1981 to 2016 – these thirty-five years span AIDWA’s progress so far from struggle to struggle towards its objective of ‘Democracy, Equality and Women’s Emancipation’. As AIDWA completes its thirty-fifth year, it also prepares for its 11th triennial conference to be held in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh from December 10-14, 2016. More than 850 delegates and special invitees from the different corners of the country are to attend this conference and to deliberate on the unprecedented challenges we face today; we fervently hope and believe that these deliberations will give us new resolve and new directions that will enable us to overcome these challenges.

The Madhya Pradesh unit of AIDWA has accepted the responsibility of hosting the conference with enthusiasm and courage. In this BJP-ruled state where circumstances are adverse for us in many ways and where communal tension tends to get whipped up on the slightest pretext, our sisters are keeping their cool and making all the necessary arrangements patiently with the help of friendly people at the grassroots as well as our AIDWA centre. Our conference may lack in pomp and splendour, but the organisers are resolved to make up for it through discipline and commitment. Well-known author and intellectual Rajesh Joshi, who returned his Sahitya Akademi award in protest against intolerance unleashed by the Sangh Parivar, is the convenor of the reception committee that has been formed and the conference is due to start on December 10 with a public rally at Iqbal Maidan in Bhopal which is going to be opened by Pinarayi Vijayan, chief minister of Kerala. Radhika Vemula, courageous mother of Rohith Vemula, and leaders of our organisation will also greet us at the rally.

Mukta Dabholkar, who has continued the fight in the cause of scientific thought as opposed to superstitions and blind faith since the dastardly murder of her father Narendra Dabholkar, has accepted our invitation to inaugurate the conference. As in earlier conferences, women from different states who have shown exemplary grit and courage in standing up for their rights and whom AIDWA has supported in their struggle, will also be felicitated and greeted by our patron Brinda Karat in her key-note address. We have no doubt that our delegates will be greatly inspired by their example. Cultural programmes with artists from Madhya Pradesh and other states have also been planned.

We are hoping to release in the course of the conference a CD on Thirty-five years of AIDWA: an audio-visual journey compiled from our digitised archives at AIDWA centre and a small booklet in English based on a study on the impact of MNREGA on women conducted by our Karnataka unit. Also as in other conferences, a number of commission papers on burning issues related to women will be presented and discussed by our delegates so that we may have a better understanding of our movement. The preparations and the conference itself will be tracked on facebook and other social media so that our members, co-fighters and friends all over the country may be in touch with what AIDWA is trying to do.

However, it is not merely through social media but through constant direct contact with the struggles of women on the ground that we need to have our energy renewed. Therefore, we have also decided, in order to disseminate the message of the conference, to organise four relay jathas from December 1-7, carrying our banner up to Bhopal from four corners of the country. They will go through a number of spots in various states where campaign in different forms such as rallies, meetings and cultural programmes will be conducted during this time. The northern jatha will start from Jalianwalla Bagh in Punjab and go through Haryana and Delhi; the eastern jatha will start from Kolkata in West Bengal and also cover Jharkhand, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. The southern jatha’s path will carry it from Palakkad in Kerala through Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra and Telangana. The western jatha will start from Gujarat and cover Maharashtra. The messages they will carry with them will be: ‘50 percent is our right and we shall have it’; ‘A violence-free life is every woman’s right’; ‘Equal work equal pay for all women’; ‘Combatting communalism, safeguarding constitutional rights’.

Even as our last conference was going on in 2013 in Bodhgaya, we lost our beloved president Shyamali Gupta; also in the last three years we have lost among others our first president Manjari Gupta and the quiet but intrepid Sudha Bindu who had pioneered our movement in Bihar. Together with them, in the coming conference, we shall recall all those leaders who built up AIDWA with their unflinching commitment to our cause and left us a glorious legacy of sustained movement, leaders like Lakshmi Sehgal, Susheela Gopalan, Papa Umanath, Kanak Mukherjee, Ahilya Rangnekar, Vimal Ranadive and many others. Taking lesson from these pioneers and looking reality in the face, we know that the changed circumstances today require of us that we update our own understanding regarding the new challenges we have to confront today. The conference is the occasion for exchanging our experiences across the country regarding these and developing new strategies for the coming days. This is our major objective for the conference and we have little doubt that the maturity and dedication of our delegates will enable them to avail themselves fully of this opportunity. 

The over-all slogan for this conference is ‘Stand up and Fight for Rights: Uniting Women, Defending Democracy’.How does this reflect our understanding of our present tasks? Democracy is one of our three basic objectives and we also feel that without the advance of democracy neither equality nor women’s emancipation can be achieved. Our commitment to this larger struggle for greater active participation of men and women in shaping their own destinies (which is the essence of democracy) is the very basis of our movement. Has democracy ever within our memory been more in danger than it is today? Has it been more brutally attacked by the global and local ruling classes using both State power and hegemonic dominance? The massive erosion of democracy in our country and all over the world is going on in tandem with the intensification of parochialism, communalism, religious and ethnic extremism and obscurantism. Neo-liberalism in the economic sphere, militarism and autocracy in the political, and the naked cult of unreason in the social-cultural are but the many arms of this anti-democratic onslaught.

Even as we reiterate our commitment to this larger struggle which links us with the democratic struggles of peasants, workers, students, youth, artists and intellectuals all over the country, it is for us to focus on the specific ways in which the present multi-pronged onslaught to destroy democracy is affecting women. Women from all sections, women irrespective of caste and creed, are some of the worst sufferers of this lethal process. Whatever rights had been wrested from the powers that be through long years of struggle from the time of our independence movement, in which countless women had a crucial role to play, are today in jeopardy once again. The right to education, the right to health, the right to earn a living with safety and dignity, the right to live a violence-free life, the right to legal remedy, the right to choose a life-partner, the right to contest elections, the right to free expression of conscience are all being severely curtailed both as a result of government policies which only benefit the rich and the powerful and due to the re-invention of forces of darkness like patriarchy, communalism and casteist and other forms of obscurantism.

One of the most pernicious effects of all this for us is that the direction of the women’s movement towards the real sources of their multiplied problems is being obfuscated and deep divisions are being created within the movement along caste, communal and ethnic lines. While the reality of the sectoral social problems from which women suffer by belonging to such groups cannot be ignored, at the same time, it is imperative to bring women together to withstand and overcome the powers that foment these divisions to weaken the common thrust of our movement towards democracy, equality and women’s emancipation. We can only do this by reaching out to women at the grassroots and by linking up with other strands in the women’s movement which are resisting these social and political forces.This is the challenge that faces us in the wake of our 11th conference and we resolve to triumph over it with our united strength raising the anti-fascist battle-cry: ‘No Pasaran’ – we shall not let pass.