Markets, Fundamentalism and Conflict: A Gender Perspective
There
are various aspects of market-oriented economic liberalisation and
globalisation that are known to be adverse for working people. But even
apart from these, it is increasingly being recognised that some of the
economic and social processes unleashed by markets also have other
adverse consequences. In particular, they generate or accentuate
tendencies of fundamentalism, sectarianism and related conflict and
violence, especially towards women.
Let us consider the mechanisms whereby this occurs more specifically in
the Indian context. The past decade or more has been the period during
which the Indian economy has been thrown more open to market processes
than ever before, and such markets have been regional, national and
international. This period has been associated with a tendency towards
privatisation of state assets, reduction in crucial government
investment, especially in infrastructure areas, reduced per capita
public spending on health, reduced public expenditure in the rural areas
generally, deregulation of and a number of tax benefits and other sops
provided to large domestic and multinational capital, trade
liberalisation which has affected the viability of small scale
manufacturing units and agriculturalists.
These policies in turn have already had substantial detrimental effects
on the economy, and more particularly, on the lives of ordinary working
people. The most evident negative feature is the collapse of employment
generation, especially in the rural areas. The rate of growth of all
forms of rural employment, including casual and part-time work and
self-employment, has slumped to less than 1 per cent in the 1990s
(regardless of whether one looks at the National Sample Survey data or
the Census data). This is not only the lowest recorded rate since
Independence, it is also much lower than the rate of growth of rural
population. This means that the absence of productive work opportunities
has become the single most important problem for large sections of the
rural population.
Even those who are self-employed as agriculturalists are facing huge
problems of viability as cultivators because of the combination of
threats from highly subsidised imports which are keeping prices down,
and rising costs because of withdrawal of subsidies. The growing crisis
in agriculture combined with the lack of employment generation have
created much more basic economic hardship for the majority of rural
residents.
In the urban areas, the rate of overall employment generation has been
slightly better, but not in the formal sector, where employment has
barely grown at all. There has been some growth in services employment,
and especially in IT-enabled services that has reduced the rate of
educated unemployment. But even in the urban areas, the problem of lack
of sufficient employment for all those who need to work, remains
significant. For less skilled workers, and especially women, the problem
of access to productive work is especially acute. Women are being drawn
into the paid labour force in some more regressive ways, in the form of
home-based work as part of large chains of production organised by large
capitalists, or as low-paid and exploited service sector workers.
In addition to inadequate aggregate employment generation, there is the
problem of reduced security of work and of incomes generally. Of course
this is most marked for wage workers in less skilled and more unstable
occupations. But it is ironically true that even in the higher ends of
the job spectrum, employment has become more volatile and fragile, and
the earlier security that was implicit in formal sector employment has
all but disappeared in the new contracts. In addition, even non-wage
incomes are now less secure and more volatile, simply because many
markets, and the income accruing from them, fluctuate much more wildly
than they did in the past.
The overall depressed conditions of employment generation and greater
insecurity of incomes have in turn been indirectly expressed in other
negative features, notably food consumption. Foodgrain availability per
head of population for the economy as a whole has been lower on average
in the past few years, than even thirty years ago. And this is combined
with a mountain of "excess" foodgrain stocks being held by the Food
Corporation of India, raising the appalling contradiction of continuing
starvation amidst apparent plenty. Per capita calorie consumption, even
for the poorest forty per cent of the population, has also declined.
This is almost unbelievable in an economy which was supposed to have
been growing at more than 5 per cent per annum and where the official
statistics are now being manipulated to announce that there is a
significant decline in the extent of poverty!
As if the reduced access to food and lower calorie consumption were not
bad enough, there have also been evident declines in the availability of
basic public services in the areas of health and sanitation. The decline
in public expenditure investment has not only meant that the rate of
expansion of much-needed health facilities has declines. The cuts in
public expenditure have also meant that maintenance and repair of such
facilities, as well as basic running expenditures, are not provided, so
that the actual quality of and access to public health and sanitation
facilities has declined. This has affected both prevented preventive and
curative health care in the public sector, which in turn means that even
poor households are forced to undertake much more expenditure on private
health care, even when this cuts into the incomes necessary for sheer
physical survival. Naturally, this tends to affect women and girl
children more adversely, and compounds the effects of gender
discrimination in nutrition as well.
Along with this, the growing emphasis on markets has implied the
commoditisation of many aspects of life that were earlier seen as either
naturally provided by states and communities, or simply not subject to
market transaction and property relations. Thus, the inability or
refusal of the government to provide safe drinking water has led to the
explosive growth of a bottled water industry. A whole range of
previously services and utilities like power distribution and
telecommunications have been privatised. Even the growing recognition
accorded to intellectual property rights marks the entry of markets into
ever newer spheres.
Of course, markets imply marketing and drawing more and more consumers
into the web of purchase through advertising and attempts to manipulate
peoples’ tastes and choices. In this effort, advertising companies have
notoriously used women as objects to purvey their products. The dual
relationship with women, as objects to be used in selling goods, and as
a huge potential market for goods, creates a peculiar process whereby
women are encouraged and persuaded to participate actively in their own
objectification. The huge media attention given to beauty contests,
"successful" models, and the like, all feed into the rapidly expanding
beauty industry, which includes not only cosmetics and beauty aids, but
slimming agents, beauty parlours, weight loss clinics, and so on. Many
of these contribute to the most undesirable and backward attitudes to
both women and their appearance, such as the advertisements for fairness
cream that emphasise that it is necessary to be fair to make a "good"
marriage, which is in turn seen as the basic goal of a woman.
All this seems plausible enough, but many would argue that the link
between all this and fundamentalism and violence is not all that
obvious. I will argue that in fact these processes actively operate to
strengthen patriarchy, encourage sectarian tendencies and add to factors
making for social conflict and violence. Some of the mechanisms are
described below.
The first mechanism comes from the sheer fact of greater material
insecurity. As ordinary life becomes more volatile, insecure and
unpredictable in various ways, people search for security in whatever
ways they can muster. Precisely because some degree of certainty is seen
as a comfort, often the more rigid a system is (whether it is a set of
intellectual and spiritual beliefs, or a religious order, or a
relatively close grouping claiming a particular special social identity)
the more attractive it perversely becomes. This may explain why some of
the more rigidly structured and sectarian religious and social groups
have attracted large following in recent times.
These groups in turn contribute to the second mechanism, the use of such
"religious" and sectarian sentiment as a means of political
mobilisation. The Sangh Parivar, of which the ruling BJP is a part, has
of course developed this to a fine art and science, but they are not the
only ones using such particularist identities, rather than genuine
class-based combinations, as a means of political organisation. The
ruling parties have in turn seized on these to divert attention from
their own shortcoming in basic governance, and their inability to
prevent deterioration of basic material conditions for a significant
proportion of the people. The pseudo-nationalism that is espoused (in
which the relevant other is usually a neighbouring country like Pakistan
or now even Bangladesh) serves as a way to channel and divert genuine
anti-imperialist sentiments of people and convert them into simple and
self-defeating war cries against neighbours.
Of course there is a strong undercurrent of violence in all this, which
spews out into the open every now and then, as it did in the
state-sponsored pogrom in Gujarat last year. The growing tendency
towards violence of various sorts – towards other "communities" or caste
groups, and especially towards women – can be seen as another reflection
and result of the economic and social processes outlined earlier. The
greater insecurity and sheer difficulty of ordinary life, the
complications and worries involved in providing for basic needs, all
make for much greater levels of everyday irritation in people. This can
only rarely find an outlet in places of work, and requires other means
of expression. In addition, the massive increase in inequality, the
growth of rampant consumerism, and the explosion of new media that
brings all the lavish new lifestyles into open public view, all serve to
add to the resentment and frustration of have-nots. The gap between
aspiration and reality becomes ever wider, and this creates a strong
urge to somehow get at those who are seen as "responsible". Of course,
the real agents of these processes – the unresponsive government, the
large companies and multinationals, the foreign investors – are all too
large, too distant and too powerful to be touched. How much easier,
then, to direct one’s ire against those who are seen as more easily
attacked – minority communities or lower caste groups, women within and
outside the household, and so on. The substantial increase in violence
against women is not just because of higher reporting of incidents, but
because of this process which results in an actual increase in the
number of such crimes.
Other factors also help once a climate of violence and incipient
conflict has been created. Fear of retribution or of being the next
target serve to ensure silence – if not complicity – among those who
would not themselves directly engage in such violence. Such fear is all
the more potent because the agencies of the state are increasingly used
to protect the perpetrators of violence and to deny victims of violence
the minimal degree of justice.
The other philosophy that is invoked and sought to be spread is that
which lies at the heart of the reliance on markets – individualism. The
"competitive spirit" is unleashed and used to make people feel that it
is each man or woman for himself or herself, and that individuals can
succeed in making gains at the expense of others in their own social
group. This acts as another way of reducing attempts by people to forge
groups for collective action to change the processes of liberalisation
and corporate globalisation.
It is clear therefore, that market fundamentalism breeds religious and
social fundamentalism as well, with disastrous consequences for ordinary
people and especially women. Of course, all this helps both directly,
and indirectly, the cause of imperialism and its domestic allies.
However, there are recent signs that such a process is finite, and that
there are limits to the extent to which rightwing fundamentalism can be
used to counter and destroy progressive forces. The recent upsurge of
people across the world against the US imperialist aggression on Iraq,
and the coalescing of the antiwar movement with the anti-globalisation
movement across the world, are very positive signs, which may indicate a
turning point in international politics. It leads us to hope that even
in India, we will soon get a reversal of these current very reactionary
tendencies and the development of a genuine democratic and socialist
alternative which will also fully recognise and protect the rights of
women.