Indian Social Science Congress
The Indian Academy of Social Science, is organizing the XXXI Indian Social Science Congress on Peop le’s Struggles and Movements for Equitable Society under the auspices of SNDT Women’s
University and Bhimrao Ambedkar Institute For Social And Economic Change between 27 and 31
December 2007 at Mumbai. The aim of the conference is to interrogate and disseminate knowledge needed to build a new democratic society, on the ideals of equity, peace and social justice.
Within this broad framework of the conference, the Research Centre for Women’s Studies, SNDT
Women’s University, Mumbai, will be organizing a three-day symposium on Women’s Struggles and
Movement for Equitable Society.
The idea is to provide Women’s Studies scholars and activists a forum to reflect upon women’s struggles for gender justice and an equitable society. It begins by documenting the hist ory of the Indian women’s movement and also examining its linkages with the broader struggles for an equitable society. As an exercise in stocktaking, the aims of the symposium are as follows:
1. To document the historical growth and development of the Indian women’s movement, since the pre-Independence era.
2. To critically examine the challenges faced by the Indian women’s movement in the past three decades to measure its strengths and failures.
3. To understand the theoretical and ideological basis of the feminist political actions.
4. To examine the changing context (in terms of ideology, state policies and global politics) in which feminist political actions have been enacted.
5. To understand the implications of these processes of socio-political change for the politics of the movement.
6. To introspect and examine the implications of “NGO-ization” of women’s groups.
7. To devise strategies to counter the current challenges and to examine the possibilities of establishing linkages with the broader peoples’ movements involving peasants, artisans, working people etc..
BACKGROUND
Rooted in the social reform and nationalist movements of the 19 th and the early 20 th centuries, the
Indian women’s movement has a long history. The emergent voices from within the women’s movement were often subsumed within the broader questions of the freedom movement and yet there were times when it was possible to hear protests against the prevailing gender inequalities. After Independence, these distinctive feminist voices became muted on the assumption that the Constitutional guarantees of gender equality would protect women’s interests. The failure of the development policies in the postindependence era led to protest movements by various categories of pressure groups including the peasants, the tribal communities, the urban working classes and students. Women also participated in these various civil rights movements led by the left parties as well as sarvodaya groups. Soon realizing the need to establish their own distinct organizations, women moved out to establish separate autonomous spaces for themselves.
These autonomous feminist groups have since the 1970s addressed questions of women’s subordination under patriarchal systems across national, geopolitical and historical boundaries. The emerging feminist voices, because of their different ideological and theoretical underpinnings, developed
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Indian Academy of Social Sciences in multiple and different directions. Despite differences, these voices had broadly located women’s subordination in the prevailing production, reproduction and sexual relationships. Further in response to the lived realities of women’s lives, feminist political action sought to ensure better legal protections for women and stringent implementation of law while dealing with gender specific crimes of rape, domestic violence and dowry-deaths; it also aimed at enabling women to access the existing goods and services in society.
The political confrontations of the women’s movement aimed at making the state more accountable for the welfare of women. As evident in the landmark Towards Equality (1974) report from
India, it also articulated a critique of the ongoing development process, which marginalized women. By the 1980s feminist theorizing became more complex as a response to the prevailing socio-political and economic upheavals. Feminist theorizing increasingly critiqued the prevailing masculine ideology; it pointed to the interconnections between women’s subordination and the destruction of the environment.
These ideas infused the various environmental, peace and anti-nuke movements across the world. The rich variety of feminist thought during this period percolated into art, culture, religion and literature.
Feminism was increasingly resonating through multiple voices. Women of colour and from developing countries were pointing to the ways in which race, class and gender were intersecting in complex ways to modify their lives.
During this decade the politics of the women’s movement aimed at dismantling state patriarchy by addressing poverty and development issues from the standpoint of women. Based on a conscious attempt to articulate the multiple voices of women, feminist politics critiqued the notions of dominance encoded in the construction of masculinities, which was responsible for the destruction of the environment, and armed conflicts across the world. In its confrontations in India, feminists noticed the inconsistencies in the responses of the state to the issues raised. They found that the state was quick to enact stringent amendments to the existing laws against rape and dowry deaths and legislate against amniocentesis; yet it also succumbed to political expediency and vacillated about justice for women in the
Shah Bano (1985) and the Roop Kanwar Sati (1987) incidents. Contrasting with these inconsistencies were some conscious measures by the state to address gender issues in its development policies. This tilt is evident in its development policy statements (such as the Shramshakti Report of the National
Commission on Self Employed Women (1987), the Challenge of Education (1985) revised and updated as a National Policy on Education (1991) and The National Policy on Health (1983); it is also evident in the attempts made to address women’s grievances by setting up the National/State Commissions for
Women, the All Women Police Stations and Family Counselling Cells. These developments signaled to the women’s movement the importance of participation in electoral politics and in the ongoing development processes.
The 1990s have brought radica l challenges: Women’s issues were increasingly articulated in international conferences, such as the Vienna Congress on Human Rights (1994) and the Fourth World
Conference for Women at Beijing (1995) and feminist theorizing acquired a degree of acceptance in the academia. Influenced by post-modern discourses, feminist theories began to dismantle notions of power/powerless, sexuality and the notions of fixed gender identities. It was also a period, when free market economies were deified and the political basis for a welfare state undermined. The decade witnessed the increased importance of IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the World Bank in determining national policies. At the outset, the various Structural Adjustment Programmes and the new trade regimes of GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) weakened state authority and regulatory powers in the name of free trade. The subsequent founding of the World Trade Organization
(WTO) in January 1995 to replace the GATT dismantles state monopolies in key sectors such as telecommunication, railways, natural resources, investments in all direct industries and services. The instrument to achieve this is the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI). As a result, nation states are becoming answerable to multinational corporate interests rather than to their citizens.
Along with other progressive groups, feminists are drawn to protests against these trends, which erode wages for the majority of workers, expand temporary/piece work, displace farmers/tribals by agribusiness, timber and power sectors, undermine existing labour laws and environmental regulations.
For apart from the economic costs of development borne by poor women, these trends are lending
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Indian Social Science Congress credence to religious, racial and ethnic fundamentalist movements round the world. The rise of global conservatism is because of the economic and cultural insecurities of the people. Fundamentalist movements are identifying the decline in traditional values as at the heart of the problem. Drawing on these traditional values (which clearly relegate women to the home), these movements detract attentions from the failures of the present economic processes. Additionally, the state/international policies are also explaining their failures by resurrecting the bogie o f the “population bomb” which targets women from poor developing countries in the various population control programmes.
Paradoxically, the 1990s also saw the enactment of the 73 rd and 74 th Constitutional Amendments aimed at the progressive devolution of political powers to local communities. Through these enactments, more than one million women for the first time in history enjoyed political power within local communities.
And yet, despite the success of these experiments, the women’s movement has not been able to muster enough support to ensure that passage of the 81 st or the 84 th Amendments through which women could represent their interests as a “critical mass” in the Parliament and state legislatures. Nonetheless, even if women were to get sufficient representation in electoral politics, the situation would not be easy. Given the ways in which caste, class and gender identities intersect, the question would remain as to how to make women elected representatives accountable to the women’s movement. In other words, who should speaks for whom? This situation is made more complex with the political reality of fragile coalitions, the rise of regional and OBC/Dalit assertiveness in party politics.
Grappling with these diverse factors, feminist politics is in a state of flux; past strategies aimed at the state have proved less effective. Confronted with an increasingly unresponsive state, which no longer maintains the fiction of social commitment, it needs to develop new political strategies and theories. W e need to understand how the system works--not just the impact of liberalization, privatization and globalization policies —but also the processes of decision making which results in the sudden privatization of certain key sectors. This understanding of policy-making processes and implementation will enable us to intervene/mitigate and, if necessary, alter the negative trends in development. It is not enough to theorize on alternative people-centered development paradigms, but rather to pragmatically examine the current processes to devise workable strategies. This would require that instead of merely looking at the impact of economic reforms on women and documenting reduction in social sector, expenditure or employment, feminist politics must grapple with institutional changes that have occurred and the new reformulations within them. This would require that we re-examine our beliefs, our theories and to develop conceptual clarity on strategies what will energize people’s collective power. A moot question would be whether the feminist agenda of gender justice would be best achieved by aligning with other oppressed groups, or by maintaining a distinct identity?
This would also mean a critical assessment of feminist politics and theory in the past three decades, to understand the gains and shortfalls. This introspection would also require a fresh assessment of the state policies that have had negative implications for women. So far documentation on the feminist movement has revolved around its history and the key issues it took up. In this seminar, we propose to chart the underlying premises of feminist action to assess their implications in the light of the present political reality. To realize this we also need to understand some of the major instruments and institutional changes proposed as well as already installed. Some of the sub themes that we propose to examine in the symposium are as follows:
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Indian Academy of Social Sciences
2. Changing Socio-Economic Context: New Challenges
3. The Changing Nature of the State and Shrinking Political Space
4. Institutional Reform/Retrogressions
5. The Functioning of Regulatory Systems
6. Expanding Civil Societies: The Role of Non-Government Organizations and Forging
Links with the Broader People’s Struggles
WHOM TO CONTACT?
Please write to the following if you want to present a paper at the national symposium on
‘Women’s Struggles And Movements For Discrimination-Free Equitable Society’ :
Dr. Veena Poonacha
Chairperson
Director
Research Centre For Women Studies
SNDT Women’s University
Sri Vithaldas Vidyavihar,
Santacruz West
Mumbai-400020
Tel: 022-28474565; M. 0-9223417701dc
E-mail: veena_poonacha@yahoo.co.uk
rcwssndt@bomz.vsnl.net.in
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