The Hindu : National : Falling sex ratio worries AIDWA

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Saturday, Nov 20, 2004

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National

Falling sex ratio worries AIDWA

By Parvathi Menon

BHUBANESWAR, NOV. 19. The seventh conference of the All-India Democratic Women's Association today adopted the Report on International and National Issues and Women's Status 2001-2004. A road map for the next three years, the report identifies the falling sex ratio in the country as a central concern of the eight million-strong organisation. The deficit of women in the population, which was three million in 1901, is now 36 million, the conference report notes, with the juvenile sex ratio at 927, according to the 2001 Census. In fact, the sex ratio for the population excluding persons from the Scheduled Tribes and the Scheduled Castes is just 900. A conference resolution calls upon the state to strictly implement laws against sex-determination and dowry, and to protect the girl child from discrimination. "Son-preference beliefs and rituals must be fought," it states.

In India, the report notes, the situation created by the electoral defeat of the "communal, anti-democratic and anti-poor" National Democratic Alliance, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Sangh Parivar, is more favourable for women's struggles and demands.

However, the neo-liberal economic policies pursued by the NDA Government, and which the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance appears to be committed to, continue to impact adversely on the status of women.

Call for struggle

The conference called for a nationwide struggle for the implementation of the assurances made to women in the Common Minimum Programme (CMP). These include the passage of the Women's Reservation Bill, legislation against domestic violence, guarantees on the right to food through the universalisation of the Public Distribution System (PDS), and the right to employment.

The system of targeting of the PDS that excludes large sections of the poor militates against democratic and human rights, the report notes.

Food, work and health are basic rights and must be provided to all those who need them. In this context, the growing distance between economic policy and the real lives of the poor, particularly women, is particularly alarming. The huge increase in women's migration, for example, where entire armies of rural women are on the move in search of work and food, is not reflected in economic policy. The Economic Survey of the Union Government, and the Union and State budgets do not take note of this serious phenomenon.

Despite the defeat of the NDA Government, communalism is an ever-present political and ideological threat — in the spheres of politics, education and culture, the report notes. By blurring the division between the genuine religious identity of women and Hindutva, the Sangh Parivar is using women in their public mobilisations. "In this context, we need to take a critical re-look at the assumption that "sisterhood" binds women's movements," said Brinda Karat, General Secretary of AIDWA. "We must address the reality that one section of women is oppressing another on the grounds of religion and caste."

Women have played a central role in the huge political mobilisation against terrorism and insurgency in the north-east, particularly in Tripura, "perhaps the biggest mobilisation of women against terrorism anywhere in the world," said Ms. Karat. "It is political intervention and not counter-terror measures by the state that will contain terrorism, and women's participation in political action by left forces in Tripura and Manipur has been the basis for building people's unity against terrorism in these States," she said.

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