The feminist movement needs to engage with mainstream politics: Nandini Deo

After Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, the RSS hit rock-bottom while India’s feminist movement thrived. Nandini Deo, political scientist at Lehigh University, Pennsylvania, is the first to do a comparative study of both movements over a century. She talks to TOI about why, 70 years down the line, the trajectories have reversed.
Why would you choose to compare the Hindutva movement and the women’s movement?
As a scholar of social movements, one should be able to compare any two movements over time.These two movements are particularly interesting as both seek to contest the boundary between public and private in a democracy. One seeks to make religious identity public, the other seeks to do so for gender.
Recent attempts by the BJP government to control educational institutions have been hotly contested. Your work shows this is not a new phenomenon.
The fights we are seeing in the education sphere today don’t come as a surprise, given the history of the RSS. Battles around cultural institutions have always been important for the RSS. Sangh history shows the importance of education in fuelling the organization. The RSS was banned after Gandhi’s assassination. When Nehru lifted the ban, the Sangh was only allowed to participate in cultural and not political activities. Under these conditions, RSS formed its present structure of a parent organization with political and non-political affiliates to achieve the goals of Hindutva. The Sangh soon realized how important education was, both in order to establish contact with the student population and to shape the content of what is being taught. Education allowed RSS to shape perceptions of what was real. In addition to its student wing, ABVP, the Sangh began its own schools. It now runs thousands of schools across India.
When the Jan Sangh, an earlier political affiliate of the RSS, formed a coalition governments in UP and MP, it was the education portfolio that its ministers sought, over more prestigious ones such as the home department. In the long run, the Sangh knew that controlling schools would help spread their ideology better than controlling the police force.
Why didn’t the feminist movement work towards shaping the education agenda?
The feminist movement in India was heavily invested in education during the 1930s and ’40s. After Independence, the movement, which enjoyed the support of the Congress and Left parties, did not actively engage in education as many women felt this was the job of the state. But in the early years of Independence, government investment in primary education was woefully inadequate. The women’s movement missed out on the opportunity to shape classroom agenda.
The environment movement effectively managed to convince the Supreme Court to make environment education mandatory in schools. This avenue is still very much open to feminists.
Would the movement be more successful if it was affiliated with mainstream politics?
Given that, in a democracy, power resides with political parties, it is important for the women’s movement to better engage with them. It isn’t necessary for the women’s movement to join a political party, but it needs to improve the way they negotiate with parties. It could do so by supporting a party or threatening to withhold support. In its early years, the women’s movement was closely allied with the nationalist movement and Congress. But after the Emergency, which saw many women’s activists in jail, women felt betrayed by the Congress as well as the Left, which supported the Emergency. Many in the movement said they were done with electoral politics and instead began their own autonomous NGOs and foundations.
Grassroots mobilization is now difficult as the women’s movement has stopped being part of people’s everyday life, unlike the Sangh Parivar.
Do you see BJP reinventing its relationship with the RSS?
This was evident during the 2014 elections. Modi is trying to position himself and the BJP as more friendly towards business interests than the Hindutva agenda. This points to an ongoing battle within the Sangh. While corporate interests are attractive to BJP and offer it an alternate source of support, it is the RSS that has the numbers that can be mobilized during an election. The threat to withdraw support will always hang over the BJP. I don’t think the party is more powerful than the rest of the movement. While the aims of a political party are to get re-elected, the aims of the Sangh are much broader and they will be willing to sacrifice an election if it helps them reorganize power within society.