Where the Mind is Without Fear, and the Head is Held High

This is the story of how a non-violent satyagraha movement for stopping atrocities on women grew from strength to strength to develop a radical and holistic vision of a decentralized and borderless world.

In the 1970s, a little-known but significant movement for protecting women’s security and well-being happened in the tiny tribal-dominated state of Tripura. The state had been the place where many refugee populations had sought shelter in the wake of increasing communal violence and political instability in bordering Bangladesh. However, the rampant poverty in the refugee communities meant that women were being sexually exploited for even getting things like citizenship certificates or ration cards. So-called respected public employees, such as schoolteachers, were even selling girls across the border. Political leaders were silent on the women’s issue, as were state instruments like the police.

When trans-border trafficking in women and girls, and the problems of sexual harassment, eve-teasing and domestic violence in the socially unstable state remained largely neglected by both state and non-state organizations, including religious organizations, a group of women and men, of various economic and cultural backgrounds, gathered around the leadership of Acharya Gour Ganguly, and began, through regular prarthana (prayer) meetings, brainstorming to think of the ways in which they could draw the attention of the state to the problems of women, or solve them on their own. In the repressive years of the Emergency, when no substantial state or institutional support was forthcoming, a nonviolent grassroots campaign began under the name Matri Shakti Vahini.

The empowerment movement, based on nonviolent strategies using unconventional strategies such as spiritual practices, the cultivation of fearlessness and collective ethical transformation through mass meetings, and village-to-village walks for gathering the little resources of the common man, developed in its later states into a radical call for a no-tax campaign and boycott of all party politics because of the apathy of politicians and police alike in solving the problems of women, and the poor. This resulted in the surveillance of Gour Ganguly’s activities by the government during and after the Emergency years, the worst years of state coercion in post-independence Indian history.

Along with the vision of decentralization were calls by his organisation, Bibek Anander Satsang, for the re-consideration of India’s indiscriminate move towards Western-style development, and the idea of a pyramidal economy where power and decision-making would flow from the base upwards to the top. Acharya Ganguly envisioned a peaceful satyagraha to make village after village self-ruled with a strong ethical base. For this, a drive to encourage self-employment was initiated among poor urban, refugee and village communities in Agartala and its surrounding districts, because the Matri Shakti Vahini led by Acharya Ganguly realized that poverty alleviation would be a major step in reducing the social behavior that threatened women’s lives, security and self-respect. The proposed peaceful methods such as no-tax campaigns, and direct elections of deserving candidates in neighborhoods and villages on a nonparty basis were a radical rejection of the way in which the contemporary state functions. Today the places in Agartala where street harassment of women was so rampant that women felt unsafe, are a totally safe space for them.

But the larger questions that the movement raised remain. What happens when common men in villages and poorer communities, that do not find their needs satisfied by a centralized and insensitive state, initiate a move towards radical decentralization, through nonviolent methods? A confidential Emergency-era dossier on Gour Ganguly revealed that he was ‘dangerous because he seeks to make the general populace fearless.’ If political parties and the state cannot solve the problems of the common man, then the creation of fearlessness can be the first catalyst for local and global change…”