Women Movements in India: Redefining definitions of Democracy -Manisha Arya
Women Movements in India: Redefining definitions of Democracy
-Manisha Arya
Women movement in India is based on wide range of issues as there have been such movements at various points of time aimed at transformation in society but also reflects the emancipation of women themselves. The coming forward of women from widely varying socio economic conditions seeking pattern of changes, new demands, new assertions whose influence not only remains limited to relatively small sections of movement but also mobilises women and make them more conscious positively and respectively. Women in India have demonstrated their autonomy through these movements through exercising collective leadership in a democratic manner.
Objective
To understand whether substantially women-led movements have been politically recognized.
Research Question
How the women’s participation is a reformulation of public life to address wide range of issues involving various approaches that enhances their political participation?
Methodology
The work is based on critical analysis of the literature and secondary sources.
INTRODUCTION
Around the late 1970s and early 1980s the autonomous women’s movement began to take shape mainly around the issue of rape, bride burning, Domestic and sexual violence against the women and even girls who are not even fifteen, assault, molestation, dowry etc. The groups which mushroomed in various cities and villages consisted of women from distinct backgrounds who were from lower, middle and upper strata of the society. Although the groups remained small in number and some massively populated like one of the gulabi gang were highly visible as some of them received wide media publicity. This acted as a pressure tactic and the state was forced to respond.
Women’s issues found place in the agenda of state-sponsored developmental schemes, social work programmes and sociological research. The anti-dowry police cells were set up by government to help victims of domestic violence. There were also several efforts at legislative reforms although the formulated laws did not have the desired effects. The autonomous women’s movement focused on issues which challenged the patriarchal power structures within a broad liberal framework.
Case Study
Gulabi gang:
Also known as pink gang, established its headquarters in the dusty agricultural town of Badausa, Banda, plagued by years of droughts and is listed amongst the poorest district of the nation. Over 20 percent of the 1.6 million people living in Banda’s 600 villages lie in the lowest scales of the rigid caste hierarchies and are low-caste groups, known as Dalits, and discrimination in any form against them has been banned by the Indian Constitution. However, legal directives and actions have little effect on social practices and prejudices, and high-caste continues to repress Dalit communities subsisting at the margins of struggling agricultural economies (Ciotti 2006). The Rural women bear the bane of poverty, illiteracy, and discrimination in such highly feudalistic society.
Sampat who was married to an ice cream vendor is a mother of five children. She was also a former government health worker who played a pioneering role in setting up the gang rebelling against caste, gendered inequities and domestic and sexual violence at an early age—when faced with her parents' resistance to her receiving an education she began drawing on the walls, the floors, and dusty village streets so the parents finally acquiesced and sent her to school. She couldn’t get further education when she was married off at the age of nine and, subsequently, had her first child at thirteen. To increase her meager family income, she began working as a government health-worker, which brought her into close contact with the socio-economic problems of rural women. After quitting her job in frustration she felt the state government does not a bit to alleviate the pitiable conditions of muted village communities.
On one evening in 2002, Pal heard rumours that her neighbourhood friend had been beaten by her alcoholic husband and that the local police, chronically indifferent to violence against women, had looked the other way. When she went to rescue her friend from a fraught household she gathered some neighbours returned to her friend’s house and thrashed the abusive husband in view of the community. This event lit Sampat’s aspiration to create a band of women fighters. Words sampat says were “In our villages where food is scarce and there has been a drought-like situation for ten years, women are the most abused.” She says that she realized that under these conditions, a woman has to fight to survive.
Munnar Plantation Act:
In Kerala, tea leaf pickers are nearly all women and work 14 hours a days, six days a week. What’s more, they earn the lowest minimum daily wage of any sector in the state, a meager average of Rs. 231 a day. In a Strike of 2015, organized by the Pempilai Orumai women, against the Kannan Devan Hills Tea Plantation revealed the ways in which female tea workers in South India have attempted to dismantle deep seeded inequality. This movement explored the role of tea and the female labour movement in the development of rural South India and revealed the role of inadequate and corrupt trade unions in sparking the strike, the rudimentary list of demands set forward by the strike organizers, and a host of unanticipated consequences that followed.
Female tea plantation labourers have been described as “overworked, consistently underpaid, and sometimes sexually harassed and bullied,” enduring gendered and inhuman working and living conditions since the plantation industry’s inception in the 18th century.
Anti-Liquor Movement:
The anti-Arrack movement was a result of tireless efforts put in by women tirelessly towards a cause in solidarity which stands testimony to include women from different classes, castes and urban and rural populations. This movement began after Nellore liquor movement and proceeded to stop the auctioning of liquor shops on October 16, 21nd 23 at Kurnool and led protests, blocked roads to stop the collector and the SP from reaching the place where the liquor auction was supposed to take place, etc. These illiterate women led by an educated woman called Sandhya (vice-president of a progressive organisation for women, Stree Vimukti), who is called 'akka' (sister) by all poor women and men, old and young of the whole area. The social complications that emerge from drinking are no less. Women cite example after example of how someone misbehaved with his mother or sister.
The women in these areas sit at the liquor shop to keep a watch on selling and drinking because the police have said "we do not bother if you control drinking but we will intervene if you destroy liquor packets". So they simply sit and keep a watch. Every woman criticises her drinking husband and exposes the economic problems due to liquor consumption. The women had developed their own intelligence network and as they got information about the trucks, ran to the outskirts of the village and stopped them. The police too had rushed there promptly but with instructions not to let loose terror but wait and watch the women. The contractor refused to take the trucks back and the women refused to leave the spot. For two days and two nights the women kept the trucks there. They mobilised stocks of rice, vegetables and cooked there. Their children were put to sleep in 'jholas' hung from trees.
Critical Analysis:
The Indian women's movement illustrates the intersection of a multitude of interests: caste, class, ethnicity, religion, and region (rural/urban). The movement currently faces a host of challenges to the efforts to define social change for women, build solidarity, and create new waves of activism in the complex circumstances of the twenty-first century. Women’s movements that emerged around this period demanded significant changes in the functioning of the state, the planning process, and even development strategies. Women’s movement reasserted the claims for participation in political and developmental process as equals. Political participation is a complex phenomenon. The participation of women demands simple justice, essentially.
This can be achieved not just by increasing the numbers but by ensuring that women leaders perceive the problems and effectively resolve the issues. The acceptance of their own equality and confidence in their ability will go a long way in altering the political scenario. Women can be effective change agents and important contributors to the national development. Their status can be co-related to their participating rights and obligations in managing society as they are always restricted to the periphery of power structure. They lack the political consciousness needed to formulate and implement policies in accordance with the aspirations of women. Their presence is a mere 'symbolism' rather than 'real power wielding'. A successful democracy requires a participant society in which power is shared and authoritative decisions are made by representatives of all citizens.
Development can only takes place when women are given decision-making roles. Their participation and political will depends upon individual experiences of negotiating the private and the public issues in day to day life and within voices, sometimes single, sometimes collective, which have gone unnoticed and unarticulated. Women’s sense of common identity needs to strengthen through articulation of the elements of feminist consciousness and special quality of women's leadership. Empowerment is a processes that enables women to gain access to, and control of, material, intellect substance. Political empowerment of women is part of the overall empowerment. Women should advocate for a polity. And although bringing more women into politics does not generally lead to fundamental change in policies, we would still contend that women do have unrealized potential in politics. Women’s potential could be realized by bringing them in the ambit of politics that could be one of the ways of bringing fundamental changes in society.
Conclusion
Indira Gandhi stated that liberation of women could be achieved only when she is free in context of her own capacities which increases their participatory base at least due to born as human beings.
When the poor women self-organize themselves provides the base for their political activity. The groups at their own initiatives create and claim a political space of their own within communities where local government has not adequately developed deeper political participation which provides them a commonplace. Through proper dialogues the importance of organised groups of women having autonomous space, where they can progress from being less visible contributors to development and governance, to being recognised as community leaders, whose views are listened to and acted upon by the government can be done. The movements have increased the participation of women in the public sphere for mobilising effectively and raise voice against social injustices through their interventions and giving space for dialogue and political negotiation.
Indian society is a constant recurrence of women’s movements. Therefore, we can say that women’s participation is a celebration of women empowerment and transforming definitions of democracy.
REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Andhra Pradesh's Anti-Liquor Movement Author(s): Kancha Ilaiah Source: Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 27, No. 45 (Nov. 7, 1992), pp. 2406-2408
- Spring 2017,Munnar Plantation Strike, 2015: a Case Study of Keralan Female Tea Workers’ Fight for Justice Shoshana Levy, SIT ,Study Abroad
- Women’s studies in India: A journey of 25 years- Madhu Vij, Manjeet Bhatia,Shelly Pandey
- Women’s studies in India edited by Mary E. John- A reader
- Feminism in India edited by Maitrayee Chaudhuri
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