‘Women’s movement in India has not addressed the issues of women of lower social strata.’ Substantiate your view.

Context

The claim holds substantial truth. India's mainstream women's movement, historically led by urban, upper-caste and middle-class women, has often universalised “women's issues” while under-serving the distinct oppression of Dalit, Adivasi, Muslim and working-class women. The criticism, voiced strongly since the 1990s, is one of representation as much as of agenda. Yet the picture is not wholly one-sided.

Substantiating the criticism

• Nineteenth-century reform - against sati and for widow remarriage - addressed largely upper-caste women's concerns, leaving caste and labour untouched.
• The post-1970s agenda - dowry, the anti-rape campaign, domestic violence - centred on issues most visible to the urban middle class.
• Dalit feminists such as Sharmila Rege and Ruth Manorama argued that mainstream feminism ignored “Dalit patriarchy” and caste-linked sexual violence, prompting the National Federation of Dalit Women (1995).
• Adivasi women's struggles over land, forest rights and displacement rarely figured on the mainstream agenda, and intersectionality - the overlap of caste, class and gender - was long absent from the movement's leadership and priorities.

The counter-evidence

• SEWA, founded by Ela Bhatt in 1972, organised poor self-employed women around livelihood and dignity.
• The Andhra anti-arrack agitation of the 1990s was led by rural poor women; the Mathura and Bhanwari Devi cases - both involving lower-strata women - produced the 1983 rape-law reforms and the 1997 Vishaka guidelines.
• Later measures such as gender budgeting and reservation in local bodies benefited poorer women too.

Thus the movement did engage the marginalised, but its dominant voice and agenda under-represented them. A genuinely emancipatory feminism must therefore be intersectional - foregrounding caste, class and community rather than assuming a single “sisterhood.” Only then can it speak for the woman at the bottom of every hierarchy, not merely for those already relatively empowered.