People's Democracy

AIDWA'S SIXTH NATIONAL CONFERENCE

A Conference of Inspiring Advance

LAST month an event took place in Vishakahapatnam which will have wide implications for women all over the country. AIDWA (the All India Democratic Women's Association) held a national conference, its sixth, from November 24 to 27, in Vishakhapatnam. For three days 900 women delegates, representing 59.5 lakh women members, from all the states of India, Kerala to Tripura, debated the gamut of issues and concerns that confront Indian women specifically, and women in general the world over.

This remarkable gathering was a microcosm of the linguistic, social, cultural and religious diversity in the country, equally well represented in AIDWA’s countrywide membership. Bringing this splendid diversity together was the strong unifying bond of a common identity in struggle against the many forms of oppression women in India today face. At the Conference, based on the remarkable range of experiences and views that were pooled and shared, the organisation's response to these concerns were all thoroughly discussed, and the tasks they enjoined on the organisation charted out.

This stock-taking exercise came after a three-year period during which the substantial growth in the numerical strength and reach of AIDWA had given it a major presence not only in the Indian women’s movement, but also generally in the movement of the Left and democratic forces in the country. It turned out to be a most inspiring conference and a fitting celebration of the twenty years of AIDWA's existence.

To mark this milestone an exhibition was prepared by the AIDWA center, depicting important chapters of that twenty-year history which captured the interest and attention of delegates and guests alike, both instructing as well as provoking deep thought amongst them.

To lend further focus to AIDWA's attempts to raise issues pertaining to the lives and work of poor rural women, the noted journalist P Sainath, had prepared an extraordinarily sensitive and moving photographic exhibition of rural women's work, inaugurated by a group of agricultural women workers who were also the subject of some of the photographs.

In a tradition which carries much meaning to participants, the hoisting of the organisation's flag by Working President Shamali Gupta, and it salutation by the delegations, marked the start of the Conference. Then the colourfully attired delegates, many of them in the traditional costumes of their states, took their seats in the large auditorium of the Vishakhapatnam Steel City.

Mallu Swarajyam, a historic figure of the freedom movement in Telengana, founder member of AIDWA and Chairperson of the Reception Committee welcomed all the delegates and guests, reminding them of the history of the Left women’s movement in the state, the contribution of women to the famous Telengana Armed Peasant Revolt, and subsequently to the democratic movement in the state.

The conference was inaugurated by another well-known militant veteran, Ahilya Rangnekar, founding member of AIDWA and a beloved and respected leader of many a working class and women’s struggle in Maharashtra.

As a founding member she recalled the achievements of AIDWA since its inception in Chennai in 1981, its role in leading struggles of all sections but particularly the poorer women, and the challenges the women’s movement faces today from the twin perils of communalism and globalisation.

The Conference paid its tribute to the AIDWA members who had passed away since the last conference, with special homage being paid to the memory of Vimal Ranadive, a freedom fighter and working class leader who was among those who laid the foundation for the Left and democratic women’s movement in the country.

The keynote address was given by another outstanding figurein the women's struggle in this country, Vina Mazumdar, the doyenne of women’s studies, a discipline she has consciously nurtured in intellectual partnership with the mass women’s movement. Mazumdar spoke of her association with Vimal Ranadive and Susheela Gopalan, AIDWA’s beloved President whose presence at the Conference was deeply missed.

She briefly traced the growth of the women’s movement in India, the widening of its traditional urban middle class base to include all sections of women, and its reaching a "critical mass" in respect of its ability to force change and influence policy.

An unusual feature and proving a high and inspiring point of the Inaugural Session was the arrival of Sahar Saba, a representative from the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, who addressed the session. This was followed by a session on Women, Terrorism and Fundamentalism in India, where four delegates from the states of Jammu and Kashmir, Tripura, Assam and Maharashtra spoke of their own experiences as women in battling the forces of terrorism and fundamentalism, which ended the morning session.

The Report to the Conference presented by Brinda Karat, was divided into two parts, comprehensively dealt with the international and national developments impacting on the status of women in India; AIDWA’s work amongst women in the last three years; and its present and future tasks.

Dealing first with international developments, the Report noted that these have intensified the pressures on democratic movements in general and the women’s movements in particular, the world over. The first of these pressures is through the medium of war, through which the US and its allies are currently enforcing their global hegemony. War and the huge arms expenditure by governments have, over the years, contributed to keeping half the world’s 6.6 billion people in poverty.

Secondly, capitalist globalisation as an economic process continuing apace, has resulted in increasing world poverty and exploitation, particularly of women; increased violence against women through the strengthening of the structures of patriarchy; and the huge growth of sex trafficking in women and children. The last three years have seen increased global resistance not just to war, but to globalisation as well, a fine example of which was the World Women’s March in October 2000, which saw a coordinated campaign and march by women’s organisations the world over against the polices of globalisation.

The status of women in India, in particular over the last three years, to which a substantial section of the Report pertains, has been influenced by many factors, viz., political developments, economic policies, cultural and social trends, fundamentalist agendas, legal processes, and the struggles of the women themselves. The Report discusses the impact of these many factors on the position of women between 1998 and 2001.

In the sphere of politics, the demand for 33 percent reservation to state assemblies and Parliament, a major demand of the democratic women’s movement, has not been met by successive regimes despite the sustained campaign launched by AIDWA and other groups. The Report noted that in the period since the last conference elections took place in 24 States and Union Territories, involving 3,224 seats. Of those elected, only 220 are women. However, the as the Report notes, the campaign for the Bill has had its positicve aspects in increasing popular support for the issue of more women in decision-making bodies.

The report analyses the gender specific impact of political trends like growing terrorism and casteism on women's lives, and most importantly, the growth of the forces of communalism, notably of the parties of the Hindu right, which have eroded the position of women, both within the family and in the public sphere. There has been a huge increase in the numbers of attacks on the minorities by the Sangh Parivar. Minority women are of course prime targets in the physical attacks against minorities. This apart, Hindutva, through textbooks, television and other channels of popular culture, has strengthened patriarchal and socially retrograde notions of the Indian woman’s role in the family and society, thereby undervaluing her actual status.

Market reform and liberalisation have worsened living standards of the people at large, with women bearing the brunt of these policies. The rise in the prices of essential commodities along with cutbacks in the public distribution system, the cuts in subsidies that benefitted the poor, the privatisation attempts in the critical areas of water and sanitation, and the provision of health care, have imposed enormous hardship on working families. In periods of economic decline, women are the first to be affected and the last to be addressed.

In is under these conditions, in the struggle against these political and economic currents, that the women’s movement, along with other progressive movements, is gaining strength. The 1998 National Conference in Bangalore had identified the struggle against communalism and economic policies which have increased both poverty and inequalities of class and gender, were identified as the key tasks before the organisation. The present Report assesses how far AIDWA has been able to fulfil the agenda set by the Bangalore Conference.

There has been a marked improvement in the range and implementation of AIDWA’s all- India campaigns. This has been achieved despite the diversity of issues and the uneven strength of the organisation in different states. There have been all-India campaigns on a whole range of issues:

• anti-globalisation and liberalisation protests;
• protests against the nuclear policy of the government;
• all India conventions/ solidarity days on the rights of Dalit women, for the rights of home-based workers, and for the rights of Muslim women;
• all-India Demands Day for the implementation of the Srikrishna Report on the communal riots in Mumbai in 1992;

struggles on the wage, land and housing issues of working women in urban and rural areas, and many more.

This sampling of the organisation’s campaigns in the last three years suggests its growing capacity to create a national platform on issues that are of concern to specific sections of women. AIDWA has been very successful in foregrounding issues that impact economically on women, whether it is in leading struggles in different states against the cutbacks in the PDS, against specific policies of economic restructuring, or in fighting for higher wages in the unorganised sector. These struggles have not merely raised public consciousness on these issues, they have to some extent acted as a brake on the untrammeled enforcement by the government of economic policies that are against the interests of the working people.

The other area in which AIDWA’s intervention has been noteworthy is in mobilising women against the impact of communalism. Despite the campaigns they have led both at the all-India level and in the various states where AIDWA units are, on a day-to-day basis, fighting the divisive strategies and campaigns of the Sangh Parivar, the challenge from right wing forces remains formidable. There is the need to reach wider sections of women, sections in danger of being co-opted by the ideology of the Hindutva forces.

The Report also noted the progress that AIDWA has made in conducting campaigns in defence of women from minority groups who have been targeted by the fundamentalists.

The AIDWA has made considerable headway in various states in defending the rights of Dalit women, the worst victims of caste-based patriarchy. In Tamil Nadu, the AIDWA conducted a campaign in Dindigul district against the 'two glass' system, a common practice in those parts. In Rudraprayag in Uttaranchal district the AIDWA led a campaign against the dispossession of Dalits’ lands for the construction of a bypass.

Indeed, AIDWA units at all levels intervene on an almost daily basis in preventing or taking action on the different forms of violence against women committed in the name of custom and tradition, whether it is against caste-based violence, dowry related crimes, sexual violence, or the growing practice, particularly in the east and north-east, of killing or attacking women branded as witches.

The maturing of AIDWA in respect of its growing understanding of the women’s question in India, and of its own role, was amply demonstrated by the seriousness and depth that marked the discussions and commentary on the report by delegates. The discussions were sharply focussed, and interventions to the point. One reason for this was because the two-volume Report of 120 pages had been translated into eight languages before the conference. This gave delegates the opportunity to come to the conference thoroughly prepared.

Picking up from the main thrust of the Report, the discussions at the Conference focussed on four areas of concern, namely,

• the impact on women, and working women in particular, of market reform and globalisation policies;
• the growth of regressive communal ideologies that erode the position of women in the public domain and private life;
• the disturbing increase in the extent and forms of violence on women; and lastly,
• the response by women to these many pressures in the form of struggles for change.

Delegates from across states painted a grim picture of the profoundly negative impact that economic reform policies are exerting on the lives of the working people, women inevitably being the hardest hit. There are few regions, or spheres of life and economic activity, which are not experiencing its impact. Falling agricultural prices, for example, is a countrywide phenomenon, as the reports from various states indicated. This has increased rural poverty, leading to hunger, migration, and in states like Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, suicides by farming women and men.

Rama Devi from Andhra Pradesh spoke of the situation in Andhra Pradesh where the impact of globalisation has hit both the agricultural sector owing to imports of cheaper agricultural commodities, compounded by the increase in power tariffs by the Chandrababu Naidu government. The AIDWA and other democratic organisations conducted a sustained campaign in 1999-2000 against the power tariff hikes imposed as part of World Bank conditionalities.

The Maharashtra delegation described their long campaign against another feature of reform that has directly hit the poor, namely, the cutbacks in the public distribution system.

The Orissa delegation spoke of the terrible paradoxes of the new economic policies. While tribals in the state are starving because they are not serviced by a subsidised public distribution network, the FCI is not lifting paddy from rice farmers leading to distress sales. The public sector, a huge employer in an underdeveloped state like Orissa, is being fast privatised. Job losses are the immediate outcome. In NALCO, for example, 30 percent of the workforce has been declared redundant. Water rates in the state have increased by 250 percent in the last three years.

Examples of the targeting of minorities, and women from amongst them, by communal and fundamentalist organisations like the Sangh Parivar, dominated the discussions, particularly by delegates from the northern states, suggesting the greater strength of such organisations in states where the Bharatiya Janata Party is in power. Here communal ideology has got institutionalised in many ways. Textbooks have been rewritten from a Hindu perspective, and channels of popular culture are utilised to propagate anti-modern roles for women in the family and in public.

A delegate from Uttar Pradesh spoke of how even unused space in government offices is often converted into ‘bhajan mandalis’. Extreme brutality has been shown to women who dare todefy moral and cultural policing by the Hindutva organisations.

Bharati Bharot from Ahmedabad who married a Muslim was summoned to the VHP office and held prisoner for several days by VHP men who wanted her to break her marriage and undergo a purification ceremony. In desperation she immolated herself in the office premises. It took the local AIDWA unit 10 days to even get the FIR registered.

Both these current issues, namely economic reforms, and fundamentalism, have intensified violence against women. A globalised media and popular culture have contributed to the devaluation of women, by reinforcing and reinventing tradition and ritual, and practices such as dowry. Women are made easy targets of abuse and violence. In many states, such as Tamil Nadu and Haryana this increased violence is getting sanction from a resurgent caste consciousness.

Azhagamma, a delegate from Tamil Nadu was fined Rs. 51,000 by her caste panchayat for refusing to give her land to her husband’s second wife. She was socially ostracised and no one was allowed to work for her. The Panchayat then said she could work her fine off, but at a humiliating cost. Each time she prostrated before them, Rs.1000 would be cut from her fine. She did this 47 times. The Tamil Nadu AIDWA unit is now fighting her case.

In the villages of Haryana, Jat panchayats have issued death fatwas against couples who have married out of caste. Jagmati, a delegate from Haryana, related a case where the Jat panchayat in Jaundhi village forced a young mother to exchange a ‘rakhi’ with her husband in front of them, to signify the breaking of their inter-caste marriage bond. Here too the AIDWA is fighting for their right to live as a married couple in the same village.

In the north eastern states, there is pressure on women from extremist groups to adhere to dress codes imposed by them. Meera from Assam spoke of how the combined impact of globalisation and political tensions have pushed thousands of young women into the hands of sex traffickers in Guwahati.

An entire session of the conference was devoted to the many forms of protest against women’s oppression that is taking place across the country. This growing consciousness is expressing itself in many ways and not merely by public protest actions. Women are fighting against oppression and for change in many forums: in elected bodies, in the courts and in the streets. Reservations, for example, may have ensured women a place in Panchayat bodies, but in exercising effective leadership women must contend with resistance from men, and in particular from upper caste men. A Dalit woman Panchayat president cannot sit on a chair in front of her subordinate who is upper-caste. A panchayat president from Madhya Pradesh complained about the repeated no-confidence motions she had to face. Making Panchayat democracy effective through the participation of women is a struggle that AIDWA is actively involved in.

One of the most important aspects of the conference was the detailed discussion on organization. Unlike the last conference, this time the discussion was divided into two separate sections, following the division of the Report itself.

After adoption of the first section of the report, the conference made a detailed review of the struggles, and weaknesses and strengths of the organization. Some of the important issues highlighted were the need to assert Left-oriented politics in the women's movement through the assertion of AIDWA's independent identity, in order to draw a much wider mass of women into our movements. Another important aspect was the need to develop a much more comprehensive policy to develop activists at all levels which in fact was stressed as one of the key tasks before the organization.

Another point discussed was the social composition of our committees at various levels and the importance of promoting women activists from the rural and urban working class and other oppressed sections. The Report of the Credentials Committee did show an improvement in this regard but much more needs to be done at different levels of the organisation. (see box)

Since the Bangalore Conference, the AIDWA has increased its membership by over five lakh, with units now functioning in the new states of Uttaranchal, Jharkhand, and Chattisgarh. Much of the growth has taken place in Kerala, West Bengal, and Tripura, a state where AIDWA is building a base in an environment where separatist movements are training their guns against all forms of Left mobilisation, including women’s organisations like AIDWA.

In Kerala AIDWA membership has increased by over 4.5 lakh between 1998 and 2000 (the all India membership figures for 2001 have not been finalised).

West Bengal follows with an increase of 1.3 lakhs in membership between the same years.

In Tripura, membership actually fell between 1998 and 2000. But by 2001, AIDWA membership grew to three lakhs, an increase of almost one lakh from the previous year.

Delhi has seen a jump in membership of 10,000;

Punjab of 7404; and Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh of over 5000.

These are the ‘growth states’ in numerical terms between 1998 and 2000.

AIDWA’s growth, however, has also been an organic one, giving it a presence and interventionary ability even in those states where its membership has either remained constant or even fallen. This feature of AIDWA’s spread is not reflected in the formal figures, but became apparent from the state-reports by delegates of AIDWA’s work amongst different sections of women, undertaken often under conditions of extreme repression. For example, with a combined membership of 3.5 lakhs, the north eastern states of Tripura and Assam account for a major chunk of AIDWA’s total membership. The base that AIDWA has built here is the result of an unprecedented mobilisation of women against the growing hold of extremism which targets all Left and democratic movements. Even a relatively non-confrontational, popular campaign such as a membership drive is undertaken in these states with great difficulty, and often in conditions of secrecy. Extremist groups, should they get wind of the campaign, will use vicious forms of violence to disrupt the campaign. Under these conditions, to actually increase the membership figure as AIDWA has done, is to demonstrate a support base much greater than the formal membership.

A second aspect of AIDWA’s growth that emerged rather forcefully during the course of the Conference is its penetration into newer sections of working and non-working women. It has been able to identify the issues that relate to the lives and work concerns of women in specific contexts and milieus, and weave these many strands into a shared programme of intervention and action at the national level. The intense discussions amongst delegates during the Conference created a remarkable reservoir of very different experiences. A common identity and the resolve to share platforms of struggle, knit these experiences together.

Clearly, an important organisational principle that AIDWA has tried to follow as it sought to expand into new areas and amongst new groups, has been to involve all sections of women in struggle against oppression or injustice against a particular section or group of women. From the discussions of the delegates, we have been reasonably successful on this score in respect of mobilising all sections of women against communal violence on women from minority groups. "The ruling classes are promoting a politics of fragmentation which imposes upon us the need to assert the common identity of the working people and women in particular" said Brinda Karat, General Secretary of AIDWA. It is this consciousness which makes struggle for land rights in Bihar, about which Ram Rathi a dalit agricultural labourer from Bihar spoke so movingly in the Conference, an issue on which Azhagamma, fighting her own battle against demeaning forms of caste patriarchy in Tamil Nadu, is prepared to support in struggle.

The Conference passed seven resolutions:

• on the market-driven resurgence of dowry;
• on legal reforms for women, including a demand for a Domestic Violence Bill and one to deal with sexual harassment at the workplace.

• on the proliferation of sex-selection techniques in the context of declining juvenile sex-ratios; here the AIDWA has demanded an amendment to the Prenatal Diagnostic Test (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Act, to restrict all genetic testing procedures to government institutions.

The six Commission reports that have been put together by the Conference present a distilled version of the rich experience, information and data that the delegates brought with them.

Behind the well planned arrangements and extreme hospitality shown by the volunteers at the Conference, lies a campaign of several months by a 500-strong campaign committee comprising workers from AIDWA and fraternal organisations. Squads of cheerful and enthusiastic young women worked round the clock for the success of the Conference despite the RTC strike. The campaign committee collected seven lakh rupees for the Conference in house-to-house collections alone, and received contributions of foodgrains, vegetables and even milk.

The Conference elected its leadership for the next three years, first acknowledging the role played by the founders of the organisation, some of them like Kanak Mukherjee, Ahilya Rangnekar. Capt. Lakshmi and Mallu Swarajyam who are amongst us, and others like Vimal Ranadive who passed away recently. The contributions to building the movement by the President Susheela Gopalan, who is battling cancer, were warmly and emotionally remembered. While Brinda Karat has been re-elected General Secretary, the new President is Subhashini Ali, with Shyamli Gupta as Working President and Kalindi Deshpande reelected Treasurer.

An 85 member central executive committee has been elected.