International Women’s Day
And the Women’s Movement in India
Woman is born in chains, but everywhere she is fighting to be free. It is a world-historic struggle being waged in different ways in different national settings.
In our country the peculiar Indian version of neoliberal model of growth preserves, profits from and in some cases reproduces in modified forms certain vestiges of feudalism in socio-economic structures, customs and value systems. The working people of India, women included, therefore have to suffer the worst of both worlds – feudal backwardness and obscurantism as well as modern capitalist expropriation and exploitation. Among them, it is women and children whose interests are most severely jeopardized in myriad ways, for example by the retreat of the neoliberal state from its welfare responsibilities and the state-sponsored corporate land-grab campaigns. In addition to the perennial violence of hunger, women are routinely subjected to all kinds of oppression, discrimination and sexual assaults, with people in high positions feeling free to indulge in such crimes and shielding other criminals. In this respect Congress-ruled Delhi and Rajasthan look exactly like, say, NDA-ruled Bihar and West Bengal under its first woman Chief Minister.
Attacks and obstacles notwithstanding, more and more women are coming out of their homes not only to take up traditional occupations but also to avail themselves of the new job opportunities, however limited, opened up by capitalist greed for exploiting cheap female labour. Even in the face of feudal- patriarchal opposition, they are trying to utilise the new opportunities – introduced by the provision of 50% reservation in panchayati raj institutions – for playing more active social and political roles as people’s representatives. The net impact of all this is that on one hand women are drawn into a new vortex of oppression and struggle in the wider world, while on the other the new experiences equip them with a keener political awareness, a higher sense of dignity and self confidence. The taste of hard-won relative freedom generates among them a healthy urge for further extending its narrow confines.
The slow but irresistible changes in the lives and attitudes of Indian women – changes that are no less conspicuous in the countryside than in urban areas – cannot but incite the forces of feudal-patriarchal reaction into frenzied attempts to stop the wheels of history. Such attempts range from emotional appeals to ‘the sacred duties and virtues’ of Indian mothers and wives through all kinds of moral policing to physical assaults, fatwas, honour killings and so on. But repression only regenerates resistance and domination the determination to fight back. Braving all difficulties and pains, women of India continue their forward march. It is this cool determination and robust dynamism of ordinary Indian women that a revolutionary women’s organisation tries to imbue with a communist consciousness and give the shape of an organized movement.
The practice of observing the 8th of March as International women’s Day was initiated about hundred years ago by socialist leaders like Alexandra Kollontai. A grand new chapter was opened up in the history of the struggle for women’s emancipation. A few years later the Communist International proclaimed in its programme complete social equality between man and woman in law and in real life, revolutionary transformation of husband-wife relationship and family code, status of social work to motherhood, social responsibility of nursing and education of children and adolescents and relentless struggle against all ideas and traditions that enslave women. Since then communists all over the world have steadfastly pursued this agenda as a most vital and inalienable component of the struggle for communism. On the occasion of International Women’s Day let us all rededicate ourselves to this noble cause.