Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

368 RAJESH RAMAKRISHNAN, VIREN LOBO AND DEPINDER KAPUR
INTRODUCTION
For the past four months, sathins from the Women’s Development Programme
(WDP) of the Government of Rajasthan have been agitating
against the state government’s decision to scrap the whole Sathin scheme.
Recently, the noted Bengali writer and social activist Mahashweta Devi
also extended support to their struggle and spoke to the Rajasthan Chief
Minister, but met with stubborn resistance. In this chapter, we will examine
the working of this programme since its inception in 1984, and the lessons
that the whole experience gives to all democratic-minded people, particularly
those working in NGOs.
THE CURRENT TREND OF WOMEN’S
DEVELOPMENT
The freedom struggle in India had an anti-imperialist and anti-feudal
content, though it was not thoroughgoing. However, it did result in an
awakening of women to the possibility of their own emancipation, though
again in a limited sense. In 1931, the Fundamental Rights Resolution of
the Indian National Congress stated that freedom, justice, dignity and
equality for women were essential for nation-building. These ideas were
also enshrined in the Constitution of India. But in the decades after independence,
women found to their dismay that, as with other oppressed
sections, the rights that were guaranteed in the Constitution remained
on paper alone. Patriarchal Indian society did not yield easily to the lofty
proclamations of the Constitution. The women’s movement acquired a
new momentum in the early 1970s along with other social and political
movements; this period of social ferment culminated in the Emergency.
The term ‘women’s movement’ encompassed a wide range of organisations
and individuals with varying outlooks, but the movement as a
whole raised public consciousness about the many manifestations of
patriarchy in Indian society that denied women equal opportunities to
develop, even to survive. Violence against women, such as rape, custodial
rape and dowry deaths, was the specific point from which many of these
movements began.