VISHAKA GUIDELINES, 1997 - An Armour for Working Women

One woman's fight for justice became the fight of the nation's women, resulting in the Supreme Court recognising, for the first time, sexual harassment at the workplace as discrimination against women and prescribing the Vishaka guidelines to deal with it

- BY SONAL KHETARPAL

A one-woman revolution. You wouldn't have expected it in the frail frame of Bhanwari Devi. Or in Bhateri, a Rajasthani hamlet 52 km east of Jaipur. But it was exactly in this heart of patriarchy, where women wore purdah and community elders married off children in their infancy, that Bhanwari, a sathin (assistant) for a state government awareness programme, intervened to prevent the marriage of a nine-month-old girl. For her daring, a lower caste Kumhar woman taking on the superior Gurjars, she was punished, in the way caste and patriarchal wrath has often been visited upon women—with gangrape, in the presence of her husband. Where lesser women would have withdrawn, Bhanwari took up her own fight, lodging an FIR, submitting herself to a medical examination, and surrender-ing her soiled lehenga as evidence when she had nothing else to cover herself with except her husband's blood-stained dhoti.