Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

12 SUMI KRISHNA
joined the movement as ‘workers’ because they were being sexually and
economically exploited by jotedars and zamindars, but they also brought
questions of gender equality and domestic violence before their male
comrades. Panjabi (2000) says:
The evidence from the women in the Tebhaga movement indicates that
they did not enter the movement looking for equality with men. It was
not the question of gender politics that brought them into the movement.
There was such acute starvation and oppression that the demand for equality
was a meaningless concept unless questions of access to food, to shelter,
to livelihood were addressed. It was an anti-imperialist and anti-feudal
movement. At rock bottom it was a movement against hunger. But what
happened next was that as the movement developed more women came
into the field of political activism and began dealing with other kinds of
problems, further gender demands came in … and the women’s movement
developed from within. (p. 81)
Women across social classes came together in the context of sexual exploitation,
although in other contexts class also reinforced gender politics.
The revolutionaries, like the Gandhian reformists, sensed that women’s
power could destabilise patriarchal institutional structures. Like Gandhi,
the revolutionary communist groups also grasped the significance of gender
equality in nation-building, but were divided on the ‘woman question’.
Despite the ideological position that women’s oppression was caused by
class oppression, there was considerable hesitation among the Communists
in allowing issues of gender relations and sexuality to be raised within
the ‘larger’ struggles for liberation. In later years, the opposition of Indian
women Communists to feminism and feminist groups (for example,
Ranadive 1987: 1–34, cited in Sen 2000) would become strident, pushing
women’s issues to the periphery of the working-class movement. The
consequent neglect of the structural aspects of patriarchy, issues of domination
and gender-power, property relations and inheritance in the
family, have been critiqued from within left-feminism (see for example
Jayawardana and Kelkar 1989; Sen 1989).
Redefining Citizenship for Development
Since the early twentieth century, citizenship has been defined in terms
of rights in relation to the state. Conventionally, these rights include civil