ABSTRACT
The most public campaigns of the All India Democratic Women's Association in the wealthy agricultural state of Haryana during the 1990s and 2000s fought powerful vested interests in two seemingly distinct areas of women's systemic disenfranchisement: land rights and community/caste values. In both kinds of campaigns, AIDWA members took enormous personal and familial risks to demand women's greater access to their rights and their dignity. They mobilized the legal system, held public hearings, and put pressure on the people and structures that held power in the localities and the state. The campaigns seemed to operate in very different spheres and were often reported independently of each other by the media. Where one set of campaigns demanded land rights, both land access and land ownership, for land-insecure women and men, the other sought to build equitable gender and caste rights for women and men to determine their own choices in marriage and their personal relationships. Yet the two kinds of struggle are deeply inter-related, and the resource and capital allocation embedded in the struggles around land cannot be seen outside of the cultural contestations of gender and caste hierarchies. AIDWA's politics reveal how neoliberal agricultural policies introduced during the 1990s also sparked upheavals in class, caste, and gender hierarchies as forms of domination in Haryana's highly capitalized, agricultural political economy.
