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The feisty Flavia Agnes: The champion of women's rights

Activist-lawyer Flavia Agnes and her organisation Majlis have offered succour to innumerable women stuck in abusive relationships. And yet, it took an external event for the 69-year-old to channel her inner strength to take on her own demons, notes Yogesh Pawar

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Varsha Kale, president of the Bar Girls Association, speaks as lawyer Flavia Agnes looks on, during a bar girls protest rally at KC College in Mumbai in 2005; The advocate in her office; With domestic abuse survivor Shaheen Ansari, actor Neena Gupta and Harish Sadani of Men Against Violence and Abuse (MAVA)
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"I had put up with beatings, was singed with cigarette butts and made to feel worthless for 18 long years. I gave up everything, including a good job as an airhostess and went with the flow in the hope of saving my marriage," she cries. "Yet, just like that, I found myself thrown out of the house. Worse, my daughters joined their father in abusing me and ignoring my pleas not to throw me out at midnight." It was as if life had come to an end. "If it weren't for Flavia Agnes and her team at Majlis, I don't know what I would've done."

The 50-year-old agent with a private insurance firm was finally able to legally seek possession of a flat (bought with her own provident fund and savings) which her husband was refusing to give her and thanks Agnes for not just giving her a way out of the abuse, but also for the roof over her head.

Champion of women's rights

"Have you had something?" Agnes asks, brushing aside a 'no' when we meet in her office. "Have some tea or coffee na?" The ikat cotton sari and chunky locket may mark her out as an activist, but she has little patience for jargon and easily slips into the Bombay English made popular by the Catholic community. Yawn-inducements like "holistic perspective," and "systems approach" find casual replacements with conversational, easy-to-get colloquialisms that are endearingly straight to the point.

Celebrated women's rights champion, activist, fierce advocate of gender equality and a source of support for many fighting abuse, violence or worse, Flavia Agnes wears many hats, exuding such simplicity and directness that it is hard not to be swayed by her charm.

At the Majlis Legal Centre office – which offers legal services, conducts legal awareness trainings, engages in policy level interventions, public campaigns and public interest litigation in order to help women access justice – the little curios Agnes has picked up on her travels to various parts of the country offer sharp contrast to the formidable-looking leather-bound legal tomes.

Agnes, who has just met a well-placed woman in distress, is appalled at how women from the upper strata are more likely to remain status-quoists despite their education and exposure. "I was speaking to this young woman trapped in an abusive marriage for quite long. After every extremely violent episode, she comes here, cries her heart out, talks about it with great passion, but then refuses to take it forward. We can only counsel and supportively point in the right direction but she has to find the strength to say, 'Enough is enough!' Otherwise it can't be a participative decision in the real sense."

Agnes blames such behaviour on the lack of knowledge of basic rights. "Right from childhood, social conditioning pushes women to abandon all survival instincts. Whether married or not, they are simply not encouraged to have agency even over the basic right to dignity. Western clothes, speaking English with a cool accent and being part of the hip partying scene gives them a false sense of confidence of being in control, but they are not."

A troubled past

She should know what she is talking about given her own intense personal struggle with a violent husband. "Many times, I wanted to kill myself and the children but I'm glad I got scared and didn't do anything rash," she says, looking back on her own fight for dignity and freedom.

Soon after passing Class 10, she went to Aden, where her parents were because of her father's job. She still wonders what life would have been if the family didn't flee Yemeni political unrest in 1967.

On return, after her father's demise, she was married off to the first man who sought her hand when barely 20. "Though 12 years older, that he had a good job and wanted no dowry was enough. Everybody kept telling me I was lucky."

Only, that was far from the truth. What began with violence over demands for her jewellery progressed into a daily routine of suspicion and cruelty. "Where were you? Who was with you? Who came home in my absence? And there were no correct answers. Any response would start the beating."

She remembers being too scared to deny him sex despite loathing him. Even the birth of her two daughters and son didn't change anything, "He'd mercilessly kick me in the belly and violently push me around even in pregnancy. I'm still amazed my children and I survived," she remembers.

Agnes took to religion hoping it would help. Priests she confided in her parish, simply said she should pray with more faith and "bear with it like a good Christian wife". One priest who tried to speak to her husband left the latter more furious. "If you talk about me outside again, I'll break your leg," she was threatened.

Taking a stand

In the process of meeting women's groups for help, she ended up enrolling at the SNDT Open University and graduating in 1980. This was when she found her own reserves of strength and empathy for women who were suffering like her.

Her experience as a volunteer with a fact finding team to Turbhe in Navi Mumbai where a little girl had been raped by local goons and a policeman in April 1980 changed her life. "Since I was the only one who spoke Kannada, a language spoken in the neighbourhood (and her medium of instruction in her Mangalore school) everybody insisted I speak." She remembers being nervous about her first speech outside Turbhe police station.

"That nervous, hesitant speech standing on wobbly wooden stool changed my life. I was speaking from my heart and saw it make a connection."

The experience led to Agnes starting her first Women's Centre and filing for judicial separation. "In those days, Christian women couldn't seek divorce on grounds of cruelty." It was poetic justice then that 17 years later, the Bombay High Court struck down this section of the Indian Divorce Act, ruling in favour of one of Agnes' clients.

By the time she completed her LLM in 1992 from Bombay University and MPhil in family law from the National Law School, Bangalore, not only had Agnes' life changed, but she was also helping others change theirs. "With Majlis, we try to help out other women caught in predicaments like mine."

Agnes and her organisation are seen as the go-to for cases of marital dispute, violence, brutality and sexual abuse of women and minors. This author of several books on women's rights and vocal opponent of the 2005 ban on Mumbai's bar dancers' has had big victories in several high-profile cases, which cannot be spoken about in the interest of client confidentiality.

Yet, she is no stranger to taking on causes that concern the larger polity. Agnes is particularly opposed to the renewed attempts at bringing forth a Uniform Civil Code (UCC). "It's strange to see women's groups raise the spectre of suffering Muslim women to justify their support the UCC. The BJP has compulsions in focusing on triple talaq, lack of maintenance for women etc. but women's groups should understand whose hands they are playing into. They are silent when asked about equal rights for Hindu women," she said during a lecture to law students recently. "Where are largest number of dowry deaths? Which community has child marriages? Which community celebrates misogynist traditions like kanyadan (giving away the virgin daughter), writing off claims in ancestral property?"

She points out how Hindu marriage is only a sacrament without documentation, underlining how polygamy is higher among Hindus. "Lack/inclusion of any one of the many Brahminical rituals at a wedding (decided by the man and/or his family) is enough to change a woman's status from wife to mistress, deciding her boundaries on rights." She warned of the dangerous homogenisation of women's rights. "All Indian women aren't upper caste Hindus. Why should perspectives on their welfare take that unidimensional view?"

***

She has her own share of detractors too. Especially among those who've bitten the dust in court when pitted against her. One such legal eagle guffaws. "She channelises all her anger against her husband when she fights a case. This kind of emotional involvement is not right."

The activist-advocate takes this in her stride. "I can't allow remarks and barbs to stop me. There is so much to do," says Agnes.

More power to her!

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