Ela Bhatt’s Women, Work and Peace

‘The Household Model’ as a Viable Alternative for International Relations 

The New Indian Express | Today’s Editorial

26 October 2023

#newspaperinlearning, #upsc, #womenwork, #elabhatt, #martinbuber

The author of this editorial feature – Shiv Viswanathan, highlights the last book written by the late Ela Bhatt titled, Women, Work and Peace, and suggests that, the household model provided by Ela could be a viable alternative for us to evolve into a caring society.

On an aside - Ela – fondly called the ‘gentle revolutionary’ is hailed as a pioneer in women’s empowerment. She is the founder of the 2.1 million-strong Self-Employed Women’s Association [SEWA] trade union in India. She’s also a committed Gandhian practitioner of non-violence and self-reliance.

Ela “designed and demonstrated a world where women tried successfully to build a non-violent, dignified and nurturing society. SEWA’s twin goals are full employment and self-reliance. It struggles for voice, visibility and viability, for women”.

In her last book titled, Women, Work and Peace, Ela proposes that, the household and the women’s roles in their households are exemplars for international relations.

International relations has much to learn from the dynamics of domestic imagination, says Ela.

The media today has turned war into a spectacle, and offers violence for consumption, hyphenating it with war as difference.

Violence gobbles up memory in the very act of consumption.

Then, Shiv compares Ela’s book with Martin Buber’s greatest work, I and Thou, which underscored the need for the sense of sacred in the Other. A sense of reverence and care as a part of the very fabric of being human.

Sadly, war today reminds one of the parochialities of nationality and ethnicity but not of humanity. The challenge today is: how does one return the human to struggles such as these.

Possible Solutions

We need to look at war as the breakdown of domestic life. This demands a new kind of storytelling.

There is little coverage of dissenting imaginations, when Israel, in particular, has outstanding pacifists who have fought desperately to create a world of Peace.

One needs pluralistic narratives and a reconciliation of truths and people to begin in Israel.

For this, we need new forms of dialogue, because war and the media propagate clichés of reporting, reinforcing stereotypes and normalising hate.

We need a new moral imagination to map worlds beyond borders and nation-states, and avoid the obscenity of official words like ‘occupied territory’.

Language, particularly official labels, normalises the increasing violence.

Care and concern are civilisational imperatives, a plural intelligence that India desperately needs to follow, 

signs off the writer, Shiv Viswanathan, a Social Scientist, associated with Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations. ❤️