We come from different countries in South Asia - Bangladesh, India, Pakistan,
and Sri Lanka. Divided by geopolitical boundaries, we are all bound together by a
common South Asian identity. This identity expresses itself both in the linkages
we have with each other and in the struggles each of us is involved in within the
women's movement in our respective countries.

These links have strengthened us individually and have led to a growing sense
of regional solidarity. Today, in the context of the contemporary socio-political
environment, we feel it is imperative to develop and further strengthen a South Asian
perspective for women's liberation in the region. This declaration is an expression
of our personal/political commitment to a broad based South Asian feminist platform
and a call for support to strengthen such a platform.

Our countries, although far from being homogenous, having different social, and
economic conditions, share great similarities. The South Asian region has been a
mosaic, a pentimento through which layers of history have been created through alignments
and realignments as people moved from one part of the region to another, mixing,
mingling and internalising different cultures. These alignments and movements were
ones of conflict as well as of collaboration; whatever their specific history, these
migrations created corresponding structures of kinship, caste and community within
each region. Each country today is internally constructed by these structures. Each
mirrors the other in richness and diversity of religions, cultures and social institutions.

The way we eat, dress, build our homes, the songs we sing, the pictures we paint
are all of a common mode, shaped more by local environments (cultural and ecological)
than by political boundaries.

Who we are today is as much a product of a common heritage of the legacy of colonialism
and the struggle of earlier generations to create a just and equal society in the
region. In the post independence period however, we have continued to be subject
to common structure of oppression and exploitation imposed by dominant class/caste
and patriarchal rule, reinforced by almost identical government responses to the
legitimate aspirations of people.

As women our lives are subject to control through predominantly patriarchal structures
and family laws and institutions, often justified on the basis of religion. The onslaught
of capitalism and imperialism in the post independence period, has led to increasing
restrictions on our space and access to resources, and a destruction of our traditional
skills and knowledge systems.

Along with other marginalised communities we have been subject to increasing levels
of state, community and family violence. Our voices are not heard as we are excluded
from the political process which projects class privileged dynastic rule, whether
by men or women leaders. The disintegration of civil society; the increasing centralization
of authority in the hands of the state, often backed with fundamentalist sanction
leaves us vulnerable to constant attack inside and outside our homes. Growing statistics
on rape, dowry deaths, incidents of acid throwing, the stripping of women as acts
of revenge, the concerted attack by religious fundamentalists to keep us propertyless
and resourceless, the continued denial of our contribution to subsistence, production
and reproduction, are shared experiences of an orchestrated compaign to keep us forever
silent, invisible and subhuman.

These similarities of experience (and internal diversities) are however denied
by the centralizing and homogenizing actions of the state in each country. Some countries
in the region project a monolithic Islamic or Hindu nation, often defined in opposition
to their neighbours. Pakistan and Bangladesh are now Islamic states, Sri Lanka is
virtually a Sinhala Buddhist State and India is being increasingly identified as
a Hindu state. Relations between the countries are determined by national security
interests. India and Pakistan have had 3 wars and numerous border clashes in the
last 43 years. Periodically there are hostile exchanges, and on each side the flames
of false patriotism, xenophobia and chauvinism are aroused. Such an imagery feeds
into traumatic memories of partition and resurrects the fears of either hindu or
muslim domination, further widening the gulf between the two countries.

Indian ships police the waters of the Indian Ocean and the presence of Tamils
across the sea in Tamilnadu, has led to fears about "Indian imperialism",
being whipped up among the Sinhala people. As a result the Tamils in the North and
Eastern provinces of Sri Lanka and the Tamil plantation workers imported by colonialism
are viewed as the Indian fifth column. Although Indian intervention in Sri Lanka
was requested by militant groups and supported by democratic forces in Sri Lanka,
the record of the atrocities by the IPKF has raised serious questions about India's
geopolitical interests in the region.

The neighbouring country is the main enemy or the cause for internal tensions
we are told. Although there is some opening up, it is still difficult to cross borders
to meet friends or colleagues, to visit familial villages or read each others books
and papers. Today barbed wire fences are being erected between India, Pakistan and
Bangladesh, while Sri Lankans are said to disappear in green boats in the seas controlled
by the Indian navy.

When we reach out in support of other women fighting against patriarchal and state
violence in the region we are labelled anti-national. Activists and intellectuals
who take a democratic stand in Sri Lanka are branded as traitors to the Sinhala nation.
Support for women in Pakistan and Bangladesh, in their fight against religious fundamentalism
by the women's movement in India is seen as a Hindu reaction and these organisations
are seen as Indian agent. Conversely, when organisations in India have highlighted
the protofascist tendencies of hindu fundamentalists and raised the issue of attacks
against minority communities, they are suspected of being Pakistani agents and betrayers
of "national interests".

The notion of "national interests" becomes a ready rationale for governments
in our countries to increase their level of militarisation. National and religious
chauvinism built on mutual hostility becomes the binding force to maintain the nation
state. It becomes possible, even commendable to kill, humiliate, maim and threaten
the citizens of another country, religious or ethnic group or nationality in the
name of preserving the unity of one's own country. Justified on the grounds of external
defence, the armies are used more often for internal suppression rather than against
each other. Rightful citizens are suddenly treated as enemy agents.

A declining proportion of yearly budgets are being allocated to health and education
while there are massive increases in defence spending. Since the 1980's defence expenditure
has escalated phenomenally in all the countries of the region. In addition, military
assistance in the form of weapons and training have been provided for instance by
the U.S. and Israel to the Sri Lankan government. The diversion of resources for
military spending results in unproductive consumption of energy and non-energy materials
and the diversion of labor and industrial production from socially useful production.
The existence of a manufacturing base for armament production in India creates a
demand for more and more wars and lays the material basis for Indian dominance in
the region. In the 1980's India's defence expenditure shot up from Rs. 4,329 crore
in 1981-82 to Rs. 14,500 crore in 1989-90.

The militarisation of our societies has made brutalisation a way of life. War
toys, daily violence in films and on the television have created a militarized culture.
For women this means a sanctioning of and an increase in violence within the home
and by the "uniformed guardians of the state". The disruption of "normal
life" in military situations adds additional burdens and dangers to women's
continuing responsibility for subsistence and household provisioning.

Each shaky regime is seeking legitimacy though projecting military power as a
symbol of independent strength, prowess and national virility. The acquisition of
arms from the superpowers has led to the creation of an interest lobby of influential
political, military and bureaucratic groups who would push for higher and higher
defence expenditures.

The most significant threat is that of nuclearisation. The use of nuclear energy
only for peaceful purposes is denied by the fact that each country uses the threat
of the "other sides bomb" as a justification to have its own bomb for national
security. The global nuclear arms race and its horrific capacity to eliminate life
on earth has shown that nuclear weapons are instruments of mass anhiliation and cannot
ever lead to security. The subcontinent particularly lies under the threat of a mushroom
cloud. Statements issued by the Indian and Pakistani governments to not attack each
others nuclear intallations do not rule out the nuclear option.

The increasing crisis of legitimacy facing our governments today is rooted in
the conditions of the birth of these separate nations, and the inherently divisive
nature of the nation state itself. The colonial policy of divide and rule led to
the political bifurcation of the subcontinent into two mutually hostile states of
India and Pakistan. In Pakistan, Punjabi domination rested on the suppression of
other nationalities and the process of Islamisation attempted to impose a homogeneity
that suppressed other Islamic minority sects and created two classes of citizens
- muslims on one side and non-muslims and women on the other side. Further intensification
of ethnic and sectarian conflict has now led to the situation where Muhajirs are
also demanding recognition as a separate nationality. In Sri Lanka, the control of
state power by a Sinhala majority together with the projection of a Sinhala Buddhist
identity led to the demand for a seperate homeland by the Tamils. Today the violence
and bloodshed continues and further divisions are being created on a religious basis.

In Bangladesh by the late seventies, the tensions between the Bengalis and the
tribal population intensified as a reaction to the state's attempt to colonise tribal
areas along with the use of constitutional/extra constitutional measures to contain
tribal demands. The projection of Islam as a state religion, backed by foreign powers,
has become a strategy to contain the economic and political crisis in the country.

In India, regional tensions have extended to communal conflicts between hindus
and muslims, hindus and sikhs, with caste conflicts also being transformed into communal
tensions. Caste conflicts and attacks on dalits have been heightened by the onslaught
of capitalist development, the manipulation of political parties and the intervention
of hindu fundamentalists. Indian secularism has contained the seeds of communalism
which are now being aggressively articulated by the Hindu majority in their equation
of nationalism with a Hindu state.

The state in our countries is chauvinist, authoritarian, militaristic and patriarchal.
Historical evidence from the earliest times indicates that the very institution of
the state was not only class defined but also based on patriarchal authority right
from the onset and the contradictions of patriarchy and class have been further developed
by capitalism and imperialism. Anti-colonial nationalism incorporated particular
notions of womanhood and manhood which ideologically circumscribed the proper roles
of women within the limits of social work and domesticity. The maintenance of separate
personal laws by post colonial South Asian states reflects their patriarchal bias,
since all these reinforce the patrilineal, patrilocal family. Equal rights legislation
remains unimplemented whether it concerns equal right to property or wages.

The homogenising and centralizing thrust of the state in our region is an expression
of the spread, albeit unevenly, of capitalism. Although there are differences in
the specific constellation of dominant classes, and the degree of dependence or independence
from foreign capital between our countries, development programmes for agricultural
and industrial growth have resulted in the appropriation of resources by a dominant
class/caste group and increasing impoverishment of large sections of working people.
Due to an energy and resource intensive strategy of development, our region, like
others in Africa and Latin America, is in the throes of a severe ecological crisis.
Water and land have been poisoned and polluted. Forests have been destroyed and river
systems have been disrupted with dams. Waterlogging and salinity have turned vast
tracts of fertile land into deserts.

Women, adivasis, dalits and small peasants have been the most debilitated in this
process. Women now work longer hours than before, seeking fodder and fuel to maintain
increasingly impoverished families. The acceleration of the twin processes of privatization
and commercialisation, exacerbated in our regions due to varied combinations of capitalism
with feudalism, has had very specific effects on women, particularly poor rural women.
The provisioning of families has shifted even more onto the bodies of women as the
number of female headed households increase in the countryside. More women are being
drawn into wage work in the invisible, irregular and low paid sectors of the economy.
New avenues of employment in the world market factories has instituted another form
of exploitation as women are barricaded into restricted industrial production zones
subject to patriachal control within and outside the factory. IMF conditionality
and structural adjustment programmes intensify these processes, particularly with
the withdrawal of already scanty social and welfare services.

Although the processes of capitalist development have led to certain changes in
the traditional structures of patriarchy, especially within the family, women are
still subject to violent forms of control by the family, community, village and the
state, as they begin to enter male space. Not only is women's labor and mobility
regulated but the state in our countries is adopting more and more sophisticated
and dangerous techniques to control women's fertility.

Over the past decades strong social movements have emerged in our countries, resisting
and struggling against these manifestations of class and patriarchal rule. One of
the most important movements of challenge and resistance to the various systems of
exploitation and oppression that exist in South Asia, has been the women's movement.
At both material and ideological levels feminists of the region have been active
in challenging the authoritarianism and violence of the state, its repressive laws,
fundamentalist tendencies, militarism and chauvinism: they have challenged the economic
exploitation of workers and peasants, social oppression through the use of religion,
culture and the cast system as well as discrimination based on ethnicity, language,
caste or religious allegiance. They have also highlighted the use of violence against
women within the family and in the workplace. In recent years they have raised the
issue of human rights violations. Apart from such challenges feminists have also
been involved in resistance to all forms of patriarchy, a resistance that has historic
roots but also been sharpened in recent decades.

However, feminists have been called western, bourgeois, anti men, at various times.
We have watched with amazement and often a feeling of regret at the strange alliance
of the bourgious controlled press, right wing fundamentalists and sections of the
progressive forces in our countries as they mocked, ridiculed and attacked the assertions
of women's autonomy from capitalist/patriachal controls. We see this labelling as
a deliberate blindness and refusal to acknowledge the issues which have been taken
up by the feminist movement in our countries. These issues have ranged from confronting
the government on the withdrawal of equal rights for women, confronting dominant
class/caste and patriarchal forces when they have suppressed, attacked and raped
us for demanding our rights to land, wages or simply a job, to raising questions
about the link between development models based on ecological destruction and violence
against women within and outside the home.

More importantly, such labelling is a denial of our history within the region
- a history which is rich with the stories of many women and men who struggled for
democratic rights for women in the 19th and early 20th century. It is a denial of
the contributions of the masses of women in national movements and in peasant and
working class struggles who raised both class and gender issues, who struggled and
fought within wider political movements and within their families for recognition
as equal human beings.

"In the 1980's we see feminism as an awareness of patriarchal control, exploitation
and oppression at the material and ideological level, over women's labour, fertility
and sexuality, within the family, at the workplace and in society in general; committed
to conscious action to transform society.

The feminist struggle is guided by a vision of a society where people can live
free of class, caste and state domination.

Although there are different tendencies within feminism, we locate ourselves within
a broad tradition committed to democracy and socialism. In our actions and our ideas
we combine a vision of socialism and feminism, seeing both as essential to a struggle
against patriarchy, capitalism and imperialism.

We believe that feminism is the expression of women in struggle and is therefore
a political movement and consciousness which will develop in practice as more and
more women begin to join together against the structures which oppress and exploit
them.

Feminism as a movement in South Asia has asserted the principle of autonomous
organisation for women, while linking with broader movements at the same time. It
rejects separatism and a narrow focus on individualism. It has opened the way to
look at alternative ways of living, of building relationships, of an alternative
decentralized economy and polity. It has struggled for dignity and for the humanization
and democratisation of the family".

Linking together in concrete actions, formulating and campaigning for a joint
charter of women's rights, sharing visions and developing alternatives to existing
development models at the South Asian level from a feminist perspective would be
an important contribution towards the overcoming of the tensions, distrust, and political,
economic, social and cultural crisis affecting our countries today. We see this as
one step in a broader process which would draw on and link together broader social
movements, political organisations and progressive individuals who share this vision
of transformation of both political and economic structures and relationships between
people.