Abstract
On the other side of the vigilante story is the Gulabi Gang. The group, famously clad in pink saris and wielding bamboo sticks, formed in 2006 to fight violence against women in North India. Despite being a symbol of women’s empowerment in the country, the group has been criticised for its use of violence to get justice
The houses belonged to Sajid Qureshi, a Muslim gym owner accused of kidnapping a 22-year-old Hindu woman. Indian news website The Wire reported that a missing person’s report was lodged by the woman’s family, with the subsequent case falling under a law that addresses kidnapping a woman with the intention of compelling or seducing her into sex or marriage.
The Dharam Jagaran group is a member of the Sangh Parivar, an umbrella term for Hindu nationalist organisations led by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The members of vigilante groups are self-appointed foot soldiers of Hindutva – the predominant form of Hindu nationalism formulated as a political ideology by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in 1923. India’s ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, is also part of the Sangh Parivar.
The mob that burnt Qureshi’s house demanded his arrest on the grounds of a phrase that Hindutva groups have lately introduced into the nationalistic lexicon: “love jihad”. It implies a conspiracy by Muslim men to convert Hindu women to Islam through marriage. In this case, the couple managed to escape and the woman in question, a BA student, later released a video stating that she had married Qureshi willingly. But that’s not the outcome in every case.
In endogamous societies such as India, it is not uncommon for transgressive inter-caste and inter-faith couples to pay with their lives. In a statement in parliament in 2021, the minister for home affairs declared that between 2017 and 2019, the country had recorded 145 cases of “honour killings” across the country. These are usually commissioned by the families of the women.
In my debut novel The Illuminated, an organisation called Mahalaxmi Seva Sangh starts off innocently enough as a “volunteer group to support women’s interests”. I wanted to illustrate their growth and the articulation of their plans by interspersing the narrative with their posters on everything from what women can wear (“Avoid red clothing”) to the more sinister “dangers of women living alone” (“Temptation and sensual behaviour”). The posters get more defined as the novel progresses. That is the insidious nature of patriarchal systems. It starts off in small ways, both in my novel and in the reality of India.
Long before groups such as Dharam Jagaran arrive with torches, the policing of women’s bodies and choices starts at home. The social legitimacy given to everyday forms of patriarchal vigilantism on issues such as women’s clothing and being “allowed” to study, work, travel or live by themselves can escalate to gruesome episodes.
In July 2021, for instance, it was reported that 17-year-old Neha Paswan was beaten to death by her uncles and grandfather in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh for wearing jeans.
Perhaps nowhere more than in India is Sansa Stark’s scathing takedown in Game of Thrones, “Uncle, please sit”, more vital. In an essay in financial daily Mint, economist Shrayana Bhattacharya has observed that “behind every case of a woman being robbed of her right to speak, live, love, study or dress as she pleases is a type of unhelpful uncle”.
Not all commit obvious crimes against women but they endorse the foot soldiers who do the dirty work of upholding the patriarchy.
While it would be fair to correlate the rise of Hindutva with the BJP coming to power in 2014 under prime minister Narendra Modi, these incidents are not entirely new. In January 2009, a group of men from an organisation called Sri Ram Sena attacked young men and women in a pub in Mangalore, dragging out the women and beating them for being “immoral”.
They announced a plan to target couples found celebrating Valentine’s Day a month later, which led to a widely-publicised campaign by female journalists who organised themselves into the Consortium of Pub-Going, Loose and Forward Women and sent the vigilantes pink panties as part of what they called the Pink Chaddi Campaign. The considerable embarrassment that this entailed led the RSS to distance itself from Sri Ram Sena’s activities – a reminder of how political parties and nationalist organisations opportunistically support vigilante groups.
It is crucial to keep the sentiment of vigilantism against women in check at a local community level. Hindutva groups see themselves as gatekeepers of Hindu sovereignty, with a sense of impunity. They operate independently but have a mutually beneficial relationship with political networks.
While the larger focus of Hindutva groups so far has been against Muslims and Dalits as they indulge in religious or caste-based crime – specifically alleged cow slaughter and beef consumption -the focus on controlling women is not far behind.
In a 2021 paper, Sana Jaffrey, director of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict in Jakarta, explains how Indonesian Islamists and Indian Hindu nationalists effectively use vigilante violence to accelerate enforcement of their ideological vision at the grassroots level. Jaffrey believes there has been a shift away from large-scale communal riots in India to targeted activities such as moral policing on Valentine’s Day, anti-love jihad squads and more. She warns that right-wing vigilantism tends to be far more brutal and deadly in India as its police structure is susceptible to vigilantes’ demands for impunity.
Things get truly alarming when governments start taking cues from vigilante groups.
In December 2022, the state government of Maharashtra instituted a panel to track inter caste and inter faith marriages. To be headed by the state’s women and child development minister, the committee has been tasked with collecting detailed information to “help women” who may be estranged from their families. The premise is ostensibly safety but the assumption that adult women are incapable of making up their own minds is deeply patronising.
The trigger for this move was the murder of a Hindu woman by her Muslim boyfriend in Delhi, but instituting the panel in its aftermath seems more to prove a point: that women are the safest under the care of their families and the state. This is control masked as care.
Speaking about The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood maintains that everything in the book has happened in some part of the world at some point. That is also true for the actions of the MSS in my novel – there is a vigilante group somewhere in India controlling how women dress and eat and work and live. For readers who see the activities of the MSS as speculative fiction, I wish I had their optimism.
My novel’s vigilante group is closer to India’s political reality than I’d like it to be.