EMPLOYMENT, INCOMES AND EQ.UALITY 113 voter. The complaint that political parties do not pay equal attention to women indicates a weakness of the democratic movement including the women's movement. But political status or real political participation does not mean just going to the booth and casting the ballot paper. Basically, it is the question of democratic struggle for political power, inseparably linked up with the struggle for political power. Formal or legal aspects need not be underestimated. Nor should the legal instruments for protection of women's rights or all-round equality between men and women be undermined. The recommendations of the committee are by and large useful for mobilizing democratic opinion. Prostitution can be abolished only when poverty and early widowhood is eradicated. Equal economic status of men and women may not, by itself, abolish the dowry system, but that is a necessary precondition. No amount of labour welfare legislation can ensure creches for all children or maternity benefits for all mothers, so long as profit maximization governs production and distribution. Compulsory primary education or universal TunctionaP literacy of women cannot be achieved as long as poverty and child labour exist. Only time can tell what such recent legislations as those regarding bonded labour and equal wages for women will achieve. Be it the "avarice of the small-property owner5"1 or the "y6ke of capital"2 l, private property will make its presence felt everywhere and no less in man-woman relationship. The 'Guru9 or the 'Baba' with all his magic and miracles will co-exist with the urban affluence of refrigerator and television. Both commercialization and semi-abnegation of sex will vitiate man-woman relationship as long as private property rules and represses the full development of man as a social being and as an individual. Women's emancipation, as Fourier had seen, reflects the general level of emancipation of the society. At the present stage, the primary need for such emancipation is a revolutionary transformation of agrarian relations as 214 million women live in rural India, where literacy rates are the lowest and more than 80 per cent of wortnen are employed in agriculture. Present agrarian relations and forms of exploitation in agriculture constitute the greatest obstacle to real economic development and economic emancipation. Such a transformation calls for a powerful women's movement as part of an equally strong democratic movement. The Committee on the Status of Women has, though not unambiguously, recommended both land reform and the organized power of women. * Towards Equality, Report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India, Government of India, Ministry of Education and Social Welfare, December 1974, pp 480. fl Census of India 1971, quoted in Towards Equality, op. cit., p 31. 8 Towards Equalityy op cit., p 37. 4 Pocket Book of Population Statistics, Census Centenary, 1972. • Women in Industry, Ministry of Labour, p 13, and Census of India 1971, Series I paper 3, 1972.