Since then, her Self-Employed Women’s Association, or SEWA, has offered retirement accounts and health insurance to women who never had a safety net, lent working capital to entrepreneurs to open beauty salons in the slums, helped artisans sell their handiwork to new urban department stores and boldly trained its members to become gas station attendants — an unusual job for women on the bottom of India’s social ladder.
Small, slight and usually dressed in a hand-spun cotton sari, Mrs. Bhatt is a Gandhian pragmatist for the New India.
At 76, she is a critic of some of India’s embrace of market reforms, but nevertheless keen to see the poorest of Indian workers get a stake in the country’s swelling and swiftly globalizing economy. She has built a formidable empire of women-run, Gandhian-style cooperatives — 100 at last count — some providing child care for working mothers, others selling sesame seeds to Indian food-processing firms — all modeled after the Gandhian ideal of self-sufficiency but also advancing modern ambitions.
She calls it the quest for economic freedom in a democratic India.
Her own quest offers a glimpse into the changing desires of Indian mothers and daughters, along with their vulnerabilities. Tinsmiths or pickle makers, embroiderers or vendors of onions, SEWA’s members are mostly employed in the informal sector. They get no regular paychecks, sick leave or holidays. Calamities are always just around the corner, whether traffic accidents or crippling droughts. Without SEWA, they would be hard pressed to have health benefits or access to credit.
SEWA’s innovations bear lessons for the majority of workers in the new Indian economy. Since economic reforms kicked off in 1991, the share of Indians employed in the informal sector — where they are not covered by stringent, socialist-era labor laws from the time of the cold war — has grown steadily to more than 90 percent, according to a recent government-commissioned report.
Among them, the report found, nearly three-fourths lived on less than 20 cents a day and had virtually no safety net. “Why should there be a difference between worker and worker,” Mrs. Bhatt wondered aloud, “whether they are working in a factory, or at home or on the footpath?”
WITH 500,000 members in western Gujarat State alone, the SEWA empire also includes two profit-making firms that stitch and embroider women’s clothing. More than 100,000 women are enrolled in the organization’s health and life insurance plans. Its bank has 350,000 depositors and, like most microfinance organizations, a repayment rate as high as 97 percent. Loans range from around $100 to $1,100, with a steep interest rate of 15 percent. “We don’t have a liquidity problem,” its manager, Jayshree Vyas, pointed out merrily. “Women save.”
A SEWA loan of roughly $250 allowed Namrata Rajhari to start a beauty salon 15 years ago from her one-room shack in a working-class enclave called Behrampura. At first, the neighborhood women knew little about beauty treatments. They only wanted their hair trimmed.
Then Mrs. Rajhari began threading their eyebrows to resemble perfect half-moons, waxing the hair off their forearms and offering facials. During the wedding season, business blossomed. Mrs. Rajhari, who only has a 10th-grade education, expanded to a small room in the next lane.
With money from her business, Mrs. Rajhari installed a toilet at home, added a loft and bought a washing machine. “Before, I felt blank. I didn’t know anything about the world,” she said the other day. “Now, with my earnings, my children are studying.”
Mrs. Rajhari then motioned to an object of pride in the living room. “The computer is also from my parlor money,” she beamed. A daughter, Srishti, is now enrolled in a private English school. She wants to be an astronomer.
Behrampura buzzed with work and hustle on this morning. Men disassembled old television sets and put together new sofas. A woman pushed a cart loaded with used suitcases. Another herded a half-dozen donkeys loaded with construction debris.
Today, she contributes about $1 a month to her own SEWA-run pension plan. A SEWA loan has allowed her to clear a debt from relatives. She easily makes three times what her mother made collecting newspapers and as she shyly admitted this afternoon, almost as much as her husband, a hospital cleaner. She just recently married, and plans to move into her husband’s family home soon. She said she hoped he would let her manage at least some of her own money.
Mrs. Bhatt’s Gandhian approach is most evident in the way she lives. Her two-bedroom bungalow is small and spare. The one bit of whimsy is a white swing that hangs from the ceiling in the center of the living room. She uses her bed as a desk chair. Her grandson has painted a child’s pastoral mural on the bedroom wall. She is known for having no indulgences.
“Above all you should emphasize her simplicity,” said Anil Gupta, a professor at the Indian Institute of Management here who has followed SEWA’s work for over a decade, sometimes critically. “In her personal life, there is not the slightest tinge of hypocrisy.”
Mrs. Bhatt is not without detractors. The chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, accused her group of financial irregularities three years ago in the management of a rehabilitation program for earthquake victims. SEWA denied the charges and pulled out of the government-run program. Mrs. Bhatt accused Mr. Modi of trying to discredit the organization. Their war of words has since cooled down.
BORN to a privileged Brahmin family, Mrs. Bhatt charted an unusual path for a woman of her time. She earned a law degree and chose the man she would marry. She began her career as a lawyer for the city’s main union for textile workers, the vast majority of them men, and broke away in 1981 to create a new kind of union for women.
Early on, she won higher rates for women porters, then a landmark legal victory that allowed women to sell fruits and vegetables on the street without harassment from the police. The fishmongers and quilt-makers who were SEWA Bank’s earliest customers sometimes stashed their checkbooks in the bank’s steel cabinets, she recalled, lest their husbands discover they had money of their own.
At first, the women’s ambitions were limited, she said. They wanted toilets, hair shears or sewing machines for work and money to pay for their children’s school fees. Slowly, she noticed, they began to dream big. Mothers now want their daughters to learn to ride a scooter and work on a computer.
“They didn’t see the future at that time,” she said. “Expectations have gone very high.”
Not long ago, Mrs. Bhatt recalled, she asked SEWA members what “freedom” meant to them. Some said it was the ability to step out of the house. Others said it was having a door to the bathroom. Some said it meant having their own money, a cellphone, or “fresh clothes every day.”
Then she told of her favorite. Freedom, one woman said, was “looking a policeman in the eye.”
Source: New York Times.
Egypt President Hosni Mubarak, Jordanian King Abdullah II and Arab League chief Amr Mussa called for an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict in 2009, at the end of the summit.
"I hope that 2009 will be the year that will see the end of all these conflicts," Mubarak said, "adding my voice" to Abdullah's and Mussa's at the end of the meeting on the Gaza crisis in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
European and conservative Arab leaders gathered in Sharm el-Sheikh on Sunday to back Egyptian efforts to turn a shaky ceasefire in Gaza into a solid mutual agreement leading to Israeli withdrawal.
The leaders of Britain, the Czech Republic, Egypt, France, Germany, Jordan, Spain and Turkey, along with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, are meeting in the resort of Sharm el-Sheikh to coordinate policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after three weeks of fighting in and around Gaza.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa also attended.
But attacks on Sunday showed that the truce was fragile, with the two sides in disagreement over what should happen next.
"There are some violations here or there. The aim now is to consolidate that ceasefire so that a ceasefire with a longer duration can be achieved," Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hossam Zaki told the Arabic satellite channel Al Arabiya.
The Palestinian ambassador to Egypt, Nabil Amr, said the most pressing issue now was the withdrawal of Israeli troops and Israel should come under pressure to pull them out at once.
Israel's decision to abandon attempts to reach a mediated truce with Hamas was a blow to Egyptian diplomacy but President Hosni Mubarak said on Saturday that Egypt would keep trying.
"The leaders want to discuss how to help in preventing this tragedy from being repeated, and how to all work on ... rebuilding Gaza," he said.
Several of the participants, including Britain, France and Germany, have offered to send warships to the Middle East to help prevent Hamas in Gaza from receiving arms shipments.
One diplomat said this in itself was a departure in policy for the Europeans, who have previously refrained from using their armed forces to help either side.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told reporters on his way to Sharm el-Sheikh the British navy would patrol the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden to prevent arms smuggling.
An end to the smuggling has been one of the Israeli demands in the conflict, which began on Dec. 27 after a six-month truce between the two sides broke down.
But Egypt, much criticised in the Arab world for cooperating in the Israeli blockade of Gaza over the past six months, has refused to allow foreign forces onto its territory as part of the anti-smuggling effort.
Source: http://www.france24.com
The London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat recently published an article by liberal Syrian philosopher Hashem Saleh, who resides in Paris, titled "Towards an Arab-Jewish Conciliation." In it, Saleh argues that the time is has come for the Arabs to make peace with Israel and to focus on developing their own countries, and that the Palestinian problem will resolve itself via the natural Palestinian demographic superiority over the Israelis.
Following are excerpts:(1)
I Want the Gaza War to Be the Last War
"This surprising heading will cause a big fuss. People will say, 'The blood [spilled] in Gaza has barely dried, yet he is already calling for defeat and conciliation with the enemy!' Nonetheless, after pondering and deliberating the matter for a long time, I am determined to defend this option.
"I confess that I was surprised at my own conclusion. I did not expect to reach this conclusion after many years of exploring every aspect of this dilemma. I spent many an hour in seclusion, reading extensively about this infernal conflict, until I was able to arrive at my [current] position.
"As the matter stands, I firmly believe that it would be absurd and meaningless to continue this conflict, because it stifles our revival and our freedom. It has become a useless burden. It has become a total waste of time, effort, money, and human lives.
"I want the Gaza war to be the last war. Let us start a fresh new era in the region, and use all the [heretofore] wasted energy and missed opportunities towards construction and development instead of destruction and devastation. Let us invest [our energy] in building schools, universities, hospitals, and children's playgrounds.
"In order for the Arab cultural enterprise to truly get underway, we cannot continue postponing it indefinitely under the pretext of liberating Palestine. Let us first of all liberate the Arab thought, and Palestine's liberation will follow of its own accord.
"I admit that, [for me,] the straw was reading the latest book by Palestinian thinker Sari Nusseibeh, recently published in English and French under the title Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life.(2) It is this book that prompted me to adopt my current position, which is bound to create problems and draw me into arguments with Arab demagogues who are filling TV programs and newspapers with their screeches and yelps…"
The Victory Over Israel Will be Achieved by a Different Tactic: Through Demography
"We take a completely wrong course when we keep locking horns with the Jews, cracking our own skulls along with theirs, to no avail whatsoever. [The Jews] have a long history, which is unique and replete with suffering. Let us try a different way of managing this conflict, instead of sticking to the same outdated and wretched stratagem.
"I am positive that we can win this battle without firing a single shot. [We can do this] by employing a different tactic – [namely,] through [our] birthrate and demographics. The Palestinians will overwhelm the Israelis and influence them [through their sheer number].
"Enough of wars and pointless confrontations! We have suffered enough [wars] and are tired of them. The Israelis, who intimidate us with their airplanes, missiles, and state-of-the-art military technology, are actually afraid of us. Their entire existence is founded upon ghettos, persecution, and unending slaughter, which has not ceased throughout [their] entire history. This is the [correct] psychological analysis of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
"Victory over Israel will surely come, and I contend that it will come of itself. How will this happen? First of all, though victory over ourselves, through a successful implementation of the Arab cultural enterprise, and through acquiring knowledge and technological [know-how].
"Look at China and what it has achieved. Don't you think that the Chinese would like to take revenge on the West, which has been humiliating China from the time of the Anglo-Chinese opium wars in the 19th century? Though the British once humiliated the Chinese in their own homeland, the contemporary Chinese are not sacrificing their lives to provoke the British. [Instead,] they are waiting until their economic, technological, and cultural enterprise is completed before standing up to America and taking revenge on Japan. They do not act [prematurely], since [they know] it is necessary to prepare the ground.
"This is the logical way to proceed. It is the [kind of] political reasoning that the fundamentalist or mystical mentality... is unfortunately unable to grasp. [It is this mentality that] has brought destruction upon us, twice within a span of two years – once [in the 2006 war between Israel and] Hizbullah, and the second time [in the 2009 war between Israel and] Hamas."
"The Future Belongs… to People of Good Intentions and Enlightened Minds, On Both Sides – Palestinians and Israelis"
"What is the use of all these wars, which bring no change? Unfortunately, they cause a lot of damage. They destroy our infrastructures, throw us back dozens of years, and bring pain and suffering upon our families, wives and children, taking us back to square one, or even [to square zero]…
"The future belongs neither to Hamas, nor to [Al-Qaeda leaders] Zawahiri and bin Laden, nor yet to the Israeli extreme right, which has lost its mind. It belongs to people of good intentions and enlightened minds on both sides – Palestinians and Israelis, Arabs and Jews. These people are many, though they are frightened and [therefore keep] quiet."
Endnotes
(1) Al-Sharq Al-Awsat (London), February 20, 2009.
(2) Nusseibeh, Sari and Anthony David, Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
But lately it is the left that has been angry with Ms. Nini. Chosen by Israel to represent the country at the Eurovision Song Contest — this year being held in Moscow in May with an expected television audience of 100 million — Ms. Nini asked if she could bring along her current artistic collaborator, an Israeli Arab singer, Mira Awad.
The selection committee liked the idea of having both Arab and Jewish citizens in the contest for the first time. But coinciding as it did with Israel’s Gaza war and the rise of Avigdor Lieberman, the ultranationalist politician who threatens Israeli Arabs with a loyalty oath, the committee’s choice was labeled by many on the left and in the Arab community as an effort to prettify an ugly situation.
A petition went around demanding that the duo withdraw, saying they were giving the false impression of coexistence in Israel and trying to shield the nation from the criticism it deserved. It added, “Every brick in the wall of this phony image allows the Israeli Army to throw 10 more tons of explosives and more phosphorus bombs.”
Neither Ms. Nini, 39, nor Ms. Awad, 33, has been deterred. But since they consider themselves peace advocates, they are a bit surprised. The antiwar movement, they say, seems to have turned into a Hamas apology force. That, together with the political turn rightward in Israel, means that while the two are being sent to represent this mixed and complex society, they also feel a bit orphaned by it.
“I am so worried by the drift to the extremes on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides,” Ms. Awad said as she and Ms. Nini, and their artistic collaborator, the guitarist Gil Dor, took a break from rehearsal to discuss the controversy. “That is not my vision of a Palestinian state, an extreme religious state where people they don’t like are shot in the legs. And then the Israeli election went to the right.”
The three are preparing four songs, from which one will be selected by a panel and an audience voting at a television performance in early March. All four songs are written in equal parts Hebrew, Arabic and English, and all seek to recognize the difficulty inherent in coexistence, rather than celebrate some mythic Kumbaya.
“And when I cry, I cry for both of us, my pain has no name,” go the lyrics of one of their offerings. “Where can we go from here? Sister, it’s been one long night,” goes a second one. Ms. Awad is one of one and a half million Arab citizens of Israel’s more than seven million inhabitants. There are four million more Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza who have no state of their own.
The two women have been collaborating for nearly eight years. At the height of the second intifada six years ago, they did a version of the Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out” that became an international hit.
Ms. Awad, the daughter of an Arab physician from the Galilee and a Bulgarian mother, lives in Tel Aviv. She is best known in Israel as an actress who appears in a popular television comedy, and has been starring lately in a searing play at the Cameri Theater in Tel Aviv about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But it is Ms. Nini who has a true international reputation. She has sold well over a million albums and has a strong following in Europe, especially in Spain, Italy and France, where she gives frequent concerts. She has a crystalline voice joined to a Yemenite Jewish background that give her music a rich ethnic quality. Having spent her childhood in New York City, she speaks flawless English and combines a number of instruments and rhythms to produce music across a broad range of styles.
“I carry a cross-cultural flag, breaking barriers between religions,” she said. “And I am also involved in other things — I am a U.N. good-will ambassador. So I feel like a kind of fusion, like Barack Obama.”
Ms. Nini, while admired in Israel, is more popular abroad. Her music, unlike that of most pop stars, is less a reflection of her own country’s sensibility than an effort to express the universal — one reason the panel may have thought she could bring home Israel’s fourth Eurovision victory in three decades. Israel’s two leading television satire shows have portrayed her as more interested in Italy than Israel, and as exploiting Ms. Awad for her own needs.
Ms. Awad, with her mixed parentage, is also something of a stranger in her own land, an Arab Christian singer and actress in a country dominated by Jews and Muslims.
That partly explains their bond, the two women say, and it may also explain the ambivalence with which their selection has been met.
But recent politics have also clearly taken their toll. During the war, Ms. Nini posted a letter on her blog condemning the Islamists of Hamas and calling on her “Palestinian brothers” to join together to eliminate what she called the ugly monster of Hamas. It was widely interpreted as an endorsement of Israel’s war in Gaza, although she said it was not.
“What I wrote was based on what my Palestinian friends in Gaza told me, that they are threatened by Hamas,” she said.
Both singers and their collaborator, Mr. Dor, say that they spend many hours arguing over the meaning of a Jewish democratic nation, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how to do their part to make things better.
