NATIONAL POLICY FOR WOMEN IN INDIA 1996—A CRITIQUE 39 'Empowerment of Women' has indeed become a widely popular, and so far, unquestioningly accepted, concept among the Third World feminists, including the Indian ones, and has, as often happens, to take the wind out of the sails of the momentum of the ideology and practice of social movements to render them rudderless, been promptly coopted by the Indian establishment. So, we have calls for, and attempts at, the 'empowerment of women'—Political, social, economic, cultural, and what have you—by the Indian Women's Movement, a movement to look for which at the moment has become like looking for a needle in a haystack of the goings-on of a multitude of disparate, autonomous, scattered groups without sufficiently coordinated voices or uniform practices congregating and becoming proactive only occasionally on certain specific issues. On the other hand, we have the magnanimous, paternalistic assurance by the Indian Government of the empowerment on various fronts of the country's womenkind who, due to lack of deeper inquiry and insight, have been sweepingly proclaimed as unexceptionally powerless by Indian feminists and academic authors of today's market-flooding 'women's studies' forgetting quite conveniently the power that mothers-in-law often wield over their daughters-in-law; the power the mother often wields over her son, particularly in India; the power that wives often wield over submissive, docile husbands; the power that high-caste women wield over not only lower-caste women but also sometimes lower-caste men; the power that upper-class women similarly exercise not only over lower-class women but also lower-class men; the power that women have over their children and over servants, both female and male. And what about the considerable power enjoyed, and put into practice, by women political leaders, some of whom have emerged as topmost political personalities in their countries. Women also sometimes, within their submissive role, in a patriarchal set-up, develop effective manipulative skills which they employ to gain for themselves latent power not visible to the naked eye but quietly working under a facade of their explicit subordination. So, women are not always quite as unequivocally powerless as one would have them be though as a rule they are more often than not so. Empowerment is a meaning-loaded word and concept, like all words and concepts. Words are symbols that we use to name a thing which may be an object, an occurrence, a situation or a process and concepts are descriptions of an existent idea or general notion. To devise words and concepts is an exceptionally human capability. Paulo Freire calls this the 'naming of the world/ He writes that human existence cannot be silent, nor can it be nourished by false words, but only true words, with which men transform the world. To exist humanly is to name the world; to change it once named. The world in turn appears to the namers as a problem and requires from them a