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 International Women Congress that took place in Beijing between 4 and 15 September 1995. The United Nations has been organizing such conferences and this particular one was the biggest till date. About 300 women from India attended it. Several resolutions passed there were strongly opposed by the Aghadi. For instance, that Conference recommended that all government schemes for empowerment of women should be channeled through various NGOs. Joshi felt this would increase Governmental interference in all such areas of work and since he generally held that that government was the best which governed the least, he naturally was against it. Secondly, it was to increase the funding of the NGOs enormously and since Joshi always felt that NGOs were not doing much effective work, he was not supportive of that proposal. The entire presentation of Indian women in Beijing was based on the Marxist assumption that men and women were like two opposing classes. Joshi rejected that and believed that men and women played complementary roles. To express that alternative view of the women’s issue Aghadi held an anti-Beijing conference in Mumbai on 24 March 1996. Dr Subramanian Swamy of Janata Party chaired the conference. Nearly seven hundred registered delegates took part. Some of them had come all the way from Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat. The conference was followed with an open session attended by almost 30,000 farming women. Surprisingly, not a single representative of numerous women’s bodies turned up despite having been invited. “Nahi dasi sarkari, nari hai chingari” was a slogan with which the programme ended. Several persons led the feminist movement and they had their own strong points. But almost entire feminist movement in India had remained restricted to the big cities. Shetkari Mahila Aaghadi was exceptional. Literally, lakhs of women from rural area participated in it. It raised their awareness level, their sense 240

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Sharad Joshi : Leading Farmers to the Centre Stage