Indian Ladies UK’s founder Poonam Joshi has been honoured with the “Shakti” award at the annual Proud Indian Women Shakti Sangamam Shakti Awards held in Manchester.
The ceremony is organized by the eponymous Shakti Sangamam, a Manchester-based group that empowers women of South Asian origin through education, vocational training and healthcare and, advocates for women’s rights.
Ms Joshi is a veteran journalist who has worked as the UK correspondent for the Indian TV network ABP News and the newswire service ANI. She’s also a columnist and contributor to British media outlets, including the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian, where she most recently helped expose the shocking plight of migrant care workers from South Asia working in the UK.
Over the past decade she has also carved out a reputation for being a passionate and outspoken campaigner for the rights of first generation migrant South Asian women exploited by their British citizen or resident spouses and those who move to the UK and fall victim to shocking domestic violence and spousal abandonment.
The vehicle of her campaigning work has been Indian Ladies in UK (ILUK), the community forum that she founded in 2015 as a ‘townhall’ for first generation South Asian migrant women but which has expanded well beyond that remit to evolve into an organization that has helped and rescued hundreds of vulnerable women from all walks of life originating from right across India.
She has frequently opened up her own home for victims and worked tirelessly to help raise thousands of pounds to help these women, including to lobby governmental organizations to repatriate women who have been callously abandoned in India – frequently along with young children – by their spouses.
In honouring her, Shakti Sangamam praised Ms Joshi’s contributions to “social change” which, combined with her “passion for the arts, literature and theatre”, has “inspired countless individuals to strive for a more inclusive and compassionate world”.
Shakti Awards founder Mahalakshmi Suresh with Journalist Poonam Joshi
Acknowledging the honour, Ms Joshi said: “I’m truly humbled by this recognition by Shakti Sangamam and I thank them profusely. Campaigning on behalf of the most vulnerable in our society – women and children – can often feel like lonely work but what sets organizations like Shakti Sangamam and ILUK apart is that we are a sisterhood, formed of and run by women – mothers, sisters and aunts, women whose whole existence and life ethos is underpinned by compassion, empathy and the desire to preserve and cherish our heritage”.
Protecting that heritage is a key component of Shakti Sangamam.
As founders, Karthikeyan Murugesan and Mahalakshmi Suresh attest: “If you look within the diaspora, women are at the forefront of carrying culture and heritage forward and passing it on to the future generations. British Indians have been in this country for a long time but our children are still, to this day, taking Carnatic music classes or kathak classes. I think that is mainly down to the wonderful and passionate women in our societies who have kept the culture going and alive.”
To that end, other award categories included ‘Artistic Excellence Award, ‘Business Leader Award’, ‘Young Icon Award’ and ‘Literacy Leader Award’ – and the winners were chosen on merit as well as votes from the community, which created quite the buzz in the community in Manchester.
