People's Democracy

We believe, that women should vote in consonance with the issues and concerns about the NDA government’s policies that they have expressed in the last five years through numerous struggles. It has been our bitter experience that on a slew of issues the NDA government has betrayed the interests of women and its regime has in fact seen an intensified assault on women’s right.

Its Economic policies that have hit women hardest:

The implementations of liberalisation policies have had the most negative impact on women. Budget priorities of this government have victimised working people and in particular women. The budget allocations on women related schemes in total public expenditure have declined successively from 1999 from 1.02% to 0.94% to a meagre 0.87% in 2002. Successive budgets have seen hikes in the prices of essential commodities including wheat, rice sugar, edible oil and kerosene oil and gas cylinders, medicines, the lowering of interest rates on small savings drastically hitting lower income groups widows, pensioners and senior citizens, the reduction in real terms of expenditure on health, education and other social services and on the contrary privatising such services Women’s jobs in the organised sector have been cut with the continuing ban on recruitment in the Government sector, the abolition of posts has led to a loss of at least 45,000 jobs held by women in the banking sector alone and an estimated one lakh jobs in Central government services. The employment growth rate for women is at an all time low of less than per cent while the mass of women labour in rural areas have faced the worst period of unemployment with hardly 45 days of work in agriculture in large parts of India. the context has been the agricultural policy implemented as part of the WTO agreement leading to a massive crisis for the peasantry. Over 9000 farmers, among whom at least one third were women, were driven to commit suicide. The period has also seen the biggest assault on the right to food: whereas the government had 6 crore tonnes of foodgrains rotting on government godowns, the poor starved, women and girl children being the worst sufferers. On the other hand the government exported over 15 million tonnes of foodgrains at prices lower than what a poor family had to pay.

A government that ‘shines’ while the economic status of women further deteriorates as a result of its policies-that is the record of this government.

The top leaders of the BJP continue their affiliation and allegiance to the RSS and its agenda of a Hindu rashtra. As long as the close links of the BJP with the RSS continue, the essential and intrinsic communal character of the BJP that distinguishes it from every other party is still the hallmark of the party regardless of its claim. In the context of the patronage extended by the Central Government to the State sponsored communal carnage in Gujarat which saw an unprecedented sexual assault on women of the minority community, even today the BJP state government is shielding the culprits in a case as horrific as the Bilkis gang rape case with no corrective intervention at all from the central leadership of the ruling party. In Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh there has been a spate of recent attacks on the Christian community. The BJP leadership has openly acknowledged that Ayodhya is very much on its agenda and has also approvingly acknowledging the role that the RSS, the VHP etc are playing in the elections in support of the BJP. It has imposed a communal reading of history in school syllabi poisoning young minds with communally biased texts. At the same time this communal agenda acts as a springboard for he force of fundamentalism in the minority communities further eroding women’s rights.

Holding that all fundamentalisms and communal forces regardless of the religion they claim to represent are the biggest block to women’s struggles for advance, women should vote decisively against communalism, against fundamentalist agendas in support of sector values and unity of women of all communities.

Never before in parliamentary history has a government got the written support of the major opposition parties as the NDA government received in support of the Women’s reservation Bill. Yet, the government in spite of the repeated assurances of the Prime Minister (personally), to women’s organisations, refused to put the bill to vote, deliberately allowing a handful of MPs to disrupt the proceedings. Adding insult to the women of this country who were being constantly denied their rightful place in parliamentary democracy, the ruling party came up with so-called ‘alternative’, highly insulting to women once again that "women" should share their reserved seat with a man through a double member system in all such women reserved seats. Women can never get the Bill through with such a government in power. Even allies of the BJP which supported the Bill failed to prevent the sabotage of the Bill.

A ruling party and an alliance that refused to put the Bill to vote even though it had the numbers to get the Bill adopted forfeits its rights to ask for women’s votes.

Violence against women has seen an exponential increase in the last five years. The Capital of the country where the police is directly under the Central Home Ministry has become known as the crime capital of he country. Instead of utilising its majority in parliament to pout in place a legal framework to tackle domestic violence, the BJP led government produced a Bill which was more like a protection of domestic violence Bill rather than a preventive one. It was the only Bill arguably in the whole world that actually provided loopholes to the accused in the name of self-protection and also redefined domestic violence to be linked only to habitual acts of violence. At the same time the recommendations of women’s organisations and even the Select Committee of parliament to amend the Bill were not accepted and the Bill was basically shelved by the government. Shockingly the government wanted to push through the most retrograde recommendation of the Malimath Committee to weaken the laws against mental and physical violence under sec. 498A of the IPC by making the crime compoundable and bail able. The government also refused to accept the important recommendations made for a comprehensive law against sexual assault including child sexual abuse.

On the contrary, the BJP and its allied sangh parivar organisations have had campaigns for imposition of dress code; they have viciously attacked young people on Valentine’s Day their women leaders have propagated ideologies that blame women themselves for he crimes against them. Even today, when the election campaign has barely started BJP candidates have used the most insulting language towards women in their speeches and except for a mild admonition for public consumption the top leadership has not intervened to stop it.

Thus the record on legal and social measures against violence against women has been extremely poor as far as the NDA is concerned. There are some of the imported issues which should determine the direction of women’s votes. Women should campaign independently forcing a public debate on issue of concern to them, some of which have been mentioned above. We know only too well from our hard facts that there are hardly any political parties who have consistently supported women’s rights or addressed women’s issues as part of their political agenda.

Nevertheless, at the present juncture when the very existence of India as a secular republic is challenged, when the economic sovereignty of our country and the minimum survival living standards of our people have been eroded as never before, we have to take a stand in favour of ‘people unity and rights’ against this onslaught under the NDA REGIME