India chose to be a planned economy after Independence and a planning commission was established. The planning commission held sway over public policy matters till recently when the planning commission was abandoned for NITI Aayog (National Institution for Transforming India).
A glance into successive plans shows how feminists have slowly made their way into India’s policy making commission. Instead of growth for the entire population, these plans seem to have a special place for women, though strangely they do not have similar schemes for men.
Plan Activity Approach
First Five-Year Plan: Set up the Central Social Welfare Board to work through voluntary organizations and charitable trusts.
Second Plan: Support the development of Mahila Mandals (Women’s Groups) to work at the grassroots level to foster rural development.
Third and Fourth Plan: Provide for women’s education and pre-natal and child health services. Target women for family planning and social services sector. Provide supplementary feeding for children, nursing and expectant mothers.
Fifth Plan: Shift from welfare to development
Sixth Plan: Treat women’s development as a separate economic agenda. Take a multidisciplinary approach with a three pronged thrust on health, education and employment for women.
Seventh Plan: Create the Working Group on Employment of Women. Collect statistics on women and enact a quota for bringing women into mainstream national development.
Eighth Plan: Redefine the core sectors of education, health and employment for women’s benefit. Paradigm shift from development to empowerment and channeling benefits to women. Increase financial support from 4 crores ($650K) in the first plan to 2,000 crores ($325M) in the eighth.
Ninth Plan: 30% of funds/benefits from all development sectors flow to women.
Tenth Plan: Create even more specific strategies, policies and programmes for the empowerment of women
The National Perspective Plan for Women (1988-2000) was prepared, which contained 360 recommendations, including credit and land schemes and quotas in local governance institutions for women. The plan was circulated to all ministries and departments. No National Perspective Plan for Men was formulated.
That ideas and objectives like gender equity, mainstreaming and gender responsive budgeting have percolated in India’s policy making is noteworthy. How did feminists achieve this? Through the Velvet Triangle, a metaphor to capture the three major groups of actors typically involved in gender/women’s politics — femocrats and feminist politicians; academics and experts; and non-governmental organizations.
So who are these actors?
First, the femocrats and feminist politicians facilitate the debate and prepare for decision-making. They also create channels for the different actors to be able to play their roles. Second, researchers and teachers promote feminism from different angles, such as literature, sociology, economy, politics, pedagogy and philosophy. They work to create academic arguments to buttress the cause. They carry out crass studies and surveys to prove women are victims. Third, NGOs drum up support through campaigns and media, based on the results obtained from feminist academics. It may be noted that political will is mostly emotional and not rational. People are seldom moved by statistics or academic arguments. People need to believe in a cause and they have to be convinced to adopt the goal. Hence support has to be drummed up through street shows and media discussion.
So what can Indian MRAs do? They too can adopt the Velvet Triangle by strengthening men’s studies courses in universities, having MRAs in the policy making machinery, and they can attempt to capture NGO attention to the same degree as feminists.
A more practical strategy is to deprive feminist academics and NGOs of funds and work to insulate and isolate femocrats and feminist politicians. Indian MRAs must be openly anti-feminist, because feminists in India wield real power. It’s all gone according to plan.
Time for a new plan. One that includes everybody.
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