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INDIA WOMEN'S CAUCUS (IWC)

A pan India movement led by women to remind the country to keep its promise of more egalitarian lives as promised in the Constitution is underway in India, with its roots in Goa. 

Is it outlandish for women to be allowed to have a voice in the government they support with their taxes? Why is then that despite all women's movements, which have had as their general goal -- women's political inclusion, are women still not sharing proportional political power? How does it matter? Its simply that research after research have pointed out that, when women engage in politics, they put important but otherwise neglected issues on the table which have a significant trickle-down effect, benefiting women from all walks of life. That women's interests would best be served by a politically gender-balanced government.

Undeniably, it needs a strong political will to support women overcome obstacles that hinder their contribution to national development. In my experience of six long years in politics, as state head of a political party -- an alternate brand of politics in India, I bitterly realised that like all traditional parties, this party too was unwilling to put mechanism in place to increase female representation in the event of the Women's Reservation Bill not coming through. This disturbed me. More than ever, I now started believing that to fundamentally bridge the political gender gap, it is crucial to bring more women into politics. The primary challenge would be to bring women and concerns of women to the forefront of Indian politics.

Need For A Movement

So to draw large numbers of women into the political process, there was need of a concerted movement and creation of a platform to identify and train leaders, and to facilitate a crucial coalition of interests -- to ensure that women find their voice and to to increase women's political leadership at the local and national levels. The need for an organization that would use successful techniques and insights from women's political leadership development across countries that managed to engage women in policy-making or bring women into decision making roles, was felt. It was essential that the organisation would collaborate with people from all political parties, women’s organizations and policy-makers to create space for women to have discusions to find common ground -- to start with.

While researching global women's political movements, I had come across the National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC), a multi-partisan grassroots organization dedicated to increasing women’s participation in the political process by recruiting, training, supporting, raising money and providing crucial hands-on volunteer assistance to pro-choice women candidates for elected and appointed offices at all levels of government. I started a dialogue with women leaders from across the country, and with a few of my friends based abroad. During this dialogue, women felt aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of parity. This dialogue slowly transformed into more of a campaign for parity. And as others started discussing the challenges, I deligently worked on creating the vision statement connecting this nascent campaign directly to the rights enshrined in the Constitution.

The Mission Statement

The statement simply spelled out the need for creation of a pan-India organisation that would be dedicated largely to the crucial cause of increasing participation of women in all levels of public and political life. It would serve as a network dedicated to the cause of expanding participation of women in the political process by imparting training, supporting women candidates for decision making bodies at all levels and enabling women to get elected to political and public offices. The project was named as India Women Caucus (IWC).

IWC's fundamental aim would be to build capacity of women to play effective roles as political actors and to harmonise the gender skew of governance structures, policies and budgets. It would aim to build a movement to facilitate the recruitment of more women as volunteers, members, leaders and candidates through capacity building, campaign assistance and election funding. Most importantly, IWC would serve as a voice for political equality representing a cross-section of women across all ages, religions, professions and ideologies; women who themselves are committed to a gender equitable public agenda. Its primary concern therefore would be to engage with stakeholders, women leaders, like-minded people and public opinion influencers from both genders across the nation to enable women across the spectrum to seek office and perform their duties as leaders with knowledge and ability.

Lessons From Similar Movements

We are aware that the staggering changes for women that have come in the country and the world, did not happen just like that. Women have never been passive recipients of miraculous changes in laws. They have been very deliberately instrumental themselves to make these changes happen, importantly in the most democratic ways: through meetings, petition drives, lobbying, public speaking, and non-violent resistance. Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden -- all four Nordic countries and Rwanda are global leaders when it comes to closing the gender political gap. If you examine these cases, women
movements for parity have led to formation of frameworks and policies which have proved effective in promoting gender equality. Then ofcourse, there was the political will as great policies and frameworks would not amount to much if political will to implement was lacking. Taking cues from these campaign, I envisaged a plan of action.

Goa Round Table Of Women Leaders Sets The Stage

IWC would endeavour to improve the status of women by amplifying their voices in government and decision making bodies. As a first step towards affirmative action, on Oct 20, 2018, I invited a few women leaders from some of the leading Indian cities, where women are vociferous and prominent in their respective professions, and about 50 recognised Goa based leaders from all activity streams. The aim was to bring them together in the dialogue termed as the Goa Round Table of Women Leaders. The deliberation at this round table was thus to set the stage for the formation of the organisation.
As expected the conversation turned to the current situation of women in the country and lot of pouring of discontent on the fact that women had not yet gained true freedom.  Every body agreed that the country would benefit from having its women play more active roles in the government and its polity. This was definitely not the first group of women to have such a conversation, but it was the first to plan and carry out a specific program. At the end of the round table discussions, some 20 leaders weere identified to take the IWC initiative forward, and the Goa state chapter of IWC was established.

Like Minds Come Together 

Much earlier, during the course of my efforts to reach out to like minded people across the country, I had contacted Shanthala Damle and Dr. Sumitra Iyengar -- two prominent political activists and women's rights campaigners of Bengaluru. I had known both of them since 2016. Shanthala, a software professional turned politician had left an illustrious career in the USA to come back to her roots in India to join active politics. Dr. Sumitra Iyengar, currenlty resides in Sydney and is the CEO, Women Empowerment International – Consulting and Networking, Australia. Both are strong proponents of proportional political representation. Both suggested the name of Tara Krishnaswamy, a noted Bengaluru based author and activist. Tara believed that the time was right for such a movement and was thus instrumental in providing valuable inputs to the original draft of the vision statement. Within a few of days of Goa meeting, Tara decided to organise the next meeting of IWC in Bengaluru on December 8, 2018. Even as this event is hopeful of inspiring more leaders to join the movement, a host of meetings have been planned in others cities like Mysuru, Mangaluru, Hyderabad, Vishapatnam, Chennai, Mumbai, Gurgaon and Delhi, to name a few.

Time Is Right

2018 has been a year filled with extreme highs and lows for women’s rights in the country. Going forward, 2019 will be a big year for IWC and its objective to increase the number of women in our parliament, which is currently dismal. In the 2019 general elections, the organisation aims to endorse women running for offices across India, besides its official launch in Delhi. We know that social change and advancements in rights take time and courage. This movement draws from the resilience of women’s movements around the world to move the needle on gender equality and stand up, get loud, and fight back in the face of disparity in representation.

Spurred by lack of political will to pass the Women's Reservation Bill, IWC is built on the premise that social, economic and political equity are the three pillars of democracy and that none of those pillars will be stable without the other two standing sturdy. Accordingly, social and economic equality of women will come about only when women are well represented in decision-making bodies of the state and the nation. Beyond the rhetoric of women led development, a difficult campaign is now under way. The outcome is uncertain. But the time is just right to prepare the ground for this demand.

Author: Rajeshree Iyer Nagarsekar