24. Tweet dated 2 January 2018, https://twitter.com/abhijitmajumder/status/948217152800137216?s=19, accessed 1 January 2019.
25. Tweet dated 3 January 2018, https://twitter.com/abhijitmajumder/status/948448968945512448, accessed on 1 January 2019.
26. The Bhagavad Gita, Twenty-Fifth-Anniversary Edition, translated by Winthrop Sargeant, edited and with a preface by Christopher Key Chapple (State University of New York Press, 2009), p. 192.
27. Ibid, p. 213.
28. Ibid, pp. 708–09. The translator specifies here that where the text refers to ‘one’s own duty’ and the ‘duty of another’, ‘caste duty is meant’.
29. Ibid, pp. 702–705.
30. Arti Dhand, Woman as Fire, Woman as Sage: Sexual Ideology in the Mahabharata (State University of New York Press, 2008), p. 148.
31. Ibid, pp. 184–85.
32. ‘Documentary: Why Do Haryana’s Old and Young Blame Women for Rape?’, The Quint, 1 May 2019.
33. Girija Borker, ‘Safety First: Perceived Risk of Street Harassment and Educational Choices of Women’, Job Market Paper, 3 November 2017, https://girijaborker.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/borker_jmp.pdf, accessed 26 November 2019.
34. Jitender Chattar, ‘“I vowed to punish my wife’s rapists,” says husband of rape survivor’, Hindustan Times, 14 January 2019.
Chapter 2: Organized Crimes against Women’s Freedom
1. Shakti Vahini vs Union of India, 27 March 2018.
2. ‘Dashing hopes, Emboldening khaps—the High Court verdict on the Manoj Babli case’, NewsClick, 18 March 2011.
3. Ibid.
4. S. Anand, ‘Mirchpur: A Dog Story’, Open, 1 May 2010.
5. J. Venkatesan, ‘SC notice to Haryana over Dalit families flight from Mirchpur’, The Hindu, 31 May 2010.
6. ‘SC Directs Magisterial Probe into Mirchpur Dalit Case’, The Indian Express, 5 April 2011.
7. Pragati Ratti, ‘Freedom must have limits too, girls should dress decently to not lure boys, says BJP’s Karnal candidate’, News18, 10 October 2014.
8. ‘Hooda defends Khaps, says they don’t order honour killings’, Business Standard, 5 October 2013.
9. Rajesh Ahuja, ‘Most people happy with functioning of khaps: Hooda’, The Hindu, 9 November 2016.
10. Vishal Joshi and Aurangzeb Naqshbandi, ‘Naveen Jindal, Chautala join hands, lobby for khap panchayats’, Hindustan Times, 11 May 2010.
11. Arvind Kejriwal, Swaraj (Noida: HarperCollins India, 2012), p. 46.
12. Yogendra Yadav, Facebook post dated 31 January 2014, https://www.facebook.com/YogendraYY/posts/601060556629023?__xts__[0]=68.ARAzfTPLgacvJdWu73zIZM0XrdGdj7-NUCC-o9GDC36KowtwedbDkzkVJOWQ_USiHflGd-0pGWYzlPGVvTCPONGk0aZD3dmCTnXUuu-nz7-8zq1eBx9PaTKv0cjIA5f4q5uQ3wwB6TKSWHoiqIAKr2jbelZ, accessed 8 June 2019.
13. Gargi Parsai, ‘Khap panchayats have no legal sanctity, says Yogendra Yadav’, The Hindu, 2 February 2014.
14. ‘An Interview with Jagmati Sangwan’, Sanhati, 17 April 2017.
15. Amit Thorat and Diane Coffey, ‘Still frowning upon intermarriages,’ The Hindu, 3 January 2017.
16. B. Kolappan, ‘Ramadoss consolidates intermediate caste groups against Dalits’, The Hindu, 18 October 2016.
17. ‘“After falling in love, I saw the reality of caste”: E. Ilavarasan’, interview with writer Kavin Malar in the Tamil edition of the India Today magazine, translated by Prakash Venkatesan, Kafila, 5 July 2013.
18. Sowmya Sivakumar, ‘Ilavarasan’s Death Was Definitely “Not a Suicide”, Says Doctor Who Examined Body’, The Wire, 15 March 2017.
19. Ilangovan Rajasekaran, ‘He should have realized his birth-based limitations’, Frontline, 7 August 2015, Volume 32, Issue 15.
20. ‘KJK merges with BJP, G.K. Nagaraj joins party’, The Hindu, 5 September 2017.
21. Tweet by S. Gurumurthy dated 7 August 2014, https://twitter.com/sgurumurthy/status/497625183809593344, accessed 4 January 2019.
22. See Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade, Why Loiter? Women & Risk on Mumbai Streets (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2011), and Mini Dixit, ‘A simultaneous protest in seven cities against hostel rules imposed after December 16, was highly inspiring’, India Today, 17 December 2015.
23. Puthumai Penn, Subramania Bharati, Bharathiar Kavithaigal, People’s Edition (Chennai: Kavitha Publications, 2006). Translated from Tamil by Kavita Krishnan.
24. Ibid.
25. Dionne Bunsha, ‘A serial kidnapper and his “mission”’, Frontline, Volume 23, Issue 25, 16–29 December 2006.
26. ‘The Truth: Gujarat 2002: Babu Bajrangi’, TehelkaTV, posted on YouTube, 25 October 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfnTl_Fwvbo, accessed 8 June 2019.
27. ‘Naroda Patiya riots: BJP MLA Maya Kodnani sentenced to 28 years in jail, Babu Bajrangi life’, The Indian Express, 31 August 2012.
28. ‘Supreme Court Grants Bail to Babu Bajrangi’, The Hindu, 7 March 2019.
29. ‘Operation Juliet: Busting the Bogey of “Love Jihad”’, Cobrapost, 4 October 2015, https://www.cobrapost.com/blog/operation-juliet-busting-the-bogey-of-love-jihad-2/900, accessed 8 June 2019.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. ‘BJP Leader, Activists Disrupt Hindu–Muslim Wedding Celebration in Ghaziabad’, The Wire, 23 December 2017.
34. Harsh Mander, ‘With his multi-faith iftar in Delhi, Ankit Saxena’s father sets an example for these fraught times’, Scroll.in, 7 June 2018.
Chapter 3: Profiles in Courage
1. Neha Dixit, ‘Exposing Love Jehad’, NewsClick, 18 October 2014. A longer version of this story originally appeared in www.aljazeera.com.
2. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1960).
3. Sourodipto Sanyal, ‘Love Jihad in 2014, staid silence now: Zee News’ narrative around the Meerut “gang rape”’, Newslaundry, 16 December 2015.
4. For example, see a tweet dated 17 August 2017 by Times Now, airing a clip from a Times Now show, claiming ‘Kerala’s love jihad victim Athira in a stunning confession, claims that hate preachings were used to brainwash girls #HinduGirlsForISIS’, https://twitter.com/TimesNow/status/898223950978789376?s=19, accessed 8 November 2019. Also see ‘Kerala “love jihad” case: 105 women converted in last one year’, YouTube, airing a Times Now story, 31 August 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmP8-Gnpw8w, accessed 8 November 2019.
5. Anusha Soni, ‘How Supreme Court failed by delaying to restore Hadiya’s marriage’, DailyO, 9 March 2018.
6. ‘SC “Allows” Hadiya, an Adult Woman, to Go to Tamil Nadu for Studies’, The Wire, 27 November 2017.
7. Megha Varier, ‘Hadiya’s Case: What Happened in Court Hall No. 1 of the Supreme Court’, The News Minute, 28 November 2017.
8. Ibid.
9. Puthumai Penn, Subramania Bharati, Bharathiar Kavithaigal, People’s Edition (Chennai: Kavitha Publications, 2006). Translated from Tamil by Kavita Krishnan.
10. Gopika Ajayan and Megha Varier, ‘New tangles in Hadiya row: “Yoga centre” members tortured me to re-convert, she reveals’, The News Minute, 29 November 2017.
11. Megha Varier, ‘Tortured for 22 days: Hindu woman married to Christian exposes Kerala’s “anti-conversion clinic”’, The News Minute, 26 September 2017.
12. ‘Court Can’t Decide Marriage Is Invalid, Hadiya Can Choose Independently, Says SC Judge’, The Wire, 23 January 2018.
13. Kathir Vincent, ‘They Killed My Husband, Saying, “How Dare You Love, You Pallar Son-of-a-Bitch?”’, HuffPost, 15 July 2016.
14. National Family Health Survey 2015–16 (NFHS-4) found that just 41 per cent of Indian women aged between fifteen and forty-nine are allowed to go alone to the market, to the health centre and outside the community (NFHS-4, Table 15.13).
15. Kathir Vincent, ‘They Killed My Husband, Saying, “How Dare You Love, You Pallar Son-of-a-Bitch?”’, HuffPost, 15 July 2016.
16. Ibid.
17. Priyanka Thirumurthy, ‘Living to defy caste: Kausal
ya’s incredible journey since her husband was hacked for “honour”’, The News Minute, 15 March 2017.
18. Mayilvaganan, ‘How a young widow brought her father to book’, The Times of India, 26 December 2017.
19. Kathir Vincent, ‘They Killed My Husband, Saying, “How Dare You Love, You Pallar Son-of-a-Bitch?”’, HuffPost, 15 July 2016. 2016.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Dhrubo Jyoti, ‘India at 70 | “I’m not Afraid”: Husband murdered, Kausalya fights honour killings’, Hindustan Times, 13 August 2017.
26. Kavitha Muralidharan, ‘When Kausalya met Divya: Coming together of 2 women who remind us of the ugliness of caste’, The News Minute, 15 April 2017.
27. P.V. Srividya, ‘TN circular sneaks in parental consent in marriage registration’, The Hindu, 11 March 2018.
28. Prerna Gauba, ‘I can’t believe that Nitish chose someone so weak like Bharti Yadav: Nilam Katara’, Hindustan Times, 17 May 2018.
Chapter 4: ‘Empowering’ Women?
1. Kalpana Sharma, ‘Maneka Gandhi’s suggestion on mandatory sex tests aims to absolve doctors of blame for foeticide’, Scroll.in, 4 February 2016.
2. Margaret Atwood’s novels The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments are set in such a dystopia.
3. Priyanka Kotamraju, ‘No bibi in Bibipur’, The Hindu BusinessLine, 12 September 2014.
4. Ibid.
5. ‘BJP leader promises brides from Bihar for Haryana youths’, The Indian Express, 7 July 2014.
6. Kumkum Sangari, Solid: Liquid: A (Trans)national Reproductive Formation (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2015).
7. Priyanka Bhattacharya, ‘Why “Swachh India” Is the Biggest Women’s Movement at the Moment’, NDTV, 3 March 2017.
8. ‘#EveryWomansRight—An Initiative By Astral Pipes’, YouTube, 21 May 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXCOUQ7ZBko, accessed 9 June 2019.
9. Nikhil Srivastav and Aashish Gupta, ‘Why Using Patriarchal Messaging to Promote Toilets Is a Bad Idea’, The Wire, 7 June 2015
10. https://twitter.com/swachhbharat/status/869437001329782784?lang=gl, image tweeted from @swacchbharat handle, accessed 8 November 2019.
11. ‘UNICEF Total Sanitation TVC 3 DULHAN Featuring Vidya Balan’, YouTube, 6 May 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBKeZmJeoy4, accessed 8 November 2019
12. http://www.communityledtotalsanitation.org/sites/communityledtotalsanitation.org/files/MP_NBA_MARYADA_guidelines.pdf, accessed 9 June 2019.
13. Poster in possession of the writer, accessed through activists in Bihar.
14. Vyas Mohan, ‘Rajasthan Wants Teachers to Make Early Morning Rounds, Click Pics to Check Open Defecation’, HuffPost, 15 July 2016.
15. Angshuman Choudhury and Prannv Dhawan, ‘Impunity for cow vigilantes in BJP’s India threatens the foundational idea of the country’s pluralism’, Firstpost, April 13 2019.
16. Shruti Jain, ‘Dirty Backstory to “Swachch Bharat” Lynching: No Toilets, No Water and the Threat of Eviction’, The Wire, 22 June 2017.
17. Salil Mekaad, ‘Villager forced to clean his feces with hands in Ujjain as part of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan’, The Times of India, 29 December 2016.
18. Rashmi Drolia, ‘Man killed for buying time to build toilet’, The Times of India, 8 October 2016.
19. ‘Bihar: Children Jump into Pond, Saved as Officials Chase Villagers Defecating In Open’, The Bihar Post, 3 August 2017.
20. Liz Chatterjee, ‘Time to acknowledge the dirty truth behind community-led sanitation’, The Guardian, 9 June 2011.
21. Achyut Mishra, ‘“Nudge” is the secret behind success of Modi’s pet projects, says Economic Survey’, The Print, 4 July 2019.
22. ET Online, ‘Modi government had already put Nobel winner’s idea into practice’, The Economic Times, 10 October 2017.
23. Suchitra Vijayan and Arjun Singh Sethi, ‘The Gates Foundation shouldn’t give an award to Narendra Modi’, The Washington Post, 7 September 2019.
24. Diane Coffey, Aashish Gupta, Payal Hathi, Dean Spears, Nikhil Srivastav and Sangita Vyas, ‘Untouchability, Pollution, and Latrine Pits: Understanding Open Defecation in Rural India’, Economic and Political Weekly, Volume 52, Issue 1, 7 January 2017.
25. Ibid.
26. Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade, Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2011).
27. Shilpa Phadke, ‘Better Toilets Won’t Solve India’s Rape Problem: Women Need to Feel Safe in Public, Not Hide in Private’, Al Jazeera, 17 June 2014.
28. Diane Coffey, Aashish Gupta, Payal Hathi, Dean Spears, Nikhil Srivastav, Sangita Vyas, ‘Untouchability, Pollution, and Latrine Pits: Understanding Open Defecation in Rural India’, Economic and Political Weekly, volume 52, issue 1, 7 January 2017.
29. Rukmini S., ‘Just 5% of Indian marriages are inter-caste: survey’, The Hindu, 13 November 2014.
30. English rendering of Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi’s address to the nation from the ramparts of the Red Fort on the 73rd Independence Day—15 August 2019, released by the Prime Minister’s Office, https://www.pib.nic.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1582107, last accessed 14 September 2019.
31. Kavita Krishnan, ‘Chhattisgarh’s Sterilization Horror: Kavita Krishnan on “Women as Wombs”’, Youth Ki Awaaz, 17 November 2014.
32. Soutik Biswas, ‘India’s dark history of sterilisation’, BBC, 14 November 2014.
33. The proceedings of this public hearing are described in detail by the author here: Kavita Krishnan, ‘Mother’s Day 2016: What the State Owes Mothers, Parents and Women’, SabrangIndia, 8 May 2016, https://sabrangindia.in/article/mothers-day-2016-what-state-owes-mothers-parents-and-women; https://protect-eu.mimecast.com/s/ntlmCP7jETNz1mVIjq0jM?domain=sabrang.in.
34. ‘Should We Run Relief Camps? Open Child Producing Centres?’, excerpts from a translation of an audio recording of Narendra Modi’s speech at Becharaji, Gujarat, on 9 September 2002 during his Gujarat Gaurav Yatra, Outlook, 30 September 2002, https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/should-we-run-relief-camps-open-child-producing-centres/217398, accessed 14 September 2019.
35. ‘MP Giriraj Singh blames Muslims as he calls for a law to control population’, posted by The Print, YouTube, 14 July 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnGuY2eFQr8&t=122s, accessed 14 September 2019.
36. ‘Operation Juliet: Busting the Bogey of “Love Jihad”’, Cobrapost, 4 October 2015, https://www.cobrapost.com/blog/operation-juliet-busting-the-bogey-of-love-jihad-2/900, accessed 8 June 2019.
37. Kalpana Wilson, ‘Towards a Radical Re-appropriation: Gender, Development and Neoliberal Feminism’, Development and Change, 2015.
38. Ibid.
39. AP, ‘Hundreds of Suicides in India Linked to Microfinance Organizations’, Business Insider, 24 February 2012.
40. Jinka Nagaraju, ‘MFI agents “forcing” debtors to commit suicide: Study’, The Times of India, 20 October 2010.
41. ‘Young Indians who make a difference’, Rediff News, 27 March 2008.
42. Greg Chen, Stephen Rasmussen, Xavier Reille and Daniel Rozas, ‘Indian Microfinance Goes Public: The SKS Initial Public Offering’, Focus Note 65, Washington, DC: CGAP (Consultative Group to Assist the Poor), 2010.
43. Vikram Akula, A Fistful of Rice: My Unexpected Quest to End Poverty through Profitability (Harvard Business Review Press, 2010).
44. Ibid, p. 76.
45. Ibid, p. 82.
46. Chander Suta Dogra, ‘Why Microfinance is Becoming a Bad Word All Over Again’, The Wire, 15 January 2016.
47. Sathish G.T., ‘Women Struggle to Repay Loans Taken from Microfinance Institutions’, The Hindu, 18 December 2016.https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-karnataka/Women-struggle-to-repay-loans-taken-from-microfinance-institutions/article16898313.ece
48. ‘Women allege coercive loan recovery by microfinance firms’, The Hindu, 6 January 2017.
49. Moi
n Qazi, ‘Why Microfinance Is an Ugly Word in India’s Villages’, DailyO, 16 December 2016.
50. ‘Microfinance has failed in India: Jairam Ramesh’, Hindustan Times, 6 December 2013.
51. Jaya Sharma, Soma K. Parthasarathy and Archana Dwivedi, ‘Examining Self Help Groups: Empowerment, Poverty Alleviation, Education—A Quantitative Study’, Nirantar, New Delhi, 2007.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid.
Chapter 5: Factories as ‘Families’
1. Nita Bhalla, ‘Victoria’s Secret bras a boost for rural indian women’, Reuters, 22 May 2012.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. ‘Understanding the Characteristics of the Sumangali Scheme in Tamil Nadu Textile & Garment Industry and Supply Chain Linkages’, Solidaridad-South and South East Asia Report, 2012, https://www.fairlabor.org/blog/entry/understanding-sumangali-scheme-tamil-nadus-garment-textile-industry, accessed 20 December 2019.
5. Charukesi Ramadurai, ‘Stitching Lingerie Improves Women’s Lives in South India’, The New York Times, 21 May 2012; Sadie Whitelocks, ‘How Victoria’s Secret Bras are Proving a Boost for the Indian Women Who Make Them’, Daily Mail, 25 May 2012; Venkataraghavan Srinivasan, ‘Victoria’s Secret—“Made in Kanchipuram”’, Linkedin.com, 4 April 2016.
6. ‘Flawed Fabrics—The Abuse of Girls and Women Workers in the South Indian Textile Industry’, a report by the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO) and the India Committee of the Netherlands (ICN), 2014.
7. Ibid, p. 6.
8. Ibid, p. 58.
9. Ibid, p. 52.
10. ‘Production of Torture: A Study on Working Conditions Including Work-Place Harassments Facing Women Garment Workers in Bangalore and Other Districts’, People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) Karnataka, NLSIU, Bangalore, Vimochana, Alternative Law Forum (ALF), Concern-IISC, Manthan Law and Garments Mahila Karmikara Munnade, July 2016.
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