“Repeal and (not) replace”? Hindu nationalist women and feminism in India

ABSTRACT

India’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) responses to feminism developed in two stages. In the 1980s, BJP women worked to delegitimize feminism by co-opting feminist language and issues. After 2010, the BJP seemingly increased women’s descriptive representation, but not women’s substantive representation. The BJP has implemented neither policies that feminists support (gender quotas), nor those that feminists oppose (uniform civil code). BJP women espouse an ideology of gender complementarity which supports limited descriptive representation; but ultimately, their representation of Indian women is undermined by their own unrepresentativeness on multiple vectors, including caste, class, religion, region, and language.

KEYWORDS:

• India
• religious nationalism
• quotas
• uniform civil code
• feminism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Mohd. Ahmed Khan v. Shah Bano Begum, AIR 1985 Supreme Court 945. For details see Williams 2006, Ch. 5.

2 Pinky Anand, interview with the author, Oct. 2013. New Delhi.

3 Sanyukta Bhatia, interview with the author, Nov. 2013, Lucknow, India; Anita Agarwal, interview with the author, Dec. 2015, Lucknow, India.

4 Some examples are listed here: https://wcd.nic.in/schemes-listing/2405.

5 http://164.100.47.194/loksabha/Members/women.aspx. Accessed 12 October 2020.

6 https://data.ipu.org/women-averages?month=4&year=2019&op=Show±averages&form_build_id=form-CdS6kQJWFPb7ATWuqYkycmIr5V-mP1KKlgBx5YPGHJU&form_id=ipu__women_averages_filter_form. Accessed 12 October 2020.

7 Pinky Anand, interview with the author, Oct. 2013, New Delhi.

8 Shayara Bano v. Union of India (2017) 9 SCC 1 (SC); BBC News 2019.

9 Nirmala Sitharaman, interview with the author, Oct. 2013. New Delhi. The idea of complementarity is widely traced to sociologist Talcott Parsons (1964: Ch. 3).

Additional information

Funding

Fieldwork in India was partially funded by the American Institute of Indian Studies and the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center at the University of Cincinnati.