India After Independence: 1947-2000 (74 page)

As a result of all these and many other similar processes, untouchability in urban areas has virtually disappeared and in rural areas has declined drastically. In the more prosperous rural areas, where employment opportunities for low castes have expanded sharply, it has decreased sharply. When employers have to seek out labour, they can ill-afford to flaunt their higher caste status. In factories and offices, caste-based discrimination is rare, though old casteist prejudices may linger. Atrocities on Scheduled Castes continue to occur, but they are usually a reaction to open defiance of upper-caste norms, such as a lower caste boy eloping with an upper-caste girl, or lower-castes allying with extremist political groups, as in Bihar, to challenge upper-caste authority. As such, the atrocities, though condemnable in the strongest terms, are to be understood as proof of increasing assertion by lower castes.

However, great inequalities still remain in access to education, to employment, to other economic and social opportunities. The link between caste and literacy is strong, with studies showing that in villages where upper castes have had near-universal adult literacy for several decades, lower castes could have rates close to zero, particularly for women.
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In 1991, in India as a whole, while literacy rates for men were 64 per cent and for women 39 per cent, for SC men they were 46 and for SC women only 19. In U.P., the comparable figures were 56/25 and 39/8. In Kerala, however, the gap is much narrower, with the general figures being 94/ 86 and SC figures being 85/73.
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The regional contrast shows how it is possible to reduce inequality through positive social measures such as provision of elementary education. Even the, benefits of the policy of reservation cannot be utilized without education as is shown by the general inability to fill quotas reserved for SCs at every level.

In the future, too, the emphasis on anti-poverty strategies such as rapid economic development and employment, and income expansion via employment guarantee schemes and other similar measures needs to continue. Education has been found to be a major vehicle for social mobility and therefore emphasis on providing universal primary and even secondary education is a must. This must include a special emphasis on female education, given the direct impact observed on fertility rates. This also shows the need for greater emphasis on equal opportunities for quality education from the primary level itself as education has been found to be a critical vehicle for social mobility.

The issue of the Backward Classes or Castes, which came to a head with the Mandal report in the anti-Mandal agitation in 1990, is quite different from that of the SCs, though efforts are made at the political
level to equate or collapse the two.
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The so-called Backward Castes are really the intermediate castes whose position in the ritual hierarchy was below that of the Brahmins and the kshatriyas and above that of the untouchables. They did suffer from certain ritual disabilities as compared to the upper castes, but they were in no way comparable to the SCs since they often had access to land and other economic resources. Nor did they suffer from untouchability. Besides, the category includes great disparities, with some castes or sections of castes being very powerful economically and socially and others being quite disadvantaged with a ritual position just above that of the SCs.

Sociologists have shown that the Backward Castes such as Ahirs, Yadavas, Kurmis, Vokkaligas, Lingayats, Lodhas, etc. have gained considerable economic advantage via post-independence land reform which gave land rights to ex-tenants of zamindars. This new-found strength increased their political clout and representation and they are now seeking to use this clout to secure greater advantages for themselves in jobs, education, etc. In rural areas, they are the biggest exploiters of the SCs who are agricultural labourers and there is little in common between them. The Mandal report has been shown by scholars to be based on faulty methodology and a weak data base. The Mandal judgements have also been subjected to severe criticism by sociologists who have argued that caste has undergone such drastic changes since independence but the judiciary is still working on the basis of out-dated and ill-informed western notions of caste. In fact, the politics of reservations for Backward Castes has more to do with sharing the loaves and fishes of office and power than with a struggle for social justice.

Dramatic changes have taken place in the legal, political, educational and social status of women since independence. This was not unexpected since the question of the improvement of the position of women had been at the heart of the social reform movement from the first quarter of the nineteenth century when Ram Mohan Roy started his questioning of social orthodoxy. Besides, the freedom struggle since the twenties and especially since the thirties had partaken amply of the creative energies of Indian women. Gandhiji’s statement in the mid-thirties to Mridula Sarabhai, a valiant fighter for his causes of women and freedom, ‘I have brought the Indian women out of the kitchen, it is up to you (the women activists) to see that they don’t go back,’
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was no empty boast and no thoughtless exhortation. The national movement by treating women as political beings capable of nationalist feelings and as, if not more, capable of struggle and sacrifice than men resolved many doctrinal debates about the desirability of women’s role in the public sphere. If women could march in processions, defy the laws, go to jail—all unescorted by male family members—then they could also aspire to take up jobs, have the right to vote, and maybe even inherit parental property. Political participation by women in the massive popular struggles from the twenties onwards opened up new vistas of possibilities that a century of social reform could not. The image of the woman changed from a recipient of justice in the nineteenth century, to an ardent supporter of nationalist men in the early twentieth, to a comrade by the thirties and forties. Women had participated in all streams of the national movement—from Gandhian to Socialist to Communist to revolutionary terrorist. They had been in peasant movements and in trade union struggles. They had founded separate women’s organizations as well; the All India Women’s Conference, founded in 1926, being the most important of these.

After independence, when the time came to consolidate the gains of the hard-fought struggle, the attention naturally turned to securing legal and constitutional rights. The Constitution promised complete equality to
women. It fulfilled the promise made many years ago by the national movement: women got the vote, along with men, without any qualification of education or property or income. A right for which women suffragettes fought long and hard in many western countries was won at one stroke by Indian women!

In the early fifties, Nehru initiated the process of the enactment of the Hindu Code Bill, a measure demanded by women since the thirties. A Committee under the Chairmanship of B.N. Rau, the constitutional expert who prepared the first draft of the Constitution of India, had already gone into the matter and submitted a draft code in 1944. Another committee, chaired by B.R. Ambedkar, the law minister after independence, submitted a bill which raised the age of consent and marriage, upheld monogamy, gave women the rights to divorce, maintenance and inheritance, and treated dowry as stridhan, or women’s property. Strong opposition from conservative sections of society, and hesitation on the part of some senior Congress leaders, including President Rajendra Prasad, led to the bill being postponed, despite strong support from a majority of Congressmen and from women activists and social reformers. Ultimately, sections of the bill were passed as four separate acts: The Hindu Marriage Act, the Hindu Succession Act, the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act, and the Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act.

The extension of legal rights to Hindu women was not sufficient but it was a big step forward. This is seen from the stiff opposition encountered by the government in its attempts to extend legal rights in the case of other religious communities. The Shah Bano case is a good example. In 1985, about forty years after Hindu law was reformed, the Supreme Court granted a pittance as maintenance to Shah Bano, a divorced Muslim woman. There was a furore among the conservative Muslim sections and sufficient pressure was put on the Rajiv Gandhi government for it to wilt and introduce a bill to negate the Supreme Court judgement. It is no doubt easy and even necessary to castigate the government for its cowardice but it should be remembered that while the Opposition brought lakhs into the streets, the supporters of Shah Bano could muster only hundreds. While criticizing Nehru for not pushing through a more radical civil code for Hindus and for not passing a uniform civil code applicable to all citizens, it should be remembered that while Nehru did face opposition, he could also muster considerable support because among Hindus the process of social reform had gone much further than among Muslims, as evidenced by the Shah Bano case thirty years later.

While some legal rights have been exercised, others have remained on paper. The right to vote has been taken very seriously and women are keen voters, acutely conscious of the power of the vote. This is particularly true of rural women. But in other respects, especially with regard to right to inheritance of parental property, legal rights are by and large not claimed. It is still common in most parts of the country for women, both rural and urban, to forgo their rights in parental property.
The custom of partilocal residence (residence in husband’s home) is very largely responsible for this. This is also one reason women have refused to give up dowry because it is their only chance of getting a share of their parental property. The legal right to divorce has been increasingly used in urban areas, though the stigma attached to divorce is still prevalent, and the difficulties of setting-up as a single woman immense.

A positive development is that women’s issues have been taken up by women’s organizations as well as by mainstream political parties and grassroots movements. As expected, attention has been focussed on the more visible forms of gender injustice such as dowry deaths, rape, and alchohol-related domestic violence. From the seventies onwards, through the nineties, various movements have been launched, sometimes localized, sometimes with a bigger spatial reach, on these issues, and public awareness of these has therefore heightened.
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After independence, with different political forces in the national movement going their own ways, the women’s movement too diversified. Many women leaders became involved in government-initiated and other institutional activities for women’s welfare, including rehabilitation and recovery of women lost or abandoned as a result of the mass migration and riots accompanying Partition, setting up working women’s hostels in cities, and women’s vocational centres. In 1954, Communist women left the All India Women’s Conference to form the National Federation of Indian Women, which became, a party forum and not a broad united platform for women. Perhaps inevitably, there was not much evidence of women’s ‘struggles’ in the fifties and sixties, which led to a view that there was no women’s movement after independence till the new initiative in the seventies. But such a perception fails to comprehend the inevitable phases of consolidation and quiet constructive work that follow phases of intense struggles as being integral parts of the movement. The Indian women’s movement went through precisely such a phase after independence.

Women have also played an important role in peasant, tribal, farmers’, trade union and environment movements and this has also enabled them to raise women’s issues within them. In the Tebhaga peasant movement in Bengal in 1946-47, women had organized themselves on a separate platform of the Nari Bahini and they ran shelters and maintained lines of communication. Communist women activists also mobilized rural women on specifically women’s issues such as rights to finance and property, and village-level Mahila Atma Raksha Samitis (women’s self-defence committees) were formed which also took up the issue of domestic violence or wife-beating. In another major Communist peasant struggle of that time in the Telangana area of Hyderabad State from 1946-1950, women’s participation was also quite significant, and the leadership did pay attention to women’s issues such as wife-beating. But there is no
evidence of women’s organizations emerging. It is also said that women were discouraged from joining the guerilla force and, when they did succeed in joining, felt they were not totally accepted. Communist women in other areas also complained later that they were strongly encouraged to marry men comrades and edged into working on the ‘women’s front’, radier than integrated into the leadership as members in their own right.
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In the late sixties and early seventies, there was a new political ferment in the country which gave rise to a host of new political trends and movements, such as the Naxalite movement, the JP movement, the Chipko movement, and the anti-price rise movement. In the anti-price rise movement of 1973-75, which was organized by Communist and Socialist women in the urban areas of Maharashtra, thousands of housewives joined in public rallies and those who could not leave their houses joined by beating
thalis
(metal plates) with
lathas
(rolling pins). The movement spread to Gujarat where it meshed into the Nav Nirman movement influenced by Jayaprakash Narayan’s ‘Total Revolution’. Though neither of these directly addressed what are called women’s issues, the very fact of mass participation of women had a liberating effect and enabled women to gain the self-confidence needed for moving on to more complex issues of patriarchy and women’s oppression. Meanwhile, in Gujarat, a very important new development was the founding of a women’s wing of the Textile Labour Association (TLA), an old Gandhian organization, called SEWA or Self-Employed Women’s Association, which eventually became independent of the TLA. It was unique in that it took up women in the unorganized sector who worked as vendors and hawkers and at home in the putting-out system and organized them into a union which along with collective bargaining provided training, credit and technical help. SEWA spread to Indore, Bhopal, Delhi and Lucknow and even today under the able leadership of Ela Bhatt is among the top success stories of Indian women.

A very different kind of movement emerged in the Shahada tribal area of Dhulia district in Maharashtra in 1972. Led initially by Gandhian Sarvodya workers and later also by Maoist activists, the movement for drought relief and land in which the Bhil tribal women were very prominent culminated in a militant anti-liquor campaign in which women, who saw liquor as the main cause of wife-beating, broke liquor pots in drinking dens and marched to punish in public, men who beat their wives. In Uttarakhand, in the hill areas of U.P. in the early sixties, a similar movement had taken place under the influence of Gandhians such as Vinoba Bhave, Gandhiji’s followers Sarla Behn and Mira Ben, who had set up ashrams in Kumaon after independence, and the local Gandhian leader Sunderlal Bahuguna, who became famous in the Chipko agitation. Women had come out in large numbers to picket liquor vendors and demand prohibition of sale of liquor. Anti-liquor movements have continued to erupt from time to time in different parts, the most recent being in Andhra Pradesh in the mid-nineties, when a powerful wave of anti-liquor protest by poor rural women led to a policy of prohibition and later
restriction of liquor sales. Clearly, Gandhiji had understood a very important aspect of women’s consciousness when he made liquor boycott an integral part of the nationalist programme and entrusted its implementation to women.

From 1974, women in Uttarakhand were again very active in the Chipko movement which got its name from the actions of women who hugged trees in order to prevent them from being cut down by timber contractors. It became famous as the first major movement for saving the environment and gave rise to the understanding that women had a special nurturing role towards nature, and that environment issues were very often women’s issues because they suffered most from its deterioration, as when forests disappeared and they had to walk for miles to collect fuelwood, fodder and water.
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In Chattisgarh in Madhya Pradesh, women were very militant in the Chattisgarh Mines Shramik Sangh which was set up in 1977 in the tribal belt to protest against the Bhilai steel plant’s policy of mechanization, which was seen as being specially detrimental to women’s employment; the Mahila Mukti Morcha developed as a new platform. In 1979, the Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Vahini, an organization influenced by the ideas of Jayaprakash Narayan, which was leading a struggle of agricultural labourers against temple priests in Bodh Gaya in Bihar, and in which women activists and ordinary women were playing a major role, raised the demand that land should be registered in the names of women as well. This idea caught on in later years and in some states
pattas
or title deeds for land distributed by government and even tree
pattas
were given only in the name of women.

The Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Udyog Sangathan played the leading role in the effort to secure justice for the victims of the chemical gas leak in the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal in 1984. In the mid-eighties, the Samagra Mahila Aghadi emerged as the women’s wing of the Shetkari Sangathana, which was spearheading the farmer’s movement in Maharashtra from 1980. Over one lakh women attended its session in November 1986 and took a stand against brutalization of politics which affects women more than other sections of society and also decided to put up all-women panels for the panchayat and zilla parishad elections.

Another stream of the women’s movement took the form of what have been called ‘autonomous’ women’s groups. These mushroomed in the urban centres from around the mid-seventies. Many of these consisted of women who had been active in or influenced by the Maoist or Naxalite movement, and its decline in the early seventies triggered off a process of debate and rethinking in which the issues of gender relations and the place of women in political organizations were prominent. Among the earliest of these was the Progressive Women’s Organization in Osmania University in Hyderabad in 1974, and the Purogami Stree Sangathana in Pune and the Stree Mukti Sangathana in Bombay in 1975. The declaration by the UN of 1975 as the International Women’s Year probably contributed to a flurry of activity in Maharashtra in 1975 with party-based and
autonomous organizations celebrating March 8 as International Women’s Day for the first time and a women’s conference being attended in October in Pune by women from all over the state belonging to Maoist groups, the Socialist and Republican parties, CPM, and Lal Nishan Party.