do try to build a culture of solidarity, so that’s how in daily life you protect yourself. You manage to create your own atmosphere in daily life, but you can’t do that in public life.

It is true you need to create your own environment of support and comfort.

WSJ: After the anniversary of the Delhi gang rape do you think the women’s movement will lose steam?

Ms. Jaising: I don’t think that civil society has lost its sense of urgency. The level of engagement of civil society with these issues is still there and the momentum for change exists.

WSJ: Is there a sense that cases of rape need to be highlighted to keep the issue alive?

Ms. Jaising: The thing is that cases will come and cases will go, they will be there all the time and they have been there since time immemorial. But what is important is to be able to rise to the occasion to seize the moment and to make sure that we bring some sanity to bear on what the case is all about. They highlight a broader issue.

It is important for the movement to focus attention on cases, definitely, without compromising the privacy of the person concerned.

WSJ: You’ve said before that women complainants often drop out of the judicial system before a conviction is made. Why is that?

Ms. Jaising:  One of the biggest deterrents is that the woman’s own life is put out for scrutiny. Her word is suspected, her character is maligned, she’s asked questions that doubt her credibility.

There is an issue of bias in the police, investigators, judges, which is coming from centuries of patriarchy. There is also a kind of trivialization of the crime, no matter how many laws we have. There’s an attitude that says, ‘Why don’t you just forget about it,’ or blood money that somehow the crimes could be compensated by the rapist marrying their accused.

WSJ: Have India’s toughened-up laws on crime against women helped at all?

Ms. Jaising: It’s necessary to have laws, they set the norm…we do see judges taking the issue of rape more seriously, and sexual harassment.

The solidarity that we saw on the streets of Delhi last year has given courage to many people. The statistics of complaints made in relation to rape and molestation have definitely gone up in the last year and definitely reflect that fact.

WSJ: What else would you like to see in Indian law to protect women? 

Ms. Jaising: You need systems to assist women who want to file their cases in court. You need to have crisis centers, one-stop centers [for reporting complaints] located in courts. The criminal justice system needs to be more sensitive to the concerns of women.

At the moment, I think it’s better to focus on procedural changes and changes in support systems, rather than changes to legislation.

Legislation can be effective only if there is a desire to implement it and implementation requires a lot of support structures.

And money, it’s very important to invest money in the criminal justice system for women. Improving and increasing the number of forensic laboratories, they are the biggest bottleneck. The forensic reports get held up. There is an important change taking place, the protocol for medical examination of victims of sexual abuse, which is to be adopted by doctors is now changing. Not just the two finger test, but how you take the history, what kind of examination you do, what kind of examination you do not do.

The Supreme Court has also said that the two-finger test is not to be done, but as you can imagine, change is slow.

What is needed is for this protocol to be adopted at the top-most level, but it will take its time to percolate down to the individual doctor. But the change is happening.

WSJ: How much has changed for rural women in the last year?

Ms. Jaising:  There is a distinction between women working in organized sectors and unorganized sectors and there is an issue of dealing with the problems of women who are Dalits, India’s lowest caste, for example, who definitely don’t get the same attention from civil society as mainstream women. This is a universal problem and yes, I think it’s a problem which has remained unaddressed.

WSJ: Are you more positive now about the situation for women in India than this time last year?

Ms. Jaising: I can see the momentum being kept up and that’s a positive thing.

The women’s movement has been able to keep the issue center stage without diverting attention from what is fundamental and that is the right to dignity, the right to self-determination, the right to autonomy and the need for a new dispensation for women.

What worries me is a backlash and I can see this backlash getting more and more crystalized and severe in the form of backward looking fundamentalists and religious forces, which will attempt to set back the movement. Unless we are very vigilant on this front, there is a danger of seeing reversals.

There is definitely a right-wing Hindu advance and we know that their stand on women’s issues is not exactly within our constitutional framework of human rights or of autonomy for women. This, I think, is going to be one of the biggest challenges that the women’s movement is going to face in the near future.

WSJ: How would an election victory by the right-leaning Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party affect the women’s movement?

Ms. Jaising: It’s not right to make any comments on that given my position. It’s not right to politicize these issues. For me these issues are universal and global. Women all over the world are grappling with these issues.