Ela Bhatt And The Meaning Of Freedom

Freedom, one woman said, was “looking a policeman in the eye.”

-From an article on Ela Bhatt in the NyTimes.

We live in times when feminisn and empowerment of women automatically implies playing pussy politics, pitting one section of the population against another, kissing the rear ends of corrupt politicians or playing their hand maidens.

Ela Bhatt and Madhu Kishwar are the breed that symbolize what is real and what truly defines the empowerment of women.

These women are poles apart from the likes of the  practitioners and profiteers of pussy politics such as  Indira Jaising, Girija Vyas and Ranjana Kumari.

Here is an excerpt from an article from the New York times that details the work of Ela Bhatt and SEWA.

“THIRTY-FIVE years ago in this once thriving textile town, Ela Bhatt fought for higher wages for women who ferried bolts of cloth on their heads. Next, she created India’s first women’s bank.

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.”

The rest of the article can be read here:

An Empire for Poor Working Women, Guided by a Gandhian Approach

_________________________________________________________________