Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

Women’s Development under Patriarchy 381
NOTICE OF TERMINATION OF THE
SATHIN SCHEME
The final blow was then struck by the state government. Having first
asked the NCW to study the efficacy of the sathins’ working, and having
seen that the NCW whole-heartedly endorsed the sathin model, the government
chose to reject the NCW report. Instead, the Chief Secretary
promised that the government was working on ‘an integrated policy for
women with focus on their improved targeting through better convergence
and inter-sectoral co-ordination’. This semantic smokescreen fooled
no one, and women’s organisations all over the country roundly condemned
the state government. In subsequent years, the state government
emerged as the chief agent of oppression of women. Besides the Bhateri
episode, there had been instances of atrocities on women in which legislators
and their kin and ruling party members had been involved. In all
cases, the police were purposefully lethargic. A shocking instance was an
acid attack on a schoolgirl by the son of a minister, who was named by
the victim; the police dragged their feet over arresting the suspect despite
widespread public protests.
In this dark scenario, the sathins who had little formal education but
had learnt much more from life than educated activists, carried on a
courageous struggle against their two-fold exploitation as women and as
workers.
ANALYSING THE WDP EXPERIENCE
So far we have seen how a programme that was supposed to ‘empower’
women finally ended up oppressing them. Why did it happen? Could it
have happened otherwise? These are the crucial questions to be answered.
The WDP began on the premise that rural Rajasthani women face
oppression from feudal patriarchal values, that they had internalised these
values so much that their sufferings remain unarticulated, that they remain
mute even under the most oppressive conditions. Under such conditions,
they could not mobilise themselves to receive the welfare programmes that
the government ran. In the face of such passivity, the rural elite and the