BY Maitree Muzumdar, Jeevika Shiv
While the need for informal and autonomous collectives to organize has remained pressing for feminist visions of grassroots-led change, when it comes to funding and access to resources, grassroots organizing in India is sitting on the ends of what can be best described as a double-edged sword.
On one end, access to resources has been severely limited due to the stringent rules and policies governing funding in India, especially foreign funding that is regulated under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA). The FCRA turns the acceptance, transfer and utilization of all accessible foreign funding into a tightrope act for feminist organizations in India, having to tiptoe through layers of scrutiny, criminalization, and opposition; especially for those building movements in less recognized frameworks of collectives and coalitions. On the other end is the politics of who gets access to the magical shrinking pot of global feminist funding where small organisations and collectives remain the worst affected.
As a response to many of such challenges, we started strengthening the collective bargaining power of the local and the grassroots in global spaces by co-building informal collectives like Feminist Manch. Feminist Manch is an independent feminist initiative based in India, co-created with young feminist community leaders, aimed to strengthen the leadership of young women, girls & gender diverse youth in policy advocacy at all levels. As Feminist Manch, we collectively explored ways to bridge the gap between resources and grassroots movements by opening channels of support and resources directly to local leaders through individual funding. We deepened the process of guiding global feminist organizing and resourcing, such as through the Young Feminist Manifesto that calls for our full, effective, meaningful and substantive participation and leadership as co-leaders, co-shapers and equal stakeholders in decision-making processes.
While Feminist Manch, and other informal collectives that center the most marginalized and their lived realities, exhibit strengths, there are challenges in sustaining engagement in this resource-deficit climate, especially for young feminists from marginalized communities. This includes Dalits, Bahujans, Adivasi and Indigenous Tribes, Denotified and Nomadic Tribes, religious minorities, queer youth, youth with disabilities, youth from rural and remote areas, youth living in poverty, and other vulnerable groups in India who face pushback against local organizing and initiatives; where the oppressed community leaders are seen as the troublemakers and at the heart of creating chaos, and where the state (and non-state actors) by default sees the need to regulate their work and threaten punitive action.
For the most marginalized at the grassroots, state actions such as the FCRA restrictions represent more than just barriers in access to funding and resources. It embodies the concept of criminalization and control over aspirations, endeavours and dreams. It means that the state cuts off resources to the community’s thought and ability to design for social transformation and gender equality, and forces towards systems that design apprehensively in response to state and non-state actors, targeting and fear. In such an environment, how do marginalized communities move to discussions centered on liberation, pleasure, co-creation, imagination, and transformative visions when it is the very radical imagination of the future that unsettles the state?
This is the same punitive and exclusionary framework that many marginalized communities in India such as Dalits, Adivasis and Denotified Tribes have historically built movements for many years – of facing restricted access, being labelled as habitual offenders for their collective action, and facing historical injustices for fighting for their basic human rights. And, it is within this framework that they enter the global feminist spaces, where suddenly the onus shifts on these same communities to make demonstrations of courage. We reject the notion that courage and resilience by marginalized communities or individuals can be a substitute or a structural answer to the larger systemic support and resourcing needed to further rights and collective organizing. Telling marginalized communities to be brave in the face of such structural exclusions, discrimination and violence, is setting them up to be scrutinized by the systems and reenacts and widens the power differential which already exists.
In this ecosystem, how do global funders ask grassroots feminists to sustainably engage, especially young women leaders and gender-diverse youth and who is going to share the burden of their risk? When global funders are only comfortable with the same old institutional forms of support, are unwilling to delve into creatively negotiating through the regulatory restrictions and administrative compliances of the state, and more often than not, fail to operate with the understanding of the state and non-state scrutinies that come with local organizing, means that it is these marginalized leaders and their communities that continue to get further alienated from global initiatives, privileging those who can afford to be visible.
It is here when the global funder must brave the face of trust-based, flexible and participatory funding, and refrain from the current practices of centering the elite urban technocrat and project consultant, who suddenly becomes grassroots enough while feminist movements and people-led agendas and initiatives remain silenced, targeted and invisibilized. This disproportionately affects human rights defenders (HRDs) and grassroots activists, while benefiting those operating within traditional Brahminical feminist institutions and consultancy models.
The critical question that the international funders and the privileged in feminist and civil society spaces need to ask is why is it easier to look at global oppressions and strategies than to have a hard look in our own backyards and learn from the lived realities, cautions, resistance and resilience that have been part of movements here. Who can afford to be courageous, who should be courageous, and who is the one that suffers systematically and gets further excluded as those with decision-making power collectively end up deciding who is grassroot enough for the “global agenda”?
As the landscape of financing for gender equality in India shifts towards reliance on private capital and funds, power differentials based on caste, class, gender, sexuality, age, privilege and other exclusions are reinforced. Discussions on who gets financed often sideline critical questions, privileging the interests of the affluent and powerful. Discussions on…
…Who is the giver?
Who is being partnered with and who is further excluded?
What is being visioned and whose vision is resourced?
Who is advising and what power structures they are part of?
What power structures are being reenacted?
Who is being criminalized and who is complicit?…
…and other critical questions tend to remain at the backseats. Gratitude gets extended towards the wealthy, mostly upper caste/class donors and their goodwill, rather than centering movement building and rights-based work. Without a deep hard look at these questions, does your needle of conscience sway towards holding accountability to our intersectional movements, or does it tend to sway towards building layers of secrecy to protect this ecosystem, and partaking in the state’s agenda of recolonization of money?
We are left wondering, we know what the state is protecting itself against, but you, dear feminist funders and consultants that hold the power to disrupt this status quo, what are you protecting yourself against?
Written by Jeevika Shiv and Maitree Muzumdar with inputs from Aditya Shrivastava