Priyanka Reddy, a veterinarian in the Indian city of Hyderabad, was brutally raped and murdered in 2019. Her scooter had a flat tire, and she appealed for help to some men who were nearby, not knowing that they had flattened the tire purposefully to enable a horrific and fatal assault on her. In the aftermath, young people in various urban areas, including Delhi, Bengaluru, and Kolkata, spilled out onto the streets protesting this violence and demanding justice. In 2019, based on a Thomas Reuters survey of 543 international experts on gender issues, India was ranked as the most dangerous country in the world for women.
Priyanka Reddy’s murder, as well as that of Jyoti Singh in 2012 (who also was the victim of a brutal attack), became the catalyst for various episodes of public despair and angry resistance to women’s situation in India. Indeed, based on the recommendations of a committee created in response to Singh’s murder, the Indian government did put in place an anti-rape law (although many scholars, including Natasha Behl, argue that this law ignored many of the substantive changes recommended by the committee). Although these two incidents attracted tremendous domestic and international attention, India’s position as the most dangerous country for women clearly reveals that vast numbers of attacks on women and woman-identified folk in this nation, go unreported and, if reported, are often ignored by the police.
Given this context, serious scholarship on women’s political agency as citizens becomes urgent. Natasha Behl’s new book provides such an analysis. The following question frames her work: How is it possible that in a democratic country wherein women possess many legal rights and have considerable constitutional protections, the lived experience of so many Indian women is marked by violence and discrimination? Locating her work in the considerable feminist scholarship on the gendered nature of citizenship, Behl begins her exploration by drawing on two major concepts: “situated citizenship” and “exclusionary inclusion.” She argues that her work not only provides a theoretical lens that reveals the tensions between legal equality and the unequal lived experiences of Indian women but also attempts to even out a perceived theoretical and empirical imbalance in the citizenship literature.
Situated citizenship assumes that a solely legal discussion of citizenship rights does not capture the uneven lived experience of Indian democracy. By bringing the lives of people who are not at the center of social power structures into focus, it reveals how subordinate groups negotiate contradictions that appear in their daily lives when the legal promise of equality fails to provide any kind of protection. Behl refers to these contradictions as exclusionary inclusion, because they allow citizens to distance themselves from participation in violence and discrimination while supporting other interests—political, religious, social, familial—that obfuscate the inequality and marginalization faced by many subordinate groups. She backs up her analysis by weaving a discussion of the 2012 rape of Jyoti Singh and the legal debates that unfolded in its aftermath with semi-structured interviews of Sikh women focusing on their experiences across multiple domains: religious, social, political, and domestic. Finally, Behl argues that her conversations with Sikh women indicate that religion—which is traditionally seen in binary opposition to secular democracy as being conservative and restricting women’s freedom and equality—actually can provide women strategic opportunities to exercise some leadership and meaningful participation in communal life.
The analysis provided in this book is compelling. The discussion of the Jyoti Singh case and of the legal/political debates that shaped the passing of the 2013 Anti-Rape Law is nuanced, revealing very clearly that Indian politicians cannot visualize radical gender equality but rather are still focused on ideas of chastity and virtue as enduring traits of femininity that must be protected. Thus, although the law did give some legal teeth to rape prosecution, it also had major omissions; for example, the Armed Services Special Provisions Act precludes members of the Indian armed forces from prosecution for sexual assault in civil courts. Behl also argues that the massive outpouring of sympathy for Singh was related to the public misperception of her as an urban middle-class girl assaulted by uneducated goons, while actually she and her attackers shared similar economic and social backgrounds.
It would have been interesting if Behl had pursued the misperception angle and also dug into other reasons for the extraordinary outpouring of sympathy for Jyoti Singh and the large political protests by young people—mainly university students—that swept the nation. In a cultural context in which sexual and gendered violence is reported daily without much public outcry, these large-scale protests were very unusual and an indicator that Indian citizens are quite aware of the hollowness of legal equality promised them. It seems that this political phenomenon could be rooted in more than the misperceived class status of Jyoti Singh. Were there other political protests churning on university campuses that provided the catalyst? Was there a fortuitous coming together of progressive and feminist leadership at this particular juncture? Did a specific image or analysis capture the public imagination? Wrestling with these types of questions would have added depth to this book’s unpacking of the politics of citizenship revealed by the state’s response to the Jyoti Singh rape and murder. However, even without attention to the aforementioned queries, Behl’s discussion is provocative and clear.
In addition to the deft discourse analysis of the legal consequences of the Jyoti Singh case, Behl uses ethnographic data to further refine her discussion of citizenship. Her semi-structured interviews of Sikh men and women, centering on women’s participation in communal living within the context of Sikhism, add a vibrancy to the book’s analysis. These Sikh voices truly underline how ordinary folks can emphasize the formal equality of religion and then strategically use this concept to justify inequality, thereby manifesting Behl’s notion of exclusionary inclusion. These interviews also complicate monolithic ideas of religious spaces as unrelentingly oppressive for women. I enjoyed reading the stories of how many women strategically used religious ideas to leverage a reasonable level of social and cultural prominence in their communities. However, because much of the discussion of how this came about centered on ideas of being a “proper” Sikh woman, who was chaste and virtuous, the liberatory potential of religion in the discourse of citizenship more broadly should not be overstated. In both secular and religious narratives, it is very easy for women to be classified as “unchaste” and therefore outside the protection of the state, as well as religious authorities.
Behl ends her analysis with a textual segment that is still quite unusual, even in feminist work: a reflexive autoethnography. Although in general feminists argue that a researcher’s positionality should be made transparent along with how this positionality shapes research, very few works actually take on such a task in a serious way. Thus, I was pleasantly surprised to encounter such a discussion in this work, which added further nuance to this study of situated citizenship.
In conclusion, Behl has written a thoughtful book on women’s citizenship. Although, with such a small sample size (a limitation of which Behl is aware), it may be difficult to generalize about a complex country such as India, this study provides future scholars with insightful and important observations as a point of departure for further scholarly work on citizenship.
