Feminism and Antiracism: International Struggles for Justice

10 Extraordinary Alliances in Crisis Situations: Women against Hindu Nationalism in India

Chapter 10 Extraordinary Alliances in Crisis Situations Women against Hindu Nationalism in India Paola Bacchetta This chapter explores women’s alliances across religions, classes, castes, and sexualities against Hindu nationalism during two significant events: a Hindu-Muslim riot in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, in 1985 and Hindu nationalist attacks against lesbianism in 1998. In my analysis of the way these alliances crystalized during moments of crisis, I draw on primary documents by women’s and anticommunal organizations,1 data from interviews with women activists, observations from my own experiences with women’s, lesbian, and anti-Hindu nationalist groups, as well as internal and public documents by Hindu nationalist groups. India has a long history of women’s allied organizing, and currently an extremely vibrant all-India Women’s Movement (hereafter IWM).2 Some direct precursors are nineteenth-century struggles against sati (in which a wife throws herself, or is thrown, onto the funeral pyre of her husband), harsh treatment of widows, and child marriage (Mani 1989; Chatterjee 1994). At the turn of the century, women’s struggles for education, political representation, and legal equality in areas such as marriage and inheritance were orchestrated by mass organizations such as Indian Women’s Association, National Council of Women, and All India Women’s Conference , founded in 1917, 1925, and 1927 respectively (Kumar 1993, 1995; Omvedt 1979). Other precedents are women’s activism in the Gandhian, mass leftist, and revolutionary “terrorist” wings of India’s independence movement, won in 1947 (Jayawardena 1994:73–108). The current wave of the IWM emerged in the early 1970s from a fractured left and other mixed-gender movements (Kumar 1993, 1995; Basu 1992). The early groups espoused a mass-based politics wherein gender 220 concerns intersected with class analysis, and included activists from all sectors of society. For example, Self-Employed Women’s Association (hereafter SEWA), a trade union for poor, informal-sector women, was founded in 1972 in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Women of the Sharmik Sangathana (Toilers’ Organization), which emerged from an earlier (1960s) landless laborers’ movement in Maharashtra, fought men’s physical violence (associated with alcoholism) against women. The United Women’s Anti-Price Rise Front, also in Maharashtra, involved housewives who protested inflation in street demonstrations (housebound women beat metal plates and rolling pins in support as they walked by), storming government offices, or raiding warehouses. The Progressive Organization of Women (POW) in Hyderabad, composed of middle-class Maoists, inspired similar groups in other cities. Socialist and communist women created women’s wings to their parties, while women workers formed wings in mixed-gender trade unions. Organizing around women’s issues was given national attention as the Indian government’s 1974 report on the status of women was publicized, as the United Nations designated 1975 as International Women’s Year (Ray 1999:4), and during the International Women’s Decade. Women’s organizations, however, were among those outlawed when, in 1975, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, threatened by opposition to her regime, called a national state of Emergency. After the Emergency ended in 1977, new types of women’s groups mushroomed across the country, parallel to the old. The post-1977 IWM is highly heterogeneous, decentralized, and concerned with a wide range of issues in both urban and rural settings (for two excellent analyses of the geopolitical specificities of IWM issues, see Ray 1999 and Basu 1992). Although there are no statistics on the number and size of groups currently operative, the fact that annual IWM conferences draw between four thousand and ten thousand women gives some idea of their enormous scope. This is in spite of the fact that many groups cannot afford to send representatives, and that most women are unable to spare the time to attend. The post-1977 groups include long-term projects such as women’s centers (providing counseling and legal aid), health programs, and incomegenerating projects. Others are organized around specific issues: dowry murders (wife burning with the goal of keeping the dowry), rape, husbands’ alcohol abuse, domestic violence, child prostitution, environmental degradation , Christian women’s inheritance rights, Muslim women’s rights to Extraordinary Alliances in Crisis Situations 221 maintenance after divorce, working women’s hostels, equal wages, and maternity leave. Their organizational forms range from nonhierarchical collectives ,to board-run groups,to organizations modeled after traditional left groups and unions. IWM organizations have a history of working to forge solidarities across classes, faiths, and castes. For example, Jagori...