ABSTRACT
The All India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA) held its Fourth National Conference in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, in 1994. It assessed the grimly historic quality of the three years between 1991 and 1994, since its last conference, held in Jadavpur, West Bengal, at the end of 1990. “We could not at that time have imagined that the next three years would arguably rank as the worst since Independence, for the mass of the people in this country.” 1 In attendance at the conference were 785 women delegates, with each delegate representing approximately 4,800 members. AIDWA's total membership was tallied to just over 3,768,000. Thirteen years had passed since AIDWA was founded, and the Fourth National Conference opened with a profoundly different context for AIDWA's organizing, its strategies, and particularly its members. The three short years between 1991 and 1994 witnessed the explosive growth in the power of communal politics to mobilize Hindus against non-Hindus, the pace of neoliberal retractions of government programs for vulnerable people, and the ferocity of casteist campaigns against redistribution of resources or opportunities from the dominant to dispossessed castes. Women lived at the cutting edge of all of these trends in the Indian polity. The women's movement, in different ways, responded with alacrity to all of these crises.
