PERSPECTIVE OF WOMEN'S MOVEMENT 3 freedom movement, the struggle for women's liberation received a great fillip, widening and deepening it still more. In other words, the general democratic socialist and working-class movement is so integrated with the movement for women's liberation that if either of them has to advance both have to advance simultaneodsly and in mutual cooperation. Let us recall in this context, that along with the sessions of the Indian National Congress and its provincial, district or local conferences were often held social reform conferences in general, or women's conferences in particular. So too, when left-wing movements, socialist groups and parties, trade unions and other mass organizations began to take shape, special efforts were made to draw women into their ranks. These organizations fighting for peoples' advance in the direction of general democracy or socialism therefore included in their programmatic pronouncements several items intended to emancipate India's womanhood from its age-old suffering. It was this that enabled the organized women's movement, and the general movement for social reforms, to get social legislation enacted even in the days of British rule. Prohibition ofsatiin 1829 was followed by several other measures enabling more and more women to get education, permitting widows to remarry, putting such restrictions on the age of marriage as to end the system of child marriage and so on. This process was naturally accelerated after the British quit India and a national government was established. Dimensions of Struggle But even 28 years after the British left, there arc today many rem-anants of the age-old order under which the woman should, according to Hindu Dharma, be "obedient to her father in childhood, to her husband in her youth and to her son in old age; never is she free". The reasons are two: firstly, after the enactment of several reform laws embracing marriage, inheritance and other aspects of family life, the legal equality between man and woman is still incomplete. The position of Hindu women is slightly better than their Muslim and Christian sisters, since the "minority rights" recognized in the constitution are so interpreted that enactment of laws regarding property, inheritance and other traditional inveteracies of non-Hindu communites are beyond the pale of the state. But even in relation to Hindu women, it is well known that there arc several gaps to be filled if there should be complete equality between the two sexes. Secondly, even in several cases where a more or less satisfactory law has been put on the statute book, the force of tradition and several other factors (including the economic factor) reduce the law to a dead letter. The scandalous violation of the technically valid anti-dowry legislation, like the violations of the anti-untouchability and several other social reform legislations, shows that, in the absence of powerful movements to get them enforced social reform legislation will be made innocuous by vested interests.