The 8th of
March marks the celebration of women’s struggle all over the world, for the
emancipation of society from class, caste, gender and racial discrimination and
to create a new world based on egalitarian principles and values. It was first
celebrated on 19th March 1911 as International Working Women’s Day. It was
inspired by the revolutionary aspirations of working class-women and Clara
Zetkin proposed the call to celebrate it internationally. Clara Zetkin’s
perspective is still the guiding principle of the women’s movement all over the
world – “The activity of communist women is directed to arousing those broad
masses of working women who have been robbed and trampled upon by the class
supremacy of the big capitalists; it also has the objective of awakening women
from all social strata who have been enchained by the sex-supremacy of men so
that they become comrade-in-arms for this work of emancipation. The aspirations
and activities of the doubly enslaved must be guided by the understanding that
the world revolution is the only path to freedom.” This political line led to
great advances achieved in women’s rights in the Soviet Union, and also in
China with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution whose consistent attack on
Feudalism and Imperialism became a living example for the democratic upsurge of
women’s liberation movements in the so called the Third World.
International Women’s Day in
India
In India,
the 8th of March was first celebrated in 1943 in Bombay by the
‘Friends of the Soviet Union’. Since 1950, International Women’s Day is
regularly celebrated by National Federation of Indian Women. However, the
struggle for emancipation of women in India goes way back to the 19th century.
Notably, social reformers like SavitriBai Phule, Pandita Ramabai, and Jotiba
Phule played an important role in fighting Brahminism and set up schools for
women’s education. In the 20th century, women became active participants in the
anti-British struggle. Amongst them, Madame Bhikaji Cama was associated with those
fighting an armed struggle against the British, and she also attended one of
the conferences of the Second International. In 1931-32, group called Women’s
Student Organisation in Calcutta carried out assassinations- the first was a
British Collector by Shanti Ghosh and Suniti Choudhary, and second an attempt
at the Chancellor and the British Governor by Beena Das. All three were later
sent to Kala Pani and served lengthy terms of imprisonment. A number of women
were also members of Indian Liberation Army organised by Master Surya Sen in
Chittagong Hills. At the age of 17, Roopvati Jain was in charge of the secret
bomb manufacturing in the Hindustan Republican Army of Bhagat Singh and
Chandrashekhar Azad. It was young Durga Devi, who once saved Bhagat Singh by
posing as his wife, and also shot and killed a British Police Officer in
Bombay. Apart from these the most significant of all were the Tebhaga (1946)
and Telengana (1948-51) peasant movements in which women not only struggled
against patriarchal oppression, but also fought landlords and police and women
in the Tebhaga struggle even supported Hindu Code Bill which was drafted by
Babasaheb Ambedkar. But after the brutal repression of both the movements, it
was only in 1967 a new uprising of peasants, students and workers swept across
the nation from Naxalbari. In this movement, students’ from all strata of the
society actively participated in liberating Indian masses from the oppression
of the landlords and the imperialist exploitation of the workers. This spark
led to a radical transformation in the women’s movement in India and can be
seen in the procession of 800 women employees of the municipality who came out
to celebrate the International Women’s Day in 1970 shouting slogans: Long Live May Day, Long Live the Heroic
Fighters of Vietnam, Long Live Proletarian Women. The 1960s and the early
1970s is a period of strong democratic movements and liberation movements all
across the globe. Since then, the capitalist class has been trying to destroy
such movements through either co-option or coercion. Today, corporate and
state-funded NGOs are actively trying to co-opt and politically dilute the
movements by separating the women’s question from the question of class-caste
discrimination. In addition to this the Hindutva-brahmanical-fascist character
of Indian state gets exposed in the sponsored attacks on tribal activists like
Soni Sori, harassment of Scroll.in contributor Malini Subramanian, and threats
delivered to women legal aid group in Jagdalpur who are fighting for the rights
of tribal people to jal, jungle, jameen which
the MNCs are systematically trying to grab and plunder for their profits with
the help of state and central government. Similar kind of repression is meted
out on Dalit community’s assertion over their right to acquire land, education,
and live a life of dignity and self-respect. Women who have taken the lead to
fight oppression and destroy the structure of patriarchy have been relentlessly
targeted by both the state and ruling classes. The system of caste is utilised
to legitimise prevailing social conditions when the ruling class invokes the
khap panchayat or when the ruling government spreads the bogey of ‘love-jihad’
to control women and oppressed people and dictate social norms. We have seen
this happen in Muzaffarnagar where dalit and Muslim women were sexually
assaulted, in Gohana dalit women, in Bawana Muslim women and the repeated
assaults on women in Delhi over the last several years.
Today, we
need to remind ourselves of the need to fight the structure of patriarchy
through the history of the women’s movement and with a vision towards realising
a truly democratic world. This vision has to come to terms with inequalities of
caste, class, region along with gender and propel humanity towards
revolutionary social transformation. When we speak of liberation, the right to
lead a dignified life breaking the inequalities of caste, class and gender is
the fundamental principle we must all unitedly uphold!
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