Toward Empowerment

Women And Movement Politics In India

Leslie J Calman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000010558
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Analyzing Indian women's groups as one sector of a complex of new grass-roots, non-party political movements, Dr. Caiman considers why and how a women's movement evolved in India when it did. She describes the nature, origins, and meanings of the movement for Indian women and discusses the movement's significance for Indian politics in general as w

PART ONE
Development of the Indian Women's Movement

1
Introduction: Theoretical Approaches to Defining the Movement and Evaluating Its Results

The women's movement emerged in response to a crisis of the Indian state. By the mid-1970s, the government appeared to be corrupt and increasingly inept. Economic development had failed to reach hundreds of millions of Indians who remained mired in poverty and illiteracy, and the state increasingly violated the human rights of its citizens. Anger at political elites and lack of confidence in state institutions, including opposition political parties, led to a blossoming of movement politics. Increasing numbers of people ventured outside of established political channels to pressure the state to protect human rights and expand economic development.

The women's movement was part of this surge. Like other secular, democratic and non-party movements that developed during this period (including those to improve the standing of Dalits [untouchables], tribals, and others among the poor, and movements to protect the environment on which the livelihoods of so many depend), the women's movement has wanted to have an impact not only on the state, but on society as well. The movement wants political rights for women, and it seeks their social and economic empowerment.

By exploring the structural opportunities provided by the crisis of the Indian political system, and examining what domestic and international resources have been available to help the movement develop, the next three chapters will analyze in detail why and how the women's movement emerged. This chapter briefly introduces the structure and goals of the movement, and presents a theoretical approach to answering both a prior question and a subsequent one that is at the heart of this book. First, how does one define a movement and judge whether or not it exists: is there indeed a women's movement in India? Second, how should an analyst go about predicting what a movement will (or will not) be able to accomplish? Some additional questions are necessary to answer the latter question: How is the structure of a movement related to its outcome? And in what arenas do we judge movement results: movement results with relation to what?

The first question is necessary because women who are politically active on behalf of women's causes in India often demur when asked if there is an Indian women's movement. The question seems to them to imply a singular, unified entity, perhaps with one guiding ideology and a compact leadership group. Such a phenomenon certainly does not exist. A movement, however—vibrant, energetic, and multi-faceted—does. That its parameters are difficult to pin down and that its tactics and leaders are many and varied make it no less a movement. Indeed, this chapter begins to argue that the decentralized structure of the Indian women's movement and its resulting capacity to engage simultaneously with many levels of government and society marks a strength, not a weakness, in its capacity to build the rights, economic and political power, and status of women.

What Is a Movement?

A movement is a collective effort to seek change. Throughout this book, I will use the term "movement" rather than "social movement" or "political movement" in order to stress that these phenomena often address change both with respect to social life and with respect to the state. Political scientists have generally attended only to the latter aspect. But many women are prevented by social constrictions from significant participation in the economy and in politics. In defining the parameters of a women's movement, then, one must make the connection between the private, or social exercise of power, and its public, or political exercise.

A movement may aim to overthrow the state, to transform it, or just to get something from it. Although it was once thought that movements were symptoms of anomie and irrationality, movements in democracies are now generally seen more prosaically as a means of aggregating and articulating interest in order to affect state policies.¹ Movements, like interest groups, are contenders for influence.

Or, and this makes them no less political, movements may decline to directly confront the state, preferring to try to supplement it with alternative institutions that fulfill needs that the state has not. Such a strategy is not necessarily antithetical to a later confrontation with the state; indeed, for the poor and powerless, the political mobilization and social and economic empowerment that can occur through direct participation in local groups may be a prerequisite to eventual engagement with the state.

Thus in India many organizations within the women's movement have as their goal moving the state to action; it is primarily the government, they believe, that should provide women with equal rights and economic opportunity. But other organizations, instead of or in addition to targeting the government, strive to improve women's lives within the context of movement participation itself. The goals of economic cooperation and development, greater autonomy within the family, and access to participatory, democratic decision making are pursued within the movement's own activities.

Thus in order to evaluate what a movement does, the analyst must not only look at a movement's relationship to the state, but at three potential arenas of action. A movement can target society, particularly with regard to social consciousness or ideology; it acts to influence the state; and it can act on participants within the movement itself.

Fluidity of "Membership" and Structure

A movement is not a mob, but neither is it an interest group. The former is completely anarchic; the latter is characterized by stable bureaucratic organizations and formal interaction with government. A movement is ordinarily somewhere in between.²

It is helpful to think of a movement as containing both groups and individuals; it is bigger than the sum of its formal, cardcarrying membership. Within a movement, there may be a number of movement organizations with identifiable leaders and members, as well as unaffiliated individuals who sympathize with the goals of such organizations;³ and who may intermittently contribute time or money, or be mobilized by those groups for particular political actions: demonstrations, letter writing campaigns, and the like. Thus Indian women activists are mistaken when they think that the decentralized character of their activities constitutes a nonmovement; that quality is, in fact, more typical of movements than not.

A Movement Mobilizes for Action

Movements are not content merely to influence the behavior or thinking of the already converted. Movements are by their nature evangelical; they seek to convert—to move—people both to new consciousness and to action.⁴ The desire and ability of movement organizations to mobilize new constituents is a key aspect of what distinguishes a movement from an interest group. If they fail to grow, movements may instead become more formally organized interest groups seeking only to protect or further the interests of their existing membership.⁵ Movements, on the other hand, seek to persuade, to mobilize, to build.

The next section argues for the importance of belief in defining, generating and building a movement. But however important belief is, it is not all that makes a movement. If, as Mao said, a revolution is not a dinner party, so a movement is not a meditation or, for that matter, a colloquium. A movement agitates and acts: it mobilizes people to attack and transform power relations in their social and political lives.

A Movement Is Characterized by Shared Beliefs

In response to Mancur Olson's suggestion that rational individuals will participate in movements only if they receive some selective, or individual, reward,⁶ a number of resource mobilization theorists have argued convincingly for the importance of ideological belief as a factor in movement emergence. For example, in his discussion of the causes of the 1960s U.S. anti-war movement, Perrow maintains that self-interest is an inadequate explanation: the war, he argues "was an issue with youth because it was seen as immoral." Similarly, her study of the U.S. feminist movement brings Carden to conclude that ideological incentives motivate most members, who "enjoy working for a cause in which they believe." In short, people may join a movement not because they have rationally balanced the selective rewards that participation will bring them against the collective rewards they can reap by letting someone else do it; people may join a movement because they feel ideologically committed to changing society and because they will find it hard to live with themselves if they don't.⁷

This is an important point to consider when thinking about what movements can achieve. Ideas are not only a critical resource of movement emergence, but of movement growth and success. The transformation of public consciousness is critical to the dual goals of moving the state and altering society. One of the main tasks of a movement, then, is to develop and disseminate ideas that challenge the status quo and suggest more satisfying alternatives. This need not be a fully developed ideology that comprehensively analyzes society's problems and gives specific, detailed guidelines for action, although this, and the charismatic leadership that sometimes accompanies it, may be the best mobilizers of movements. The belief may instead be a more vague sense that a wrong needs to be righted, and that it can be righted.

Except in highly centralized or authoritarian movements, views on precisely what tactics to utilize toward what specific future will vary widely. Movement organizations and movement members will agree about some things, disagree about others, come together when they agree, diverge when they disagree. As long as the broad goals—such as greater equality for women—remain the same, there is a movement.

What Do Movements Do?

There are limitations to the existing theoretical approaches to answering the question of what movements can accomplish, but there are some useful analytical insights.

Movements Contend Against Others

It is helpful to view movements, as Alberto Melucci does, as "action systems operating in a systemic field of possibilities and limits,"⁸ What a movement can accomplish, in other words, is substantially influenced not only by what resources the movement brings to the battle, but by the strength of those institutions with which it contends. Thus, to the extent a movement's goals include the changing of state policy or action, the analyst must explore why the state is disposed to facilitate or to hinder the movement's achievement of its goals and what resources it can bring to bear to enforce its desires. Similarly, one must examine the strengths of other movements or interest groups that are in alliance or in contention with the movement for influence and power.

In evaluating the possible outcomes of the Indian women's movement, then, one line of questioning has to concern what groups oppose its goals, and what are their relative strengths. Similarly, it is necessary to ask two questions about the state: What incentives does it have and what capacity—economic and political—does it have to respond positively to movement demands?

Movement Structure Helps Determine Outcome

What a movement will be able to accomplish is dependent, too, on the structure of the organizations within it, and the overall structure of the movement itself. A consensus seems to have emerged among theorists on the relative merits of centralized, hierarchical organizations with well-developed divisions of laborr as compared to those of organizations characterized by little division of labor.⁹ Centralized movement organizations are thought to be more successful in the short run in influencing established institutions of government because they can coordinate the support that exists and can provide the type of technical expertise to which bureaucratic government institutions respond. On the other hand, grassroots mobilization and ideological innovation seem to be better accomplished by smaller organizations that can more precisely fulfill the individual desires of prospective members for such selective incentives as direct participation, consciousness raising activities (such as small group discussions and projects), the learning of new skills, and the development of interpersonal bonds and thus group solidarity. A number of small organizations linked together loosely are better able than one hierarchical organization to embrace a diversity of ideological beliefs and choice of tactics; this characteristic, too, makes them better suited to mobilizing the grass roots.

The insight that different structures give individual organizations different strengths can be applied with equal value to the structures of movements as a whole. Movements come in diverse structural forms—some, like the Indian nationalist movement, centralized with a single organization and authoritative leadership at their core; others, like the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• PART ONE Development of the Indian Women's Movement
• PART TWO Effectiveness and Potential
• Glossary
• List of Acronyms
• Bibliography
• About the Book and Author
• Index