Illustration: Bilash Rai / Himal Southasian September 2006
Illustration: Bilash Rai / Himal Southasian September 2006

Taming of the Indian shrew

Feminist outrage and the demand for women’s rights seem to have been shelved as we enter the Era of Gender Mainstreaming.

Laxmi Murthy heads the Hri Institute for Southasian Research and Exchange and is a Contributing Editor for Himal Southasian.

Vibrant, forceful, dynamic, strident. Many more terms can be used to depict the Indian women's movement, but these will suffice to describe some of the great transformative events of the second half of the 20th century – a period of exhilarating social upheaval. Although 'women's issues' are being picked up and debated everywhere, we find the voices of the movement somewhat muted today. There has definitely been a dumbing down of the cause. To what do we owe this? Has the mainstreaming of gender blunted the edge of the women's liberation movement? Can the movement be reclaimed?

In the 1970s, organisations of the New Left and mass-based organisations mobilised around issues of social injustice. Tribal landless labourers led movements against the exploitative practices of non-tribal local landowners, land alienation and extortion by moneylenders. Women were at the forefront of these struggles, and began to take direct action on issues that affected them specifically as women – liquor, for instance, and the physical violence and indebtedness associated with alcoholism.

Similarly, the Anti-Price Rise Movement in Maharashtra following the drought of the early 1970s brought women together under the banner of the United Women's Anti-Price Rise Front. This militant campaign saw thousands of housewives taking to the streets in protest, marching with thalis and rolling pins, challenging government dormancy and demanding action against black-marketeers.

All over the country, women participated actively in movements for social transformation. The Garhwal hills were home to the Chipko movement, initiated by rural women to prevent destruction of forests by contractors and government officials acting in collusion. Moving beyond the immediate objective of saving trees, Chipko came to symbolise women's relationships with the environment and their crucial role in maintaining ecological balance.

Although gender oppression and the need to organise around it had long been recognised, it was only in the late 1970s, in the ferment following Indira Gandhi's Emergency of 1975-77, that independent activists firmly put women's liberation on the agenda. What became known as autonomous women's groups (AWGs) emerged in several cities of India in the early 1980s, so called because they were not affiliated with political parties and remained independent of the government. These feminist groups were loosely structured and functioned as collectives, incorporating newer and more democratic forms of leadership. Groups that sought to rid society of domination and hierarchy, it was thought, must also have evolved organisation that reflected egalitarian principles.

The Forum against Oppression of Women in Bombay, Stree Sangharsh and Saheli in Delhi, Stree Shakti Sanghatana in Hyderabad and Vimochana in Bangalore were some of the groups that emerged around this time. The slogan of the day, 'Personal is political', articulated the attempt to link oppression in individual women's lives with patriarchal structures in society. The idea was to fight these structures collectively.

Small groups, big noises

Removing the veil on violence against women was one of the most significant achievements of the feminist movement. In the 1970s, these activists broke the silence around wife-battering, domestic violence, marital rape, child incest and violence against lesbian women. For the first time, the dark side of the family was exposed, and the demand was made for intervention on matters hitherto regarded as 'private'. The autonomous women's movement also articulated women's rage against state repression, which found its most cruel manifestation in custodial rape. Activists also raised their voices against rape and murder by security forces – especially in the Northeast and Kashmir. The vulnerability of women during communal and caste conflict was a matter of huge concern, as was the targeting of women in the name of a community's 'honour'.

The same period saw vehement protest against the subjection of women to contraceptive trials in the name of controlling overpopulation, and the demand was made for safer, non-invasive methods of contraception for both men and women. The AWGs fought laws of each religion that discriminated against women. Because this issue was left pending by the authorities, India still lacks a civil code based on the equality principle, and women remain at the mercy of iniquitous religious laws under the control of increasingly fundamentalist community leaders.

The lack of women's control over sexuality, reproduction and production was highlighted by groups that fought for the recognition of women's labour – both in paid employment and unpaid domestic work. The fundamental dispossession and marginalisation of women in the economic sphere was a major arena of struggle against patriarchy – reflected in interpersonal male-female relationships, the family, the community, and in actions of the state and international actors. Women clamoured for radical transformation, but the governments, the lending institutions and development agencies responded with sops.

The success of the movement in gaining women visibility and making their voices heard had a flip side that activists were ill-equipped to handle. Institutionalised funding, which lapped up 'women's issues' with a vengeance, led to a rapid depoliticisation, as the spontaneous anti-authoritarian campaigns of the women's movement became replaced by gender sensitisation, training and 'empowerment' of women. Even as women's groups realised that no amount of sensitisation and empowerment would change the basic material conditions of women unless patriarchal structures were transformed, the need to earn livelihoods – and the even more insidious need to be seen as making a difference in women's lives – led many an NGO to get swept up in the tide of 'empowerment' programs.

Micro-credit, macro-hype

Over the last decade, micro-credit has been promoted as a panacea to multiple ills: poverty, disease, illiteracy and women's subordinate status. NGOs in every corner have abandoned other welfare activities and enthusiastically climbed onto the bandwagon, setting up a plethora of self-help groups (SHGs). Go to any village in India and what you will find – besides dry wells, leaky hand pumps and skinny cattle – is the ubiquitous SHG.

But the time has come to raise disquieting issues. The 'happy' face of micro-credit is that women become a conduit for bringing credit to the family; the 'sad' face is that women are left eternally burdened, struggling to make this small loan viable and to ensure repayment. Women are often only able to ensure repayment by cutting down on their own consumption or seeking wage labour. Micro-credit does not generate employment – only self-employment, and that too on an unviable scale. There are innumerable examples of subcontracting on exploitative terms, with scant respect for labour laws.

Ironically, in most micro-finance schemes, the women's own money is locked up even as they are forced to take out loans against their own savings at a higher interest. NGOs have become collecting agents for banks trying to increase their penetration of credit, which only creates more dependence. Back-to-back lending ensures that women are constantly in debt. It may be no coincidence that Andhra Pradesh, often quoted as a 'success story' of micro-credit, is also the Indian state with the highest number of suicides due to debt

Agricultural and other subsidies are being taken away as a right, and credit given as a burden. Moreover, the cash orientation of micro-credit is premised on an analysis of exploitative usury arrangements, rather than an analysis of the breakdown of food security or the mutuality of village systems. We find that women often approached the moneylender for food security, market access or crisis expenditure, and that these needs are now being met by SHGs without addressing such fundamental questions as: Why is there food insecurity? Why do producers not have market access? Why do only girls' families have to spend on dowry?

That micro-credit will empower women and enable poverty alleviation is a myth propagated by international agencies to draw people into a market economy based on cash or credit. Promoters of micro-credit are steadily building markets in smaller towns and rural areas, a 'penetration' they lacked previously. In cahoots with international lending agencies, the state finds this a 'win-win' scheme that allows it to give up its responsibilities for the citizens' development and welfare. For at the core of the micro-credit approach lies the assumption that people are responsible to lift themselves out of poverty. There is a blindness to the structures of economy and society that conspire to keep people poor.

Micro-lending, after all, cannot change macro structures. To some extent, it can create space for rural women by providing them with more mobility and exposure, but this happens within a restricted framework and a pre-set agenda. Micro-credit does not transform, it shackles. Instead of mere 'access' – to credit – we need to speak about entitlement for women in the realms of land rights, purchase and control of assets. These are questions that only genuine movements for social change can address, but which are drowned amidst the cacophony of the development market.

Shaping women's 'choices'

The women's movement is placed in a peculiar position: it wants to spread the good word, but is unhappy with the way in which the word gets distorted. Co-option by market forces is another inevitable, though harder to resist, aspect of mainstreaming. Thus we have 8 March, International Women's Day, stripped of its political content and sponsored by Ponds or Whirlpool. Celebrated is a woman's 'choice' between this body lotion and the next, one dishwasher over the other.

The question of women's 'choice' – often cited as a justification of sex selection and hazardous injectable contraceptives – is mired in a multitude of layers within which women in a patriarchal society make choices. When these conflicting interests are mediated through rights discourses and legislative interventions, the issue of choice loses some of its nuance.

While it would be misplaced to entirely deny agency to women who undergo sex determination tests, use hazardous hormonal contraceptives or put themselves through risky cosmetic surgery, it would be equally wrong to think of 'choice' in a vacuum. Much as the images and subliminal messages in advertising and marketing techniques drive consumer 'choices', social context, prejudice and norms shape the 'choices' women make.

Patriarchy leaves little room for autonomous decision-making by women. Women are constantly under pressure – both visible and invisible – to make decisions that do not threaten the prevailing social norm. Deviating from social norms brings with it a range of strictures – from social disapproval, ostracism and psychological torture to outright violence. Women with only female children, for instance, are often subjected to taunting and social boycotting, and are under threat of being deserted, divorced, battered and even murdered. Little wonder that women 'choose' to ensure that they have sons, or try to fit a specific notion of 'beauty'.

Mainstreamed movements

The past three decades have witnessed an increasing flow of resources from donor agencies and the United Nations system into gender issues. The eagerness with which 'gender' as a category has been picked up has inevitably contributed to the blunting of the early militancy of the women's liberation movement. With the UN system, governments, the market and rightwing fundamentalists wholeheartedly embracing the concept of gender equity, women's rights inevitably take a back seat. With more and more NGOs espousing the cause of 'gender', we find that civil society is expanding, only to leave us with a smaller political space. To talk of gender – a postmodern notion that attempts to go beyond the stark 'hierarchy of oppression' that 'patriarchy' denotes – is all very well, but whatever happened to the women's liberation movement? What happened to political feminism?

Through the medium of the development industry, the state and the market (in the guise of gender mainstreaming) have appropriated the jargon, slogans and symbols of the women's movement. One example is the de-politicised notion of 'reproductive rights'. Women's groups have asserted that the debate on women's reproductive rights must account for the fact that reproduction is only one aspect of women's physiology and life, and cannot be viewed in isolation. They have argued that the understanding of patriarchy must encompass complex realities, because we live in societies where political, economic, cultural and social factors come together to influence women's health and determine understandings of fertility, sexuality and reproduction.

Donor assistance has had a deep, adverse impact on the women's health movement in the developing world. For women's groups trying to resist coercive population-control programs (that erroneously locate 'overpopulation' as the cause of inequity in resource distribution), donor assistance from international agencies with large financial interests in the pharmaceutical industry has dangerously skewed the agenda.

Donor agencies have been steadily working their way towards the manufacturing of consent on the theory of overpopulation, with scant attention to over-consumption in the industrialised world. To cite one example, preceding direct intervention in population-related activities, the US-based Ford Foundation has, since 1952, spent millions of dollars on biomedical and demographic research. They have funded the Population Reference Bureau, Population Council fellowships, the United Nations Demographic Centres, universities including the London School of Economics and the Johns Hopkins Institute, and scores of Population Research Centres in India and other parts of Southasia. The products of these efforts are well moulded in the ideology voiced by the donor agencies.

In today's climate of donor-driven NGOs, it is imperative to differentiate between NGOs and social movements. While institutionalised NGOs with vertical funding can effectively deliver services and even raise issues of concern, they cannot spark genuinely transformative social movements. And it is up to the movements to cut through the confusion created in countless workshops, consultations, seminars and summits on 'gender mainstreaming'. Unless we ask the right questions, however uncomfortable they might be, we will not get any answers.

If the state, donor agencies and the market are today entering and taking over a space carved out by the women's movement, this challenge must be met head-on, with clarity and courage. These questions are perhaps going to be debated at the Seventh National Conference of Women's Movements in Calcutta in September. The criticality, radical resistance and anger against injustice need to be voiced more loudly and more clearly. The vociferous and questioning women's movement needs to be reclaimed from the stakeholders meetings and genteel discussions of gender mainstreaming.

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