I. The Puzzle at Chhatron Ki Goonj
At the fourth edition of “Chhatron Ki Goonj” in Pune last week, Rahul Gandhi told a crowd of some fifteen thousand young women to “smash patriarchy.” He quoted the Manusmriti’s prescription that a woman obey her father in childhood, her husband in youth, her sons in widowhood, and called the verse a shame. He told the gathering that women belong to no one but themselves. It was, by any measure, an important and socially resonant intervention — patriarchal discrimination as a daily lived experience is among the most written-about, least politically operationalised subjects in Indian public life. But its political potential remains doubtful, and the doubt is not new. In 2022, Priyanka Gandhi ran the Uttar Pradesh campaign on almost the identical register — “Ladki Hoon, Lad Sakti Hoon” — and the Congress recorded its lowest-ever vote share in the state, roughly two percent. Meanwhile Narendra Modi, whose government’s senior leadership speaks in openly patriarchal registers, remains among the more successful mobilisers of the female vote in recent Indian elections, with some analyses suggesting his current hold on power leans more heavily on women than on men.
This is the puzzle any honest essay on the subject has to sit with before proposing anything: a party that centres women’s dignity keeps losing women’s votes to a party whose senior leadership includes a Prime Minister who once called female protestors’ use of abusive language a “cultural shock,” and an RSS chief on record with his own patriarchal pronouncements. Explaining this puzzle, and building a framework that resolves it rather than wishing it away, is the task of this essay.
II. Why Politics Is Not Ontology
The place to begin is with a distinction that is obvious once stated but is routinely elided in Indian feminist commentary: the undoing of patriarchy is, in the ontological register, a win-win. Simone de Beauvoir’s account of woman as confined to immanence — defined relationally, denied the subject-position of self-authored transcendence that man claims as default — implies a corollary about men too: the demand that a man perpetually occupy the position of controller, provider, and unyielding authority is its own kind of confinement, exhausting and brittle in its own way. Patriarchy’s dismantling liberates the enforcer as much as the enforced, in principle.
But politics is not ontology. Politics, at its most basic, is the question of who gets what — an essentially zero-sum allocation problem, mediated by coercion, persuasion, or, more subtly, guilt and moral pressure. Reservation for women in legislatures is a seat taken from a pool men currently occupy disproportionately. Property rights for daughters are property not passed, in the same measure, to sons. There is no version of these specific transfers that isn’t a transfer, however just. A society already registering severe backlash — rising upper-caste assertion, an anti-reservation movement gaining ground, a mainstreaming of frankly misogynist discourse, a normalising of “politically incorrect” diction as a badge of authenticity — is a society in which the zero-sum nature of these asks is being felt, resented, and organised against. The recent public attention to cases like Ketan Agrawal’s, the Raja Raghuvanshi case, and the Meerut Saurabh Rajput case — whatever their individual facts — are being narrated by a section of male opinion as evidence of a new persecution: men gaslit into surrendering privilege, now facing a hostile state, hostile law, hostile discourse. That these are isolated incidents set against a much larger pattern of violence against women is, to that narrative, beside the point. But the narrative’s existence is itself instructive: the mere public thinkability of “reverse victimhood” as a claim is evidence that patriarchy’s capacity to enforce silently and uncontested is eroding — visible backlash of this kind is characteristically a symptom of a losing hierarchy, not a stable one, in the way post-Reconstruction violence in the American South marked the breakdown of unchallenged racial control rather than its continuation.
The confusion between the ontological and the political registers is precisely where “smash patriarchy,” however true, runs into trouble as a political slogan. It reads, to a hostile listener, as an accusation requiring a concession before it can even be engaged with — and mass electorates do not occupy formulations that ask something of them before they are permitted to say yes.
III. Can Women Be a Political Class?
The deeper question the puzzle raises is whether women can function as a political class at all — a constituency with sufficiently unified material interest to sustain durable collective mobilisation the way caste, region, or economic class have, at various points in Indian history, sustained it. The honest answer, drawn from a debate the Indian discourse has mostly imported without its vocabulary, is no, structurally.
Materialist feminists in the 1970s West — Christine Delphy chief among them — tried to establish women as a class in something like the Marxian sense, defined by the extraction of unpaid domestic labour the way the proletariat is defined by the extraction of surplus value. Heidi Hartmann’s rejoinder, in her essay on “the unhappy marriage of Marxism and feminism,” remains the clearest statement of why the project failed: patriarchy and capitalism (or, in the Indian case, patriarchy and caste, patriarchy and class, patriarchy and region) are separate systems of domination that sometimes align and sometimes cut directly against each other, and no single-axis class analysis of gender survives contact with those cross-cutting loyalties. The intersectionality literature that followed a decade later formalised the same finding for race in the American context — the question of race consistently overrode the question of gender within feminism’s own house, fracturing what should, on paper, have been a unified movement.
India’s version of this fracture does not need an imported vocabulary at all. It is caste. A landowning-caste woman and a landless Dalit woman share the “grammar” of patriarchal subordination — Manusmriti’s prescriptions apply, formally, to both — but they do not share a material political interest capable of grounding solidarity, because caste position determines far more of each woman’s daily experience of power than gender position does. This is why no country has produced a durable women-specific political party: the axis is real, but it is never the only axis, and it is rarely the dominant one for any given woman weighing her vote. What survives, everywhere, is not a women’s party but the folding of feminist claims into a broader progressive-versus-conservative axis, where feminism becomes one plank among several inside an existing coalition rather than a coalition unto itself. Any manifesto has to be built on this premise rather than against it: it cannot assume gender solidarity will do the organising work; it has to do that work itself, by other means.
IV. The Nitish Model: Recognition Without Redistribution
If strategic, class-based feminist appeals structurally underperform, what explains the alternative that does work — Nitish Kumar’s sustained hold on Bihar’s female electorate, or the welfare-transfer politics (Ladli Behna, Ladki Bahin, Ujjwala) that has helped narrow or reverse the gender gap in the BJP’s favour in several states? The answer lies in a distinction Maxine Molyneux drew decades ago between women’s practical and strategic gender interests. Practical interests arise from within the existing gender division of labour and seek to improve conditions inside that role — safety from a violent or alcoholic husband, income, a child’s education — without challenging the underlying subordination. Strategic interests challenge the subordination directly: legal equality, redistribution of authority, autonomy as such. “Smash patriarchy” is a strategic appeal. Nitish’s prohibition, cycle scheme, Jeevika self-help groups, and panchayat reservation are a textbook practical-interest platform: prohibition removed a named source of domestic violence and financial ruin; the cycle scheme tied a material gift to a daughter’s continued schooling, so mothers experienced it as investment in the family’s future rather than a claim against their husbands; Jeevika built a collective economic identity for women entirely inside the domestic-managerial role. None of it required any man to publicly lose anything he would admit to valuing — the enemy was a specific, disownable vice, never men as a class.
This is also the real content of Modi’s female vote, which is not, on inspection, an ideological achievement so much as a transactional one: direct cash and in-kind transfers from the exchequer to women as clients of the state, never framed as a claim against men. It coexists without contradiction alongside Hindutva’s conservative gender politics because the two never touch — one governs the domestic and status order, the other delivers welfare that requires no confrontation with that order at all. The starkest instance of the same logic operating in the register of pure recognition rather than redistribution was Modi’s description of manual scavenging as an act of altruism — a move identical in structure to the oldest trick in the caste playbook that Ambedkar spent Annihilation of Caste diagnosing: sacralise a degrading role so completely that leaving it reads as a spiritual failure rather than a liberation. Applied to gender, the same sacralising gesture converts confinement into a role to be honoured rather than a grievance to be redressed. It is, in Nancy Fraser’s terms, recognition without redistribution — a pure, costless gift from the state’s rhetorical budget, and it is precisely because it costs incumbents nothing that it scales instantly across an electorate that a redistributive claim could never reach at the same speed.
There is a demographic dimension to this that a manifesto has to take seriously rather than gloss over. The average age of marriage for Indian women sits around twenty-two; the politically addressable cohort of unmarried women in the “smash patriarchy” idiom — students and young professionals still, provisionally, inhabiting the subject-position Beauvoir called transcendence — is narrow, bounded on one side by adulthood and on the other by marriage. Married women, who form by far the larger constituency, are not simply less oppressed and therefore less receptive; if anything the constraints of in-laws, domestic labour, and reduced mobility bite harder after marriage. What changes is the idiom that reaches them. A campaign built on self-assertion and Manusmriti-as-villain speaks to a woman still authoring her own future; it does not speak to a woman managing a household’s present. Nitish’s “vanguard of the children’s future” framing, by contrast, reaches exactly this larger cohort because it addresses her as the manager she already is, not as a subject she is being asked to become.
V. More Room, Not Freedom
None of this licenses a manifesto built on Modi’s recognition-without-redistribution structure, which would betray the very values it exists to advance. The harder and more honest task is to make progressive values themselves hospitable — occupiable without requiring anyone to publicly concede status before they can say yes to it.
The frame that does this work is a distinction between room and freedom. Most Indian women, however traditional their own lived accommodation with patriarchy, want a more egalitarian order for their daughters than the one they themselves received. And a great many modern, liberal, working women who inhabited something close to full subject-hood before marriage withdraw, substantially, into more traditional roles after marriage and especially after motherhood — an ontological shift, not merely a change of schedule. Read uncharitably, this looks like resignation or false consciousness. Read through Deniz Kandiyoti’s concept of the “patriarchal bargain,” it looks like something more dignified: a negotiation within the structure rather than a capitulation to it, in which present compliance is traded for future leverage — classically deployed on behalf of sons in patrilineal systems, and, in the pattern this essay is describing, increasingly redeployed on behalf of daughters. The mother is not exiting her own settlement; she is using her position inside it to negotiate better terms for the next occupant of her position. Arjun Appadurai’s account of the “capacity to aspire” as itself unevenly distributed and transmitted across generations, through the accumulated experience of a family rather than sprung whole from an individual, describes the same mechanism from the other direction: a mother’s hope for her daughter is not a consolation prize for her own foreclosed ambition, it is the aspiration-transmission mechanism working exactly as it should.
This is, not incidentally, the most legible political idiom available in the country — the same grammar that runs through every first-generation-literate family, every reservation beneficiary, every migrant household: I accept my own ceiling so my child does not inherit it. It does not read as feminism to most listeners; it reads as the ordinary structure of parental sacrifice, which is precisely why it is occupiable by fathers as well as mothers. This is the frame’s real political innovation. Lived experience never casts the father as the oppressor the way it casts the husband — even where the Manusmriti’s textual authority formally implicates father and son alongside husband, the felt experience is asymmetric: the father protects rather than confines, the son is cared for rather than experienced as a rival claimant. A “room for my daughter” appeal does not ask the father to cede anything. It asks him to redirect authority he already indisputably holds — from gatekeeper to sponsor. It recruits fathers as agents of the manifesto rather than naming them as its targets.
The distinction between room and freedom is not merely tactical softening; it tracks a real difference, close to Amartya Sen’s distinction between capability and a prescribed exercise of liberty. Room means an expanded choice set — later marriage, completed schooling, financial independence, legal protection, a genuine say in the timing and choice of marriage — without dictating what a woman must do with it. Freedom, in the register the manifesto should avoid, tends to smuggle in a specific valorised use of that expanded choice set — sexual autonomy, career primacy, exit from marriage — as the marker of true liberation, which has the perverse effect of retroactively pathologising the choice a great many women in the target electorate have already made. A woman offered more room who chooses domesticity anyway has used her capability; a woman offered “freedom” who chooses domesticity anyway reads, in that rhetoric’s own terms, as having failed to escape. This is why sexual freedom as a plank, however ontologically correct, is a political non-starter that neither women nor men currently in the electorate are buying — and why “more room” survives where “freedom” does not.
Room is also, deliberately, a closed frame rather than an open one — it does not promise limitless expansion, only more than the previous generation had, which is a promise that can be kept and shown to have been kept. That closure is what protects the manifesto from the classic failure mode of deferred justice: a promise renewed every generation and cashed in none, the endless “wait” Martin Luther King warned against. To avoid it, “more room” cannot remain purely rhetorical. It has to be built from bounded, measurable, time-stamped instruments a father can be recruited to actively deliver rather than passively bless: enforced minimum marriage age with a real penalty structure rather than the current unenforced law; inheritance reframed explicitly as a father’s bequest to his daughter rather than a claim she makes against a husband’s family — the same asset, an opposite valence; school-retention transfers tied to a specific age, on the Nitish model, but pitched as her room to finish rather than her freedom to study; and auditable career and skilling pathways rather than slogans.
VI. Status-Preserving Masculinity
Room for daughters is compatible with the existing family structure only on one condition: that her freedom does not require an equal and opposite loss of standing from the men around her. In practice this means the manifesto needs an explicit theory of masculinity, not just of femininity — and it needs to avoid the single most common error in how that theory gets stated.
R. W. Connell’s account of hegemonic masculinity is useful here: masculinity has never been singular, it is a hierarchy of masculinities, with one culturally exalted form — provider, protector, controller, unyielding — sitting at the top, and alternative forms, including the domestically engaged, caregiving man, coded as subordinate. An appeal for “softer masculinity,” phrased as it usually is, asks men to move down this hierarchy for nothing in return — a pure status loss, structurally identical to the redistributive asks this essay has already flagged as backlash-inducing, just relocated from the material register to the status register. It is precisely the “guilt-tripped into surrendering privilege” complaint that fuels the current backlash discourse.
The fix is not to ask for less masculinity but to relocate what counts as its top rung — to supply an alternative hegemonic model rather than push men toward a subordinate one. Sweden’s paternity-leave campaigns of the 1970s through 1990s are the clearest empirical case: rather than marketing caregiving as a diminishment of manhood, the state deliberately paired it with virility-coded imagery — a champion weightlifter photographed cradling an infant — to prevent the caregiving father from reading as the lesser masculinity. Uptake became durable only once involved fatherhood was framed as an upgrade — still strong, still the provider and protector, and present — rather than an exchange of strength for tenderness. A manifesto plank on masculinity needs the same three components: a positive vocabulary that avoids deficit language like “toxic” or “fragile,” since the empirical record on Western political communication shows such terms entrench backlash by naming the identity itself as the problem rather than naming specific conduct; a status-preserving image bank — public figures, sportsmen, uniformed officers, whose masculine credibility is already unimpeachable, photographed as engaged fathers and partners; and the same generational hook as the “room for daughters” plank, so that involved fatherhood reads as the father’s own contribution to his daughter’s expanded room, not a personal capitulation to his own father’s model.
VII. Naming the Front, and What Defeating It Does and Does Not Do
A manifesto built only on this positive architecture has no antagonist, and movements built entirely on positive vision without a named adversary tend to generate warmth without urgency — a gap the framing-theory literature on collective action (Snow and Benford’s diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational tasks) identifies precisely: everything constructed so far in this essay is prognostic and motivational. It has no diagnostic component.
The diagnostic claim available to Indian progressive politics is that contemporary Hindutva politics functions as the validating front for jingoism, caste supremacy, and the political instrumentalisation of religion together, and that this front has raised the ceiling of publicly acceptable patriarchal conduct by giving it state sanction and cultural cover. The evidentiary spine for this claim is already sitting in the public record: Modi’s manual-scavenger remarks; the Bhagwat statements Rahul was directly rebutting in Pune; anti-conversion and “love jihad” legislation that functions as state control of women’s marital and mobility choice under the language of protection; khap-adjacent moral policing; and the upper-caste anti-reservation assertion that has accompanied the same political current. Ambedkar’s concept of graded inequality — a hierarchy in which every rung dominates the one below while itself being dominated from above, sacralised through the same Brahminical texts — supplies the theoretical unification: caste supremacy and patriarchal backlash are not two adjacent targets that happen to share a manifesto, they are one ideological mechanism, graded and sacralised hierarchy, applied to two different sorting axes from the same textual source Rahul was already quoting against it.
This diagnostic claim needs one explicit qualification, or a hostile reader will supply it as a refutation. Antonio Gramsci’s distinction between political power and cultural hegemony is the check: hegemony lives in civil society — media, family, religious institution, popular culture — not in the government benches, and a party can lose an election without losing hegemony at all. The deeper structure this essay has been describing — patriarchy as a grammar predating and outlasting any single political formation, written into a text Rahul is quoting against rather than for — does not fall when a government falls. Nitish Kumar’s own record, built in explicit coalition with the very front this essay is naming, and Congress’s own unremarkable pre-2014 record on gender, are the two obvious counter-examples a critical reader will reach for, and the manifesto’s argument should anticipate rather than avoid them. The honest formulation is not “defeat Hindutva politics and an egalitarian order follows,” but the more modest and, this essay argues, more durable one: Hindutva politics has raised the ceiling on acceptable patriarchal conduct by giving it religious cover and state sanction; defeating it lowers that ceiling and withdraws the sanction, which is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the slower cultural work that only a positive architecture — more room for daughters, status-preserving masculinity, bounded and cashable commitments — can actually accomplish. The manifesto’s own content, not the electoral defeat of any single formation, is the real mechanism of change; the defeat only clears space for that content to be tried.
VIII. Toward the Document
What this essay has been arguing for is not itself a manifesto but the shape one would need to take to survive contact with Indian conditions rather than merely feel correct. Its design principles, briefly: bounded and auditable commitments rather than rhetorical gestures, so that “more room” does not become an infinitely renewable promise no generation ever collects on; split registers for the unmarried and married cohorts, since the same slogan cannot address a woman inhabiting Beauvoir’s transcendence and a woman who has already, provisionally, re-entered immanence; fathers and husbands positioned throughout as sponsors of an intergenerational project rather than targets of an accusation; a masculinity plank built on upgrade rather than subtraction; and a diagnostic naming of the political front responsible for raising patriarchy’s current ceiling, stated with enough theoretical honesty to survive its own obvious counter-examples.
Chhatron Ki Goonj’s real achievement may not be that it offers this manifesto — it plainly does not, not yet — but that it names the felt experience with enough force to make the absence of one conspicuous. The next task, for whoever takes it up, is to write the document this essay has only sketched: specific enough to be delivered on, modest enough to be occupied by people who have not yet been persuaded of everything it ontologically implies, and honest enough about what electoral politics can and cannot do to survive its own first hard year in office.
