17 Challenges to the women’s movement: Globalization and Communalism

Sneha Gole

Introduction:

In this chapter we are going to look at the challenges to the women’s movement, in terms of those posed by globalization and communalism. In order to do that we must begin by looking at the category ‘women’s movements’ and understand what this means in an Indian context. Like most social movements, the women’s movement in India is also made up of a number of strands, which differ from each other in terms of the way they understand women’s issues, the prioritization of issues, strategies and organizational forms as well as nature of collective action they undertake. As scholars like Roy (2010) point out, while specific issues have taken precedence at specific historical periods, there has existed a broad consensus on what constitutes ‘transformatory change’ for women. It is generally agreed upon that collective action around issues regarding women has to be multi-layered, directed against multiple levels of domination, like caste, culture, ideology, and has to mean action both from within and outside of institutional frameworks. Power is thus, sought to be dismantled at the level of both society and state.

Thus, as argued by scholars like Basu (1999), Omvedt (1993) in the Indian context, we need to move out of the equation of feminism with movements organized by women autonomously from male-dominated organizations, because such a formulation excludes many forms of activism within the context of democracy, nationalist and human rights struggles in which women ultimately take up questions of gender inequality even if that is not their initial objective. The category ‘women’s movements’ includes therefore not only in the autonomous women’s groups, but also wings of political parties, trade unions, rural mass based organizations and left affiliated women’s groups and mass organizations.

It is in the context of this understanding of the women’s movement that we are addressing questions of challenges faced by it, particularly in the decade of 1990s. This decade has been characterized as the Mandal-Masjid-World bank years (Niranjana and Tharu 1999). The turn of the 1990s saw these three major influences on India’s economic and political landscape. Though they are often lumped together, we need to remember that their coming together was conjectural rather than structural and that each of these has meant very different kinds of pulls and pushes for the women’s movement (John 2009).

The first of these forces, characterized as the secular upsurge of caste, came up in the context of the Indian government’s decision to implement the recommendations of the Mandal Commission to extend reservations in government employment and higher education to the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and the bitter opposition to it by the so-called ‘forward’ classes, who had until then disavowed caste in their public dealings. The nature and language of Indian politics was permanently changed by this. There has been a consolidation of a wide range of regional, lower caste political parties which emerged thereafter as significant players in national politics (Menon and Nigam, 2007). In this context then, caste gained centre-stage and it became possible to talk caste without being casteist, in the context of modern democratic structures.

This was also a period marked by the complete collapse of the ‘Nehruvian consensus’, which was seen in terms of a vision of self-reliant economy based on a model of import-substituting industrialization, a secular polity and a non-aligned foreign policy (Menon and Nigam, ibid). The period then marked an initiation of the structural adjustment program, under the auspices of the IMF and the World Bank. This happened in the context of the collapse of the socialist bloc, pushing neoliberal reforms inevitable.

The third major force, to be marked as ‘mandir’ can be seen in terms of the rapid rise of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party as a major claimant for political power in the centre, fueled in this time period by a successful mobilization for the construction of a ram mandir in the disputed site at Ayodhya and leading to the demolition of the Babri Masjid which stood there in 1992. This has been seen as marking a new wave of sectarian violence against the Muslim minorities in the country, a pattern repeated, most significantly in 2002 in Gujarat.

As scholars like Menon and Nigam (2007) point out though these factors seem to come up at this particular conjecture, it is important to remember that they have a long history of development, which can be traced back to the late 70s and 80s. However this conjecture has come to mark a water-shed in Inda’s polity and economy and also in the understanding of social movements. All social movements in India, including the women’s movement have influenced and have been influenced by these conjectural factors in different ways. For the movement, this has thrown up challenges as well as new forms of mobilization, newer issues and strategies. We will concentrate here on the two major challenges, those thrown up by the neoliberal policy regime, also often spoken of in terms of globalization and challenges of communalism. We are arguing that though the phenomenon of globalization and communalism are linked, they are not similar in terms of the challenges they throw up and therefore there is a need to look at each of them seperately.

This chapter covers four sections. In the first section, we will look at the different ways in which globalization has been understood and why it has been seen as a challenge to the movement. The second section looks at the responses of the movement to the challenges of globalization, especially through transnational organizing. The third section outlines the feminist scholarship on the challenges of communalism and in the last section we take an overview of the movement’s responses.

Section 1: Understanding Globalization and its challenges to the women’s movement

As we saw earlier, the 1990s has been marked as a watershed in terms of a host of changes to do with neo-liberal economic policies, opening up of the market and economy, proliferation of the media etc. These changes often broadly characterized as ‘globalization’ are seen to have impacted the nature of social movements in general and the women’s movement in particular. Scholars of social movements have characterized these changes as ‘decline’ in the women’s movement as the ways of organizing and activism changed (Krishnaraj 2003) specifically in terms of what has been termed as the ‘NGOization of feminism’ (Chaudhuri 2004). Scholars like Dietrich have argued that loss of socialist vision, coming both from an international context of the collapse of ‘already existing socialisms’ and from an ideological vacuum has had an adverse impact on the women’s movement in India which has been co-opted into the ideology of ‘empowerment’. She argues that in this climate, it is difficult to even think of alternatives and therefore proposes that a re-emergence of ‘socialist vision’ which would mean ideological clarity, self-reliance and simple living is necessary for a relevant politics. (Dietrich, 2003)

Scholars have pointed out how the proliferation of NGOs is a wide ranging reorganization of the political field. It has also been pointed out how the matrix of NGO-isation in India is largely non-feminist, as NGOs intersect with the State, donors, market and civil society actors with complex networks and relationships that span these boundaries. (Sangari 2007) Scholars point out that growing participation of NGOs in each of the national women’s conferences reflects the fact that the women’s movement is a hugely funded affair today. (Biswas 2006)

The anxieties centre around the relegation of autonomy and agency to global funding imperatives, the privileging of specialist knowledge and solutions over structural analyses of power, shifts in the modes and methods of decision-making, all of this seen as a move away from mass-based, agitational political struggles to a professionalized project of governance, and a general fragmentation of the Indian women’s movement (Roy 2011, Jaywardene 2009 and Alvarez 1999). It has been seen to boost temporary, careerist, “nine-to-five feminists”’ who are then seen as ‘the most obvious fall out of the professionalization of feminism’ (De Alwis, 2009: 86).

The state’s move towards market-based reforms, which led to the international donor-driven NGO ‘boom’, has positioned NGOs more and more within the ‘public service contractor model’ of service delivery; one that prioritizes a language of competence over commitment in social development activity (Kudva, 2005). It has been noted by scholars (Alvarez,1999) that with the ‘boom’ in NGOS, the character of the autonomous women’s groups has undergone major changes, manifested in their organizational structure, funding patterns, strategies, programmes and even in their aims. It has been contended that they focused on service delivery and policy assessment rather than social transformation and policy amendment, working more as gender experts rather than gendered citizens, as surrogates rather than representatives of civil society (Alvarez 1999).

This has been especially noted in the Indian case, since many of the autonomous women’s groups which were formed in the late 1970s and 80s, have become funded NGOs by the turn to the 90s, given an exhaustion of organizational resources and easily available funding. This has led to a formulation whereby professionalization is said to have enabled women with little or no political commitment to practise feminism as a profession rather than as a politics (Menon, 2004).

At another level, globalization is seen to have thrown a challenge to the women’s movement in terms of the simultaneous but contradictory processes of relegation and cooption of women’s issues by the State. The state is noted to have picked up the langage of ‘gender’ where gender has come to be equated with ‘women’, and been operationalized through programmes like the Mahila Samakhya on the one hand and programmatic interventions like self-help groups on the other.

Though it has been argued that it is withdrawal of the state from ‘welfare’ which marks globalization, we have to see that in fact there is a clear difference in what was happening to the state in the 1980s and 90s. Though in the 1980s, the international policy agenda, led by the neo-liberal stance in the main international financial institutions, downsized the state and eroded its powers, in the late 1990s, the state was brought back in as an institution that bore the main responsibility for governance (Mukhopadhyay, 2007). The first phase of the ‘good governance’ agenda sought to build a technocratic state that would be an efficient and honest manager. Subsequently however there was a growing interest in reforming the political state and fashioning liberal democracies. Despite the realization that entrenching democracy and enhancing the role of the state in safeguarding citizens’ rights required rebuilding the political relationship between the state and society, the formula for democratic reform concentrated on the institutional design of the state. It involved the reform of electoral systems, decentralization and devolution of government and the reform of administrative and legal systems. Development discourses backed by the power of financing, projects and knowledge production constructed the idea of a state without politics and proposed a generic model of a citizen unmarked by social relations. A plethora of new sites for citizen participation were opened up, without the state intervening to guarantee social rights for everybody. (Mukhopadhyay, 2007) The power of the state to effect social redistribution was undermined by international neo-liberal economic policies from the mid 1970s onwards, when downsizing of the state occurred. Although the role of the state was rehabilitated in the 1990s, it was within the contours of a specific agenda. Thus, the present context is characterized by an emphasis on democracy and rights at the international level on the one hand, and consolidation of a market-led development model inimical to redistribution on the other.

Thus, it is important to understand the complexity of the state at the present juncture. While on the one hand, one can see the State not being interested in redistributive agendas, on the other, we see the opening up of spaces for citizens’ participation where none existed before. However we need to critically examine the nature of this citizen partnership. In this paradigm, policy making is no more seen as a political process, as a process of negotiation between diverse and often competing and contradictory demands. It has come to be seen in terms of merely collating the obvious. As scholars have pointed out accounting practices and narrow cost-benefit definitions of efficiency assume more weight in the policy process than moral objectives of governance like human equality and democratic accountability (Brodie, 2005). Questions of gender have found habitat as ‘women’s empowerment’ within this state context, making this visibility of gender particularly problematic for the women’s movement.

Section   2:    Responses   of   the   women’s   movement   to   challenges    ofglobalization:

Transnational Organizing

We can understand the response of women’s movements to the challenges of globalization in three ways: one, to look at efforts like World March of Women which has been the feminist anti-globalization transnational network, to look at how feminist organizations within India have responded to these challenges, by centering their hybrid nature and through strategies like inter-sectoral organizing and thirdly, the feminist interventions in state-led empowerment programmes.

Scholars have pointed out that women’s movements though universal in aims and inspirations are locally situated in terms of their character (Basu 1995). This scholarship has emphasized the ‘local origins, character and concerns’ of women’s movements. Scholarship has pointed out how women have challenged universalist understandings of feminism and thereby relocated feminism amid the marginalized/subordinated groups. It has been pointed out that the history, shape and analytical scope of the women’s movement in India do not fit into with either the model of localism or derivation. (Sangari 2007) The local origins, character and concerns of the movement then become very crucial in order to map the larger movement. At the same time the movements are influenced by and influence the global. Recently the studies of social movements have attempted to go beyond those models which presuppose a single nation-state since increasingly movements are having a global reach and transnational mobilization. It has emphasized the importance of transnational advocacy networks as borders between states become permeable to international political activism. The processes of globalization are seen to have also created the possibilities of solidarities across boundaries as communication networks expand. Such transnational organizing has blossomed within the women’s movement, feminist activists are increasingly and self-consciously participating within international forums and constructing a women’s movement understood as being both local and global (Cockburn 2000, Basu 2000, Steinstra 1999,2000, Sperling et al 2001, Thayer 2010). This period has seen very influential transnational advocacy networks around issues of sex work, trafficking, migrant labour, gender-just laws etc.

Scholars like Moghadam (Moghadam 1996) have argued that transnational networks are organizing women around the most pressing issues of the day and that they have a broader and more far reaching impact than local movements. We can take the example of the World March of Women, which is an international feminist action movement connecting grass-roots groups and organizations working to eliminate the causes at the root of poverty and violence against women. The March includes a total of 6000 grassroots women’s groups and its importance lies in the diversity of its constituent groups which include unions of informal sector workers, mass organizations of women, feminist NGOs etc; the reliance on contentious politics more than lobbying and the ways in which it brings gender to anti-globalization movement and anti-globalization agenda to women’s movements. The WMW has been coordinating campaigns across different coutnries, which take on the larger agenda of ‘freedom from poverty and violence’ while responding to the particularities of neoliberal politics in the respective nations.

Batliwala (2002) argues that the rise of transnational grassroots movements, with strong constituency base and sophisticated advocacy capability at both local and global levels, is an important phenomenon in this context. These movements are formed and led by poor and marginalized groups, and defy the stereotype of grassroots movements being narrowly focused on local issues. They embody both a challenge and an opportunity for democratizing and strengthening the role of transnational civil society in global policy. This is the importance of transnational networks.

At the second level, feminist organizations have responded to the discourse of NGOization in several ways. It has been shown by scholars that earlier assessments of NGOisation might have been overly pessimistic and that feminist politics is being forwarded in many unexpected sites (Alvarez 2009). Feminist NGOs have a hybrid face that seeks to combine the service delivery mode with the agitational mode. In a context where globalization has sharpened economic inequalities, the service delivery mode is seen as essential and it has been argued that even when they are doing service delivery, feminist NGOs as important producers of feminist knowledge and disseminators of feminist discourse – not just to policy makers, but also to other social movements and civil society organizations. Thus, feminist NGOs are involved in mobilization of ideas, not just people. It has also been argued that NGOisation as an effect of the UN decade and associated development strategies has had contradictory political effects for feminist movements. There are growing class, cultural and strategic divergences between highly professionalized, internationalized feminist policy experts on one hand and more aggressive and combative grassroots movements on the other. This calls for, a need to rethink our imagination of the movement itself, thinking of it as a kind of mega network which includes more formalized as well as fluid, informal webs.

Through a centering of the voices of ‘career feminists’ belonging to feminist NGOs which show that we need to move beyond purist and dichotomized understandings of feminist activism and identities, and move, instead, towards points of convergence and hybridity, scholars have shown how passion/ profession, real/virtual, agitational/service delivery might not be useful binaries to understand the movement (Roy 2011, Nazneen and Sultan 2013) Scholars have also drawn attention to new sites of activism, like urban cyberfeminist activism (Mitra-Kahn 2013). It has been argued that the hybrid activist spaces comprised of ‘offline’ street activism and ‘online’ campaigning is a conscious countering of the assumption that young middle class women are apathetic towards feminist politics. Thus, it emerges from these readings that globalization and the different configurations made possible through it have created spaces for young women to politically intervene in ways that might not have been possible for an older generation of feminists. Thus, these new feminist subjectivities though linked to the terrain on which they are being formed, might not be easily reducible to a ‘co-opted’ neoliberal subject, as many critiques have assumed.

Then we need to look at the fact that in the context of India, there are many forms of organizations, like the non-funded mass organizations affiliated to left parties, who have remained non-funded. For instance the All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA) which is probably the largest women’s organization in the country today. The AIDWA has responded to challenges of globalization through what it calls ‘inter-sectoral’ organizing, focusing on the possibilities of solidarities between disparate groups of women, focusing on over-lapping rather than discreet facets of women’s lives. Thus, the neoliberal policies and communalism have been the major targets of the campaigns, with concerted organizing around issues like the universalization of the public distribution system, violence against women, ‘honour’ related crimes, against privatization of health care etc. This enabled the AIDWA to expand in unprecedented ways in the exact period of globalization (Armstrong 2014).

Another major organizational form which came up as response to the challenges of globalization was the emergence of unions of informal sector workers, especially women workers. Pioneered by SEWA in the 70s and 80s, the unions of informal sector workers have emerged as a key site of feminist resistance, especially since the structural changes in the economy have meant greater informalization of the workforce. In this context we see important organizations of domestic workers, of waste-pickers, self-employed women have emerged. There is also much transnational organizing around issues of informal sector labour, as in networks like HomeNet etc.

The context of the AIDS scare and funding for AIDS-related work has also created the opportunities for sex worker collectives to be formed, as they came to be mobilized in this as ‘high-risk’ groups. Thus, it is important to see that globalization while creating challenges for the movement, also opened up new possibilities, sites and strategies for the movement.

At the level of the operationalizing of gender by the state, we see that feminists have consistently intervened in it. At the level of efforts like gender budgeting and gender planning by the state, feminists have critiqued and constantly tried to rework the same. They have intervened in government programmes like the Mahila Samakhya.

The major aim of the Mahila Samakhya programme was to achieve women’s empowerment through education. It was based on the highly successful Women’s Development Programme (WDP) of the government of Rajasthan. The programme worked by training women from various villages to become village-level activists. These women were then trained to organize other women from the village into groups. The nature of activities taken up by the programme in each village varied according to the needs and aspirations of the local women but education remained at the core of the programme. Feminists have consistently intervened in the MS programme to ensure that the vision of empowerment remains political. Narayanan’s study in rural Karnataka shows that poor rural women supported by a solidarity network of sangha can begin to challenge discrimination based on gender, caste and class. It confirms that an on-going ‘empowerment’ programme can create an enabling environment for poor women elected to panchayats. In Uttar Pradesh, through consistent efforts by women’s groups, the MS experience has been translated into the production of the Khabar Lehariya, India’s first newspaper run entirely by rural, Dalit women. The newspaper has not only meant transformation in the lives of the women who run it, but has also interrogated the nexus between knowledge and power in significant ways.

Thus, as Menon (2004) has argued that in India, the globalisation debate offers only one of two positions – an uncritical celebration of a homogenised globe or an equally celebratory reassertion of the nation as a bulwark against global capital. The challenge for feminist politics is the working out of a different space for a radical politics of culture, one that is differentiated from both right and left wing articulations of cultural and economic nationalism, as well as from the libertarian and celebratory responses to globalisation from the consuming elites. This is especially seen to be crucial, as culture and issues around culture like dress codes, beauty contests etc. have come to be centrally important in the debates and actions of the women’s movement, in the period after 1990. The resistances to globalization that the movement has offered are continuously attempting to do the same.

Section 3: Challenge of communalism to the women’s movement

The challenge of communalism to the women’s movement came up in a context where religion and gender have come to be increasingly intertwined, not only in India but in South Asia as a whole. Not only have religious forces marked women as repositories of religious beliefs and keepers of purity and integrity of the community, but women have also engaged in activism within this “communal” politics (Basu, 1999). It has been a challenge for the women’s movement to both understand and analyze women’s participation in communal politics as well as strategies to combat the same. As scholars have pointed out the relationship of women to politicized religion is paradoxical and complex, because on the one hand it creates opportunities for women’s activism while simultaneously undermining women’s autonomy. The women’s movement had to grapple with issues of religious identity, which complicated the way in which women’s groups had hitherto seen the relationship between women’s rights and rights of communities to preserve their religious and cultural identities. The right of communities to administer themselves in civil and family matters has been a field of contestation for the women’s movement and the right-wing political formations in India (Roy 2011).

In this context, it is important to look at the Shah Bano case. In 1985, the Supreme Court while delivering a judgement in favour of Shah Bano (a Muslim woman who had gone to court seeking maintenance under Section 125 of the Criminal Procedure Code from her ex-husband), also remarked that the governemnt enact a Uniform Civil Code. This judgement sparked off a controversy, with a section of the Muslim community protesting against the statement of the Court and asking for the sanctity of the Shariat (Muslim legal code) to be upheld. The state responded by bringing in a legislative measure namely, the Muslim Women’s (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986 that exempted Muslim women from Section 125 of the Criminal Procedure Code, thus, freeing Muslim men from the obligations to maintenance they had under it. The Shah Bano case and the subsequent law became grounds for major contestations between Muslim fundamentalist groups who upheld the law, different strands of the women’s movement who criticized the law for marking Muslim women as secondary citizens, for groups which opposed the communalization of the gender question and called for a gender-just Uniform Civil Code and for the Hindu fundamentalists who supporting the call of the Court for the UCC felt that this vindicated their characterization of the Muslim community as backward and barbaric. In many ways then the Shah Bano question became a site for contestations around community, rather than questions of women’s rights.

The other critical event to understand in this context is the debates and demonstrations which followed the Roop Kanwar sati incident in 1987 in Deorala, Rajasthan. Women’s groups were criticized for not understanding what “real” Indian womanhood stood for and right wing Hindu groups argued for a woman’s “right” to go sati, again pointing to the complex ways in which women are imbricated in questions of religious identity and community autonomy (Roy 2011). Both the cases had broad similarities. At the core of the debate was women’s rights, especially rights to property of widows and divorced women. However in both cases, the male religious leaders and fundamentalists were able to raise the bogey of the “community under siege”, thereby reaffirming their right to represent the community. The state took up a position of siding with the male fundamentalists in both cases, sacrificing women’s rights in order to strike a bargain with the larger ‘community’.

For the women’s movement all this posed a number of dilemmas. On the one hand, it had to deal with the rise of a hegemonic Hindu identity, that in many ways was restructuring the very ideals of secular nationhood. On the other, both the cases also brought into sharp focus issues of difference and a recognition of the fact that the identity ‘woman’ was layered, with women often in hierarchies of their own. The third challenge that the women’s movement had to confront was how to make sense of the activism of upper-caste, Hindu women which was not a part of feminist activism.

This activism of Hindu upper-caste women was seen in the context of the anti-Mandal agitations where young, upper-caste Hindu women took to the streets asking the state “who would their husbands be?” in case OBCs were given reservations in government jobs. As Chakravarti points out, these women spoke the language of merit and had taken to the streets as concerned secular “citizens” while their very question was framed through a tacit acceptance of caste endogamy. Therefore, as Tharu and Niranjana (1999) point out that there was a resurgence of these women in the public sphere, and they attempted to stake a claim to equality through the elimination of competing claims by Dalit women.

Hindu upper-caste women also became active in women’s organizations aligned to communal parties and movements like the Rashtriya Sevika Samiti, the Durga Vahini and others. As Sarkar (1996) points out the participation of upper-caste Hindu women in organizations like the Samiti ironically inverted the traditional invisibility of these women when they played an active part in the communal rioys in the wake of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. This participation contributed towards women’s political self-activization and self-actualization, albeit in the context of an anti-Muslim identity. These women saw themselves in a new, empowering self-image as karsevikas rescuing the birthplace of Lord Rama (Sarkar, 1996).

At another level, when it came to issues like opposition to the Miss World contest, women’s organizations found themselves to be strange bed-fellows with the right wing organizations. Though the reasons and analysis of the opposition were different for the two groups: for women’s groups it was a symbol of objectification of women, for the right-wing groups it was about “obscenity” and an assault on “Indian culture”. However as scholars point out, it became very difficult for women’s groups to mark out their distinction from the right-wing organizations.

Scholars attempting to make sense of Hindu women’s wide-scale participation in right-wing movements have pointed out that this activism often strengthens systems of gender segregation and while empowering women from particular communities also deepens the relgious and ethnic divides among them (Basu 1999). In fact it is only on the site of the construction of the community, that women are allowed agency. The space for this agency is also created through women upholding the standards of proper conduct to which they are expected to conform as a basis for criticizing other groups and institutions. In fact, scholars have argued that women’s large-scale participation in communal organizations is tied to the fact that these organizations offer women a space in the public, without having to critique the institutions like family. In fact this participation is seen as an extension of the familial/ community.

It has also been pointed out by scholars that the communal organizations often use the language of legal and constitutional rights to pit women’s rights against minority rights. The idea of secularism is reinterpreted to mean that Hindus and Muslims should be treated alike without paying any attention to the specific sturctural vulnerabilities of Muslims as a minority group. In this formulation then, any positive discrimination gets marked as ‘appeasement’ of Muslims. The Muslim woman has emerged as a victim in this discourse, someone who needs ‘saving’, the saviour being cast as the Hindu man.

Another significant way in which communalism has raised a challenge for the women’s movement is through this avowal of the language of rights, choice, freedom etc. and recasting it in terms which create schisms between women, which is violent and deeply anti-democratic.

From within the women’s movement there has been internal critique of what has come to be marked as the implicit ‘Hindu-ness’ of the movement. In their critique of the movement, Agnes and Patel pointed out that in its efforts to combat the selective ‘western’ tag and to claim indigenity, the symbols (like Kali for Women) and histories (like the Goddess as feminist) that the women’s movement discovered and adopted were ‘Hindu’, collapsing Indian into Hindu. They also pointed out that while the Muslim or the Christian woman was named so and marked out, the subject of feminism remained the unmarked ‘woman’ who was also by default the Hindu woman. They argued that in order to make sense of the rise of Hindu right-wing the movement would have to be critical of its own practices, strategies and symbols.

Thus, we saw how understanding the large scale mobilization of women in right wing movements and their leadership and visibility in these movements became a challenge for the movement and how feminist scholarship has understood it as ‘inverted feminism’ (Basu 1999).

We also saw how a challenge was thrown up for the movement through its own internal critique which showed how the women’s movement while being unmarked had remained implicitely Hindu, upper caste (Agnes 1994, Patel). This forced the movement to rethink the way the unmarked homogenous category ‘woman’ had come to be used within the movement.

Section 4: Responses of the movement to the challenge of communalism

In this section, we will see how the women’s movement in India has responded to the challenge of communalism, especially through the debate on the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) and the different ways in which women’s groups have responded to the call for UCC. The call for a uniform civil code has a long history but came up once again in the context of the Shah Bano case. The thrust of the feminist demand for a uniform civil code was gender equality much more than ‘uniformity’. The argument was that all religious laws, because they have a basis in patriarchy are unjust to women and therefore there is a need for a comprehensive gender-just civil code. However in the aftermath of the Shah Bano judgment and the remarks of the Supreme Court, the question of Uniform Civil Code came to be cast by Hindu right- wing as reform in Muslim law to bring it on par with what was seen as the ‘progressive’ hindu code. In this formulation then, it was oral talaq and polygamy (essentially Muslim law) that were highlighted as practices needing reform and not the unequal succession, property and other laws that existed among other communities. The emphasis was on ‘uniformity’ for the sake of ‘unity’ and ‘national integration’. In a context when the demand for UCC came to be communalized, the women’s movement withdrew its demand for the UCC, arguing instead for a focus on achieving gender equality rather than uniformity. The movement proposed a number of different alternatives, including focusing on reform from within religious communities, for framing and implementing an ‘optional’ gender-just code which individuals can choose to enter etc. There has also been many efforts for the reform of Muslim law from within the community, with Muslim women pushing for change. This has led to interventions like the model Nikaahnama which takes advantage of the fact that Muslim marriage is considered as a contract to frame a gender-just marriage contract, formation of all-women Jamaats as feminist informal justice mechanisms etc.

At another level, the movement has tried to face the challenge of communalism by being reflexive about its own practices and symbols. It has also tried to continuously underline the inter-linkages between gender and communalism, by showing how the imagery of communalism is gendered, how it is women’s bodies that become the battle-fields when the identity of the community is sought to be consolidated. The women’s movement has also been active in rescue and rehabilitation in cases of communal conflict and in recording and documenting instances of violence. Feminists have been at the forefront of attempts to bring justice to those affected by violence and in underlining the gendered and sexualized nature of such violence. They have challenged the impunity with which acts of gendered violence are undertaken in situations of communal violence.

Conclusion

The women’s movement in the contemporary times is thus facing the challenge of sustaining itself, of sharpening the edge of its struggle, in the face of the challenges thrown up by globalization and communalism. In the 1970s and 80s the most urgent task for feminists was to address the question of ‘invisibility’ of women. In the contemporary period, visibility of women is no longer an issue. As feminist scholars Tharu and Niranjana (1999) point out, “women are suddenly everywhere”. The questions for the women’s movement today are how to contend with this ‘hypervisibility’ of certain groups of women – most notably urban, middle class, upper caste women and the question of how to conceptualize the ‘differences among women’. The question that is been asked is how to understand this visibility? Whether it is to be understood as the success of the women’s movement or are the concerns and the language of the women’s movement been co-opted by agendas and institutions that in fact seek to contain and deflect this potential? The rise of right wing and market feminisms on the one hand and the significant political assertions and theoretical interventions of third world and dalit feminists as well as feminists centering the question of sexuality have challenged the assumed notion of a ‘universality of gender oppression’. It has initiated the questioning of the fault lines of caste and community that exist within the supposedly homogenous category ‘woman’. A contemporary theory of gender has to take into consideration these fault lines. Without a coalition with democratic, transformation oriented forces, the women’s movement’s dream of complete social transformation cannot become a reality.

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