This is the progamme of the first registered all women political party in India. It has fought last assembly elections in the state of Maharashtra. Your comments and suggestions are welcome.

The symbol of the Party is Bangles in the hands as shown in the below picture.

SYMBOL

DEMANDS:

Following are the provisional demands and they will become a part of Party Programme, only after their due ratification in the forthcoming convention of the party.

1. The present reservation should be properly protected for effective implementation of the PRI and it should be increased to 50 percent from the present 33 per cent.
2. A bill with a provision of 50 per cent reservation for women should be passed for the Lok Sabha and State Legislature.
3. Women’s name should be included in the 7/12 document (Land ownership Deed)
4. Immediate implementation of the Maharashtra State Women’s Policy (declared sometimes back).
5. Women should be provided with adequate micro credit through village co-operative societies.
6. Mechanism should be evolved to open district women’s co-operative banks in all the districts.
7. 50 percent positions be reserved for women in the board of directors of co-operative banks, state corporations, charitable trusts, government aided schools and colleges’ managing committees.
8. Women hawkers, vendors and self-employed women should be given 50 percent reservation in the identified hawker’s zones in Gram Panchayat (village council), Nagar Palika (Municipality) and Mahanagar Palika areas.
9. Women should be given 50 percent reservation in allotment of stalls, shops and canteens on contract basis, by railways, state transports and government offices, schools and colleges.
10. Government schemes, budget and policies should be gender sensitised.
11. Women should get ownership rights over natural resources.
12. Implementation of the Gramdani Act, 1964 passed by the Government with appropriate changes
13. Opening of all women police stations in each city, block and town
14. Immediate stopping of prodigal wastage of public money on administration and implementation of the useful recommendations of various reports on the governance and administrative reforms
15. Adoption of sustainable and effective strategy to counter recurring drought
16. Evolve effective mechanism to stop sexual harassment of women at work places.
17. Evolve mechanism to recognise and pay for women’s unpaid contribution to the house
18. Provide safe drinking water to each village.
19. Provide free bus and railway passes to girl students to attend schools or colleges, far off from their homes.
20. Women should be given 50 per cent reservation in higher up decision-making positions in private as well as public corporate sector.
21. Undertake review of the privatisation policy and ensure social security, food security and livelihood security for the masses.

WE COMMIT TO:

1. The various issues raised by the Feminist movement in the last three decades will be taken up and implemented by the party when it comes to power.
2. Strive to address the problems of rural women, urban women, and working women, disabled women, senior citizens, children, home makers and domestic workers.
3. Work for the development of all marginalised and weaker sections of the society such as Dalits, Adivasis and rural as well as urban poor.
4. Contesting and winning elections will not be our sole aim, but we will strive for the empowerment of women and other marginalised population in every sphere of life continuously.

WE APPEAL:-

To all the women such as working women, urban and rural women, to join the party to turn the wheels of history and to make it Herstory.
- To all the women who aspire to contest in the forthcoming election and those who have contested in the past to join the party.
- Finally, to all the men of this great nation, to support our women’s party, encourage and facilitate their mothers, sisters, wives, daughters and friends to join the party to enrich Indian democracy and to make India a truly developed nation in the near future. Remember, if given an opportunity, women will manage the administration as spend thriftily, effectively and meticulously as they manage your home, and avert the prodigal ways in which the present politicians manage your country.
- For several years, you have tried different political parties and what have you got. “Don’t you think we deserve a chance?”

WHAT YOU CAN DO?

1. Become conscious of your rights and refuse to bow down
2. Believe in yourself and establish your identity
3. Don’t allow yourself to be exploited at your work place and stand by your fellow women employees in their crisis
4. Vote for WPI or candidates supported by WPI
5. Donate whatever you can for the party
6. Join the party
7. Encourage others to join the party and propagate its message
8. Become an active member of the party

Your response awaited eagerly.

THIS IS ME?
Look at this photo.

.

Can you imagine this was me? No one has so far seen this photograph for years.
From this photo you will make out that in other
post I was sitting pretty with some man.
Guess who?
It was none other then my life partner – Ankush.
Just a peep in the past.
I am standing in front of one hut in one tribal village, where we used to work in those days to
wage struggle for rights of landless and rural poor.

This is the photograph of the Jambhulpada village where I started my working for the rights of tribals.

Let us take the debate to another level. It seems we all agree that women and men are different in many respects.

Apart from physiological aspects how they are different in terms of thinkig, behaviour, approach, values...?
Why they are so?
Why women are like women and men are like men?

And above all does that matter?

Can woman offer something new to the society and polity?
Can women offer alternative to established systems, structures and values in any way?

Being the first woman to achieve anything often meant battling obstacles that "first" men never faced. Such women deserve to be carried in our minds, and in our hearts.

Being first woman pilot, first woman cab driver, first teacher, pime minister is difficult then the 'first' man doing it?

I NEED TO KNOW YOUR VIEW AS I HAVE BECOME THE FIRST FOUNDER PRESIDENT OF ALL WOMEN POLITICAL PATY IN INDIA.

What do you think?

THIS IS AN ARTICLE WRITTEN BY AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST WITH THE HELP OF OUR UNION ON THE PRESENT SITUATION OF THE BARGIRLS.

Brings Hardship on Mumbai Dancers// (Mumbai, India)
By Paul Watson
(c) 2006, Los Angeles Times

MUMBAI, India -- Pasties and a G-string are no good to an Indian erotic dancer. With sari firmly tied, she just flashes some navel, or bares her back, to fire up a bar full of men into a money-throwing frenzy.

Striptease is out of the question, table dancing an unimagined horror of Western promiscuity. Women who entertain men in India's nightclubs are supposed to do so more or less fully clothed, with a vague nod to an ancient art of suggestion.

Nonetheless, here in the country's business and entertainment capital, the government decided that the stripless tease was evidence of a moral slide that had to stop. It banned nightclub dancers, known as bar girls, in August, claiming they were vulgar and not averse to selling themselves.

Critics say the ban has driven the young women, many of them born into a caste that once produced entertainers for tribal leaders, into much lower-paying jobs. Others have been forced to turn to prostitution in Mumbai's red-light districts, fetid warrens of rat-infested brothels that are the center of India's AIDS epidemic.

"The girls are very vulnerable now," said Varsha Kale, who is fighting the ban as head of the Womanist Party of India. "Pimps are selling the bar girls to other countries because they don't have any work."

Nonsense, says Sanjay Aparanti, a deputy police commissioner in Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay.

Before the ban, almost all of the city's hundreds of dance bars were fronts for prostitution and human trafficking, he contended.

"The dance, per se, is not pernicious," Aparanti said. "But it's the dance in that particular place, where liquor is served and clients are sitting getting boozed. Then the whole atmosphere becomes conducive for men to tease girls, or to book girls for further prostitution.

"Hence, we thought that this is the kind of a place where the woman's dignity is at stake. Under the garb of these dance bars, full-blown trafficking was going on."

Mumbai's dance bar owners are fighting the ban in Maharashtra state's High Court, arguing that the government is infringing on the dancers' constitutional right to earn a living. A ruling is expected soon.

Kale said the ban threatened the livelihood of about 75,000 women who worked as dancers and waitresses, as well as the families they supported.

It doesn't affect the more than 100,000 prostitutes who police say are working out of five-star hotels and ramshackle brothels in this city of more than 16 million.

Many bar girls were forced to become dancers because they belong to the Beria caste, whose girls were traditionally selected to become dancers, Kale said. Courtesans used to perform classical dance, in sessions called "mujras," for royalty, tribal leaders and the upper class, but in modern times many of the women have ended up in bars, entertaining drunks who shower them with tips.

Indian governments have long tried to end the caste system, which divides millions of people into hundreds of sub-castes, but it remains a powerful source of discrimination.

Pinky Yadav, a member of the Beria caste, was a mujra dancer but quit 15 years ago because, she said, "I found a good man."

Now Yadav heads what she calls an association of 2,000 dancers. Dozens of them are her tenants.

At the end of an alley, where a man selling balloons on sticks edges past a pile of rotten trash, a rickety set of rusting metal stairs leads to Yadav's place on the second floor. It's called Congress House.

On a recent afternoon, 10 young women were sitting barefoot on a black marble floor in long kaftans, mesmerized by a TV soap opera. Their freshly washed hair lifted in a humid breeze stirred by an old ceiling fan. Several had cell phones charging on a small shelf.

When the soap ended, they sat in a circle, overnight cases open on their laps, putting on makeup and laughing like schoolgirls on a sleepover. Then they changed into glittering saris of red, yellow and blue, and headed off to work in the bars where they once danced.

After the ban was imposed last summer, some of the women were kept on as waitresses, but their incomes dropped sharply, Yadav said. As dancers, the bar girls could count on making $10 to $20 a night, a good wage for mostly illiterate young women. Now they're lucky to bring home a couple of dollars after each shift.

From that, they pay Yadav $34 a month in rent for their bit of sleeping space on the floor or in a cramped loft. That leaves little to send back to families, many of whom have no other income.

Pressure is building on the women to move into Mumbai's brothels -- hellholes of prostitution and human trafficking that the dance bar ban was supposed to stop, Yadav said.

"They're in a very bad position," said Yadav, her arm draped over a knee as she sat on the floor of a tiny bedroom.

Shweta Sharma, 21, was born into the same caste as Yadav, and for more than two years she has supported her mother and five other family members.

She doesn't have the hard-edged stare of prostitutes her age who wait for customers in Kamathipura, one of Mumbai's largest red-light districts, where four-story brothels stand next to tailor shops, dry cleaners and a clinic specializing in ailments of the "Skin, V.D. and Sex."

Sharma is cryptic about what she will do if she loses her bar job, or if the money runs out.

"I don't know what I'll do," she said. "Whatever I haven't done until now, I'll have to do that someday."

One of the politicians who led the campaign against bar dancing is Vivek Patil, a member of the state assembly from the Peasants and Workers Party.

His district in the city of Panvel, a rail and highway crossroads outside Mumbai, had become a hub for prostitution run out of dance bars, he said.

"These ladies' bars had become a big problem (for the community), especially for the younger generation, because instead of working, they were going and spending time in these bars," he said.

"If they didn't have enough money, they would resort to anything to acquire it. There have been cases where youths have murdered their own mothers for the sake of going to these dance bars."

Bar owners in Mumbai contended that their dancers provided clean entertainment for the middle classes in what has long been one of India's most cosmopolitan cities.

"Several members of the legislative assembly used to come here," said a co-owner of Hino Bar. "They weren't regulars, just twice a week." He asked not to be identified because he feared pressure from police.

Kale says that arguments against the bar girls are exaggerated and that sexist, upper-caste men want the dance bars closed because they can't stomach a low-caste woman making a good, clean living.

"This is a male-dominated society," she said. "The fact that a girl is earning ($560) a month from dancing is something that the males cannot tolerate.

"If they sleep with a man and earn $11, then the males can pity them as sex workers who have to sell themselves for a pittance to earn their living. A girl from a nomadic tribe earning ($560) from dancing is not acceptable to this society of ours."

AP-NY-03-21-06 1231EST

HOW LONG WE ARE GOING TO WAIT TO HAVE OUR DAY?

THIS CAN BE OUR DAY IF WE RESOLVE.

LET US CELEBRATE!

It is difficult for bar girls to live on an income of Rs 80-100 a day as a waitress, when they’re used to earning Rs 700-800 daily, up until a month ago
On hearing about the suicide of two bar girls at Goregaon and Dahisar, another bar girl from Borivali, Rakhi, tried to jump out of a running auto rickshaw and was restrained by her colleague with great difficulty.

The duties of a bar waitress include attending to a single table, serving liquor without touching the table and of course standing for almost eight hours a shift. The ladies bar owners pay the middle-aged women around Rs 700-800 per month and the ladies receive tips from customers. Says Kale, “There should be a dress code for women working in ladies’ bars and they should be protected under the Act Governing Sexual Exploitation at Work.”