PARTICIPATION of women in a big way in the just concluded yearlong farmers movement has been seen as a progressive phenomenon. Their colourful and militant participation in all forms and at all forums is something refreshing as well as a subject of curiosity.

 In fact a very familiar resonance and reverberation of the much common slogan of kisan- mazdoor- mahila ekta zindabad , matri shakti zindabad or Haryana – Punjab bhaichara zindabad had actually borne out from the real-life they were made to live at border sites, toll plazas, in mahapanchayats and other occasions during the entire tough times.

Sacrificing over 700 of their comrades, hundreds injured, thousands framed in police cases and arrests, braving water cannons, barricades, tear gas shells, bullets and lathis coupled with heinous conspiracies of defamation and denigration with canards and falsehood were the peculiar features that made it an unprecedented and unique struggle. Although it was entirely a movement based on three black laws it actually went much beyond its reach by laying down the basis for weakening the regressive hurdles of caste and gender in socio-cultural life. It provided the basis for bringing together the disparate formations ranging from khap panchayats to women, dalits and youth organisations.

 Food security as an area of livelihood had a centrality in it that is organically linked to state purchase on MSP, storage, and distribution of food grains and other items through PDS.

It is this very linkage that entails in its scope the class unity of the farmers with other downtrodden, deprived and toiling masses. It is said that the best of humans comes out in the toughest of times just like the water gets purified only by flowing through uneven and turbulent mountainous terrains. It was this experience that the people for a change found a potential of change in it and chose to be in the lap of farmers’ struggle.

  As far as women are concerned, it was initially the organised and conscious sections among them who associated themselves with the movement sensing the three laws would deprive them whatever smaller share of the land the women do own as titles in their names, which is meagre 13 per cent. They will lose the work in market committees (mandis) as labourers and farmers’ fields or the mid-day meal facility etc. This fear could be well-read on the faces of women who came to join the ‘Delhi Chalo’ call on the very first day i.e., November 26, 2020, and were arrested by police on the way to Delhi. Besides this, it was the bravery exhibited by Punjab women in overcoming all police obstacles and advancing ahead, a fact that provided the much-needed impetus to the pent-up anger that made them real protesters. Women had a fresh memory of the powerful and brilliant struggle they had fought in the recent past on the streets for days and nights against the unconstitutional and hated set of legislations called CAA and NRC enacted by the same authoritarian Modi regime that brought the ruinous three laws and labour codes.

Let it be recalled that the agriculture crisis for the decades had pierced through the minds and bodies of rural women. It impacted their health, spoiled their educated offspring who had been deprived of their right to employment and took them upon to drugs and crime. The anger thus compounded by the indebtedness and distressing conditions of their devalued labour got channelised in the struggle.

 In spite of the burden of multiple chores of domestic as well as looking after kids, the elderly and the cattle besides farming, women gladly took upon themselves the crucial activities related to the movement and discharged these tasks more truthfully and sincerely not as a burden but by singing folk songs and creating new songs and slogans as they were finding it worth for themselves. They could not be cowed down or snubbed or ignored so easily and reacted suitably to being discriminated against.

  Many young women and research students could be seen all around doing multiple voluntary tasks of writing, serving food or water, documenting or doing social media work in the face of a hostile godi media in the masquerading as mainstream media. They included those young women too who had always seen their mothers and elder sisters working entirely but on the dictates of their patriarchal male elders but now, on the contrary, they were freely raising slogans, conducting the stage and addressing big gatherings applauding through their dynamic speeches. This was their transformed self-image. This movement gave an opportunity to so many rural women to express themselves on public platforms.

It was not the women alone to have some attitudinal change but also made the males also to have a rethinking and they too showed more respect towards women whom they had been evaluating with lesser worth. The male relatives or husbands of the women activists were feeling more respected in the village community. They were more cooperative in sharing the multiple domestic tasks with the family women.

Another area of women participation was the protests in the form of showing black flags as a part of the social boycott of BJP and JJP ruling alliance leaders as a standing call of the SKM an umbrella platform spearheading the farmers’ struggle. They forced an MLA and a former BJP minister from Rohtak to apologise for showing indecent gestures towards protesting women who were showing black flags to them when they were exiting from a university campus at Hisar following a party meeting there.

  SKM calls for observance of a special mahila kisan diwas on January 18, and international womens’ day on  March 8, drew massive mobilisations of women was a sure indication of a steady but strong undercurrent of assertion in them. The participants on these occasions included women not from the farmers' families alone but from landless communities too. This is how women were passing through new experiences in their life and have started aspiring for larger roles for them.

  However, it is to be noted here that they were largely in this movement through the approval of their patriarchal family heads. In the face of their negligible share in the family landholding and other property, their position remains vulnerable. Therefore, and it is quite difficult for them to maintain the level and pace of their assertion, yet it is not impossible.

 The threats to our democratic setup from the communal and corporate nexus have to be fought against and the task of defending the livelihood or food security is integrally linked with the creation of an egalitarian society for all including women.