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The Fourth M.A. Thomas Memorial Lecture

The Impact of New EconomJc
Policy on Women iN IncKa
ANd FEMiNisT AlTERNATivES
Gabriele Dietrich

EcUMENiCAl CHRISTIAN CENTRE
WkiTefield, BanqaIore
Auqust 1997

The Rev. Dr. M.A. Thomas
(1913—1993)

The Rev. Dr. Madathethu Abraham Thomas was born on August 10, 191G
Kerala. He graduated from Maharaja’s College, Thiruvananthapuram. A:
student, he came under the influence of national leaders like Mahatma Gt
dhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Jayaprakash Narayan, and identified himself fi
with the freedom movement. He entered public life as Secretary of the Int
Religious Student Fellowship of which the late Dr. S. Radhakrishnan w
the all-lndia President. During 1945-’47, he studied at Cambridge, Er
land. In 1950, he was ordained a priest of the Mar Thoma Church.
In 1963, he founded the Ecumenical Christian Centre in Bangalore and <
veloped it into a meeting place of people of all religious and political vie\
The story of ECC is also the story of his commendable efforts to regard
people, irrespective of caste or creed as the children of one God.
The Rev. Dr. Thomas served as the President of the Indian Section of A
nesty International and the Association of Christian Institutes for Social Cc
cern in Asia (ACISCA). In 1977, he founded the Vigil India Movement
human rights organization.
The Rev. Dr. M.A. Thomas authored many books in English and Malayala
Some of his works have been translated into German and Welsh. He pass
away on June 25, 1993, and was buried at the ECC campus.

The Fourth MJL Thomas Memorial Lecture

The Impact of New Economic
Policy (NEP) on Women in India

and Feminist Alternatives
by
Dr. Gabriele Dietrich

Ecumenical Christian Centre
Whitefield, Bangalore
August 1997

The Fourth MA. Thomas Memorial Lecture

Foreword
The Rev. Dr. M.A. Thomas Memorial Lecture has now become a part and
parcel of the Annual pre-Council Meeting of the Ecumenical Christian Cen­
tre. This is to commemorate the memory of a person who had a vision for
the humanity. The ECC would like to keep his vision alive in social relations.
It also provides an opportunity for the ECC family to measure the distance
between him and its siblings.
More than these, the memorial lecture has a special purpose. It is indeed
a gathering of the friends of achen Thomas and of the ECC. The topics that
are chosen for the memorial lectures bear a distinctive stamp of concerns
the late Rev. Thomas, the founder-Director, had in his mind. They have also
become the basic philosophy of ECC—the unity of humankind.
We have had four memorial lectures until now. The first lecture was
delivered by Mr. B.G. Varghese in July 1994 on the topic, Human Rights,
Democracy, Secularism and Social Change, the second by Prof. Ninan Koshy,
in 1995, on the theme, Religion and Politics, and the third lecture by Justice
Sri V.R. Krishna Iyer, in 1996, on the topic, Human Rights—Their Spiritual
Dimensions. This booklet contains the fourth lecture by Dr. Ms. Gabriele
Dietrich on The Impact of New Economic Policy (NEP) on Women in India
and Perspectives of a Feminist Alternative.
The topic for this lecture too indeed has a spiritual dimension as it touches
the lives of the ordinary and the marginalised. The market reforms in India
have now taken different shapes and shades through its philosophy of
globalization. There are many who sing songs of praise to the ‘Market deity
based on statistics’. But remember, as someone has humorously said, “a stat­
istician is one who will tell you that if a man is standing with one foot on a
hot oven and the other on a slab of ice, on the average, the man should be
comfortablel” Yes, ‘truth and falsehood go hand in hand as buttermilk and
water exist harmoniously in a glass’.
The New Economic Policy (NEP) has exerted its pressur e on women in a
way that is not yet fully assessed. In general categories of thought, econo3

Impact of NEP and Feminist Alternatives

mists like Dr. C.T. Kurien have described Market forces as vehicles of cul­
tural brain drain. It expands its empire of “neo-colonialism” through its
ideology of a monoculture. Oh, it moves in the vast sea of Asia like an Octopusl
Dr. Gabriele, Professor at the Centre for Social Analysis, Madurai has
many things to share with us from her own experience and erudition.
The speaker was given the freedom to caution us, frighten us, and even
to give us a clarion call! Armed with statistics and stories of despair, I am
sure, she could disturb us. I wonder whether she could make us cry! The
speaker has succeeded in reminding us of tire words of Esther: “I will go to
the King, even though it is against the law. And if I perish, I perish.”
We do hope that the issues raised in the lecture will break the conspiracy
of silence and create a few ripples in our thinking process.

Dr. M.J. Joseph
Director, ECC

Bangalore
Oct. 2, 1997

4

The Fourth M.A. Thomas Memorial Ledure

The Impact of New Economic Policy (NEP) on
Women in India and Feminist Alternatives
It is indeed a very emotional occasion for me to have been asked to de­
liver the M.A. Thomas Memorial Lecture at the ECC, coinciding with the
50th year of Independence of our country. In Tamil there is a saying which
means: “At midnight we got (freedom) but still the dawn has not come.”
I have to confess that from the point of view of my local situation from
which I come, I have felt quite depressed about fifty years of Independence.
The situation of slum dwellers and dalits in the present situation is very
discouraging. But I also have to say that I just attended a workshop of the
Indian Association of Women’s Studies (IAWS) in Baroda in which we were
looking at the first 30 years of Independence. It was extremely encouraging
to hear the testimonies of women who had fought in the Telengana Move­
ment in Andhra, the Thebaga Movement in Bengal and Old Adivasi freedom
fighters from the Sarvodaya Movement in Gujarat. It is the continuity of
such struggles which encourages us to forge ahead.
I am sure that any one of you who has come here would share with me
this anguish that the dawn has not come for the masses of workers in the
unorganized sector, small peasants, women, dalits, adivasis, tribal commu­
nities in the North-East and even for all the other living beings, the birds in
the sky and the fishes in the sea. Our lands are once again invaded, if not by
foreign rulers, then by global companies. Our rivers are dammed. We have
to struggle to keep our seas free from foreign fishing vessels. We import
obsolete technologies to build nuclear plants. We squander our own energy
resources in oil scams and invite foreign companies with an abysmal eco­
logical record like Enron for privatization of electricity production. All along
the coast a massive struggle is waged these days against coastal industrial
aquaculture. The veteran freedom fighter, S. Jaganathan and his wife
Krishnammal of the Gram Swaraj Movement have launched vigorous
safhyagraha from August 9 onwards. The government had to release
Jaganathan as it was too embarrassing to keep an old freedom fjghter in
5

Impact of NEP and Feminist Alternatives

custody on this particular occasion, but his co-workers have been kept in
jail. People have to offer sathyagraha by the thousands and court arrest be­
cause the highest court of the land itself has stayed, under political pressure,
the implementation of its own historical judgment of December 1996 on
the closing down of prawn farms. This judgment was of historical impor­
tance not only in our own country but even more so for neighbouring coun­
tries like Bangladesh where the struggle against industrial aquaculture suf­
fers from severe curtailments of democratic rights.
The rising masses of the poor are waging desperate battles against all
these policies but their struggles get deflected in artificially created violence,
be it caste or communal. After 50 years of Independence, people can be shot
like rabbits, hacked to death in buses (as it happened in Madurai recently)
in broad daylight. For every peaceful Dalit demonstrator in Chennai on 6th
August there was an armed police man. And thousands of people were kept
in preventive detention. Is there no decency, no shame, no integrity left in
our political fabric after fifty years of independence? When a Gujarati friend
from the United Kingdom sent my son a Greenpeace T-shirt with the en­
dangered species of animals printed on it which need to be protected, I felt
for a moment, the sarcastic impulse to add to these pictures the Dalits, the
Adivasis, and the girl child.

Now let me stop describing the scenario of despair. Let me come back to
the faith in our humaneness and the confidence that we can live together in
sovereignty which has brought us together on this occasion. This is cer­
tainly the moment to remember with immense gratitude the late Rev. Dr.
M.A. Thomas who was both a visionary and a man of practical action. Let
me say something personal here. When I came to India in the end of 1971
during the Bangladesh war of independence, I worked for three years un­
der the leadership of Dr. M.M. Thomas at the CISRS. During that period I
also was in frequent touch with the late Rev. M.A. Thomas and the ECC. I
also travelled to Kerala at the time and met other people from the group of
that young generation of the forties like the Rev. K.K. Chandy of
Christavashram. I always felt that each of these friends stood for a somewhat
different aspect. The Rev. Chandy had built up a Christian Sarvodaya Ashram
to implement a local vision of social transformation. Dr. M.M. Thomas con­
tributed a lot of his energies to the international ecumenical movement and
later also to governance as well as to people’s movements. Rev. Dr. M.A.
Thomas was a visionary who operated at intermediary levels. He created an
institution like the ECC to offer a space for reflection on critical commitment
to society for a whole variety of activists and thinkers. He also created an
organizational structure like Vigil India which got its major impulse from
resistance against the Emergency in 1975. This organized watchfulness over
human rights as inspired by the J.P. movement in Bihar and many other
6

The Fourth MJt. Thomar Memorial lertvre

human rights struggles all over the country, is more urgently needed than
ever at the present juncture in history.
Let me now come to the impact of NEP on Women and Feminist Alterna­
tives which was given to me as the topic for today’s lecture. When the NEP
and SAP were fully embarked upon in the early nineties, I was one of the
persons in the women’s movement who came out publicly with a critical
stand while many people felt we were lacking a statistical base to take a
position. While I was aware of my limitations in terms of data base, I felt
emboldened to take a stand because of what I saw with my own eyes. The
slum dwellers in the women’s movement I worked with, were facing ram­
pant evictions. City beautification deprived them of housing and livelihood
as vendors.
Going to the coast, I could see the women of the fishing community, who
had been pushed out of net-making due to mechanization as early as 1980,
being more and more marginalised from the marketing operations and hav­
ing to undergo much longer journeys to vend the fish, facing stiffer compe­
tition from men and finding it more difficult to come by any reasonable
quality of fish for consumption in their own households. In Kerala, kappa
(tapioca) which had been a staple food, soon became a rare delicacy as eve­
ryone started to grow rubber and other cash crops. More and more, we
could see young girls under increasing pressures of dowry demands being
sent from villages in Kanyakumari and Kerala to far-flung places in Gujarat
where they were working never-ending backbreaking hours, feet wet, hands
injured in crowded prawn peeling sheds, only to be cooped up to a fitful
sleep at night in cramped accommodations, to rise early and crowd up in
batches of four and six in inadequate bathrooms, taking a hassled bath in
order to get ready for the next round. In the meantime, their Dalit sisters
who had been agricultural labourers in the Cauvery delta in East Thanjavur
and Nagapattinam, lost their livelihood as workers in paddy production, as
the Tamilnadu Government was vigorously promoting high incentives for
prawn farms which destroyed rice production, polluted the drinking water
and made our land and water subservient to foreign luxury consumer wants
while production of staple food for domestic needs got disrupted.
There were of course also the apparent beneficiaries of NEP, girls who
were “lucky” enough to be recruited into sweat shops of export garment
industries or electronic goods, sports goods, or toys at a pittance of a wage on
a piece rate until, within a very short time, their eyesight falters, their spines
cave in, their “nimble fingers” become stiff or their jobs vanish due to bottle­
necks in market demand and they end up spending their scant savings on a
dowry to “settle down” in life to an uncertain future. If less lucky, they may
find themselves eking out a living in prostitution, having been “socialized”
into it by the sexual harassment of their contractors on the job. In places like
7

Impact of NEP and feminist Alternatives

Goa large numbers of women have been recruited into the tourism industry
which is often a concealed label for sex workers. The Goan women’s or­
ganization Bailancho Saad in a newsletter of 1990 reported that they had
been refused loans by Industrial Development Bank of India (1DBI) for em­
ployment generation programme for women in distress, as there was enough
work available for bar maids and entertainers.

Other deeply problematic impacts of NEP can be found in the fields of
education and health. With inputs gravitating towards higher education
and natural sciences, the male elites are bound to reap benefits while women
whose larger participation is at primary levels and in the humanities, bear
the brunt. Cuts in the health sector, privatization of hospitals and free entry
of multinationals in the pharmaceutical market drives health expenditures
to dizzying heights and leaves women’s health to growing neglect. Women
are also subjected to hazardous contraceptives, often without their knowl­
edge, as population control is part and parcel of NEP. For several years In­
dian women’s movements have been fighting against dangerous hormonal
contraceptives, injectables and implants like Net-En, Depo-Provera, Norplant.
Recently, widespread misuse of the malaria drug Quinacrine for steriliza­
tion purposes has been documented. While women’s health is thoroughly
neglected, their child-bearing capacity is treated as a lethal liability. Obvi­
ously, clamouring for equity of access in a thoroughly profit-oriented and
technocratic health system is not much use. The experiments m holistic health,
nature cure and indigenous healing methods from the women’s health move­
ment must be focussed to make an impact at policy levels.
As the feminist demographer Dr. Malini Kakar has been pointing out, a
major priority should be to raise the age of marriage and child bearing for
women. This can only be achieved by giving access to education and work.
In reality, even in the fully literate state of Kerala, the marriage age is going
down because dowry is constantly going up. Are we prepared to take action
on such problems?
However, the media do their best to make women themselves marketable
commodities and status symbols. Beauty contests are used to bulldoze the
road of access of cosmetics companies to the consumer desires of a small
elite of privileged women. This happens in total disregard of the survival
needs of crores of ordinary women.
Let me become a bit more systematic in describing some of the overall
trends at macro-economic levels in order to locate women, especially women
of the toiling classes, in this overall framework. It has been pointed out that
the liberalization-cum-structural adjustment package brings about four dif­
ferent kinds of distributional shifts: from workers to capitalists, from petty
producers and small capitalists to large capitalists, from domestic capitalists
to foreign capitalists, from producing interests to financial interests,1 i.e.,
8

The Fourth MJL Thomas Memorial lerture

from entrepreneurs to rentiers.
It is evident that such policies per se go against the interests of large
numbers of women as the vast majority of women have been employed in
the unorganized sector. High interest rates make access to credit, for self­
employment more difficult. Women, who traditionally have been working
as small producers, are losing out. With increasing privatization and com­
puterization, jobs in the public sector like nationalized banks, LIC, railways
are cut down. These were the fields where at least a small elite of educated
women had some social security. Traditional women’s jobs like typists, tel­
ephone operators and even nurses are cut down. Thus, despite growth of
service sector via-a-vis productive activities, “rationalization” and “effi­
ciency” take their toll of workplaces even here.
Another trap is the “elasticity” of female labour. Women are the last to
be hired and first to be fired and the shift from subsistence crops like millet,
rice, wheat and corn towards cash cropping of fruits, vegetables, mushrooms,
flowers for export, affects women’s jobs negatively. Many end up in the ur­
ban and rural reserve army of unemployed, gravitating in and out of jobs in
electronics, garments, gem cutting, pharmaceuticals.
I feel there are three major trends which are outrightly alarming in the
present situation and these are: The threat to food security, land alienation
in the name of “development” and tremendous rise of violence against women
and any other vulnerable sections.
While many of the above mentioned macro-economic trends have been
going on throughout the eighties already, the “food first” policy promoted
by the Government of India during the eighties had led to a rise in per capita
food availability. At the same time, the FDS afforded access to basic food,
though not to an adequate extent. This trend has been reverted since mid1991 up to mid-1997. The “exports first” policy which started in 1991 under
pressure of the debt crisis has led to a predictable decline in per capita food
production.2 The area under food grams has been falling and food output
growth has sunk to below the rate of population growth. Since mid-1997 a
new policy is embarked upon under pressure of WTO which will remove
quantitative restrictions on imports. For the first time, the agricultural sec­
tor is open to imports from foreign countries. As so called advanced coun­
tries heavily subsidize agricultural production, it may become more diffi­
cult for Indian farmers to break even. This means, while rural women may
be able to generate some income by growing strawberries or flowers for
Western markets, staple foods may no longer be available to them and their
families.
There are large exports in oil seeds, much of it going into oil cake for
cattle feed to cater to the meat production for a wealthy elite in the country
and abroad while basic food crops arc dramatically declining. As conse9

Impart of NIP and Feminist Alternatives

qucntly the food prices have been going tip, poverty has taken such a toll
that there has been a prolonged phase of poverty induced lower offtake front
PDS which only improved recently when food grains were made available
for families below poverty line at special prices from February 1997. An­
other betrayal of the values of self-reliance upheld during freedom struggle
is the rampant and mindless export of raw cotton which leads to de-indus­
trialization at home and soaring garment prices.
Land alienation is another factor which affects women’s lives in detri­
mental ways. Oftentimes women have been holding on to the land while
men migrate. This is the reason for the large number of women-headed
households in our country. However, at present land is taken over in the
name of development all over the place. In Rathnagiri district in Maharashtra
where tire American multinational Enron has taken over vast expanses of
fertile land for electricity production, it is the women of the agricultural
and fishing communities who are in the forefront of the struggle. Likewise,
in tire struggle against industrial aquaculture it is the women who stake
their lives to recapture the use of the land for food cropping. Vast acres of
land are today taken over for car production which again affects land and
water resources. This is part of the process of privatization of transport and
need for broadening of roads which further contributes to land alienation.
In the cities, land speculation runs havoc which contributes to commu­
nal riots. It is today acknowledged that in the Bombay riots following the
destruction of Babri Masjid in 1992-’93, the interests of the builders played
an important role in the systematic destruction of bakery shops and timber
depots. At the same time it was the local women and women’s groups like
“Majlis” who intervened successfully in strife-stricken localities like
Behrampada.’
At present, hundreds of pavement dwellers and vendors of Chennai are
fighting a desperate struggle for their survival after having been evicted
from Parry’s corner after over forty years of tenancy, nearly the entire pe­
riod since Independence. There is no place for such people in the schemes
for relocation of markets in the city planning under World Bank guidance.
Chennai is also under the impact of an Agreement of Understanding with
the Japanese government offering to clean the waterways like Coum and
Buckingham Canal in the name of ecology. The idea is to build five-star
hotels along the waterways and at present the slum dwellers along the ca­
nal banks are experiencing an inexplicable chain of “accidental” fires which
help to clear them out of the locality to pave the path towards development.
There again it is the women who are in the forefront of the struggle as they
also have to protect their livelihood as construction workers, vendors, do­
mestic workers and recyclers of waste materials.

Coming from the southern districts of Tamilnadu, 1 am obviously at
10

The Fourth MJl. Thomas Memorial Lecture

present under the impact of protracted caste clashes. Human life has be­
come incredibly cheap and normal life is disrupted much of the time. While
all the different incidents need separate enquiries and analysis, there are
certain overriding features. It is agreed upon that many of the clashes are in
retaliation of Dalits claiming their very humanhood. Likewise, the murder
of municipal councillor Ms. P. Leelavathi in Madurai in April 1997 was
clearly in retaliation for the audacity of a woman not only claiming her
rightful place in local politics but also tackling corruption, illicit liquor and
pilfering of rations. In the two months after her murder, eleven cases of
murder of women, some connected with gang rapes, were reported in
Madurai city and even in the women’s movement many women felt terror
and helplessness. This, of course, is exactly the purpose of such happenings.
Violent clashes and murders deviate and deflect people’s energies from their
will towards sovereignty. As long as we understand ourselves as victims, we
cannot take charge of the situation and come together to solve it. Only as we
transcend our fears and rise up to take responsibility for our own lives, the
alternative can come into being. The frightening thing in the present situa­
tion is that the government virtually tries to promote violence in the way of
self-fulfilling prophecy as in the case of the Dalit march in Chennai on Au­
gust 6, 1997. The amazing and heartening thing is that despite the attempt
from on high to create a riot, the event went on peacefully and disciplined.
Implicitly, we have already entered into the discussion of the feminist
alternative by pointing to women’s leading role in all of the ongoing peo­
ple’s struggles for social transformation. While women per definition among
the most severely affected under NEP, the alternative is already gestating in
the belly of the beast of aggressively profiteering global capitalism. How­
ever, it is important to conceptualize and organize the alternative, if women
should not once again be used as the dispensable reserve army of the revo­
lution while the mechanisms of power remain untransformed.
I have to make a clarification here. When I speak of feminist alternatives
to the hegemonic development concept, we are dealing with problems which
reach far back beyond the beginning of NEP in the eighties and nineties. The
Nehruvian concept of growth which was inspired by heavy industrialism
promoted in the Soviet Union, was in substance not different from the capi­
talist model, even though it laid more emphasis on distributive justice and
welfare measures. It relied on centralized planning and subjugation of na­
ture through mega-projects. It contributed to a lot of displacement in the
name of development. In many ways, NEP is quite a logical conclusion of
this historical legacy. The weakening of the State under expansion of corpo­
rate interests has led to a situation where accountability is difficult to en­
force. Corporations are buying over the civil society. This leads to unprec­
edented new forms of inequality and social chaos.

F.;G- I OU

Impact of NEP and Feminist Alternatives

However, despite tlie widening gap between rich and poor globally and
nationally, I am firmly convinced that we have a much better potential for
organized social transformation than most other countries. The history of
the freedom struggle has provided us with a precious treasure of experi­
ences which lead into the present struggles of people’s movements in differ­
ent parts of the country. Not only that, the proud history of anti-brahmin
movements has left us with a legacy of organized efforts to break down caste
and to overthrow patriarchy. The Sarvodaya movement has given us im­
pulses for environmental struggles and alternative economics along the lines
of D. Kumarappa. In all these historical struggles the vigorous participation
of women has prepared the way for another wave of women’s movement
which took shape since the early seventies. However, I do not think that the
feminist alternative to the present destructive development paradigm can
come out of the women’s movement on its own. It has to be culled out of the
experience of unions in the organized sector, dalit movements, environment
movements as well as autonomous women’s groups.
I would like to mention here one of the impacts of NEP on the discourse
of the women’s movement itself. I think one important impact has been to
co-opt women into the hegemonic development discourse, to take
globalization, privatization, liberalization, monetization as a given and to
make women to demand a greater share of the cake, shrouded in the magic
word “empowerment.” This was achieved by a vast array of gender trainings
for NGOs which were preparing women for equity and efficiency. Women
were also taught to distinguish between “practical” and “strategic” gender
needs4 and we were then told that it was only “practical” to access water
and fuel while it was considered “strategic” to get access to funds and to the
keys of the NGO vehicle.
I think it is very important not to miss the wood for the trees. We know
from feminist research that the fuel crisis is one of the most serious prob­
lems to await us at the beginning of the new century.5 Many analysts believe
that water would become more precious than oil and a bone of contention
to cause wars within rather short time. It is therefore strategic not only for
women but for the survival of humankind as a whole to plan for fuel, to
come up with a sustainable energy policy and to preserve water as a peren­
nially renewable resource. Thus, what was considered women’s private and
practical responsibility, fetching water and fuel, providing and sustaining
life itself, has to be put at the centre of the alternative paradigm: Production
of Life and Livelihood zs. Production for Profit. This can only be attempted if
women are enabled to participate in decision making at all levels which in
turn means that household labour needs to be shared and violence as a form
of control must become totally unacceptable. In terms of social structures, it
means that we have to work hard to overcome caste as well as nuclear fami12

The Fourth MJL Thomas Memorial Lecture

lies. Consumerist individualism is as unviable as collective egoism based on
caste or community.

A production process must be developed which lays emphasis on the right
to work, energy conservation, substitution of non-renewable by renewable
resources, food first policy, together with conservation and regeneration of
soil and water and enhanced production of biomass. At the same time a
permanent cultural revolution is required to safeguard equal access to re­
sources for women, dalits and other disempowered sections.
We need to form vigilance groups not only against abuse of human rights
in the conventional political sense but movements which protect the land,
the water, the forest, the rights to life and livelihood, the right to work, the
right to a living wage and to occupational safety. This is by no means easy.
The unorganized sector is steadily expanding. By now, 92.7% of workers
are employed in the unorganized sector. Work participation of women in
India has been low throughout this century. Not that our women don’t work,
their labour remains invisible even now. Even today official work participa­
tion is only around 22%. Many of the opportunities we are offered under
NEP are very precarious due to international competition. Today, in the name
of liberalization, the state abdicates its responsibility and the total market
takes over people’s lives. It is not even possible to open anything as innocu­
ous as a tailoring unit in a village without being sucked into the tentacles of
globalization as the panchayat president will promise a bright future through
garment exports.
Of course, none of this is sustainable as the money markets are bound to
crash. In the long run, globalization will run out of fuel because of the fi­
niteness of fossil fuels. Even before that, with expanding industrialism glo­
bal warming will create climatic convulsions and land will have to produce
the biomass for sustainable energy use. Solar and wind energy will gain in
importance.
There are indications that globalization from below can bring sanity.
The recent award for Tom Kocherry of the National Fishworkers Forum from
an environmental organization close to the UN is an unexpected acknowl­
edgement that the alternative policies of people’s movements do represent
an alternative. The ongoing struggles against big dams spread the insight
that mega projects of this kind are indeed unviable. The struggles of adivasis
and tribals are translating into mechanisms of local self rule as documented
by the Bhuria Committee report which are relevant for self rule in other
areas as well. However, such sovereignty can only be implemented if we are
serious in breaking down patriarchy and untouchability. The second free­
dom struggle has begun since years even as benighted politicians under the
impact of hawala money and scams are still selling us out to foreign inter­
ests. The formation of broad national initiatives like NAPM and Jan Shakti
13

Impart of NIP and Feminist Alternatives

Abhiyan spurn our imagination to transcend our paralysis and helplessness.
I am sure you have heard the fairy tale of the Emperor’s new clothes in
which a cunning pair of cheats promise a gullible and vain emperor mar­
vellous materials which will be visible only to wise men and invisible to
fools. In their fear, neither the Emperor nor his ministers are prepared to
admit that they can’t see anything. There are numerous new development
projects which promise more prosperity and it would require the courage of
the child which shouts “the Emperor is naked” in order to expose what this
kind of progress holds in store for the majority of people.

It is not easy to arrive at a new paradigm. I would like to give a sketch of
the feminist alternative in the form of a poem:
The trouble between you and us
said the woman to the forest official
is simply this:
you want the trees dead
they are timber and money to you
we want to live with them
they gives us fodder for our cattle
and fruits for the children
and shade to rest in
even air to breathe and fuel to cook on
if we cut
it is like killing a child.
The trouble between you and us
said the woman to the development worker
is simply this:
you rape Mother Earth
she is money to you
you rip it off
you poison her
you make her bear three crops in a year
Can I bear three children in a year?
Will she not die?
Does she not need rest?
Can we sell our mother
when she is destitute?
Do we not feed her,
clothe her nakedness?
The trouble between you and us
said the fisherwoman to the fisherman
14

The Fourth MJL. Thomas Memorial Lecture

is simply this:
you rape Kadalamma
with your technology
you think fish is money
and you want to fish more
to make more
But the children cannot eat money
the money eats us our debts
sucks the marrow from our bones
you drink
you beat us
you make the sea go empty.

The trouble with ourselves
said the women among each other
is simply this:
We do not rely on ourselves
we do not know that we know
we only cook and give suck
and rock the cradle and toil
from morning to night
and cry our hearts out
amidst violence
When will we take our hearts
into our hands
and quietly learn
to run the world
ever so gently?

It might be the right thing to close here. However, since I am talking to an
audience which is, to a large extent, Christian, let me reflect for a moment
what all this means theologically. It is important to remember that those of
us who have come together here are not the primary victims of NEP. Many of
us may take advantage of the new developments. So it requires a political
will to shift to a new development paradigm. It is good to think of resurrec­
tion and uprising in this context. It is our responsibility to hasten the coming
of God’s reign. At the same time the burden is not entirely on our shoulder.
Even as we think: Who will roll away the stone, we can be reminded of the
angel. It must be possible not to be victims of the system and not to victimize
others. It is possible to leave victimhood behind and to strive for sovereignty.
It is possible to be with the people in resurrection and uprising.
The dawn has not come, as I quoted in the beginning. But to put it into
the line of another song of hope: The Dawn is Very Near to Hand.
15

Impact of NEP and Feminist Alternatives

Notes

I. Prabhat Patnaik, “Macro-Economic Policy and Income Distribution,” Economic
inc. Political Weekly Vo\. XXXII, Nos 20-21, May 17-24, 1997.

2. These trends have been extensively documented by Utsa Patnaik. Sec her arti­
cles: “Political Economy of State Intervention in Food Economy,” ATWVol. XXXII,
Nos. 20-21, and “Export Oriented Agriculture and Food Security in Developing
Cotmtries and India,” OTVVol. XXXI, Nos. 35-37 Spl. No. 1996.

3. See the video documentation, “1 Live in Behrampada,” as well as Flavia Agnes’s
article in Manushi.
4. Carolyn Moser, “Gender Planning in the Third World, Meeting Practical and
Strategic Gender Needs,” World Development, Vol. 17, No. 11, pp. 1799-1825.
5. Bina Agarwal, Cold Hearth and Barren Slopes: The Wood-fuel Crisis in the
Third World (New Delhi: Allied Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1981).

16

Dr. Gabriele Dietrich is a founding member of the Centre
for Social Analysis in Madurai. She has been teaching So­
cial Analysis and Feminist Theology in the Tamilnadu Theo­
logical Seminary since 1975. Born in West Berlin, she came
to India in January 1972 and became an Indian citizen in
1989. She is widely known for her involvement with the
women’s movement in Tamilnadu and at the national level.
She is the State Vice-President of Pennurimai lyakkam and
presently serves on the Executive Committee of the Indian
Association of Women’s Studies (IAWS). Over the past •
two years she has worked very closely with the National
Alliance of People’s Movements. She has been involved
with unions in the organized sector and environmental con­
cerns. She is at present the Tamil Nadu State Convener of
NAPM. She has several books and numerous articles to
her credit which have been published nationally and inter­
nationally. She is also known for her poems. She combines
in herself activism, organizational work and scholarship in
a special way.

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