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Political Violence and Gender in the Age of Globalisation: A Case from India
| On 19th December, 2006 the charred body of Tapasi Malik was found in a pit inside the land fenced off for the Indian corporate giant Tata Motors’ small-car project, in the Singur region of West Bengal, India. As her death initiated intense public debate, claims and counter-claims were made by the ruling and opposition political parties about her allegiance to the local farmers’ resistance movement against the project. The death of Tapasi Malik is the proverbial tip of the iceberg of intense political struggles over the implementation of corporate-led development policy in the increasingly globalizing economy of India. In her life and death Tapasi Malik becomes an insignia to explore the gendered dimensions of political violence at the structural and discursive levels. Her death is also an indicator of rural women’s political agency. It is her political activism that possibly determined her gruesome death; and yet it is her political agency that makes her more than a statistics of violence against women. This paper is an effort to unravel the complexity of intersections between gender, politics, and violence at a moment of mass fury against global capital and its local intermediary – the state.
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