The ability of social systems to enable their citizens to live a life free from violence should surely be an important measure of judging them in terms of human advance. Yet since the ascendancy of the empire of the United States in the decade of the nineties and the absence of equally powerful alternative models of development, violence has almost come to be accepted as a necessary evil, a constant shadow of "development."

Even the more sensitive human development reports produced by agencies of the United Nations give little weight to the presence of violence or the absence of it in measuring a society’s advances. For example, how important should it be in indices measuring human development that a significant aspect of the American way of life is that 10 American women are killed every day in incidents of domestic violence, or that every 15 seconds a woman is battered in an American home? Indeed the US could learn a few lessons perhaps from its small neighbour Cuba, just ninety miles away, with a social system that has ensured that the country has one of the lowest rates of violence in the world although in recent times there have been indications of the social cost being paid as a result of the intense pressure of the US economic blockade on that country.

There is a link between violence on the one hand and socio–economic systems and dominant political platforms and cultures on the other. Typically, societies that are more equal are less violent. Violence against women also needs to be seen in such a context. One cannot easily think of a society where the graph measuring the extent of violence against women worked in an opposite direction to a graph depicting general rates of violence although there is certainly no one to one ratio. The growth rates of violence against women can be faster than that of other crimes.

For example, in Russia and other east European countries, after the collapse of socialist systems, whereas crime in general has increased, crimes against women have recorded a much greater increase compared to previous decades. The point is that analysis of or struggles against violence also need to go beyond the male–female framework and look at policies and politics that promote male supremacist values and cultures that get reflected in increasing violence on women.

In India, this is all the more necessary as struggles against violence against women have to confront the forces of liberalisation on the one hand and communalism on the other. Organisations like AIDWA (All India Democratic Women’s Association) have been arguing that there is an invisible cost that women, more specifically poor women, are paying consequent to policies of liberalisation. The huge increase in rural unemployment coupled with the retreat of the government from the provision of minimum needs, like the availability of cheap food and access to health care, has had a devastating impact on the lives of poor women increasing their dependence on the rural rich and forcing them into cruel strategies of survival.

Information through discussions, meetings, surveys in many states like Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, where AIDWA has been working among these sections of women, point to an increase in cases of sexual harassment and abuse directly related to worsening conditions of work and even more frequently, during the search for work. Since paid work opportunities are limited and usually only on a contract or casual basis, women’s bargaining powers for a safe and secure work environment are limited.

Sexual harassment at the work place has greatly increased for these women. These realities are never reflected in official statistics. There are no procedures that can measure the level of abuse or humiliation that a poor woman faces when she is out looking for work, any work, so that she can feed herself and her family and there are no laws to deal with it. In any case, economic circumstances leave her no choice but to go out and find work. Thus, none of the cases of sexual abuse that occur in such situations ever get reported.

The large majority of these women are Dalit, Adivasi, or belong to other oppressed castes. In several cases the abuse faced by the women is additionally of a casteist character. Commercialisation of panchayat property in many states has also deprived Dalit women, the large majority of whom are landless, of access to fields for fodder collection, fuel collection and in the absence of public toilets for relieving themselves.

In an AIDWA organised convention of Dalit women in Rajasthan, women related how a line of upper caste women of landed families stood in a row with lathis to prevent them from using the fields to relieve themselves. Violence and humiliation just to answer the call of nature is an experience common to Dalit women in many states that has worsened because of policies associated with liberalisation that deprive the poor of access to panchayat land.

Surveys conducted by some NGOs in districts in Orissa where there has been prolonged drought and famine with no government intervention, have found an increase in the numbers of women in prostitution or in the sale of girl children. At the same time, a powerful mafia has developed that trafficks in women both inside and outside India. According to government figures, over the last few years, 67 per cent of all abductions and kidnappings in India are of women, of whom 54 per cent are under the age of 18, but conviction rates are low and the missing women rarely found. In fact, in one shocking statistic, even the investigation in 36 per cent of cases of women missing in 1999 was not complete a year later.

In the liberalised era, market values have not replaced feudal values; rather, they have commercialised them. The only difference between a pati vrata today and one a century ago is not that her main reason for existence is no longer to serve her husband, but that she would better do it with a particular brand of washing machine or cooker! A male centred ritual like Karwa Chauth becomes a commercial venture and the message is spread through the sale of greeting cards, TV advertisements and so on.

Market and advertisement driven consumerism fuels the practice of dowry. Advertisements promote dowry, linking particular products as being essential to keeping the groom happy. Even a government insurance company advertises insurance "for expenditure during a daughter’s wedding."

At another level, women themselves become commodities in a globalised world with women’s bodies being used to sell everything from soap to tractors. The big increase of sexual violence cases against women is not unrelated to the projection of women as sex–objects in at least seven out of ten visuals projected across the country through the powerful reach of the electronic media.

The years of reform have hardly enhanced women’s status. On the contrary, they have strengthened systems that subordinate and demean women. In addition, violence against Dalits and specifically Dalit women as a result of policies of liberalisation has also increased. It is also no coincidence that it is in these years that the politics of communalism has grown. It is not in the scope of this article to draw out the links between communalism and liberalisation and why, although seemingly opposite, the two not only peacefully co–exist but happily cohabit. But clearly, communalist mobilisations serve as a convenient and sometimes even effective method of dealing with the political consequences of people’s alienation caused by the inequality creating policies of liberalisation, which is why India’s ruling classes have lent in substantial measure their support to the politics of Hindutva. One of the many aspects of the Hindutva platform is the violence it generates.

It hardly needs reiteration that when there is communal violence, the most vulnerable targets are women. Women who are in fact subordinate in the community, lesser citizens, are turned into the representatives of the community, repositories of the community’s izzat, linked to notions of female chastity and purity that must be defiled and destroyed to establish the other’s superiority. In Gujarat, the VHP and the Bajrang Dal and the mobs led by them, deliberately sought out Muslim women, humiliated, sexually abused, raped and killed them as the means through which the community itself is destroyed even in its own eyes.

But although men committed the act of rape, it was supported, defended, praised as legitimate revenge equally by women who belonged to the same political platform. Their actions showed the false premises of feminist theories built around a "homogenous female identity", or an imagined "sisterhood" spontaneous and biological, sans politics, sans other social categories. Without grappling with the politics of communalism, the dangerous consequences of communal violence on women can hardly be understood leave alone resisted.

The intrinsic violence in the Hindutva platform of the sangh parivar has wider implications for women across community. There is a deliberate move to militarise the sangh’s political base through the distribution of arms. Swords, sharp- edged trishuls, daggers, knives are being handed out free to any youth willing to commit himself to the communal platform. Classes on how to use such deadly weapons are also being held. The well–publicised public distribution ceremonies of arms face no hindrance from official agencies.

What effect will the distribution of deadly weapons have in a society where violence is growing? Will it have any impact on domestic disputes? An indication, not a straw in the wind, came from the town of Bhavnagar in Gujarat, where such arms had been distributed. A young woman came to the AIDWA legal aid cell a few months ago with injuries caused by a sharp weapon. She was loath to go to the police. After several rounds of discussion it emerged that her husband, a drunkard and a lay about, had received a trishul from the local VHP. "He was always abusive and used to beat me," said the complainant, "but ever since he has got the trishul, he takes it out when he is angry and threatens the children and me with it. Last night, he took it out and stabbed me in the arm… I am part of a bigger army, he said, no one can do anything to me."

In another incident, in a water dispute between neighbours, one of the men rushed into his house and brought out a sword, again handed over to him by the VHP, and cut the other’s arm with it. In both cases the victims were Hindus. For those in Gujarat who believe that the carnage was a one time lesson that needed to be taught to the Muslims, or those who believe, as does Nadira Naipaul, that "Gujarat was an aberration… it is over," the implications of these two incidents should be an eye- opener. The free and widespread distribution of arms in other parts of the country will further violence and its bloody manifestations in different social situations, not necessarily linked to communal agendas, including the domestic sphere where obviously it would be women at the receiving end.

The impact of communal mobilisation often accompanied by violence finds its echoes in other communities, particularly when the state and central government are so blatantly partisan. Counter mobilisations or violent reprisals are seen as the only means of self– defence. In fact, it can be said that the laboratory of the sangh parivar has created the ground for a new wave of activities by terrorist groups in regions like Gujarat where they never existed. In such a situation, fundamentalist forces within communities get greatly strengthened, putting the more progressive and secular forces within minority communities on the defensive. Issues of women’s progress or advance, if seen to challenge conservative notions of community identity, get sidelined and rebuffed. Struggles against violence therefore have to address the specific position of Muslim women, both in relation to the insecurities created by the communal mobilisations against them and the attendant economic and social discrimination on the one hand and the position of Muslim women within the community where injustice is often linked to unreformed personal laws.

The recent dictates against Muslim women in Kashmir threatening them to wear the purdah, to stay at home, to leave employment in the police force have been widely condemned, as they should be. Although such dictates may not have had an immediate impact on women in the region, it illustrates the deeply anti–women character of fundamentalist forces regardless of the community they claim to represent.

Women’s movements for justice and advance are among the more dynamic social movements in India today. Struggles against violence against women have been high on the agenda. Issues like dowry, female foeticide, wife beating, sexual harassment, and rape are being confronted in numerous ways. It is however becoming more and more clear that the struggle against violence has added dimensions in the present political context of liberalisation and communalism that require new strategies and new alliances to confront and defeat.