Last month, on the 21st of January 2024, a young woman, an assistant public prosecutor at a lower court in the district of Kollam in Kerala, took her own life, after sending out one last desperate plea — calling for justice after her death at least. She revealed through audio clips that fighting for justice at her workplace had worn her out completely. Her words brought out the rot infecting the institution of public prosecution (the stench of it is very much in the air, actually, unbearable it has become, though our political leaders and social justice motormouths seem to largely ignore it).

From her own account of her ordeal, forty-one-year old S Aneeshya was pushed into suicide by the strategy of mass harassment well-rehearsed in Kerala since the early 2000s at least. It involves the ganging up of colleagues, men and a few women too, against a lone conscientious woman who challenges the ways in which they play fast and loose with the rules at the workplace. From the lowest employee to the boss, all probably profit from the subversion of the rules; not surprisingly, they are motivated to attack her from all angles, till she is silenced effectively. We saw this in the ‘Prakashan’ case in the University of Calicut in 2000, in which an employee of the university, P E Usha, fought against the combined might of the Left trade unions and others who unleashed a slander campaign first, but then tried every trick in the book to silence her. Usha’s brave battle went down in the history of feminist struggle in Kerala as the first successful attempt to harness the law against sexual harassment at workplace.

However, this does not mean that the strategy of mass harassment had ended. Indeed, the law can deal with single harassers or a group of them, but mass attacks by colleagues are difficult even to prove in court. Usha was an activist and writer and she took up the struggle in explicitly political and feminist terms — winning some supporters as well. While Usha has said many times about the emotional drain she suffered, that this was a political fight probably made some difference. It might have held her back from collapsing under the unprecedented barrage of abuse and attacks, not to speak of the denial of justice at almost every turn.

If the period from mid-1990s in Kerala is identified as the epoch of ‘women’s empowerment’, I fear that the silent murky underside of it is such mass harassment as that Aneeshya faced. This was the time when large numbers of women entered local governance first through the thirty-three per cent reservations which then went up to fifty per cent in 2009. In Kerala’s judicial worlds now, the springtime of ‘women’s empowerment’ seems to be unmistakably — and ironically — in full bloom. In 2022, in the High Court of Kerala, out of 38 judges, seven were women, the highest number in its history. In recent times, women judicial officials asked for a change of dress code and were granted it — away from the saree.

In my fieldwork among the successful women panchayat leaders in the first decade of the new millennium, it appeared to me that the most successful women — those who had established their leadership status in the panchayat as well as created for themselves enduring bases in local politics — were women who gained an excellent grasp of the rules of local governance and were therefore able to make appropriate decisions within their terms, and articulate criticism of the everyday — and highly male-centred — subversion of the rules of governance.

However, these women also enjoyed tremendous social advantage of caste, community, and stable marriages. They were usually highly-educated and were often retirees from senior positions in education or banking. They hailed from the middle-classes and were often financially stable and past childbearing and child-rearing ages, and with adequate support from family and extended family members. It appears now that if these women were spared of mass harassment, it was because they were thus bolstered. It is not easy to mess with a woman with powerful connections especially through the family, especially upwards in the party hierarchy.

Aneeshya did not enjoy any of these advantages. Both she and her partner, also a judicial officer, rose to office overcoming many social and economic barriers, she says. She obtained her office through passing an exam, while the colleague she sought information against (for which she was publicly ridiculed at a meeting convened by the Kollam Deputy Director of Prosecution — the final blow which made her take her own life) was a favoured candidate who rose on the strength of the utterly-normalized Left nepotist network that holds all of the state in its stranglehold now. She had three senior people, all ailing and with poor mobility, to care for at home, besides her teen-aged daughter and her husband who has himself struggled with ailments. The continuous slander, whispered accusations, isolation, everyday betrayals — in the end they pushed her off the edge.

Slogans like ‘women’s empowerment’ are useful only to denote a basic common denominator of demands, perhaps. For it is as though once women are ’empowered’ (inducted into positions, allowed to wear convenient clothes etc etc), they are expected to function — and succeed– on their own strengths as individuals. So many times I have heard such mockery in the words of male panchayat leaders and others who I have interviewed since 2006 to now. Once ’empowered’, women who want to assert themselves are more or less on their own.

And the Malayali feminist mainstream seems satisfied with precisely that — some basic common non-controversial denominator. Right now, they are busy collecting signatures for a mass petition demanding equal representation as candidates in the upcoming national election. If there is an issue on which even the right-wing might agree in Kerala, it is this (after all, after the waves of right-wing women’s propaganda during their opposition to the SC judgment on Sabarimala, the BJP newspaper Janmabhumi hailed their role as the defenders of tradition of Women’s Day!). The harder part is to start working at the grassroots to make sure that women candidates will receive votes, that male prejudice against them will not interfere — so that the parties who do will not end up losing. (We do know that such prejudice does work). But this labour, we ought to have been doing years back!

Also, the entry of women into any institution cannot mean that the heights of empowerment and women’s rights are scaled for once and all. At least, that would be case if we assume the continuing presence of patriarchy. I do not know of any mainstream feminist or other effort to intervene in the struggles of women in local governance though some mainstream feminist NGOs have brought out a few studies (of varying quality) about them. I do not know of effort by mainstream feminists to bring these issues into public debate in any substantial way.

Nevertheless, I have also learned that a little support can actually prevent the tragedy that Aneeshaya embraced.

Recently, a field contact from the Pathanamthitta district of Kerala told me about a young woman activist of the CPM in a rural panchayat there — who was facing an unrelenting assault from her colleagues in the local CPM as well as the panchayat. I had heard much of her in 2018, of the stellar role she had played in rescue and relief in her village in this badly-affected district — and had sought to interview her. I had to postpone the interview for many reasons, but when I heard that she had won the 2022 elections and was a Ward Member now, I tried to get her contacts. It was therefore a terrible shock to know of this attack as well as the utterly nefarious manner in which it unfolded..

Let me refer to her as Anila (not her real name). Anila is a 41-year-old Muslim-born woman who has been fully in public life for some years now. She comes from a ‘CPM family’ — her father was an ardent party activist and her siblings and mother, though not all CPM supporters, continue to support her actively in her public work. She exited an abusive marriage early and now raises teen-aged daughter by herself. The difference between Aneeshya and her is precisely that her family was able to support and care for her in her crises — Aneeshya, in contrast, bore numerous care responsibilities, with little help.

When I tried to contact Anila again, the police was looking for her. She was apparently accused of spreading communal disharmony through a facebook post that ridiculed some Hindu spiritual figure. It was not her creation; she had merely re-posted it, and so had very many other CPM supporters in the panchayat. However, the local BJP had filed a complaint against her and the police had decided to act.

I wasn’t surprised by this — this is not the first time that the Kerala police seemed quite pro-Hindutva. But more intriguingly, this was the last in a series of episodes of harassment. Anila was accused of corruption, of stealing from the SC/ST funds and interrogated by the Ombudsman. The Congress and the BJP sat on the dharna for the whole period shouting abusive slogans against her. No one, of her party included, really tried to stop them. The case was false,and she was acquitted. Then she was accused of abusing the SC complainant, and the police started again, with her enemies spreading vile rumours. But the CCTV evidence showed that the accusation was a lie; the attack then subsided. Earlier, some local politician had apparently told the police that she kept guns in her house, and a large group of policeman arrived at her home (where she stays with her teen-aged daughter, nephews, and 78-year-old mother) and demanded to search the place. Being popular in the area (she won the elections in a Hindu Nair-dominated area with a majority of 77 votes, when in local elections the margin of victory can be as small as one or two votes), and because of her ow fearless articulation, Anila managed to stop them.

Now, with the facebook post, her enemies seem to have seized a golden opportunity. But what shocked me beyond belief (though the social researcher in me was hardly surprised) was that this was widely-believed to be the handiwork of a local CPM leader, a man who was not averse into making deals with the local natural resource predators — the granite quarrying companies — on the one hand, and sharing those spoils with BJP supporters on the other! Anila was apparently a persistent thorn in his flesh especially in party — and he also because suspicious that she had leaked information about his fast-and-loose manipulation of the funds in the local Cooperative Bank. However, Anila managed to stave off blow after blow — and it seemed now that she had finally lost control. I was told that she was not to be found even after many days.

This was around the days when Aneeshya’s death appeared in the press — I prayed that Anila would not take such a path. The tactics of mass harassment seemed almost exactly the same — slander, public ridicule, sly and open accusations, attacks on integrity, the effort to wear the prey down with continuous attack from all sides.

I came to know that she had filed an anticipatory bail plea, which was being pushed ahead. I can well-imagine what she must have been through — but that the local leadership seemed either passive or some of them were actively spreading tales of her involvement with terrorists! I tried to picture what this woman must have felt — from all accounts she seemed to be the model ‘secular’ Muslim in every way. Only to be easily pushed into the ranks of ‘terrorists’ because of her Muslim name…!

Then I learned that though the local leadership had thus conspired, the district leadership had taken a different view. K P Udayabhanu, District Secretary of the CPM evidently saw both the danger and the injustice of the irresponsible misogyny at the local level in Anila’s panchayat, and stood by her. So also, the district-level leadership of the AIDWA, of which Anila is an active member, stood by her. She has been apparently granted anticipatory bail, and state-level leaders like P K Sreemathi have promised enduring support.

The contrast between Aneeshya and Anila could not been starker. Aneeshya chose suicide because the higher authorities, instead of supporting her bid for transparency and adherence to the rules, slandered and ridiculed her, thereby destroying her will to withstand the local-level assault. In Anila’s case, the upper echelons of the CPM saw the danger — of playing dangerous games with Anila’s Muslim name just to extract misogynistic vengeance. Bad enough, really, to drive her to her death.

I rely on a field contact’s account for Anila’s story, but I hope it is true. Comrade Udayabhanu and the others who prevented her from death — gave her the courage to pull herself together and return and ask help — represent the sagacious political understanding and commitment to justice that we badly need to stop women’s empowerment from turning fatal. I salute their spirit which can alone hold up the ethical commitment that the Left made to Malayali women when they championed women’s empowerment.

As for Aneeshya, it is left to those of us who may not have been entirely seduced by ‘women’s empowerment’ but still hopeful of its potential to speak up. I hope the mainstream feminists, especially, will wake it. They need to remember that the marginal utility of the least common denominators do fall and rapidly.