Battles ahead

AIDWA's national conference in Kanpur highlights some of the issues facing the women's movement today.

recently in Kanpur

THAT the All India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA) has come to occupy centre stage in the women's movement in India today is not just because of its size and all-India presence, significant though they are. Indeed, its size and diversity is steadily expanding, as was established at the 9th National Conference of the organisation held in Kanpur from November 9 to 12. Over 800 delegates, representing a membership of over one crore spread across 23 States, attended the conference. In addition to being the largest women's organisation in India with the widest regional spread, the profile of the delegates established the broad class diversity of its membership. They had working class, peasant, Adivasi, agricultural labour, organised and unorganised labour, and professional backgrounds, bringing together an enormous pool of organisational experience and knowledge.

It is this diversity, combined with AIDWA's distinct and effective style of functioning, that has over the decades brought it to the forefront of the women's movement in India. Women's experiences of oppression and discrimination have some overarching similarities but are quite specific to different sectors.

The nature of exploitation that a woman worker in a hosiery unit in Tirupur in Tamil Nadu faces will be different from that of an Adivasi woman from Andhra Pradesh whose village is under threat of displacement from large mining companies; and both their worlds, on the face of it, are far removed from the world of a young woman from Haryana who has experienced the horror of an honour crime (the punishment meted out by an upper-caste panchayat on the family of a young person who has dared to exercise the right to choose a partner). Organising these apparently disparate sectors of women in specific struggles while drawing them into a common programme of action has been AIDWA's achievement and the reason for its effective and well-targeted interventions in support of women's rights.

The penetration of AIDWA into the many and complex spheres of women's work and lives has given the organisation an in-depth and nuanced understanding of the status of women in the Indian context. Impacting on the specific problems that women in different sectors face are larger national and international forces, for example, globalisation and the neoliberal policies followed by governments in India since 1991, the impact of the global financial crisis on a range of sectors, the growth of communal forces, the rise of terrorism and ultra-Left violence, and the cultural impact of the mass media. AIDWA's national conference, therefore, was not merely an occasion for it to draw attention to itself and its work but also a four-day exercise in stocktaking and in refining its theoretical understanding of the changing status of women on the basis of the new information delegates brought on the problems and struggles of women from across the country.

The commission papers presented and discussed at the Kanpur conference reflected AIDWA's perspective on the major issues confronting Indian women. There were papers on the impact of the global economic crisis on women; laws and the rights of women; the problems of Adivasi women in the context of the Maoist challenge; identity politics and the women's movement; the situation of women in the north-eastern region; the problems of the girl child; and the media as a political actor. The major points raised and recommendations made during the discussions on each draft commission paper will be incorporated into a final paper and put up on the AIDWA website.

Impact of global crisis

If there was one issue that formed the leitmotif of the discussions, with delegates from all over the country reporting on it, it was the global economic crisis and its continuing impact on women; this is a crisis that the government and the corporate media have officially described as being over. The discussions on the commission paper dealing with the global crisis and its impact brought to the fore the many new facets of the economic and social pressures on different sections of working women. Three clear trends appear to have emerged. First, women's employment is seeing a shift from better-paid to lower-paid jobs and from the organised to unorganised sectors. Second, in the export sector (especially garments), which employs a large number of women and where production has drastically come down, exporters are cutting women's wages in order to remain competitive. Third, as financial institutions push the government to bail them out, the government in turn targets welfare schemes and subsidies, and this affects the poor and vulnerable segments of the population, especially poor women.

People who say that there is no impact of the crisis are not able to see it because it is being borne by women who have been invisibilised', said Kiran Moghe, secretary, AIDWA. Wages drop as working hours increase. In Haryana and Himachal Pradesh, delegates from those regions reported, girls who used to work in the software sector have now lost their jobs as their companies had closed down. Many now work as salesgirls for Rs.500-1,000 a month. The Tamil Nadu delegates gave the example of the Sumangali scheme introduced by companies in Tirupur, the centre of the hosiery industry. Young girls are employed on the promise that they will be given a sum of Rs.25,000 to Rs.30,000 at the end of three years. They are made to live and work in subhuman conditions and, at the end of the period, are often not paid the promised amount.

From Madhya Pradesh came the story of women workers who had jobs in the organised sector now turning to domestic work because large companies such as TELCO and TISCO have cut back their operations. Even in the high-wage State of Kerala, because exports such as cashew have been affected, women workers are forced into casual employment, as, for example, making plastic slippers, and earning Rs.30-Rs.50 a day. It has also been observed that because male employment was shrinking, men were becoming middlemen for women's occupations, thus pushing women's wages down. This was happening in occupations as different as garland making (reported by delegates from Maharashtra) and chikankari embroidery (reported by delegates from Uttar Pradesh).

The formidable threat posed to the organised Left, including AIDWA, from Maoist insurgency groups was an issue that was debated by the conference. It was brought up by the delegates from West Bengal and other States that have Adivasi populations and where the problem of Maoist insurgency exists.

Impact of Maoist violence

According to them, AIDWA has lost many of its cadre to Maoist terror. AIDWA members are unable to function in the open in these areas; they cannot even stay in their homes for fear of being attacked. A poster exhibition on the brutal violence perpetrated by the Maoists was up on display at the conference venue.

AIDWA activists, many of them Adivasis from this region, underlined the fact that the existing discrimination faced by Adivasi women had been compounded by the spread of Maoist insurgency.

As a section most affected by neoliberal governance and privatisation, the rights of Adivasis to land, livelihood, education, health and cultural identity are already threatened, said Malini Bhattacharya, Chairperson of the West Bengal Commission for Women. We must answer those who argue that the Maoists are showing Adivasi people the way. Adivasi women are particularly vulnerable in this scenario. Our activists are in a cleft stick. If they do not go with the Maoists and pay taxes, and so on, they are punished, sometimes killed. On the other hand, if they are with the Maoists as recruits and made to fight, they become victims and a target of the state. Either way, the Adivasi woman is in danger, said Malini Bhattacharya.

Resistance to the Maoists by civilians is met with terror. Anandamayee Kar was burnt to death along with her husband, a senior Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader, in Purulia in 2009. The mother and sister of a locally prominent Adivasi leader of the CPI(M) were tied to their cots and burnt by the Maoists.

When, from the middle of this year, resistance to Maoist terror tactics was building up in Pashchim Medinipur, Bankura and Purulia districts, the Maoists reacted brutally by killing Adivasi men and women. Nilmani Tudu, a folk singer, was killed, and three anganwadi workers were abducted on the suspicion that they were police informers. The body of one of them, Chhabirani Mahato, was found in a grave where she had been buried alive after being gang-raped and tortured.

Yet, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and intellectuals are sympathetic to the Maoist cause, argued delegates, who expressed deep concern about how little of the truth of actual Maoist practice gets reflected in the mainstream corporate media, which paint the Maoist movement in glowing colours. In West Bengal, where the mainstream media are openly hostile to the Left Front government, the violence unleashed by the Trinamool-Maoist alliance gets little coverage. The NGO movement plays a big role in selling the view that the Maoists are leading a liberation struggle. In reality, Adivasis suffer as the Maoists do not allow civic amenities such as schools, public health centres and anganwadis to function in these areas.

In other parts of the country, privatisation has resulted in Adivasis losing what little land they own and made them refugees who are forced to migrate in search of work. Women are doubly vulnerable as their access to education and health is severely curbed by the state and large corporates. It is in this scenario that Maoist groups with their leftist rhetoric have penetrated. There is large-scale trafficking of Adivasi women from these areas, delegates reported. AIDWA faces a major challenge to its growth and functioning here.

Rights of Muslim women

The work that AIDWA has done on the issues faced by Muslim women was yet another major area of debate in the conference. The conference released a book entitled Muslim Women: AIDWA's Interventions and Struggles (AIDWA; New Delhi, 2010; Rs.25), a collection of articles, reports and documents on the many levels of discrimination faced by Muslim women: in the personal sphere, as victims of communalism and terrorism, and as a section deprived of basic rights of citizenship.

The triple talaq is a sword hanging over the heads of married Muslim women, said Sehba Farooqui, secretary of the Delhi State unit of AIDWA, in her introduction to the resolution on the practice of triple talaq passed by the conference. A minor disagreement can result in talaq.

Triple talaq, according to the resolution, has been proscribed or limited in a number of countries across the world, for example, in Pakistan, Indonesia, Iraq, Turkey and Tunisia, and it is only in India that Muslim men have untrammelled freedom to pronounce triple talaq. AIDWA sent a representation against the practice, signed by 20,000 Muslim women, to the Central government and the Muslim Personal Law Board, but this was ignored.

Drawing attention to a case where a wife was recently divorced by triple talaq through an online Skype chat, the resolution highlighted the iniquity and absurdness of a practice that is affecting thousands of Muslim women in the country today. The Darul Uloom Deoband upheld the husband's right and issued a fatwa against the wife. The AIDWA resolution argues that not only is the practice of triple talaq discriminatory and unjust towards the wife and thus against constitutional principles, but it is also contrary to Islam. Triple talaq said in one sitting is a part of one interpretation of the Quran. Actually, the Quran proscribes it, said Sehba Farooqui. There is another interpretation that talaq should be given over a three-month period, and we are urging that this pro-woman option be exercised.

For AIDWA, however, the issue of fighting for citizenship rights for Muslim women for fair wages, jobs, access to civic amenities (including the public distribution system) is an area of immediate priority, said Sehba Farooqui. In Delhi, for example, Muslim women are concentrated in exploitative home-based industries working at piece rates, where they earn between Rs.1,000 and Rs.1,200 a month. They cannot afford to lose their jobs when their men are out of work, but here we have fought for provident fund provisions for such women.

The contrasts in the status of Muslim women across the country was vividly illustrated by the experiences of Tajwar Sultana, an activist who lives and works in the crowded bylanes of the Jama Masjid area of Old Delhi, and 35-year-old Parveen Akhtar from West Tripura, who is an elected member of the zilla parishad. In Tripura, the practice of triple talaq is absent, whereas it occurs in the thousands in Delhi, according to Tajwar Sultana.

Microfinance murders

AIDWA is among the first women's organisations to have identified and documented the impact of the private microfinance sector on women. One of the most important resolutions passed by the Kanpur conference was on the need to regulate microfinance institutions (MFI), which are exercising a deadly impact on poor women debtors in several States.

The resolution drew attention to the spate of suicides as a result of the harassment and strong-arm tactics employed by commercial and profit-oriented corporate MFIs for loan recovery. Taking advantage of the failure of banks to meet the credit needs of the poor, this new breed of moneylenders is luring women to form self-help groups, and then charging these SHGs exorbitant rates of interest as high as 48-60 per cent.Whatever little collectivism has been generated by the SHGs has been systematically destroyed in the process.

The resolution highlighted the situation in Andhra Pradesh, where 32 MFIs are reported to have given loans worth Rs.25,000 crore to 40 per cent of the poor women in the State. Unable to meet the demands for loan repayment, more than 100 people have committed suicide in the last three months. The ordinance promulgated by the Government of Andhra Pradesh is an eyewash as it does not put a cap on the interest rates that MFIs can charge.

In Andhra Pradesh, where 32 MFIs are registered with the Reserve Bank of India in 2008, MFIs operate by pulling women out of the government self-help groups and forming their own groups comprising five members each, said P.A. Devi, Andhra Pradesh State AIDWA committee member. Every woman gets loans from four to seven MFIs, and there are designated days of the week for repayments to different MFIs. There was cent per cent recovery from the groups until the suicides started. The State government has spread the canard that women borrow in order to buy beauty products for themselves, whereas the reality is that they borrow to pay private school and college fees, to meet the loan demands from other MFIs, and to meet the daily requirements of the family, Devi said.

From the village moneylender to the corporate moneylender is how Taposhi Praharaj, vice-president of the Orissa unit of AIDWA, described the credit situation in her State. The AIDWA unit in Orissa surveyed 600 SHGs in 12 districts of the State. The survey covered SHGs that had taken government loans; those that had taken loans from the government and from MFIs; and those that had borrowed only from MFIs. The last category accounts for 70 per cent of the SHGs surveyed.

The survey found that MFIs had penetrated deep into villages and towns. While on paper the rate of interest is stated as a 10 per cent flat rate, the interest charged is on the entire principal throughout the repayment period and cuts are made from the principal amount under several heads, such as processing fee, bank charges, agreement charges and membership charges. The compounded interest is never less than 52 per cent, and we found that on the last Rs.10 instalment, the interest is 525 per cent!

Agents operate through the head of the SHG that the debtor belongs to and take away every possession the woman owns if she defaults. Bilashini Behra from Bhubaneswar took loans from three MFIs, each successive one to pay the previous one. She committed suicide because she could ultimately not repay them, said Taposhi Praharaj.

The AIDWA resolution called for an immediate Central law to cap interest rates charged by MFIs and to regulate their operations; to file criminal cases against MFIs engaged in extortionist practices; to cap interest rates from banks to SHGs at 4 per cent and cap loans given by MFIs to not more than 2 per cent above the banks' interest rates to MFIs; and to expand cheap credit facilities through direct banking to SHGs.

If these were some of the major issues that AIDWA brought to the foreground as the more recent issues impacting women, there were a welter of other important issues, ranging from the situation in Kashmir and the way forward to the impact of price rise on all sections of the people, including women, that were also discussed. For this organisation, the way ahead is tough and complex, but if the outcome of the conference is any pointer, AIDWA has deepened its understanding of the situation it faces and honed its strategies to meet the challenges.