It has been observed in the literature on the Kerala Model that the political field remained inaccessible to
Malayalee women despite their impressive social developmental achievements in the twentieth century. More than a decade after that observation was made, and after many years of effort to mainstream gender concerns into local government, there is little effective change in sight. There is no doubt that more women have entered local bodies now. However, whether this will lead to a rise in the numbers of active women politicians, and to a greater articulation of women's interests via the broader politicization of women as a group is still to be seen. Ironically enough, since mid-90s, feminists have been demanding gender justice from the state and battling the major political parties over a series of well-publicized cases of rape, traffic and sexual harassment, in which leading members of major parties, both on the left and non-left seemed implicated.
Very little support to this cause came from women who were inducted into the political process through political decentralization. So the gender equality lobby in the state, represented mainly by the feminist network, the Kerala Stree Vedi, had been engaged in almost a continuous combat with the state and political parties - who of course are the major actors in political decentralization. Indeed, a certain rapprochement of the feminists with the left - that seems to be falling apart in the present -- came when one of the most powerful and senior leaders of the CPM, the present Chief Minister of Kerala, V.S. Achutanandan, began to seriously take up the issue of sexual violence as Opposition Leader under the previous UDF government , in 2005. This has important implications that the large numbers of women in local governance have not yet become part of the gender equality lobby, and that senior male leaders still control the decision whether or not to support it.
This curious phenomenon -- the simultaneous 'presence' and 'absence' of gender concern in political decentralization in Kerala in the 1990s -- makes sense when viewed in a historical perspective. Playing on the title of Robin Jeffrey's well-known book on the Kerala Model, a widely shared conception of the roots of the Kerala Model may be expressed in formulaic terms as 'Politics + Women = Social Development/Wellbeing'. The conjunction of a particular sort of politics with a particular sort of female subjectivity is seen to have produced the well being Kerala is so famous for. Politics as mentioned earlier, has been a male zone; as for the 'enlightened ' female subjectivity, it, as well as the community reform movements that projected it as a desirable attainment, has been incisively criticized in recent feminist research. It has been pointed out that women were accorded a new role and social space shaped by and serving modern patriarchy that limited female agency to the sphere of modern domesticity, and ultimately tied to the welfare of the larger collective -- be it the community, the locality or the nation. There were efforts to expand women's social space in the 1930s -- this however largely made a powerful case for women's presence in the public by emphasizing that certain 'Womanly' qualities -- capacities supposedly given to women by virtue of their 'natural' sexual endowment, like compassion, patience, gentleness and so on -- were necessary for the smooth running of modern public life.
This claim was never really effective in the field of politics and political society in mid 20th century Kerala continued to implicitly or explicitly endorse the public/domestic divide and the relegation of modern female agency to the domestic. This continued to be so during the decades of left hegemony in the Malayalee public sphere that lasted roughly up to mid -1980s. The gains of mid 20th century dominant leftist politics were certainly gendered and historians have begun to notice this now. As Anna Lindberg has recently shown for the cashew workers of Kerala, women workers were directed towards the home through a range of strategies by state officials, employers and their own trade union representatives. Thus while maternity benefits were fought for, the family wage remained in place. In the state-sponsored development programmes of the 1950s and 60s, women were organised at the local level, the focus being on the intersection points of social development and rationalizing and modernizing family life.
The civil social associations of women which began to appear since early 20th century were also less concerned with resolving the 'women question' in favour of women's autonomy and equal participation in community life and citizenship than with shaping ideal home managers. Though the issue of patriarchy was raised in the major civil social mobilizations of the 1980s (such as the People's Science Movement and the Fishworker's Movement), those who sought to articulate it within these movements found it a steep climb. At the end of the 1980s, however, feminist groups had indeed made their entry, they found not much support in civil or political societies rather, they were greeted with hostility and suspicion at worst and palpable caution at best.
In the 1990s, gender equity came to be discussed much more in the hugely expanded mass media (the coming of satellite television) with the sites of enunciation for Women increasing. In the same decade, public debates over gender inequity and injustice have been bitter and long-drawn out and still continue to be so-- while in contrast, there seems to be all-round support for women's associational efforts that define empowerment as strengthening women’s economic contribution within patriarchal frameworks, which, it is assumed, will lead to an expansion of their life-choices automatically. Indeed, there is reason to think that the drive towards mainstreaming gender in local level governance was inspired at least as much by strategic considerations as it may have been by commitment towards gender equity. For, the PPC was also an effort to overcome the crisis of redistributionist politics. The remedy, it seemed, was to expand the inclusiveness of People as the historical agent of change and so the interest in integrating women into peoples planning was to be expected. Women in Kerala had already proved their mettle as agents of change within their families, and in local communities, more recently as instructors in the Total Literacy Campaign of the early 1990s.
It is important to note that the PPC was launched and implemented in an atmosphere in which the feminist network in Kerala was confronting the major political parties over their adamant and blatant sexism. This meant that an element crucial in ensuring the attainment of declared goals of mainstreaming gender in political decentralization was missing right at the beginning. It must be remembered that this was the first time in post-independence Kerala that Women were treated as a political group with representatives (pre-independence legislatures had nominated members to represent Women). However, for the large number of women who were newly inducted into the political process, this was certainly a new and unfamiliar idea. Similarly for women in general too, the idea of having representatives of their own was a new one.
The gender equity lobby which could be reasonably expected to mediate between these two groups and establish the lines of communication between them, however, was grievously debilitated precisely because of the massive confrontation between feminists and political society in general. Indeed, political society, both the left and the non-left, have been doing their utmost to strip off the feminists their claim to represent the interests of women as a distinct group. In such a situation, the impact of
women's large-scale induction into local-level political structures was bound to be limited seriously. The latter rapprochement arrived with the CPM in 2006 was under the hope that the new LDF government under V S Achutanandan would act seriously on issues raised by the feminists; something that has not yet actualized.
The PPC, however, seemed to offer much: besides the 33 per cent reservation of seats, it has been further characterized as marked by a concern for gender equity, along with social justice and efficient implementation of developmental programmes. This experiment at micro-level planning tried to structurally integrate gender priorities into the planning process (rather than simply upholding them as normative ideals) through providing for a Women's Component Plan (WCP) to be implemented with ten per cent of the total grant-in-aid for the plan. This was later made mandatory. It was hoped that these measures would help build synergies between women's political empowerment and their active induction into socio-economic life as subjects of development in their own right.
Beginning actively in 1997-98, the Women's Component Plan (WCP) fell short of the expectations of policy-makers. The allocations for the WCP did not often come close to the stipulated ten per cent; besides, many of the projects allocated under it were stereotypical. Some effort to correct this was made in the second year of its implementation with guidelines being set and attempts to tackle gender stereotyping in project formulation. The serious inadequacy in the participation of women in the planning process was sought to be overcome through setting up need-based neighbourhood groups and including their convenors in the Village Assemblies.
The number of women who entered the local bodies has been quite large. A total of 6566 positions are reserved for women, of which 382 are seats for the president position. Now, the number of women in the LSGIs exceeds the 33 per cent. At present, the participation of women in the Village Assemblies highlighted in PPC as the basic forums of local democracy -- have improved considerably mainly due to the integration of the vast network of womens self-help groups set up towards the end of the 1990 as part of the Kerala States Poverty Alleviation Mission, the Kudumbashree, with the panchayats.
A Quick Survey of Literature
There is general consensus in the existing literature on gender in the PPC that the substantial reservation for women was definitely a major step towards inducting women as participants in local governance and have often resulted in individual capacity building of women, they have also pointed out the limited interest of political parties in ensuring the actualization of the mandatory Women's Component Plan; their reluctance to politicize women as a group and even their hostility towards assertive women.
About local planning, almost all the reports agree that practical gender needs are often well-addressed while projects that address strategic needs are ignored or opposed. Indeed, the moral opposition seems greatest when the boundaries between these are not so clear that is, when the effort is to address women's practical gender needs through means that essentially challenge entrenched forms of patriarchal power. For instance, Vanita Mukherjee and T.N. Seema mention how a scheme for training girls as auto-rickshaw drivers (not only a male preserve, but also a very visible masculine public role in Kerala) that aimed at generating greater income for
women was crippled through public derision of the women who underwent the training and finally, had no takers, as it went against accepted gender codes and seemed to hold the possibility of upsetting established norms of sexual morality. The SAKHI report mentions another telling instance, in which a proposal for generating employment for women through starting a unit to manufacture cheap and hygienic sanitary napkins was booed out as indecent.
Many of the reports point out that the remarkable spread of self-help groups in the state has often given women much greater self-confidence as earners. However, many have also remarked about the consequences of tying women's empowerment to poverty eradication, which leads to the instrumentalist reduction of the former into a tool for the latter. Fourthly, many reports reveal the extent to which community solutions were posed for gender conflict instead of the mobilization of women in anti-patriarchal struggle.
The situation in the planning experiment at present, in sum, is as a report put it: The conscious efforts to alter the conceptual rationale of planning, under the decentralized regime, recognizing the market and domestic roles of women, and the gender differences in needs and interests, remained largely at the level of rhetoric in policy making and disappeared the level of implementation. Gender Status studies recently conducted in 43 panchayats by the Kerala Institute of Local Administration, SAKHI, and SDC-CAPDECK revealed that women's subordinate status continues uninterrupted in almost all, and indeed, women are at least more visible in public precisely in panchayats which have had a history of strong political mobilization in the mid-20th century (for instance, Karivalloor-Peralam).
However, most of these reports do not explicitly consider how the experience of the past ten years has impacted upon women's perceptions and assessment of, and expectations from politics.
If it was also hoped that by the induction of a large number of women into local-level governance, women as a category would emerge as a political one i.e., as a group conscious of common interests to be secured in society and economy, with a direct claim on state resources and well-defined rights as equal citizens then, ten years past, it is certainly time to make an assessment of the ways in which this making-space within political institutions has impacted on women's perceptions of the nature and possibilities of politics, their self-perception as a distinct social group, and the social space that they may legitimately claim. This may require us to take an approach that is more sensitive to the contemporary context in Kerala we need to be alive to the fact that such change is being shaped by several processes, institutions and agents, at times unconnected or even antagonistic to each other.
With the exception of one study that focuses rather narrowly on feminist politics in Kerala in the 1990s), such serious work on the transformation of women's lives and space in the political public here is grievously lacking. While it is important to study the numbers and the achievements of women who have entered local governance, it may also be important to go beyond such considerations to reflect upon the kinds of spaces and agency that this avenue has opened up for women. This, however, cannot be done by maintaining a singular focus on the expansion of local self-government and the new opportunities for women, to the exclusion of adjacent processes in the fields of politics and development that may be of equal importance.
New Perspectives, Possibilities
The present report hopes to make a beginning towards constructing a richer and more complex account of women’s entry into the public in Kerala since the mid-1990s. We do believe that it is pointless to assess the achievements of women members of the LSGIs without scanning a larger field to understand emergent challenges to gender justice and citizenship, so that one may ultimately reflect whether political decentralization and women's representation in LSGIs has indeed been capable of rising to meet these challenges. This is not to say that focusing on the achievements of these women is unimportant. Nor is it to apply a feminist measure to assess the achievements of these women only to condemn them as victims of false consciousness in other words, sit upon (political) judgment. The historical significance of the 33 per cent reservation of seats in the LSGIs of Kerala for women can scarcely be belittled.
It is for the first time since the 1940s since the pre-Independence legislatures in the princely States of Travancore and Kochi -- that women have been recognized as a political category in their own right. But besides, the question whether it offers opportunities for women to enter the almost-exclusively male domain of politics is all-important. The lack of women in politics demands immediate redress, and without the expectation that women be have as better and less corrupt politicians or, indeed, they become gender justice warriors. Moreover, the enthusiasm for public life and knowledge of public affairs that women members have generally displayed all over India certainly serve the important feminist political goal of breaking down misogynist stereotypes about women's reluctance to enter public life.
That said, however, given that the political field generally remains hostile to issues of gender justice, feminist researchers cannot afford to discard their critical lenses. While we need to relax the assumption that women in power will somehow automatically fight for gender justice, we also need to relax the assumption that the entry of women into local governance will automatically redress their abysmally low presence in politics. Indeed, as we were to find out in our research, conservative gender norms may be reiterated precisely through the availability of certain forms of agency to women. And bargaining with patriarchy does have its limits; most importantly, we need to inquire about which women are able to bargain with patriarchy at all. This leads to the question whether the spaces and agency opened up for certain kinds of women masks parallel processes of disempowerment of other women, and eventually to the larger question of understanding what women's critical agency may be, under emergent neoliberal contexts of extractive growth, welfarist regime based on responsibilization of the subject of welfare, and crucially, within a conservative interpretation of the concept of gender in prevalent discourses of local development and politics.
Given this goal, we hope to take our inquiry beyond political decentralization. How exactly we propose to do this is summarized in the following points:
Instead of concentrating on political decentralization, we propose to focus on three processes that unfurled side by side in this period, covering the major portions of the fields of formal politics and oppositional civil society. These are:
(a) the opening up of a number of spaces within formal institutions of local self government under the 33 per cent reservation of seats as part of political decentralization.
(b)The creation and functioning of the State-wide network of self-help groups constituted by women from below-poverty-line families under the aegis of the State Poverty Alleviation Mission, the Kudumbashree.
(c) The burgeoning of struggles around degradation of the environment and destruction of livelihoods outside both politics and local governance, in which poor women, who are affected more drastically by these changes, are active participants.
The exploration of adjacent processes will help us to produce rich comparative insights. The focus on the women who are now at the interface of development and politics through the expansion of the machinery of social welfare -- is interesting not only because women are now emerging as central targets and agents of welfare governance, but also because t his group has been an important catchment area from which women have been inducted into local governance. An active circulation of women between this area and local governance is evident today. Thus becoming the President of the Community Development Society, the highest tier of the Kudumbashree self-help group structure at the village panchayat level, is often a passport to candidature in local elections.
However, though the Kudumbashree was envisaged as a state-centric civil society that would work independently alongside the village level local body, it has been heavily penetrated by political parties, particularly the CPM, from the second tier (the ward-level Area Development Society) onwards. Also, focusing on women in the oppositional civil society is important to examine what forms of agency are emerging outside the states openings, and how they relate to the latter. In sum, our effort is to make sense of women's opportunities in and through decentralization within the larger and more complex picture of women's entry into the public in the period from the mid-1990s onwards.
Secondly, we bring to bear on our empirical work on the present, a feminist historical perspective. In other words we seek to understand our empirical observations in the light of the critical history of gender, politics, and development in Kerala so that shifts are perceived and reflected upon. This means that we introduce a generational comparison in the first chapter, on women in politics and governance, between women who entered politics in the decades of the mid-20th century and those who entered local governance in the mid-1990s.
The comparison does bring insights into the shifts in the manner in which politics is conceived by the two generations, the gendered implications of current institutional changes, and allows us to ask what this may mean for the de-masculinisation of high politics. This also allows us to ask whether the identification of poor women as principal targets, and the induction of large numbers of women as agents in the new welfare disbursement network that Kudumbashree represents, really alter the androcentric structure and culture of the development bureaucracy, entrenched here since the 1950s. This perspective also helps us avoid presenting the oppositional civil society as a monolith, allowing us to take note of implications of the chronological differences of its many strands.
Thirdly, our methodology has been crafted out of specific elements to gather more than numbers and quantifiable achievements. Originally we had planned to combine a questionnaire survey along with qualitative fieldwork semi-structured and in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, memo-writing, and participant observation --and textual analysis. However in the field we found that the questionnaire was less useful, for two reasons: one, it did not seem to be yielding anything more than what we could learn from available analysis of larger data sets; two, for many of our interviewees, especially the women outside the formal institutions of politics and governance, it represented the state. Striking discrepancies were noted between what many of our interviewees wanted to be formally written up in the questionnaires and what they told us in interviews. Thus we decided to use the survey in a much more limited way. Statistical analysis in this work uses State Election Commission Data for 2005, and also data which we collected as part of fieldwork, of aspects not available in the former source.
Fourthly, while we were not interested in simply reducing womens experiences into numbers, we were also wary of replacing this with an equally questionable romanticisation of women's voices'. Thus, we certainly listened to women's voices, especially those of women marginalized from mainstream politics and governance, but? also sought to record and interpret the rich narratives we collected from the field through interviews within emergent and historical contexts.
We however, do not claim to have resolved the tension between listening to women’s voices and placing them within discursive and non-discursive contexts. The tension between these two imperatives is certainly evident in our writing, especially in our accounts of marginal women's battles in oppositional civil society and indeed it may be necessary to retain the tension than offer unsatisfactory resolutions one way or the other. Such resolutions would only affirm our own location within the dominant as privileged researchers researching marginalized women. Further, not allowing the tension to dissipate also lets us reflect on critical political agency in these troubled times.
Fifthly, our concern for the futures of democracy, and our conviction that democracy cannot be complete without gender justice, informs our fieldwork deeply. This again forces us to go beyond numbers. The material we have produced lets us engage with major ongoing debates on civil society and social democracy in general, as well with those on postcolonial democracy in India.
Extract form the introduction of the report gender and governance by usha zacharias, ranjini krishnan, a.k rajasree, reshma bharadwaj, rekha raj, s. santhy, s. anitha, binitha thampi, reshma radhakrishnan, p.r nisha, k.p praveena, and j.devika
