Twenty-one police commandos. Clad in black dungarees. Quick and slick. On January 4, it was not yet another passing-out parade in Chennai. For the first time, a state police force had trained women commandos. And they demonstrated their skills: firing away from awkward positions as they swung along a winch, wielding guns while riding jeeps and motorbikes, plunging and jumping at moving targets. Basically, doing everything that male commandos do.
It reads like yet another story where the point that 'women are as good as men' is being laboured; a case of Amazon feminism where gender stereotypes are challenged and a vision of heroic womanhood is posited. And looking at the 21 women commandos perform with aplomb, one can easily buy the story of gender parity. Says R. Senthila, after swooping down from a 300-feet high winch: "Even we did not expect to learn the kind of things we did during this rigorous three-month course. On day one, running 3 km was an ordeal. Towards the end, we achieved a night march of 38 km in seven hours. On a jog, we can clock 24 km in 2 hours 20 minutes."
Being a commando is a test of both physical and mental endurance. It also means commanding a range of arms: LMGs, 9-mm pistols, 9-mm carbine guns and AK-47s; besides training in swimming, parasailing, rock-climbing, fire-fighting and bomb disposal. Fifty-four women constables were shortlisted, of which 21 were selected for training. "Usually, even among male batches there's a dropout rate of 15 to 20 per cent. But from this group there was not one casualty during the three-month training. This speaks volumes for these young women's commitment and fervour," says K. Rajendran, IG (operations), who heads the Tamil Nadu Commando Force (TNCF). Given that even the NSG and CRPF do not train women commandos, Tamil Nadu's achieved quite a first.
Though these commandos are yet to be deployed in real-time operations, plans are afoot to train women commandos on a regular basis. The Jayalalitha government, which has pioneered all-woman police stations, plans to recruit 1,500 women constables of whom 25 per cent are expected to be trained in commando operations. The first batch is likely to be attached to the TNCF and be involved in VVIP security and in escorting dreaded criminals. Their deployment in anti-Veerappan operations is also not being ruled out by senior officials. Says an enthusiastic P. Vijaya, 23: "During the selection interview they asked some of us whether we will be prepared to go to the forests to hunt Veerappan. And now we are looking forward to that. Maybe we'll succeed where the STF men have failed."
Fact is the use of women in combat operations has been pioneered by outfits involved in insurgencies and anti-state activities: the LTTE (since 1986) and the Naxalites of Andhra Pradesh, for instance. Rajendran, in fact, seeks to justify the need for women police commandos on these very grounds: "Remember Rajiv Gandhi was killed by a woman LTTE suicide cadre." This logic, for some observers, amounts to celebrating the state's deployment of women for carrying out acts of violence while looking down upon the same when so-called insurgents and terrorists do it. Says V. Geetha, feminist scholar: "This is a parody of what feminism has been demanding. Gender justice using peace is different from indoctrinating violence in any form. Besides, the Jayalalitha government even during its last term had espoused the politics of cooption. Superficial pro-women posturing masks the overall unaccountability of the general administration."
Moreover, an undercurrent of anti-women ideology informs the manner in which women cops have been used by the police establishment. Senior police officers often 'play dirty' while deploying women constables in tackling demonstrators. "Unarmed women police are deployed in the front. When the protesters come in contact with them, molestation is alleged, and this becomes excuse to attack the people. This is the strategy that led to the death of 17 people in police violence in Tirunelveli in July 1999," says Sudha Ramalingam, lawyer and PUCL activist. Women police, here, are clearly used as scapegoats. Talking to the 21 commandos, it emerged that not one of them had fired a single shot in their three- to five-year careers. They had at best wielded unloaded .303 rifles. Today, having mastered the art of showering bullets through an AK-47, they are immensely thrilled. But as Ramalingam says, "Training anyone, men or women, in arms should be viewed with caution. This must be tempered by values of humaneness that our police lacks."