Some months ago I had the unique privilege of inaugurating the women's policy programme fashioned by the Government of Maharashtra.   

Today, I am performing with great pleasure, another function celebrating the platinum jubilee of the Maharashtra State Women's Council. More than anything else what has thrilled me, is that the women's development the policy which was inaugurated by me has gone into serious implementation already only within a few months.  I want to congratulate the Government and the people of Maharashtra for taking up this task with such earnestness and already registering successes in this field.   

This organisation was founded during the British period.  As your President said the organisation has been growing younger every year!  It has been renewing itself.  But it also shows that at least some of the problems which existed during the British times are still with us today.  I read in my school text books about the abolition of sati and the child Marriage during the British period.  But as you may all know we are still struggling with these problems in several parts of India and therefore, it is important for us not only to pass legislation but to change these practices by changing the attitudes of people and by transforming the society itself.  I watched with great interest the video film you have just shown.  When I saw the statistics of the sufferings and of the indignities and atrocities committed on women, it startled me.The giant agony of the women of this country ‑ how they pass through these with grace, with courage and with hope is something to be admired.   

Maharashtra has been a progressive state from the beginning, involved in basic social work, social changes, specially in the field of liberation of its women.  You can be proud of the work that has been done here.  The work of this Council itself has been and has many faceted and has had a very powerful impact on society and on the status of women of this state.  The core of the problem of Indian women today, is one of empowerment.  We have tried several other methods.  We have tried reformist methods, we have tried a little bit of agitation, propaganda; we have tried developmental methods for dealing with womens' question.  But ultimately until women acquire power social, economic and political power ‑ in their hands, they will not be able to deal with their problems successfully.  Therefore, many of the programmes that you have unravelled here touch this core problem.   

Before proceeding further, I want to thank you not only for inviting me but my wife also to these celebrations.  She had been in Bombay before when she was a student and she did some probject work on juvenile delinquency in the children's home here when she was a student of Delhi School of Social Work.  Therefore, she has been coaching me on some of these problems!   

When one thinks about the status of the women one cannot but go back to Mahatma Gandhi.  He promised that I shall work for securing the same rights for the women of India as for men.  Then when he issued the call to the country, particularly to the women folk to participate in the non‑cooperation movement, he was startled by the wonderful response he got.  He said that the response given by the Indian women was unmatched, I am using his own words, anywhere in the world and that it has shown how the intelligence and skills of the Indian women have not been tapped for the national cause.  He saw an immense opportunity for doing this and it is precisely what he did by tapping the intelligence, skills and the initiative of the indian women in strengthening the Indian Nationalist Movement.  That was one of the most important elements in securing freedom for this country.  In those days, he said, out of his own experience that, why most of the social movements in India have stopped half way is because we did not succeed in enlisting women into those fields.  Women constitute almost half of the population of the country and I think you cannot succeed in anything in a real sense unless the active cooperation of women is secured.   

I have often wondered about the tradition of violence against women in this country.  Of course we are not unique in this respect.  It has happened all over the world.  It still happens.  But one thing which astonishes me is the draupadi syndrome, I will call it, of humiliating women by public stripping.  I do not think I have come across ‑ I have wandered about the world a little ‑ this kind of treatment anywhere else in the world. Therefore, my mind goes back to the Mahabharata and I wonder whether there are some basic distortions in the psyche of the Indian manhood which expresses itself in this form, in the villages and in the towns all over India.  You read the newspaper, even today and you will find these that this one of the typical methods of punishment or humiliation that is inflicted on women in this country.  Therefore, we have to search our own hearts and minds and see if there is some hidden, peculiar distortion in the male psyche of this country.   

Recently in the realm of violence against women, some new phenomenon has come up.  Isolated instances in, innumberable cases, always had taken place in this country as well as in other countries.  But today we read about whole villages, whole towns, the whole community being terrorised by this kind of assault, violence on the women of the whole villages or the whole township. I would call it a kind of sexual terrorism and in this people take advantage of shall I say, of our cultural hesitation, reluctance of our girls, of our women to complain about what had happened to them.  This is out of their modesty, out of their social values that they do not like to talk about it.

Therefore, they remain unheard, unnoticed.  By taking advantage of this through a collusion of may be the affluent, ill‑bred sections of the society, may be collusion with some of the authorities, may be sometimes with political circles, people indulge in this type of mass terrorism.  I think we have to do something to face this new menace.  What surprises me is that such incidents, such tragedies are reported profusely in the press, in the media.  The method of reporting is such that there is almost a subtle incitement to the sex instinct of the reading public and secondly after a few months or so, after a great deal of writing and hullabaloo about of then you do not hear about it at all.  Some of these incidents are in my mind. 

I often wonder what happened finally.  You do not know what happened to the people who committed the crime. There is a certain strategy of hushing up in our society of such crimes even after they have been exposed.  Therefore, women organisations, Government agencies and voluntary organisations had the duty to pursue to follow up, such tragic events and insist upon knowing what finally happened to settle these matters.  Many of the events are in my mind.  Frankly I do not know what was done, what happened ultimately, whether any punishment was meted out at all, whether the society has just forgotten all about it and this hushing up of such gruesome crimes is something which you have to fight against in our society.  For this I think our women themselves will have to get rid of some of the inherited psychological attitudes.  It may be difficult to complain about it, but if our women keep quiet after something like that happens then naturally you will not find any kind of solution to this. 

Therefore, untill women liberate themselves mentally, psychologically, from this inhibition of complaining in public about the atrocities that has been meted out to them, I think this evil will persist much longer than we realise.  I think organisations like this who have such a big network of institutions have a great responsibility in following up and also in transforming the attitudes of our women to such problems.  They have to be bolder, they have to take risk and ultimately they have to produce rebels and they have to produce leaders from among themselves who will actively work in the field taking risks if necessary.   

It was only yesterday in Parliament that one of the ministers reported the statistics about crimes against women during the last two or three months. It is really a kind of pathetic thing seen in the capital of India itself.  Of course it is not enough that women themselves become rebels or change their attitudes.  One has to work among them, especially among our young women.  I think they would be receptive to the new ideas, the new freedom that is given to women.  If we work among them and make them understand these things, after all I always ask are not women our mothers, or wives or our sisters, or our daughters?  If you discriminate against them, if you do violence against them, such a person would be capable of doing anything, any crime, because ultimately you are doing this to the flesh of your flesh and the blood of your blood.  Therefore, there is something very heinous, something very sub human about what you call crimes against women.   

Now, the document which I released here some months ago about the women's policy for the State of Maharashtra had indeed many programmes, which would actually empower women.  I was fascinated by the portions dealing with the property rights for women.  Not only the reservations, but how the Govt grants, Government leases, allotments had to be in joint names and if a young man is not married and he gets an allotment by the time he marries it becomes joint property of his and his wife's.  Such imaginative laws are required in this country.  Some time ago I was talking with a woman member of the Iranian Parliament and was surprised very pleasantly to hear from her that in spite of the orthodoxy we read about some of the progress in laws they had.  She told me that at the time of marriage they have to sign a document before the civil authorities, by which half of the husband's property would belong to the wife.

Further if he had to divorce her then at the time of divorce the work she had done during the period of her wedded life as a housewife would be calculated and she had to be given that worth in terms of money before the divorce is given.  There is not enough propaganda about this..  So I do not know that in Iran such laws exist.I think we are still thinking of how to calculate women's economic contribution.  Domestic work is not considered as any sort of economic contribution.  Actually my daughter was telling the other day that very often when somebody calls on us and we ask his wife what she is doing, she very often says I am merely a house wife.  But mere housewife means a full time job, and very agonising very arduous work at that.  Therefore all of this has to be legally recognised in our country and I am happy to know that there are many moves in that direction and ultimately with your struggle and with the struggle of this very enlightened minister who spoke here today I think we would be able to safeguard ourselves.   

I mentioned empowerment.  Ultimately I think politics is a source of all power.  If you do not have your hands on the levers of powers in politics you will miss many things.  Then therefore, one wonders and though this country had produced great women, we had women ministers, women governors, women ambassadors, women judges even today, but particularly during the early period of our independence, the number of women in the Indian Parliament is only abour 5 or 6 % and I think this is a probably the same in most of the legislatures in this country This is an atrociously low percentage. 

Of course we have now introduced new legislation where 30 % is reserved for women in the Panchayats and the district councils.  I was very pleased to see in the elections for the Panchayats about 38 % of women in Madhya Pradesh were actually elected and this shows how the community is reacting.  There were complaints that many of the women who were elected were either wives, or daughters, or daughter‑in‑laws of powerful persons in the village.  Even if that is so in the beginning, I am sure after a few elections, women will independently assert themselves and come on their own as representatives of the people in the Panchayat and district councils.  One task we have to undertake with great earnestness is training these one lakh, representatives.

I think we have to undertake very seriously, large scale programmes of training these women representatives who have entered Panchayats and then not only they will emerge as political, social and economic leaders, in fact ultimately women can give us much better leadership at higher levels in this country than men have been able to give.  It has always been, I am not saying just to please you, but I think it is a fact Nehru had said several times, if some job is given to a woman whether as a legislator, as official or as ambassador, diplomat, she does her job with a greater degree of concentration and honesty than a man will do.  That is why I said that by training women in representative capacity in the village level and district level, they could well come up and emerge as leaders at the national level.  That training is what should be given not just once by an orientation course but periodically so that they will be able to play their role effectively.   

It is not enough to talk about women.  Your work concerns children also and I think that women and children's work are inseparable.  You have been doing wonderful work through the rescue homes, through the Asha Sadans and children homes.Women and children are the most fragile elements in our society.  If there is violence, if there is war, they are the first to suffer. If there is disease and there is plague they are also the first to suffer. Children's health, children's education have to be looked after.  I remember we get gruesome of statistics about child labour in this country.  There is lot that is said on environment and all that today.  Mahatma Gandhi in the 1930 said that it is sinful to buy or to use any article made by sweated labour.  It was a far reaching statement to have been made in 1930 and early 1940s.  Today, we find countries putting prohibitions on goods made by this kind of sweated labour.  But let us not forget that the prosperity of almost all the developed countries of the world has been built on sweated labour of children as well as others.  So what is behind all these things when you look at it is that there is education, literacy and health. 

I come from the small state of Kerala and it has proved that for securing the rights of women, for reducing infant mortality, for promoting family planning, for giving nutritious food to the members of the family, the first thing you require is the education of women and then the equal distribution of health facilities in a state or the country as a whole.  As long as within 5 or 10 kilometers you have a hospital or a primary health centre available, then you will find that the status of health of the community there would be much higher than if they had to go 20 or 30 miles to a hospital.  The work you are doing in regard to the literacy, in regard to health, I think these are of a fundamental importance.  I applaud you for this kind of work and the variety of activities in which your members are involved.  I only would like to wish that you carry on this glorious work and make Maharashtra a really ideal state of India.  It has every right to be an ideal state of India and in this ideal state, I think the women would be the most active, most useful and the most beautiful members.  With this wish, may I thank you for inviting me to this very significant celebrations. 

Thank you