Kick him in the groin! And pull him by the neck (performs drill),” thunders Usha.
“Woah!” reacts the audience.
“It’s very easy,” Usha continues, following it up with a snare.
“Most attackers who use knives often pull you towards the wall. How will you save yourself? What will you do? Even a small mistake can prove deadly.” She looks at the audience. ‘Punch!’ shout some. ‘Kick’, shout others.
“Scratch his face,” Usha counters. “He will have to use his hands to save his eyes.” She then performs the drill on a male volunteer.
“What if he had grabbed me by the neck,” Usha asks next, and goes on to demonstrate some Krav Maga, the Israeli self-defence technique. “Hit at the most vulnerable point. Do it with a jhatka (jerk),” she says, and slaps the boy hard on his wrist causing him to lose grip. “Smack his wrist, not his forearm.”
It is mid-morning on a regular working day at Army Public School in Lucknow’s Cantonment area. Around 200 students, all girls, have gathered in an auditorium in one corner of the campus. They watch attentively as Usha Vishwakarma and her team of five volunteers demonstrate self-defence techniques. They are dressed in red T-shirts and black trousers — red for struggle and black as a mark of protest. The colours represent the ethos behind Red Brigade, the non-profit organisation that Usha leads.
Street warriors
Much like the famed Gulabi Gang that took root in the State in the early 2000s to help victims of domestic violence, volunteers of Red Brigade, composed almost entirely of survivors of rape and sexual harassment, patrol the streets of Lucknow and help young women in distress. The group is the subject of a recent Al Jazeera documentary that featured Usha and other abuse survivors, some as young as 17. The documentary shows the girls conducting street plays and engaging not just women but also men in conversations on consent and equality.
LUCKNOW, UTTAR PRADESH,23/08/2017: RED BRIGADE WOMEN SELF DEFENCE:: Usha Vishwakarma, co founder of Red Brigade, Lucknow, teaching self defence tactics in case of adverse condition . In 2010, Ajay Patel had been working for woman empowerment with many non-governmental organizations (NGO). He found Usha Vishwakarma, who was a survivor and ardant social worker who survived an attempted sexual assault by a coworker at the age of eighteen. Usha's locality had more such survivors. Ajay formed a team of 15 girls including Usha and started conducting series of self-defense workshops for girls. Photo Rajeev Bhatt
Today, the team is visiting the school as part of its ‘100 schools 100 days’ campaign to impart self-defence know how and confidence-building training to girl students.
“If there is a group attack, how will you save yourself?” Usha continues. She asks her team to enact the situation. “Stalkers come prepared. They pick a place that is isolated,” Usha says.
The audience responds with giggles.
“You are laughing now, but what will you do should you find yourself in such a situation, god forbid?” Usha asks in a slightly stern voice. .
The girls fall silent. “Target one of the stalkers and pick the direction in which you can run. Stay alert and confident. If you are not confident, even a pistol will not help in self defence,” Usha roars.
Since its inception in 2011, Red Brigade has trained about 47,000 girls and women, a volunteer says. The organisation has also run several awareness campaigns and workshops on self defence, gender discrimination and concepts like ‘good touch and bad touch’. As part of their activities, they also reach out to families of rape survivors, and help them overcome the trauma and file a police complaint.
In 2006, Usha was teaching in a slum near Lucknow when a co-worker tried to rape her. “I was always very sharp and alert, but that incident left me shocked. People tried to tell me that I was in the wrong. I had seen such things on TV. But when it happened to me, I was in a trauma,” she recalls.
Breaking the myth
The incident proved to be her primary motivation. Usha undertook martial arts training and, already doing social work from 2005, she intensified her activism and collaborated with other abuse survivors to raise awareness about sexual violence. They started with nukkad natak , workshops and protest marches. Self-defence also became an integral part of their campaign. Satyabrat Singh, a Red Brigade volunteer, says the idea is to break the myth of the weaker sex. “We teach them to say ‘No’. Fighting comes later.”
“It is more important to increase confidence,” says Usha. We try to bring out their strength; make them understand they are strong.” ‘Fight back, be alert. Always be prepared’ reads the banner the group has put up at Army Public School. Over the years, Usha has crafted a set of about 25 self-defence techniques she calls ‘nishasthra kala’, a combination of self-defence moves and improvised stunts.
Red Brigade’s campaign, however, is not restricted to physical training. Every session of their 100-day campaign begins with a narration of an inspirational story of a woman hero. At Army Public School, the students are being told the story of Urdu writer Rashid Jahan, whose book Angaaray was banned in 1932 by fundamentalists as it dealt with sexual morality.
