Climate emergency is a legacy of colonialism. In India, casteism and Dalit Varna is a classic example of British colonial legacy. The horrors of it still echoes in my community. Xenophobia and border violence are bubbling in the partitioned Indian subcontinent and indigenous tribes on the border are facing the brunt of it, most popular is the Kashmir crisis. Women and children in Kashmir and PoK (Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir) still are struggling for the basic right to life amidst the climate change and ethnic cleansing. Sexual abuse as an enforcement mechanism for land and property grabbing became regular. I have left their pain in my bones. I spent my childhood with a Kashmiri refugee family, bonded with love and food and cultural exchange. They lost their ancestral land, livelihood, and had to flee the state in fear of death and worse in the 1990s.
I want to focus on the intersectionality of climate change as a “threat multiplier”, meaning it escalates social, political and economic tensions in fragile and conflict-affected settings. As climate change drives conflict across the world, women and girls face increased vulnerabilities to all forms of gender-based violence, including conflict-related sexual violence, human trafficking, and child marriage.
Fortunately, I am in touch with the people and locations of the narratives I want to portray in this project. I am in touch with the Dalit students (and their families) who I taught at NCDHR in the Seelampur slum whose story I want to cover. I have connections with the Kashmiri and Arunachali families who were displaced post-war.
Cutting right to the chase:
- What? An interactive digital handbook for women (a medium to educate and spark a public discourse on these matters)
- Why? To identify person-at-risk and intervene.
- To better understand the climate crisis and gender based inequity. Since the reader is believed to be close to the women of their community (and probably share a rapport with them) I want to build a toolkit to help them identify who is at risk or who is facing such forms of violence.
- This handbook will help you learn how to then intervene and address the issue with appropriate help.
- How? Using an “Intersectionality Test”. Based on the result of a well-researched questionnaire in the handbook:
- Provide hotline resources to women seeking help.
- Provide a very simple and comprehensive short literature (using stories of my study subjects) on the issue so that the reader can be informed and become a better ally.
- To suggest reports, research labs, active authors, nonprofits to the science-minds who want to collaborate and build real-time solutions - this is easy for me given my background.
- Who? The project will be covering stories of:
- The Kashmiri refugee family I grew up with.
- The Dalit women from NHDHR NGO.
- The children from slum colonies who I had taught in Seelampur.
- Stories from my academic network on gender inequity in the climate change movement and call for inclusion of LGBTQIA+ voices.
All these human beings and their lives are exemplary of resilience in the face of hardship, with a focus on climate injustice and adaptation.
If time permits, I also want to cover some vault-tracks within the project which will have a common purpose: To understand disproportionate impacts of climate on previously colonized nations and indigenous peoples, focusing on India - pretty much the only thriving ancient civilisation known to mankind, second to Africa.
- Uneven industrialisation of India, the mass migration, and slumisation of Delhi.
- Disproportionate impact of climate change on displaced communities of Northern India.
- How climate injustice intersects with caste and gender inequalities in India: A study in the Seelampur slum with the same female students with whom I taught during NCDHR program.
- Gender Equity: I read somewhere “If you are invisible in everyday life, your needs will not be thought of, let alone addressed, in a crisis situation. Humanitarian programmes tend to be heteronormative and can reinforce the patriarchal structure of society if they do not take into account sexual and gender diversity.” I want to also study the Impact on the LGBTQIA+ communities in post-independence India.
I hope that the handbook I design will be used as a medium of education and a local action plan in the fight against climate change.
For future work, I want to make this handbook a part of the United Nations campaign.