Azra Jafari wins Meeto Memorial Award for Young South Asians 2011

22 September, Islamabad:  The Meeto Memorial Award Trust, Rozan and Sungi are pleased to honour Azra Jafari as the winner of the Meeto Memorial Award 2011. Azra is Afghanistan’s first and only woman mayor whose work and commitment towards social development have made a crucial difference to local development. 

The Award will be presented to Azra Jafari by Asma Jahangir, Pakistan’s leading lawyer, Chairperson of the Human Rights Commission and a tireless human rights activist and Hameeda Hossain, the eminent civil-rights and women’s rights activist from Bangladesh, in a ceremony that will be held at the Pakistan National Council of Arts on 22^nd September starting 7 P.M.

Among others attending the ceremony will be activists from different countries of South Asia, many of whom will also be attending the Rozan-orgainsed conference titled “Reclaiming Space: from victimhood to agency: state and civil-society response to violence against women”. A troupe of male dancers from India, led by Navtej Johar, a well-known and awarded dancer, will perform Fana’a, a revised version of the legendary tale of Heer. The Zarsanga group, performers from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, will regale the audience with folk songs.

The Award has been instituted in the memory of Meeto or Kamaljit Bhasin-Malik (1978-2006), a scholar, activist and dancer, by her mother, Kamla Bhasin. The award aims to honour young South Asians whose work demonstrates a commitment to communal harmony, peace, justice and human rights. The Award comprises of one lakh Indian Rupees, a citation and a memento.

It is a special privilege for the Award Trust that the ceremony for 2011 is being held in Pakistan, thanks to the collaboration of Rozan and Sungi, two eminent civil-society partners. Another reason that the venue of the Award gains significance is that last year’s winner, Akeela Naz, is from Pakistan.

Akeela does not need any introduction in Pakistan—she is the persona behind the ‘Thapa force’, an army of protesting women farmers, a grassroots revolutionary fighting for the rights of a million landless farmers. Though Akeela was one of the many who joined the AMP, she was the first woman to do so. Starting the year 2000, Akeela actively campaigned across the Punjab province and organized women into self-defense committees. Women learnt to use their thapas as a weapon for self-protection and to guard their lands and families against encroaching police forces. It finally forced the government to give in to AMP’s demand of land ownership by tenant farmers. Akeela was one of the main interlocutors during the ultimate parleys with the government.

The first-ever Meeto Memorial Award 2009 was awarded to Anusheh Anadil, a Bangladeshi singer and peace activist, and Laxmi Ben Vankar, an Indian social worker and activist in a ceremony held in New Delhi in October 2009, the first-ever inaugural ceremony that was attended by over 200 members of civil society including artists, activists, academicians and diplomats, including guests from Bangladesh and Pakistan.

About Meeto

Meeto (Kamaljit Bhasin-Malik; 1978-2006) was a scholar, activist and dancer. She studied at Sardar Patel Vidyalaya, New Delhi and Rishi Valley School in Andhra Pradesh. She graduated with first class honours in History from Stephen’s College. She won the Radhakrishnan-British Chevening Scholarship to study history at St Hilda’s College in Oxford University and graduated from there also with first class honours.

Between 2001 and 2004, Meeto researched and wrote on projects ranging from the refugee problem in post-Partition Punjab to the role of parliamentarians in Indian democracy and the role of the colonial census in creating monolithic identities in Sri Lanka (research that led her to spend three months with the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo).

She was the first primary coordinator of SAHR (South Asians for Human Rights) and helped organize the first general convention of SAHR in Neemrana, Rajasthan in 2002 and in Delhi the year after. Between 2003 and mid-2004, she worked as a programme associate at the Ford Foundation in Delhi working on human rights and development issues.

In 2004, Meeto won the Clarendon fellowship and returned to Oxford University. Her pre-doctoral research, tragically interrupted by her passing away in 2006, is published under the title “In the Making: Identity Formation in South Asia” by the Three Essays Collective.

As a dancer, Meeto performed with Leela Samson’s dance production Spanda across India and in Bangladesh.

Meeto’s academic and professional interests were at one with the way she lived.  She revelled in the aesthetic traditions of the multiple religious and cultural traditions to which she was an heir as a South Asian citizen.

To commemorate her brief but brilliant life, Meeto’s mother, Kamla Bhasin has decided to institute an award in her memory to honour young South Asians whose work demonstrates a commitment to communal harmony, peace, justice and human rights. The Award comprises of Indian Rupees one lakh, a citation and a memento. If more than one person is selected, the money will be shared. The recipients will be invited to present their work at the award ceremony. The Award will be announced in October every year. The recipients of the Award will be chosen by a selection committee whose decision will be final.

The Meeto Memorial Award for Young South Asians is managed by ANHAD and Sangat.