This is the call of the revolutionary Maoist forces in India on the occasion of March 8, 2005 to all the toiling and oppressed women of India. The day signifying women’s united struggle against inequality and exploitation, brought to the center stage of the world by the socialist women’s movement in the early part of the 20th century even today stands for women’s struggle for justice despite all the attempts of the imperialist bourgeoisie to convert it into a consumerist women’s day. For the toiling women of the world it is the day when resolves have to be built again and plans charted to get their due place in all aspects of social life and live with dignity. For women in India this year is especially significant.

The merger of the two powerful revolutionary parties, the CPI-ML (PW) and MCCI marks a leap in the development of the revolutionary movement within India. The revolutionary movement is a movement committed as much to the emancipation of women from the bonds of centuries old patriarchal oppression as it is to freeing India from the shackles of imperialism, feudalism and their agents the comprador big capitalists. The merger of these parties has meant a unified revolutionary movement spread in many parts of the country. It has also meant the emergence of a unified revolutionary women’s movement in rural India. Hundreds of units of the revolutionary women’s organizations Nari Mukti Sangh (NMS), Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sangh (KAMS), Vimukti Mahila Samiti (VMS), Nari Mukti Sangharsh samiti (NMSS) that function in the villages of Telengana and eastern Ghats, in the forests of Bastar and Gadhchiroli, Sarguja, Giridih, Dhanbad and other districts of Jharkhand, in the plains and forests of North Bihar and Uttaranchal are already experiencing changes in the social environment since the growth and spread of the revolutionary movement in their regions. They have experienced the liberationist potential in the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA) and are joining it in large numbers. This is a call to spread the women’s movement with a revolutionary perspective to ever-newer areas.

The pro-imperialist policies of the successive Central Governments including the present UPA Government, its open support for globalization has led to the ever deteriorating condition of women in India – 50 % of agricultural laborers are women and most of them are surviving below the poverty line. Even if we consider only the number of recorded crimes against women, records show that 80 cases of crimes against women are reported every day. The increasing destitution of women, especially in rural areas, and the increasing violence against women have revealed the hollowness of the Government’s claim to have improved their conditions and "empowering" them. The stranglehold of big landlords over cultivable land, the neglect of agriculture by the Governments and the devastation of the natural environment has meant that the bulk of rural women are bearing the brunt of inflation, unemployment and drought. They are propertyless and powerless. The insecurity in their lives has intensified. The daily newspapers are full of stories of the kidnapping and sale of poor girls and women to pimps and procurers parading as employment agents. This is the cruel reality facing Dalit and Adivasi women. Gang rapes and public humiliation of women of lower castes by powerful landed interests and powerbrokers is the order of the day. On an average 3 Dalit women are raped everyday and 2 are killed daily. Their independent existence is not acknowledged and not acceptable, their right to marry a man of their choice denied by powerful caste panchayats. The number of couples desperately trying to challenge this authority in Haryana and Western UP are a powerful indictment of this feudal authoritarianism still strong in rural India. A culture is perpetuated such that women’s physical existence is under attack. The declining sex ratio is but a stark statistical manifestation of this. Whether Tamilnadu or Punjab, traditional methods and modern technology have come together to deny the girl child the right to live. Breaking the economic, political and social hold of the powerful landed and commercial interests is the ONLY way out, the essential pre-condition to achieve substantial steps for the emancipation of the vast majority of toiling women, and this is what the revolutionary movement is doing.

The onslaught of globalisation and the invasion of the latest in electronic technology like digital cameras and mobile phone cameras have only meant further exploitation and entrapment of women in even more vulgar and sinister ways. Sex scandals have erupted in so many towns and cities that they are being considered almost routine. Prostitution rings for upper class customers when busted reveal only the tip of the iceberg. Girls from Delhi and Chandigarh sent to Surat and Mumbai and girls from Mumbai for customers in Goa and Delhi. Poor women from Orissa and Jharkhand, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh ensnared in increasing numbers into life-long bondage in the sex cages of Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata. This sex slavery is but a part of the sex tourism being vigorously promoted by the imperialists under liberalization. The imperialists have ruthlessly pushed pornography on the internet and elsewhere, promoted decadent loose sexual norms through the media and sex tourism leading to the spread of AIDS and HIV positive cases. Lakhs of ordinary women in India too, as in Africa and elsewhere, are afflicted with this deadly disease, and fall victims of this imperialist policy. The imperialists then piously fund programs for AIDS while at the same time making essential drugs exorbitantly expensive and thus out of the reach of ordinary people through their WTO patent regime. The garment factories in Bangalore, Tiruppur, Delhi in India, in Thailand and China have become centers for the super-exploitation of women’s labour by major MNCs and the big compradors. Lakhs of women, driven by hard economic conditions are suffering physical and sexual harassment to stay employed in these sweatshops. Imperialism, the worldwide exploiter of women’s labor and degrader of her dignity has to be smashed to end this slavery. This is the task the revolutionary movement in India has set itself.

The Indian State and its wings – the judiciary and the police and para-military, military forces is maintaining and upholding this violence against women and the discrimination against them. The successive ruling parties have all, in one way or another continued to support the patriarchal State. The role of the State in the condition of women in a country is crucial, and this is what even a liberal organization like the Amnesty International has pointed out in recent reports. The State, hand in glove with conservative patriarchal ruling classes, has subverted every attempt of women to obtain justice. That in all the 18 sati mahima cases in Rajasthan courts the accused are acquitted and the State Government chooses not to appeal is enough for women to understand that justice cannot be obtained through these courts. While Bilkis Bano, victim of gang rape and witness to the murder of 17 people by the Hindu fascist hordes during the pogroms in Gujarat in 2002, is still valiantly struggling, three years later to get justice through the courts, scores of other Muslim women in Gujarat who suffered rape or torture in the same riots have been denied justice completely. The Gujarat State is fully responsible for this. If the State cannot subvert, it suppresses, as it tried to do in Manorama’s rape and murder case in Manipur last year. It was the bold and collective struggle of Manipuri women and other sections that put the UPA Govt and the Army on the defensive. The police and the Armed forces are themselves perpetrators of atrocities on women. A DSP and his cronies rape a minor girl in Madhya Pradesh, police constables rape an arrested woman in custody, a minor girl in Kollam district in Kerala is gang raped in a military camp, are some incidents that reached the media. The cases of suppression of women in the political movement carries on. Manorama was raped and killed by armymen after she was picked up on the suspicion that she was linked to the underground movement in the State. Latha a woman activist from Kurnool dist. AP was killed in a so called encounter. Unspeakable atrocities continue to be committed on ordinary women in Kashmir. The present authoritarian, patriarchal State, itself the perpetrator of crimes against women, must be changed, which the revolutionary movement seeks to do.

The development of the revolutionary movement in the country marks a great hope for women all over the country. Women too must move forward collectively, unitedly to demand what it theirs by right, to oppose the continuing atrocities and discrimination, to participate in the struggle for a new democratic society. If the women’s movement moves forward hand in hand with the revolutionary movement for new democratic revolution only then the root causes of women’s oppression can be smashed and concrete steps forward for the emancipation of women taken. Women’s liberation can be achieved as part of the transformation of the entire socio-economic set-up. We learn this from the example of China. The mass of women gained substantially during the revolutionary war and after its victory during the period of socialism. They have faced setback and increased discrimination again due to the reestablishment of the rule of the reactionary bourgeoisie. Without women’s own struggle all this is not possible. Struggles by women are breaking out. Most notable was the recent struggle of Manipuri women which shook the whole of India. Let the coming March 8 be celebrated with the resolve to build up women’s mass struggles against injustice and this unjust order.