Why women's rights?

Ok so I was in Nagpur this weekend, I am still doing trainings and travel with my previous organisation whenever I can. We had a meeting on Human Rights issues with students of the Law college in Nagpur. I was to speak on women's rights. Due to some change in the agenda, I had to follow the session by Ram Punyani on Communalism and boy was I worried, because this session was a roaring one, very interactive, humourous and amazingly insightful!!! Anyways most of what I am about to pen down is what I had spoken.

Somewhere last decemeber we had a meeting of the women's rights lawyers in the country where we wanted to do a reality check on where we were and the way ahead. So obviously we also did discuss a lot of perspective issues. One of the main and key questions was are we human rights lawyers or women's rights lawyers. In my head I was quite clear, boss I am a women's rights lawyer, no two wasy about that and in any case that makes me a human rights lawyer (you know, women=human get the picture??)

Anyways so when we say that we are women's rights actvists, we dont mean we are against men, no what we are standing up against is gender burdens that both have to face, the patriarchial set up and the exploitation of the vulnerable by the powerful...thats all. And if in this context, if it has been the men who have been in power for so long and exploited women so be it... then there is the argument of women being the biggest enemey of women, but what we conviniently loose sight of is that it is the powerful woman oppressing the powerless woman and that situation can be between any two set of people. The way our histroical set up has been, it is women, dalits, disabled, sexual minoroties who get exploited as they are in most cases powerless in comparision to the men, upper castes etc.

I have come to realise that the best way to start of a discourse on women's rights is to assure the audience that this is not a male hating, man bashing session but just an attempt for us to go beyond our assumptions and actually start questioning them. Scratch the surface and see, really is this reality or is it only the perception!!! And then we will get our answers and we can actually look beyond the assumed obvious and live a life free of shackles.