A CASE FOR CONSCIENCE AND HUMANITY

Wars highlight nationality and ethnicity at the cost of humanity. We must look at Ela Bhatt’s household model to move towards a society that cares

- SHIV VISVANATHAN

ELA Bhatt, the founder of the Self-Employed Women's Association or SEWA, was one of the most innovative activists, blending theory and practice at every step. In her last book Women, Work and Peace, she proposed that the household and women's roles in their households are exemplars for international relations. International relations, she claimed, has much to learn from the dynamics of domestic imagination.

When I first read the book, I felt that Ela behen, one of my favourite activists, was being naïve. Yet the more I thought of it, the more inviting the idea seemed. Bhatt's book is a plea for feminism as an epistemic form. Forging creative links between women, work and peace was precisely the kind of civil society intervention that she argued for during the various wars in Africa and Afghanistan while working for the Council of Elders, a group of senior statesmen working for world peace.

I was remembering Ela's argument when Israel and Hamas went to war. Her book was a tacit commentary on three things. She was candid about the sense of helplessness citizens and housewives felt in the face of war and violence.

She was vocal about what war does to domesticity and everydayness, a precious state of being today. Less than two weeks ago, Israel imperiously ordered everyone in Gaza city and in the north of the Gaza Strip 1.1 million people to move south immediately.