1
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© Natasha Behl 2019
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Behl, Natasha, author.
Title: Gendered citizenship : understanding gendered violence in democratic India / Natasha Behl.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2019. | Series: Oxford studies in gender and international relations | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018057796 (print) | LCCN 2019004996 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190949433 (Updf) | ISBN 9780190949440 (Epub) | ISBN 9780190949426 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Women—Violence against—India. | Sikh women—Violence against—India. | Women—Social conditions—India. | Sikh women—Social conditions—India. | Women—Legal status, laws, etc.—India. | Citizenship—Social aspects—India. | Democracy—Social aspects—India.
Classification: LCC HV6250.4.W65 (ebook) | LCC HV6250.4.W65 B438 2019 (print) | DDC 362.88082/0954—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018057796
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
Dedicated to my parents, Ashok and Jass Behl; without you I am nothing, I do nothing.
Acknowledgments ix
1. Politics in Unusual Places: Understanding Gendered Citizenship and Gendered Violence 1
2. Situated Citizenship: An Intersectional and Embodied Approach to Citizenship 15
3. Unequal Citizenship: Secular State, Religious Community, and Gender 34
4. Understanding Exclusionary Inclusion: Sikh Women, Home, and Marriage 56
5. Challenging Exclusionary Inclusion: Sikh Women, Religious Community, and Devotional Acts 84
6. Conclusion: Reconsidering Politics in Unusual Places 113
Notes 125 Bibliography 145 Index 163
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have a debt that I can never repay to the research participants in Punjab, India, for their generosity and insights. Without their stories, this project would be impossible. I have done my best to keep faith with their stories. I have also done my best to keep faith with Jyoti Singh’s story and the stories of the countless unnamed victims of gendered violence who inspired this research.
I am extremely grateful to my mentors, who taught me what it means to stick with a problem, to dwell on its complexities, and to push even further. Foremost among these are Raymond Rocco, Caroline Heldman, Rita Dhamoon, and Anna Sampaio, who through their exemplary scholarship and patient guidance have made the undertaking of this project both a challenge and a pleasure. I am especially grateful for their help in navigating life inside and outside of academia. I should also note that the concept of exclusionary inclusion that I advance in the book is also used by Raymond Rocco (2014). The initial formulation of this concept emerged from collaborative discussion, teaching, and writing.
To my mentors and teachers at Smith College, who inspired me to start this academic journey, I would like to say thank you. Thank you to Ambreen Hai and Tandeka Nkiwane for being my role models. Your strength inspired me to start my journey on this path. I would also like to thank Andy Rotman for encouraging me to conduct research on Sikhs in Punjab. And lastly, I would like to thank Greg White, who provided me with constant encouragement and support.
I am grateful to Angela Chnapko, editor at Oxford University Press, and Laura Sjoberg and J. Ann Tickner, series editors of Oxford Studies in Gender and International Relations, for seeing the value of a research project that centers the lived experience of minority Sikh women in India. I also want to thank the anonymous readers for their critical insights; thank you for seeing promise in this project. Lastly, I thank Laura Grier for giving permission to use her photograph for the cover of this book.
The ethnographic research that informs this book was conducted with support from the Bhai Gurdas Fellowship, Center for Sikh and Punjab Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. This book was also supported by Arizona State University’s Carstens Family Funded Research Aides, Scholarship, Research and Creative Activities Grant, and School of Social and Behavioral Sciences. Portions of this book are derived in part from articles published in Politics, Groups, and Identities and Space & Polity: “Situated Citizenship: Understanding Sikh Citizenship through Women’s Exclusion,” 2014; “Diasporic Researcher: An Autoethnographic Analysis of Gender and Race in Political Science,” 2017; and “Gendered Discipline, Gendered Space: An Ethnographic Approach to Gendered Violence in India,” 2017.
I would also like to thank my friends and family, whose care and affection sustained me through the writing process. To Raquel Zamora and Rebekah Sterling, thank you for your unfaltering support of me and of my ideas. To Annika Mann, Devorah Manekin, and Risa Toha, thank you for your help in navigating academia and motherhood. To Rashi Majithia and Neeru Jindal, thank you for your unconditional love and friendship. You kept me going when the writing seemed impossible.
My family has provided me with unwavering love. Their confidence in me gives me the strength to dream a little bigger and work a little harder. I thank Jagtar Singh Sodhi (my maternal uncle), Paramjit Kaur Sodhi (my maternal aunt), and their family—Palvi Singh, Upkar Singh, Phulbag Singh Sodhi, and Poonam Kaur Sodhi—for making my research in Punjab possible. Without your help, I am lost. I thank Biji, Sumitra Devi Behl (my paternal grandmother), and Mama, Jass Behl, for teaching me the value of family and community; for demonstrating the depths and power of these
Acknowledgments xi bonds; and for giving me the linguistic, cultural, and religious knowledge and sensibility to engage in this ethnographic research. I thank Pitaji, Gurbaksh Singh Behl (my paternal grandfather), for his commitment to education, a commitment that was not limited by gender, and for his embodiment of chardi kala (eternal optimism).
I thank my parents, Ashok and Jass Behl, for being my first and true teachers, who taught me about love and equality; about seva (service) and submission; about freedom and liberation. Without you I am nothing, I do nothing. I thank my siblings, Esha Behl, Ankit Behl, and Digvijay Singh, for the joy they bring to my life. Without you I am nothing, I do nothing. I thank my life partner, Corey Vuelta, for his generosity, loyalty, and love. Without you I am nothing, I do nothing. I write out of love for my son, Elan Behl Vuelta, and my nieces, Huntleigh Behl, Aria Singh, and Anika Singh. I write for your future; I write to teach you about love and equality; about seva and submission; about freedom and liberation. Without you I am nothing, I do nothing.
Politics in Unusual Places
Understanding Gendered Citizenship and Gendered Violence
POLITICS IN UNUSUAL PLACES: SITUATED CITIZENSHIP AND EXCLUSIONARY INCLUSION
On December 16, 2012, Jyoti Singh,1 a twenty-three-year-old female physiotherapy student, and her male friend, a twenty-eight-year-old software engineer, were attacked on a bus in Delhi, India.2 The attack lasted for forty minutes, during which time six men beat the engineer unconscious and gang-raped the female student.3 In addition to sexually assaulting her with an iron rod, they slapped her in the face, kicked her in the abdomen, and bit her lips, cheeks, and breasts. Ram Singh, one of the assailants, confessed to police that he and the other men burned the victims’ clothes, washed the bus, and removed flesh from the seats following the attack (Sharma, Agarwal, and Malhotra 2013). Badri Nath Singh, the victim’s father, said of the attack: “They [the perpetrators] literally ate my daughter. There were bite marks all over her” (Sharma 2013). Ultimately, the perpetrators dumped the victims naked and bleeding on the side of the road and attempted to run them over. Jyoti Singh died a few weeks later from massive internal injuries; her friend survived.
On the one hand, Indian democracy has been consistently rated as a successful, consolidated democracy. In addition, Indian democracy has embedded gender equality into its political institutions since the creation of its modern constitution. On the other hand, gendered violence in India has the practical consequence of cutting off women’s access to the public spaces required to support that democracy. Jyoti Singh’s brutal murder brings a hidden picture of gendered violence—from physical assault to economic and emotional violence—into a very public light (chapters 2 and 3). Despite constitutional guarantees of women’s formal equality, Indian women’s lived experience reveals a more complicated picture, where experiences of citizenship are plagued with everyday discrimination, exclusion, and violence in the private and public spheres.
This horrific event sparked a national debate within the institutions of Indian government and among its citizens that highlights a tragic contradiction within Indian democracy—one that gravely affects its institutions and ultimately puts its citizens at risk. It begs the question, why do we find pervasive gender-based discrimination, exclusion, and violence in India when the Indian constitution builds an inclusive democracy committed to gender and caste equality? Jyoti Singh’s violent murder illustrates the contradictory nature of Indian democracy—the promise of radical equality and the tragic failure to attain this equality. Jyoti Singh’s brutal gang rape demonstrates that even though all citizens may be accorded equal standing in the constitution of a liberal democracy, such a legal provision hardly guarantees state protections against discrimination, exclusion, and violence.
The book, Gendered Citizenship, argues that conventional understandings of citizenship and democracy cannot adequately explain pervasive gendered violence in both public and private space and instead see it as a bizarre anomaly, insolvable paradox, or intractable problem. Most democratization scholars study gender equality by studying onedimensional indicators of gender inclusion, such as the number of women in elected national legislatures or gender equality clauses in constitutions. According to Aili Mari Tripp (2013, 514), “This bias in the literature limit[s] a fuller understanding of the relationship between regime type
and women’s status.” Tripp (2013, 514–515) calls for more sophisticated and robust measurements of democratic representation and participation concerned with “gender inequalities across a wide range of outcomes beyond formal representation.” I respond to Tripp’s call by analyzing multiple dimensions and domains of democratic inclusion and participation.
This book weaves an analysis of the 2012 gang rape and the subsequent political and legal debates with ethnographic data with members of the Sikh community to explain women’s unequal experience of democracy in multiple domains—state, civil society, religious community, and home. These two analyses are linked together in a single study because in their linking they call attention to the dangers that lurk in every case of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), from its most extreme and horrific expression to the more commonplace repressions of daily life. I by no means seek to flatten the extreme difference between these iterations of SGBV—between the unimaginable and the indignities of a more mundane experience. But I want to highlight the similar logics and perspectives at play along the entirety of the spectrum. I also want to highlight how these logics cause women’s lives to be at risk in all spheres of life.
At its core, the book sheds light on a paradox in the lived experience of Indian democracy and, in so doing, highlights a serious shortcoming in traditional scholarship. I ask why women’s lives are potentially at fatal risk in the everyday sites of public participation and in the private space of the home, when Indian democratic institutions are nominally inclusive in terms of gender equity.4 Addressing this question reveals a theoretical and methodological blind spot in some political science scholarship—a blind spot that results in the reproduction of gender blindness and the legitimization of gendered violence.5
The book proposes situated citizenship as a general theoretical and methodological framework to understand the contradictory nature of democracy in any context and then applies this framework to understand uneven experiences of Indian democracy. Theoretically, situated citizenship captures the fact that citizenship is more than a fixed legal status; it is also a situated social relation. Methodologically, situated citizenship requires that as researchers we be situated within local contexts to
understand citizenship. Through an analysis of lived reality, situated citizenship highlights how citizens understand and experience the promises of formal equality—moving researchers past the supposed impasse at an institutional level and toward an understanding of the mechanisms by which these contradictions are incorporated in daily life. I characterize the experience of this contradiction as exclusionary inclusion, whereby contradictions within all spheres of life, from private belief to the institutions of government, reinforce an uneven and unequal democratic experience, but also potentially renegotiate that unevenness and even challenge it.
Situated citizenship as an approach explains how and why subordinated groups experience, negotiate, and resist exclusionary inclusion in multiple domains. A theory of situated citizenship makes citizens’ embodied, lived experience of gender and other intersecting categories of difference central to the analysis, and thus helps explain how and why citizenship has failed its promise of equality. As legal status, situated citizenship requires an analysis of citizens’ access to civil, political, and social rights. As an embodied intersectional social relation, situated citizenship enables an analysis of mediating forces, such as relations of power, and asks how these forces affect citizens’ standing as members and participants in their communities.
This book responds to an important gap in the citizenship literature. According to Ruth Lister, there is an imbalance between theoretical and empirical work on citizenship. Lister (2007, 58) calls for more empirical studies of the “cultural, social and political practices that constitute lived citizenship for different groups of citizens in different national and spatial contexts.” I respond to Lister’s call by developing the framework of situated citizenship, which enables empirical analysis of exclusionary inclusion in different contexts, including subnational, national, and transnational. Exclusionary inclusion refers to a range of practices—legal, institutional, ideological, material, and embodied practices—that cause limited membership in different domains. Exclusionary inclusion allows different entities to minimize their own participation in discrimination and distance themselves from exclusion and violence, while advancing other
interests—majority group domination, religious autonomy, minority rights, family values—over equality. Exclusionary inclusion often operates in a reinforcing fashion across different sites, from the public sphere to the private space of the home, and yet these sites are independent of one another. As a result, scholars cannot assume that social relations are experienced uniformly across these different domains. In fact, this is an open empirical question.
While situated citizenship and exclusionary inclusion have implications for studying lived experiences of unequal democracy across a variety of subordinated demographics in different geopolitical locations, this study focuses on gender-based experiences of democratic unevenness in India. Through a situated study of Indian women’s lived experience, I demonstrate how the state and formal, legal equality can operate in undemocratic and exclusionary ways. I also show that religious communities can be a surprising resource for women’s active citizenship, enabling women to both uphold and resist exclusionary inclusion. Situated citizenship provides a more nuanced and detailed understanding of exclusionary inclusion while also identifying potential sources for challenging it.
Through a situated analysis of citizenship, this book maps how the mechanisms of exclusionary inclusion operate in multiple spheres—state, civil society, religious community, and home—to create women’s secondclass citizenship.6 I show how similar gendered norms—such as norms about women’s rights and duties and women’s religiosity—operate in statecitizen relations, in interpersonal relations, in religious relations, and in kinship relations to limit women’s inclusion and participation, to police their behavior and bodies, and to determine their worth and standing. I also show how women negotiate, navigate, and resist exclusionary inclusion in these different domains. A situated analysis of citizenship makes visible the mechanisms of exclusionary inclusion that limit inclusion for some, explains the contradiction between expressed commitment to equality and lived reality of inequality within and between multiple levels of analysis, and asks how these limitations and contradictions impact democratic participation and inclusion for all.
The book contributes to growing literature on the impact of unwritten rules and social norms on public policies and social reforms (Chappell 2014; Raymond et al. 2014; Waylen 2014; Hochstetler and Milkoreit 2014). According to Leigh Raymond and S. Laurel Weldon (2014, 181), “Informal institutions, or the sets of ‘unwritten’ rules . . . frequently cause behavior that is inconsistent with formal laws and policies . . . [yet they] receive relatively little attention from those trying to solve important policy challenges.” I address Raymond and Weldon’s concerns by turning our attention to informal institutions—in particular gendered norms—to understand the seemingly intractable problem of women’s integration into the world’s largest democracy and their pervasive experience of discrimination, exclusion, and violence.
Prevailing academic understandings of the relationship between secular state and religious community in India often assume that state-citizen relations are democratic and religious relations are nondemocratic.7 When it comes to gender, scholars often assume that the liberal democratic state protects women through law as equal citizens, while religious communities subordinate women through traditional practice as unequal members.8 This book upends these assumptions—this analysis finds that religious spaces and practices can be sites for renegotiating the terms of democratic participation, while secular mechanisms designed to include can be sites for exclusion.
This book takes up the project of analyzing gender relations in different sites to provide detailed evidence that challenges long-standing assumptions about key concepts, such as democratic participation, civil society, religious space, and women’s agency. An ethnographic analysis of Sikh women’s lived experience of civil society demonstrates that prevailing understandings of civil society as a space of free, voluntary associations do not always hold true. Similarly, detailed ethnographic evidence about Sikh women’s experience of religious community demonstrates that established assumptions about religious space as hierarchical and oppressive are not always accurate. Likewise, thick ethnographic description of Sikh women’s devotional practices reveals that predominant understandings of
religious women as willing participants in their own subordination are not entirely correct.
Democratization scholarship tends to universalize the experience of Western liberal democracies and apply it to the Third World (Rai 1994; Rudolph 2005; Keating 2007, 2011; Das and Randeria 2014). It has been long assumed that the preconditions for establishing a democratic polity are economic development, high rates of literacy, and ethnic and religious homogeneity. Similarly, it has long been assumed that the preconditions for establishing modern citizenship are low levels of premodern forms of affiliation (i.e., religious, kin, and caste groupings), high levels of affiliation with and loyalty to republic (state and nation), and high levels of voluntary association.
In India, none of these conditions were met. Veena Das and Shalini Randeria (2014, 163) assert that the Indian experience reveals the ethnocentrism of Western political theory itself. Similarly, Aya Ikegame (2012) finds that various forms of citizenship have been systematically subjugated by Eurocentric political theory because strong religious, communal, and kinship ties in non-European societies are treated as antithetical to modern citizenship.9 Christine Keating (2007, 132) argues that Eurocentric modes of theorizing overlook “transformative work being done to recast democracy on more egalitarian and inclusive terms in postcolonial polities.”10 A situated analysis of citizenship makes visible forms of citizenship—in particular religious practices—that remain outside of most theoretical and empirical understandings of citizenship. A situated approach to citizenship also uncovers how some women engage in religious community in unexpected ways to create more egalitarian gender relations. Situated citizenship enables an examination of how the very definitions of civic life are themselves resisted, tested, expanded, and appropriated by citizens on a daily basis as they live.
This study also contributes to a growing literature on women’s agency in devotional organizations across faith communities, which adopts an expanded understanding of agency to challenge false dichotomies of devout women as either empowered or subordinated (Mahmood 2005;
Isin and Ustundag 2008; Bilge 2010; Isin 2011; Ikegame 2012; Singh 2015; Banerjee-Patel and Robinson 2017). According to Saba Mahmood (2005, 14), “The normative political subject of poststructuralist feminist theory often remains a liberatory one, whose agency is conceptualized on the binary model of subordination and subversion. In doing so, this scholarship elides dimensions of human action whose ethical and political status does not map onto the logic of repression and resistance.” I respond to Mahmood’s concerns by focusing attention on interconnected understandings of human and divine agency that operate within multiple meanings of both liberation and submission.
To understand how women’s integration into the world’s largest democracy and their pervasive experience of gendered violence can coexist, I utilize original data based on extended participant observation, sustained immersion, and in-depth, semi-structured interviews with members of the Sikh community. Sikhs are a minority religious community in India. Followers of the Sikh faith often understand their religious community as a space of gender and caste equality. The Sikh case provides insight into the difficulties of achieving gender equality in the world’s most diverse democracy differentiated along gender, caste,11 class, religious,12 linguistic, and tribal13 lines. The Sikh case also illuminates the tensions between state and religious community, between majority and minority religious communities, and between state, community, and gender. Lastly, the Sikh case highlights the contradiction between an ideal of gender equality and the lived experience of inequality, which parallels women’s contradictory experience of belonging vis-à-vis the state.14
This book uses an interpretive research design and analysis that is more concerned with questions about contextuality and meaning-making than questions about generalizability (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow 2012, 47–48). This type of research design aims to produce research findings that are sufficiently contextualized so that scholars can determine the relevance of specific research questions and findings for other research settings (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow 2012). Similarly, this type of research seeks to adequately contextualize research findings so readers can evaluate the trustworthiness, systematicity, and transparency of the research design
and interpretation (Sprague 2005; Hawkesworth 2006a; Schwartz-Shea and Yanow 2012).
While the full range of interpretive methodological approaches can be used to study situated citizenship, this book uses a political ethnographic approach because it requires an awareness of and sensitivity to embodied lived experience, meaning-making processes, and self-reflexivity (chapter 2). Political ethnography relies on immersion to generate detailed evidence and thick description, which can, in turn, open up the possibility of “theoretical vibrancy” and “epistemological innovation” (Schatz 2009) especially as it relates to seemingly insolvable problems. A situated, ethnographic analysis of citizenship explains (1) why it is so difficult to achieve gender equality even when it is constitutionally mandated and protected; and (2) how in the face of exclusionary inclusion some women are able to, albeit in a limited fashion, link the goals of gender equality and minority religious autonomy to create more egalitarian relations and to resist exclusionary inclusion.
Through an interpretive research design, this book explores a continuum of mechanisms used to control women’s bodies, to limit their inclusion and participation in democratic society, and to police their behavior in civil society, community, and home. At one end of the spectrum is violent sexual assault and rape. At the other end of the continuum are gendered norms and informal rules that determine who has access to food, healthcare, education, inheritance, and property rights.15 Violence in the private sphere is inseparable from more visible violence in the public sphere.16 Both public and private forms of gendered violence17 are often used to create women’s exclusionary inclusion in India.18 I adopt R. Amy Elman’s (2013, 237) definition of gender violence as practices that “represent a violent reproduction of gender that specifically functions to enforce and perpetuate female subordination.”19 This definition enables the study of both public and private forms of violence without adopting fixed or homogenous notions of masculinity and femininity.
Lastly, this study contributes to multiple literatures dedicated to explaining and eradicating the causes and consequences of SGBV in the Indian context. Some scholars approach the issue of SGBV in the
Indian context from a postcolonial framework (Sangari and Vaid 1999a; Subramanian 2014), while others deploy a political economy frame (John 1996; Bhavani et al. 2016). Some researchers address the question of gendered violence in India through a legal framework (Menon 1999, 2004; Baxi, Rai, and Ali 2007; Baxi 2014), while others adopt a caste and communal approach (Sarkar 2001; Das 2007). This study underscores the importance of a contextual cultural-religious approach, which can be used to supplement and extend these other approaches to SGBV in India (chapter 2).
OVERVIEW OF THE BOOK: CONTRADICTIONS OF INDIAN DEMOCRACY AND CITIZENSHIP
The remaining chapters examine women’s experiences of democratic unevenness and their negotiation of and resistance against exclusionary inclusion in multiple domains from the intimacy of the home to public political and religious life. Chapter 2 advances a theory and methodology of situated citizenship, which is used in the rest of the book to make visible and intelligible the mechanisms and consequences of exclusionary inclusion.
In developing a framework of situated citizenship, I review democratization and legal studies literatures, identify the major limitations of these literatures, and explain how a theory of situated citizenship overcomes these limitations. Many of these scholars assume that citizenship rights are determined by constitutions and statutes; however, this assumption overlooks the fact that often the localized practices of exclusionary inclusion determine whether women can exercise their formal rights. These scholars also point to the existence of certain laws and statutes to argue that Indian women are full citizens; however, they do not ask if these laws construct the very gendered oppression they seek to eradicate. Lastly, these scholars emphasize the number of women in elected national legislatures or gender equality clauses in constitutions as evidence of gender equality; however, they do not ask if these institutions and laws are experienced in a
biased way. What remains unexamined is the extent to which formal, legal approaches effectively achieve gender equality, engender behavioral and attitudinal changes, and empower women.20
I argue that institutional indicators and formal rights fail to tell the full story—and hide more than they show because through nominal female inclusion these formal institutions often render the mechanisms of exclusionary inclusion invisible. I develop a theory and methodology of situated citizenship to explain how uneven and unequal experiences of citizenship are created, maintained, and challenged in the private and public spheres through concrete face-to-face social practices often compounded by intersecting categories like gender, caste, class, religion, and nation (Glenn 2002, 2; Hawkesworth 2013, 49).
In developing situated citizenship as a theory, I draw on feminist and critical scholars of citizenship, who often follow the Marshallian conception of citizenship because it is a normative vision about equality and an analytic tool for determining inequality (Siim 2013, 758; see also Marshall 1950, 1964; Hall and Held 1990; Held 1991; Lister 1997; Yuval-Davis 1997; Yuval-Davis and Werbner 1999; Glenn 2000, 2002, 2011; Lister et al. 2007; Roy 2014). This literature helps to advance a theory of situated citizenship because it challenges “the assumption that once suffrage was achieved for women, blacks, and other minorities, all citizens became automatically equal subjects” (Yuval-Davis and Werbner 1999, 4). Rather than assuming equality as a starting point, these scholars ask whether citizenship is experienced unequally depending on intersecting forms of difference—age, class, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability (YuvalDavis and Werbner 1999, 4–5).
In advancing situated citizenship as a methodological approach, I draw on feminist and critical approaches to methodology in political science that expand existing methods to include interpretivist approaches, which understand data as cogenerated by the researcher and researched, and knowledge production as political (Shehata 2006; Tickner 2006; Hawkesworth 2006a, 2006b; Pachirat 2009; Schatz 2009; Schwartz-Shea and Yanow 2012; Ackerly and True 2010, 2013; Campbell 2015). This literature is useful in developing a methodology that is sensitive to the lived
experience of power relations because it challenges positivist claims of neutrality and calls for political science to study itself and its research communities as sites of politics (Hawkesworth 2006b; Weldon 2013; Ackerly 2018).
The remaining chapters investigate the gap between expressed commitment to equality and a lived experience of inequality in all spheres of life, from private beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors to the institutions of government. Chapter 3 focuses attention on women’s uneven and unequal experience of the Indian state through an examination of the political and legal debates surrounding the 2012 gang rape. Chapter 3 examines both the progressive political opening and the retrenchment of patriarchal norms following Jyoti Singh’s murder, and argues that this opening and retrenchment are emblematic of the Indian state’s radical promise of equality and its horrific failure to achieve this equality. An analysis of politicians’ responses demonstrates how gendered norms—women’s religiosity and women’s rights and duties—operate in the state, and how these norms are used to exclude women in the name of inclusion. This analysis highlights the difficulty of eradicating gendered violence through legal reform, demonstrates the unpredictability of the political process, and shows how gendered norms operate in the public sphere to undermine and frustrate progressive change.
Chapter 3 also situates the 2012 gang rape in larger debates about the current tensions between state, religious community, and gender. In doing so, chapter 3 draws on and contributes to feminist and critical legal studies, which challenges the assumption that legal institutions and standards can arbitrate social power in an objective, impartial, and neutral fashion. This scholarship sheds light on the contradictory nature of Indian democracy because it demonstrates how legal institutions construct social power, and how the law is constitutive of power relations (West 1988; King 1988; Crenshaw 1989, 1991; Williams 1991; Harris 1990; Matsuda ([1988] 1992; Merry 2000; Gomez 2000, 2008; Menon 1999, 2004; Cramer 2005). I rely on feminist and critical legal scholars to raise the following questions: Can scholars and activists turn to law as a liberatory strategy, when it creates and maintains women’s unequal citizenship? Can researchers, activists,
and political actors eradicate gendered violence given the uneven and contradictory nature of the Indian state and law?
Chapters 4 and 5 uses semi-structured, in-depth interviews with members of the Sikh community to analyze exclusionary inclusion in civil society, religious community, and home. Through an ethnographic examination of interpersonal, religious, and kinship relations, I map how one minority religious community in India both upholds exclusionary inclusion and resists it. These chapters are animated by the following questions: How are dimensions such as religion, ethnicity, caste, and gender implicated in structuring the material circumstances of women’s lives and their experience of citizenship? Are Sikh women full members of their communities? Do Sikh women have the capacity—the civil, political, and social resources—to effectively exercise their citizenship rights? Do Sikh women experience civil society, religious community, or home as a site of liberatory politics? These questions matter because they are central to understanding and transforming exclusionary inclusion. The goal of these chapters is to demonstrate how gender intersects with other identity categories to determine who is most vulnerable to violence, who has actual power to be active as citizens, and who can command democratic participation and action.
Chapters 4 utilizes interview and participant observation data to focus on Sikh women’s lived experience of exclusionary inclusion in civil society and the home. Chapter 4 demonstrates how research participants construct the category of woman in relation to home and marriage, and how they naturalize exclusionary inclusion through the following unwritten and informal rules: (1) women’s rights and duties, (2) public policies, (3) women’s religiosity, (4) women’s purity, and (5) women as perpetual outsiders. A majority of research participants understand gender equality and religious autonomy as competing goals, which makes it more difficult to achieve equality. The ethnographic data reveals that Sikh women do not experience civil society as an uncoerced space of voluntary associational life, and they do not experience the home as a place of safety, security, and respect. Rather they experience exclusionary inclusion in both these spaces.
