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Promises and Reality — India’s Conundrum as an Advocate of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda

08 Mar 2022
By Natasha Singh Raghuvanshi
The all-woman Indian peacekeeping mission to Liberia perform a martial arts ceremony.
Source: UN Peacekeeping, Flickr, https://bit.ly/3IP52K5

New Delhi proudly points to its peacekeeping efforts and growing list of appointments to senior UN bodies as evidence of its commitment to advancing women’s rights. But despite its accolades, India is not doing enough for women.

In 2021, India began its eighth tenure as a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). It presided over the Security Council session expressing its commitment towards three main areas — maritime security, counterterrorism, and peacebuilding. In the same year, India was re-elected for its sixth term as a United Nations Human Rights Council member for the period 2022-2024. In 2020, India was elected as a member of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women until 2025. On Twitter, India’s ambassador to the United Nations tweeted, “it was a ringing endorsement of our commitment to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment in all our endeavours.”

These events coincide with 25 years of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (BPfA) and 20 years of UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325. BPfA is considered a visionary agenda for a comprehensive framework to realise gender equality and the human rights of women and girls worldwide. UNSCR 1325 comprises the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda and another nine subsequent resolutions that support increasing the role of women in peace and security decision-making. It reaffirms the importance of protecting the rights of women and girls during and after conflicts and highlights the urgent need to mainstream a gender perspective into peace and security operations.

India proclaims itself a strong WPS advocate. However, India’s commitments to the agenda in its foreign policy do not match its domestic policies. UN member states have developed an interest in WPS agenda to serve their national interests, impacting the agenda’s implementation. In Soumita Basu’s recent work, she highlights that India’s support towards the agenda, as with many other member states, is outward-facing and pragmatic — designed to  further member state’s interests at the UNSC.

In arguing for an effective feminist foreign policy, feminist scholar Khushi Singh Rathore reminds us that it is crucial to act with caution and perceive the state with scepticism. While paradoxical behaviour is often visible in the international arena, it is still important to continue highlighting the contradictory nature of WPS claims made by member states because they have real implications on women’s lives. Below, I highlight contradictions in India’s WPS record and the related statements at the UNSC to point out ever-present barriers to effective implementation of WPS agenda in India.

Women’s involvement in peacekeeping and peacebuilding 

India takes immense pride in its contribution to UN peacekeeping. In 2015, India participated in the training of peacekeepers, courses which continue today. In 2021, India reiterated its pride and highlighted the achievements of their all-woman peacekeeping contingent in Liberia and India’s female engagement team in the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO). At the recent WPS open debate, the Indian ambassador welcomed the Uniform Gender Parity Strategy to increase the number of women peacekeepers and women protection advisors for effective monitoring, analysis, and reporting arrangements on conflict-related sexual violence in the field. India is the third-largest contributor with 5,538 personnel deployed across nine UN missions.

However, only 97 of the 5,538 peacekeepers were women. This number may be attributed to the low number of women in the Indian armed and police forces. There have been many advancements to women’s participation in the armed forces in India. In March 2021, the top court in India attacked and struck down the military’s discriminatory recruitment criteria. However, women officers continue to face systemic gendered challenges in a service that supports strong masculine networks, often impacting women’s success in the armed forces. India has focused on adding more women to the armed forces, without addressing these underlying issues.

Protection and peacebuilding

At the WPS open debate in 2022, the Indian ambassador to the UN made the following statement:

Member States should identify and address barriers to women’s meaningful participation in the prevention and resolution of conflict, and in post-conflict peace-building efforts and programs…ensuring accountability and checking impunity of those perpetrating violence against women.

Since its independence, the Indian state has faced numerous challenges to its national sovereignty in the domestic sphere. These are armed conflicts arising from ethnic contestations whose roots lie in the politics and history of colonial and post-colonial India. Government officials have conceptualised these movements as “disturbed areas,” “law and order problems,” and “terrorist activities.” Indian approaches to these conflicts are underpinned by militarism, patriarchal majoritarian nationalism, and hegemonic masculinity. This is evident in the government’s narratives regarding the need to protect and glorify Mother India from the threats posed to her by insurgents and “lesser” masculinities. The Indian state’s response to these rebellions has been military-backed suppression and enforcement of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) in various parts of India. The act grants special powers to armed forces and gives soldiers effective impunity from prosecution for serious human rights abuses. It has severely affected the lives of men and women in these regions. On 4 December 2021, adding to a long list of botched operations, security forces shot civilians in Nagaland, mistaking them for terrorists. The impunity granted to the soldiers from being prosecuted, the lack of any real debate in the national capital, and minimal statements of solidarity have angered the people. This impunity has severely threatened women’s rights.

Sexual violence against women has often been used a tool for punishment as it is an attack on the “collective honor” of not just individual women, but their communities as well. Thirty-one years on from the security forces’ mass rape of 23 women in Kashmir’s twin village Kunan Poshpora, the case remains unresolved. Denial, collusion, and the destruction of evidence to protect perpetrators characterise institutional responses towards sexual crimes. In seeking justice for these crimes, women have joined the movement against the state — for instance, the 2016, women-led, women-only protests in Kashmir.

Notably, in such a scenario, the WPS agenda remains absent in the government’s policies and plans for engagement in any dialogue or peace process pertaining to these zones of conflict in India. Women at the grassroots have been redefining peace and striving to rework gender stereotypes that exclude them from power. Despite this, they remain missing from leadership positions in these areas, rendering them absent in the peacebuilding process.

The Way Forward

Worldwide we are witnessing increased militarisation, threatening lives and rights of women. For India, WPS agenda can help dismantle the patriarchal cultural values sustaining gendered behaviour of the state and its domestic institutions.

An assessment of India’s WPS record requires moving beyond superficial speeches at the UNSC and participation in UN peacekeeping. The political demands for gender equality within the contexts of conflict in India require engagement with the permanent problem of militarisation and conflict in the region. Grassroot women activists working towards disarmament argue that nation-building cannot be left to men. Military solutions, violence, and AFSPA have failed to bring peace. What is needed is the involvement of women and all other genders in any discussion of the conflicts.

For India’s to meet its commitments under WPS agenda, it will require serious discussions of militarisation, AFSPA, and engagement with women building peace on the ground. That is only, of course, if India wants the world to take its commitment to the agenda seriously. Otherwise, looking at the world today, I must say with despair, that member states move the goalposts for feminist and WPS agenda every day. In the middle of this, as a postcolonial state, India has a chance to be different.

Natasha Singh Raghuvanshi is a doctoral candidate at Monash Gender, Peace and Security Centre. She is the recipient of the inaugural Meenakshi Gopinath Ann Tickner Scholarship at Monash University. Her research examines India’s engagement with the United Nations Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda. 

This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.