India After Independence: 1947-2000 (75 page)

After the Emergency in 1977, another spurt of activity began. A women’s group in Delhi began what turned out to be one of the most enduring institutions of the women’s movement.
Manushi,
a journal which has documented and analyzed the women’s movement, told its history, presented literature by women, and much else, has continued till today under the able leadership of Madhu Kishwar, undoubtedly among the most original, self-reflective and fearless voices in the women’s movement.

The women in the Janata Party, mostly Socialists, formed the Mahila Dakshata Samiti and played a major role in initiating the campaign against dowry in which the Delhi-based Stri Sangharsh was also very active.
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The issue of dowry harassment and dowry deaths was taken up from 1979 in a big way through street rallies and plays, demonstrations outside houses of dowry victims, and demands for legal reform. The Janwadi Mahila Samiti, a wing of the CPM women’s wing, the All India Democratic Women’s Association set up in 1981, conducted a door-to-door campaign on the issue. A bill to amend the Dowry Prohibition Act (1961) was sent to a Joint Select Committee of the parliament and throughout 1981 and 1982, women’s organizations and other activists presented evidence before the committee as it toured the country. The amendments strengthening the law against perpetrators of dowry-related crimes were passed in 1984; a few minor ones followed later. The movement declined after this, leaving behind a feeling that the victories have not meant much, given the persistence of dowry and difficulty in securing convictions of offenders.

The other major campaign issue that emerged was rape, especially police rape. A number of cases, the Rameeza Bee case in 1978 in Hyderabad, the Mathura case in Maharashtra and the Maya Tyagi case in western U.P. in 1980, brought the whole issue to public attention. Women’s groups and organizations, along with mainstream political parties, took up the issue in a big way and a bill was introduced in 1980 itself to amend the existing law on rape. Passed in 1983, the main change that it brought about was that custodial rape was treated as a more heinous crime than other forms of rape and the burden of proof was shifted from the victim to the accused and this made a sea change in the possibility of bringing about convictions of offenders. The campaign had subsided in the meantime, having shown up in its course the sharp divisions in the women’s movement, which were caused as much by struggles over turf as by differences of ideology and strategy. The prompt response of the government also left many activists feeling that their agenda had been hijacked or ‘appropiated’ by the government. The inherent weakness in a strategy that does not have room for absorbing reformist gains was revealed starkly.

The anti-dowry and anti-rape agitations seemed to have spent the energies of the movement for some time, and while there were protests
around the Shah Bano case in 1985-86, there was not the same enthusiasm or unity. The issue was also less clear, being complicated by the overall communal atmosphere in which issues of Muslim identity got entangled with the simpler issue of women’s rights, and the Hindu communalists’ enthusiasm for Muslim women’s rights often left women’s rights activists confused and helpless.

The agitation against what was called the sati but looked like the murder of Roop Kanwar, a young woman in Deorala in Rajasthan, was also on the same lines, with the issues being muddled by Hindu communal groups portraying it as an attack on Indian tradition and putting women on to the streets to defend their right to sati. Interestingly, some of the more effective opposition to sati came from Arya Samajists like Swami Agnivesh, who toured the rural areas of Rajasthan and Haryana mobilizing opinion against sati, and also challenged the head priests of the Puri and Benares temples to a debate on their claim for a scriptural sanction for sati. In Orissa, Gandhians organized a rally of 10,000 women to gherao the head priest of the Fluri temple, challenging him to prove his claim, which he could not. Opposition also came from the anti-caste movement in Maharashtra and rural women in Rajasthan.

Among the ‘autonomous’ women’s groups, by the eighties there was a clear shift away from mass campaigns to less dramatic work such as setting up of women’s centres for legal aid, counselling, documentation, research, publication and the like, at least partly because it was felt that the mass campaigns with their focus on legal reform had not really succeeded in solving the problems they had set out to address. Many women’s groups such as Saheli in Delhi felt it was important not only to focus on women’s problems but also on their joys, and encouraged women to express themselves through music, dance and art. Others brought out magazines, acted as watchdogs on the media for scanning advertisements and films derogatory to women, raised issues related to women’s health, or campaigned against foeticide, for the rights of the girl child, or for water and housing for women in the slums. Many groups who worked with communities and not exclusively with women also brought a greater focus on women’s issues into their work.

In Hyderabad, Anveshi was set up as a platform for theoretical studies of women’s issues and in Delhi the Centre for Women’s Development Studies promoted research and documentation, including in later years the launching of a Journal for Gender Studies. Many more university-based centres also came up in the nineties, and enough research and writing was available for courses on Women’s Studies to begin to appear in university curricula.

Clearly, the movement had entered another phase of institutionalisation and consolidation as it had in the early fifties, and what appeared to some activists as a watering down of the movement was more likely diffusion of its ideas into the wider society which was bound to be accompanied by some dilution of its sharp ideological content. It is also true that the movement suffered from a lack of unity about goals, strategies, and
methods, from sectarianism which was probably the contribution of the left, and a tendency for reacting to immediate crises rather than building a consensus on an agenda for action. It has also been alleged that some sections were swayed by the money received from foreign organizations into taking up issues that concerned the donors but had little relevance to the movement in India, and at least some of the more convoluted debates on theoretical issues that absorbed the energies of some feminists suggest that the charge is not without substance. The gap between urban educated women’s groups and rural or poor urban women’s concerns also remained, though it narrowed in some instances. The sense of achievement that was so palpable in the thirties and forties, when the leaps in empowerment and consciousness were huge, was missing as one looked at the women’s movement since the seventies.

This is not to say that the efforts were in vain. Government policy was certainly affected, and it came up with a National Perspective Plan for Women in 1988, which detailed plans for women’s health, education and political participation. In 1989, the Panchayati Raj bill was introduced (though it was passed only in 1993) which instituted one-third of the seats in the panchayats to be reserved for women. The Scheme for Development of Women and Children in Rural Areas (DWACRA) was introduced which sponsored Mahila Mandals or Sanghams in rural areas and it enabled many poor women who had no other access to organize and express themselves, often helped by local level voluntary groups and political activists. Another innovative scheme called the Mahila Kosh was also started which extended credit to Mahila Mandals to enable their members to improve their skills and standards of living. The effectivity of these depended on the capacity of their utilization at the local level, and this varied with the level of politicization and awareness of women’s issues. But large numbers of groups were able to use the legitimacy or protective cover of a government scheme as a stepping stone to reach poor rural women whom otherwise they would find difficult to touch.

Attempts to increase women’s role in local and national politics are still being made. Since one-third of the seats in the panchayats are now reserved for women, women panchayat members and village pradhans are now being given special training to perform their new roles. A serious move to reserve one-third of the seats in parliament for women has been going on for some time and has received considerable support from women politicians and women’s groups and some political parties, and generated a great deal of debate.

The flip side of the coin is that female literacy in Barmer, the worst district in the most backward state (Rajasthan), is 8 per cent, lower than Burkina Faso, the worst country in sub-Saharan Africa, where it is 10 per cent. The infant mortality rate in Ganjam, the worst district of India in
this respect, is 164 per thousand live births, which is worse than Mali, the worst country in sub-Saharan Africa, where it is 161. The fertility rate in U.P. is 5.1, which is higher than the average for all low-income countries and much higher than even Burma and Bangladesh. The female/ male ratio, i.e. number of women per 1000 males in Haryana is 865, a level lower than that of any country in the world. Among elderly widows, the mortality figures are generally 86 per cent higher than for married woman of the same age.
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The population of rural females aged 12-14 who have never been enrolled in any school is one-half in India as a whole, above two-thirds in U.P., MP and Bihar, and as high as 82 per cent in Rajasthan. Only 42 per cent of rural females in the 10-14 age group, and 40 per cent in the 5-9 age group are reported to be attending school. The dropout rate is also very high. Average number of years of schooling for persons aged 25 and above is 2.4 in India as a whole, while it is only 1.2 for females and 3.5 for males. In India, half of all females in the 15-19 group are illiterate, in China less than 10 per cent.

The all-India averages and the focus on dark areas, however, hides the bright spots that hold out a candle of hope. The state of Kerala has a record that would be the envy of any developing country and in some respects even equal to that of the developed countries. The adult literacy rate for women in 1990-91 was 86 per cent (and 94 per cent for men). This was far higher than China’s which was 68 per cent for women and 86 per cent for men. It was even higher than any individual Chinese province. By 1987-88, Kerala had a female rural literacy rate in the 10-14 age group of 98 per cent. By 1992-93, 60 per cent of females aged 6 and above had completed primary education, the all-India average being only 28.1. The total fertility rate in 1992 was 1.8, which is below the replacement level of 2.1, and which is the rate in the US and Sweden. The all-India average for fertility rate is 3.7. The infant mortality rate, which is closely tied, as is well known, to the position of women, was only 17 per 1000 live births in Kerala in 1992, compared with 31 in China and 79 in India as a whole. The female-male ratio improved from 1004 to 1036 between 1901-1991, whereas at the all-India level it has declined from 972 to 927 over the same period.

Fortunately, Kerala is not the only glowing example. It would appear that it is unique because of the historical advantage of having a very early start in the field of education, and because of the matrilineal customs of a significant part of its population. While both these advantages are a fact—the erstwhile princely states of Travancore and Cochin which constitute the bulk of modem Kerala, did give a very strong emphasis to education from the first quarter of the nineteenth century and the matrilineal system, which includes matrilocal residence, inheritance through females, etc. is a strong positive factor—other factors such as an activist and participatory political culture, itself helped by high literacy levels, positive public policies in the areas of health, public distribution system, and primary education, have been extremely important. And these are
replicable, as shown by other success stories, notably Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.

As recently as 1961, the crude literacy rates in Himachal were 9 per cent for females (and 21 per cent for males), which were below the all-India averages. By 1987-88, literacy rates in the 10-14 age group were as high as 81 for females in rural areas and even higher at 97 per cent in the urban (the corresponding, figures for males being 95 and 96 per cent). Thus, in urban areas women had outstripped men. Himachal Pradesh in this respect was second only to Kerala. In terms of number of girls in urban areas attending school, Himachal even did better than Kerala: 95 per cent versus 94 per cent. In rural areas, Kerala had the lead with 91 per cent versus Himachal’s 73 per cent, but Himachal’s figures were still higher than those of any other state. Other indicators followed suit. The female/male ratio in Himachal increased from 884 : 976 between 1901-1991, the biggest increase (+92) in the whole of India. Kerala had increased only from 1004 to 1036, though in absolute numbers it was way ahead. The ratio of female death rate to male death rate in 0-4 age group was only 88.2 per cent in 1991, even lower than Kerala’s figure of 91.1 per cent and way below the all-India average of 107.4 per cent. However, the infant mortality rate was still quite high at 70 per 1000 live births in 1990-92, as was the fertility rate at 3.1 in 1991, though both were below the all-India average.

In Tamil Nadu as well, there have been dramatic improvements in various gender-related indicators. It stands second only to Kerala in its fertility rate, which was 2.2 in 1991. The infant mortality rate is 58 per 1000 live births in 1990-92, which is the third lowest in the country, only Kerala and Punjab having lower rates. The female literacy rate in the 10-14 age group in 1987-88 was 85.6 per cent in urban and 70.8 per cent in rural areas. The ratio of female death rate to male death rate in age group of 0-4 was 90.5 per cent in 1991, the all-India average being 107.4. About 97 per cent of children between the ages of 12-23 months had received some vaccination by 1992-93, the highest percentage in the country.

The extreme diversity that we have encountered enables us to analyse the factors that facilitate and inhibit positive trends in gender justice. While history and tradition are important and the south of the country, historically, has a better record than the north, a strong commitment in public policy can bring about rapid change, as shown by Himachal Pradesh. The diversity also shows that economic prosperity or growth does not automatically lead to greater gender justice; Punjab, and even more Haryana, two prosperous states, perform pretty poorly on the gender front. The factors which facilitate improvement in women’s position also emerge quite clearly. Female literacy and education are unambiguous winners, with the links with improvement in all other indicators coming out very sharply. Conversely, low literacy and education levels lead to negative trends in other indicators.