The Tsunami's Windfall: Women and Aid Distribution

All India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA) is a part of a loose network of leftist organizations with a close relationship to the Communist Part of India (Marxist) (CPI[M]). In 1986, they estimated their membership at 115,000 women across the country (Calman 1989, 944). That number had grown to over eight million members by 2004. They are membership-funded with dues of one rupee per year. As one activist in their New Delhi national office described to me, "We don't take funds from the government or from donor agencies. We need our politics to be led by our members, not by our donors." AIDWA's independence from funding agencies and relative autonomy from their allied party and social groups contrast markedly to many other women's organizations in the Indian women's movement.

Two weeks before joining AIDWA activists in Chennai, on December 29, 2004, I interviewed Brinda Karat, the general secretary of AIDWA from 1993 to 2003. She described AIDWA's analysis and method of organizing as "inter-sectoral, inter-class, and crossing," and she explained their refusal to skirt divisive campaigns that crossed class and caste lines within the organization. "For example, if you were taking up dalit [oppressed, "untouchable" caste] women's issues, could your movement organize upper-class women in support of dalit women? Then you would say, 'Yes, this is women's unity, this is sisterhood.' So could you organize women who would normally not be eating in a Muslim household to come out in support [of Muslim women], to defend Muslim women against the state, not their own fundamentalists, but against the oppression on the state?. . . Are you prepared to go to Hindu localities and tell Hindu women that they are utterly wrong? And that is what women's unity is and must be." "The sea was like boiling milk. But after the first wave, the sediment churned up by the sea made it appear like boiling milk with rice in it."

—Comment from a fisherman in Nalla Thanni Odai, North Chennai, India

On January 15, 2005, three weeks after the Tsunami, I visited relief camps in and around North Chennai, India, with the All India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA), which was in the process of assessing damage and reconstruction needs. AIDWA, a national organization with 450,000 members in the state of Tamil Nadu alone, was able to provide its services in the immediate aftermath of the disaster in a highly coordinated effort across the coastal areas of the state. On the very day that the tsunami hit, December 26, AIDWA activists had already begun to visit hospitals, towns, and villages to help people. Their fundamental goal to help others simply survive was evident in the city of Nagapattinam, in the Thirukkadaiyur area, where a large group of refugees from local areas had gathered for safety from the flood waters. When local officials could not agree what to do with the sudden influx of destitute people, two AIDWA activists broke the lock of a public school and opened the door to the survivors. They then mobilized their city members to collect over 800 pounds of rice to feed the refugees.

January 15 was the last day of Pongal, a harvest festival in Tamil Nadu in which rice is boiled with milk until it overflows. The ritual symbolizes community hopes for a year of plenty, but in the wake of the avalanche of aid for tsunami victims, it appeared to also represent another kind of plenty: individual greed and official corruption in the distribution of resources.

As is true with so many large-scale relief efforts in the face of disaster, including, most recently, aid to the U.S. victims of Hurricane Katrina, unscrupulous practices, particularly by individuals and polities of color, are highlighted by the media and are often used as rationales to explain why such efforts often fail to reach the people most in need of them. But the discourse around corruption often stereotypes prospective recipients and ignores the specific consequences of inequitable distribution for poor women.

After attending meetings in three communities in...