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Human Rights Organization Helps Empower and Support Indian Widows

By Sudeshna Sarkar, Womens Feature Service

Lily Thapa has been on an unusual campaign since the 1990s, trying to bring about a silent social revolution within Nepal's orthodox society - by empowering young widows.

When Thapa heard the news that her husband, an army doctor in Iraq as part of a UN Peacekeeping Force, had died in the Gulf War, she lay in a coma-like daze for three days. As she flitted in and out of consciousness, she felt someone lunging towards her with a dagger and she sat up screaming. Her shock, something which hundreds of widowed young women in Nepal still experience, is now part of a 43-minute social documentary film in Nepali, 'Born Again'.

Today, sitting composedly in the library of Women for Human Rights (WHR) in Kathmandu, a non-governmental organization (NGO) she founded in 1992 to support single women, mostly widows, she explains the factors that drove her to focus on this issue. "When I was widowed, it was as if I was born again," she says. "I had no idea about the inhuman treatment meted out to widows. When your husband is dead, you are struggling to cope with the grief. But instead of support, you get the most appalling treatment imaginable. A widow is not allowed to wear colored clothes. She is made to wear white. Then her red glass bangles, indicating her married status, are broken, the vermilion dot on her forehead is rubbed off and all her jewelry removed. I had a little nose pin given by my father when I passed the school-leaving examination. Because I was unconscious it could not be prised out. Somebody tried to cut it out with a knife. It must have been a small knife but my horrified mind exaggerated the size of it."

The deprivations don't end there. A widow is not allowed to meet her parents or siblings for a year, or even leave the house. Afterwards, she is discouraged from attending events like weddings, because she is considered an ill omen. But Thapa says she was luckier than most. Her mother persuaded her husband's family to allow her to move into an apartment close to her. She was also encouraged to go out, especially to the boarding school where her three sons were studying.

It was during one of those visits that she came upon her mission. "The principal wanted me to meet a young girl, whose in-laws worked in the school," Thapa says. "She was also recently widowed. When I went to their house, SHE was not there but her mother-in-law was."

The elderly woman threw Thapa out, screaming abuses. "She called me a whore because I was wearing a yellow salwar-kameez even though I was a widow and had ventured out of home. She accused me of trying to corrupt her daughter-in-law. I cried all the way home," recalls Thapa.

But the principal, on learning this, persuaded Thapa to meet the young woman in school. Once she did, she was stunned again. "The weeping girl told me she was being forced to have sex with her brother-in-law. The family knew about this but no one had objected. Instead, they threatened to throw her out if she protested. I was shocked that such things could happen. I realised how lucky I was: I had no financial constraints and my family was supportive. But there were hundreds of women like her, brutally treated with nowhere to go."

Thapa began to seek out other young widows. "We had no idea what to do," she says. "For two years, we huddled together, shared our bitter experiences and simply cried," recalls Thapa. Then, in 1994, she decided to register an organization with the chief district officer. He was amazed, observing that it was for the first time that someone was registering an organization for widows. Thapa found it difficult to get the six other signatories that were required to register an organization. None of the widows in her group were willing, fearing the wrath of their families. Finally, she had to approach her own family and acquaintances, including her mother and a former teacher.

To learn how to run an NGO, Thapa volunteered at Tewa - an NGO that helps disadvantaged women become independent. In her two-year stint at Tewa she learnt how to raise funds and implement programs and WHR began its active life with $1,000 donated by the Global Fund for Women. Today, the organization has nearly 45,000 members - widows, wives whose husbands went missing in the course of the 10-year Maoist insurgency, and women separated from their husbands. Members also include unmarried women up to the age of 35.

WHR runs four programs through a network of 225 single women's groups in 52 of Nepal's 75 districts. The programs include micro-credit schemes to provide loans to single women to set up small businesses; a shelter that provides food, a place to sleep and psychological as well as legal counseling; a special unit for women who are affected by conflict; funding for education and training sessions for employment generation.

Realizing the importance of networking, WHR is now part of the South Asian Network for Widows Empowerment in Development (SANWED), a loose network of groups working for widows in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, with a chapter in Australia, too. As a member of SANWED, WHR is developing guidelines to collect information on the status of widows in the member countries, share the "best practices" for the promotion and improvement of the status of widows and their dependents, and lobby governments to adopt and implement the Charter for the Rights of Widows. The Charter, presented in the 49th session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women in New York in 2005, seeks to end all discrimination against widows, both within the family and community, as well as in public life.

At home, WHR has been waging battles in court to strike down discriminatory laws. It has successfully challenged laws that needed women to get permission from their husbands or fathers to apply for passports, and widows to get the permission of their sons to sell their property and to return the property they had inherited if they remarry.

The latest campaign is against an announcement by the new government in Nepal that a man would get NRS 50,000 (about $680) if he married a widow. Explains Thapa, "It makes a woman a piece of merchandise and puts a price tag on her forehead. The state bounty can lead a widow to an even worse situation, since she can be married for the dowry offered by the state and dumped later. Instead of perpetuating dowry in this form, the government should use the money to educate widows or offer them training in income-generating activities, so that they can stand on their own feet."

After WHR challenged the cabinet decision in the Supreme Court in September 2009, it ordered the state to show cause. In the meantime, WHR is leading rallies in the capital and outer towns, in which the women participants wear red clothes and bangles. "Seven years ago, when we took out the first red procession, people hurled abuses at us," Thapa says. "But we persevered. Today, there is an amazing change and it's mainly due to economic empowerment."

The widow raped by her brother-in-law, who was a catalyst for the red revolution, now runs her own tailoring shop in Kathmandu. She has moved out of her husband's home and lives on her own. Thapa says she is amazed by the transformation. And, as she laughs, something glints in her nose. The nose pin is back.

Womens Feature Service covers developmental, political, social and economic issues in India and around the globe. To get these articles for your publication, contact WFS at the www.wfsnews.org website.