Growing women's movement in India

April 30, 1997
Issue 

SUJATHA FERNANDES recently spent a year in India working with various women's groups and organisations. Following is an abridged version of her talk, sponsored by Green Left Weekly, to mark International Women's Day in Sydney.

Last year cosmetic companies and industries sponsored a Miss World contest in Bangalore. The contest was divided into sections, with each of the different parts of the body — Miss Legs, Miss Eyes, Miss Breasts and Miss Smile — sponsored by different cosmetic companies. The whole spectacle was beamed live across the subcontinent and promoted for weeks beforehand.

Ten years ago Indian feminists would have said that body image and beauty were issues for white feminists only. Today it is not even true that these are exclusively middle-class issues. I stayed in a boarding house in Calcutta where the domestic servants, girls aged 12 and 14 who were on an income of barely $10 a month, would sit glued in front of the TV commercials for beauty products and spend the majority of their income on them.

The structural adjustment policies of Indian governments over the last two decades have given impetus to export-oriented industrialisation. The entry of young single women, mostly from peasant families, into these industries brought a generation of women into direct contact with international capitalism.

Waged work has made these women independent and given them greater social freedoms by allowing them to delay child bearing and marriage. However, traditional sexist ideology is still requires women to do most of the unpaid labour in the home and in subsistence agriculture. They are paid lower wages than men and sexually exploited in the workplace.

The International Monetary Fund's structural adjustment policies have given rise to the economic and sexual exploitation of women in export processing zones, where 70-80% of workers are young women; predicted unemployment of 8 million in the next few years; and cuts in subsidies to health care, child-care, education and food.

Cooption

NGOs are a powerful force in the Indian women's movement. In Uttarakhand alone, there are 400 NGOs focusing on women's issues. The government has used NGOs to coopt a very radical and left-oriented movement.

NGO work provides "band-aid" solutions to major environmental and social catastrophes. NGOs obscure the fact that poverty, unemployment, illiteracy and environmental destruction are caused by an internationalist capitalist system that exploits Third World people and natural resources.

Some NGOs are doing useful work among women. But in many cases, NGO work funded by institutions such as the World Bank is tailored to the interests of the First World.

Innovations in Family Planning Services (IFPS) in the state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) took me to a number of villages where the women workers explained that their aim was to raise the health, living standards and education of women by providing them with contraceptives.

I was horrified when the IFPS worker tried to convince every woman we came across that she should be sterilised, and that it was a quick, harmless procedure. I was not surprised to learn that the project was sponsored by USAID in collaboration with the Indian government.

The state has also coopted the women's movement by encouraging activists to become paid workers. In the hill areas of UP a strong women's movement developed from the famous Chipko struggle to defend forests in the '70s. Since then the state has poured money into organisations set up by the popular movement, turning former activists into paid workers and transforming organisations of struggle into passive NGOs.

At last year's International Women's Day, NGO women argued for the march and rally theme to be "Celebrate" rather than take up political themes. The left women's organisation, the All India Progressive Women's Association (AIPWA), suggested slogans such as "We demand the right to education for all women", and "No to sexual violence", but these were rejected by the NGO women as too "confrontational".

AIPWA eventually left the committee and organised a march which attracted nearly 10,000 women, largely composed of poor urban, rural and slum women. The official NGO march attracted only 800 women, mainly from NGOs and the urban middle class.

Postmodernism

Another trend having a major impact is postmodernism. This has been particularly acute in the wake of the collapse of Stalinism and the resulting pessimism among sections of the left about the possibility of permanent social change.

Postmodernism, as espoused by western academics, argues that the world can no longer be understood in class terms. Movements are said to be monolithic structures which subsume differences and power relations.

Postmodernism was the theme at last year's Calcutta Book Fair, one of the biggest academic events of the year, organised by the ruling Communist Party of India-Marxist state government.

The shift to postmodernism by many academics and activists has had a demobilising effect.

A well-known literary theorist, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who calls herself a Marxist, deconstructivist, postmodernist, post-structuralist feminist, regularly addresses women's groups in her home town, Calcutta. The last time she presented a paper in the usual dense postmodernist style to a group of rural women, the audience became very angry and asked her how it was relevant to their lives. When she couldn't answer, they asked her to translate her paper into Bengali, which of course she couldn't!

I saw the way postmodernism is dividing the women's movement. In Delhi young women from the Communist Party of India-Marxist Leninist (CPI-ML) were interested in radical politics and had joined the All India Students Association (AISA), but they spent a lot of their time discussing Derrida, Foucault, Irrigary, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and eco-feminists such as Vandana Shiva.

When we took part in the IWD rally, these women were reluctant to have discussions with, or relate to, the masses of urban poor, peasant and working-class women attending because they felt that they were so different and that they couldn't fight together because they would be "appropriating their issues".

Autonomous groups

Those autonomous women's groups still involved in struggles are those affiliated to left parties. They are no longer fighting just local or national enemies, but the international economic order.

Autonomous and left party-affiliated women's groups have their roots in a strong independence movement and left tradition. Many women were involved in the Indian independence struggle, mobilised by the Communist Party, the Congress Party and the Gandhian movement.

However, in the '70s there was great disillusionment with the Congress government and the Communist Party, which was in government in two states. A movement of agricultural tenants started in Naxalbari, and as this spread to the rest of the country there was a rebellion among young people on campuses. From this Naxalite movement, the Communist Party of India-Marxist Leninist (CPI-ML) was formed.

This movement gave rise to a number of revolutionary ideas and movements, in particular autonomous women's movements, and it sharply redefined the old left's reformist agenda.

Among the many women's groups to spring up was the Progressive Organisation of Women. POW drew strong parallels between caste, class and gender oppression and highlighted the economic dependence of women on men.

POW comprised women from many backgrounds, including left parties, civil liberties organisations, student groups and trade unions. Groups such as POW have played a major role in fighting sexism and such anti-women religious practices and customs as dowry and sati. They have also campaigned against violence against women, been active in environmental struggles and led anti-price rise movements.

However, the lack of a strong connection between these groups and the socialist movement often meant that they ebbed after achieving only some partial reforms.

The traditional left parties, the CPI and the CPI-M, have always had large affiliated women's organisations, but they have tended to be undemocratic and not challenged women's subordination. I met a number of women party activists who felt that their party had never seriously challenged sexual inequality, cultivated female leadership or addressed the problems of poor rural women.

Women party activists were also responsible for domestic chores both at home and within the party. The first generation of communist women did not question the party's neglect of gender issues. Having taken the radical step of severing ties with their parents, they sought protection from their male comrades and were often financially dependent on the party.

It has been difficult for the CPI-ML to break with this tradition, although there is a real desire within the party to fight sexism. The CPI-ML and its women's organisation, AIPWA, are playing a major role in the women's movement.

AIPWA believes that women's oppression in the Third World is a product of the global economic system, and made worse by religious fundamentalism and traditional practices. It concludes that to win liberation, women have to change the whole system and create a socialist society that gives them control over their resources, livelihoods, bodies and lives.

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