For decades, women’s safety in India has been treated like a private problem with public consequences: a daughter warned to “come home early,” a student told to “stay alert,” a working woman advised to “dress carefully,” a survivor asked what she did to “invite” it. The country has learned to speak in the language of caution rather than the language of rights. What often goes unspoken is that this caution rests on a narrow idea of what it means to be a “good” woman—an idea that quietly functions as a social unit of account, against which women’s safety, respectability, and worth are constantly measured. And when outrage erupts—after a brutal assault, after a case that breaks through the wall of everyday violence—it is often followed by a familiar cycle: candlelight, slogans, a burst of enforcement, and then the slow return to normal.
But “normal” has a body count—and it has a paperwork trail. In the most recent official tallies reported to Parliament, recorded “crime against women” cases were 428,278 (2021), 445,256 (2022), and 448,211 (2023)—a scale so vast it risks becoming background noise (Ministry of Home Affairs, 2025). Within those numbers, what stands out is not the horror of public violence, but the persistence of private terror: “cruelty by husband or relatives” remains the single largest category, with 133,676 cases in 2023 (Ministry of Home Affairs, 2025). The state’s own gender compendium underlines the same truth in plainer moral terms: women’s safety is compromised first, and most often, inside the home, where “cruelty by husband and relatives” accounts for roughly one-third of major crimes against women and where a cluster of categories together make up more than 70% of recorded crime (Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation [MoSPI], 2023). These numbers represent the crimes reported to the authorities, but in a nation of silent women, a majority of cases remain silenced.
This violence that never becomes an FIR is even harder to face. Using survey data alongside police statistics, the same compendium notes that the share of ever‑married women aged 18–49 who have experienced emotional, physical, or sexual violence by a husband declined only marginally—from 33.3% (2015–16) to 31.9% (2019–21)—still roughly one in three women living with intimate‑partner violence (MoSPI, 2023). A society cannot police its way out of that. A nation cannot CCTV its way out of that. A state cannot slogan its way out of that.
Still, the numbers demand honesty. Rising recorded cases do not automatically prove rising violence; they can also reflect increased reporting (a claim made by the Ministry of Home Affairs)—driven by awareness, easier access to registration, and shifts in enforcement. A state can congratulate itself for “better reporting” while refusing to confront what the reports are actually saying: that women are not merely unsafe in public spaces—they are systematically harmed in the most intimate ones.
This is where the question becomes more than a data debate. Because women’s safety is not only about what happens to women, it is also about what a society believes women are for. And over the last decade, India’s political common sense has been increasingly shaped by Hindutva—a project that frames national belonging through a majoritarian religious identity and seeks to reorder the social world around that identity. In that worldview, women are rarely treated as full citizens first. Too often, they are cast as symbols: bearers of “culture,” vessels of “honor,” boundary-markers of the community. When women become boundaries, “safety” stops meaning freedom from violence and starts meaning containment—restrictions justified as protection.
The clearest example is the obsessive political energy poured into policing women’s intimacy, especially interfaith relationships. The “love jihad” narrative is not just propaganda; it has become a governing style. Scholars of Hindu nationalist statecraft describe how “love jihad” politics folds gender and intimacy into a conservative regime of control, where women are constituted as “subjects of protection” and the state claims authority to supervise personal choice (Nielsen & Nilsen, 2021). Legal analysis of “love jihad” ordinances makes the same point with sharp precision: the phrase operates as social and political control, limiting women’s free will by treating adult women as if they cannot decide whom to love or whether to convert (Sonkar, 2022). The problem here is the patriarchal logic beneath it: women’s agency is treated as a security threat, and “saving” women becomes an excuse to discipline them.
This discipline spills into streets and screens. Feminist scholarship on the contemporary moment describes a “vigilante” ecosystem where moral policing thrives—an atmosphere in which women who transgress prescribed roles (by protesting, speaking out, loving across boundaries, dressing visibly as themselves) are treated as fair game for public humiliation and punishment (Chigateri & Kundu, 2024). And online, a new front has opened: the production line of misogyny that trains young men to see feminism as a civilizational enemy. Research on the Indian manosphere documents how online misogyny can function as a pedagogy—socializing men into a digital subjectivity aligned with Hindutva politics, steeped in resentment and gender hierarchy. When misogyny becomes a political identity, women’s safety cannot be separated from the ideological climate that licenses contempt.
This is the central contradiction of Hindutva’s safety story: it speaks loudly about “protecting” women, but often in a way that relocates danger onto an externalized enemy—an “outsider,” a “predator,” a communal Other—while downplaying the violence that is statistically most common and socially most tolerated: violence within the private sphere (MoSPI, 2023; Ministry of Home Affairs, 2025). When safety is narrated as protection from the Other, the state can perform toughness without touching patriarchy. It can promise rescue while leaving women trapped in homes, in marriages, in bureaucracies, in courts with endless delays.
And so, “decades of women’s safety” becomes a story of misdirection. The argument is not that patriarchy began recently—it is older than any election cycle, older than any government. The argument is that a majoritarian ideology that treats women as cultural property deepens patriarchy’s grip by making control feel like patriotism. It tells families they are guardians of the nation when they are, in practice, guardians of women’s silence. It tells men they are defenders of honor when they are, too often, perpetrators protected by shame and impunity. It tells women they are safe when they are compliant.
This is also why the usual turn to jobs, opportunity, or “empowerment” can feel beside the point. That discourse assumes a “real world” that comes first—where culture is already settled, women are already legible as subjects, and rights can be exercised as if the main barrier were access. But women encounter politics upstream, long before any job offer: in warnings, reputations, sermons, news cycles, viral clips, and the everyday sense of what will be believed. When a political project succeeds in staging its own version of “Indian tradition” as common sense, economic participation becomes a downstream promise in a world where women’s credibility has already been bargained away.
Women’s safety is easier to politicize when women are not treated as people but as value—as a kind of gold standard for “culture,” a deliberately narrow measure of womanhood that must be guarded, defended, and kept from “contamination” or “theft.” In the Hindutva version of this story, that “value” is narrated as national culture itself—treated as something the ruling project owns, and therefore something women must embody and defend. Feminist theory has a name for this logic: the “traffic in women,” where women are positioned as the medium through which social bonds, status, and legitimacy are organized (Rubin, 1975). But the traffic only works because a particular idea of womanhood is treated as the standard that makes the exchange legible. “Respectable,” “pure,” “protected,” “fallen”—they are the categories that allow families, communities, and political movements to price honor and disgrace. Violence and surveillance do not merely punish women who step out of line; they stabilize what “woman” is allowed to mean, keeping it narrow enough to remain exchangeable. In this frame, violence is not only a private act; it is a kind of enforcement. It disciplines the “currency” when it is perceived as out of circulation, devalued, or circulating in the “wrong” direction. And it is precisely because the currency is symbolic that it can become brutally material: women’s bodies carry the costs of political meanings that men and institutions claim to own.
That’s why the language of “honor,” “purity,” and “protection” functions like a shadow economy: it assigns women a public value that can be accumulated as symbolic capital—something families, communities, and political movements can convert into moral authority (Bourdieu, 1986). Nationalist projects, in particular, rely on women as a kind of infrastructure for belonging: women are cast as biological reproducers of the nation, cultural transmitters, and boundary-markers that distinguish “us” from “them” (Yuval-Davis, 1997). Under that logic, the state does not only promise women safety; it claims the right to manage women’s circulation—who they marry, how they appear, what they symbolize—because controlling women’s agency becomes a way of controlling the nation’s imagined coherence.
In this sense, women-as-currency is not just a metaphor but a political economy. It treats value as something already given—honor, purity, community standing—and “safety” as the policing of how that value circulates. Public claims for freedom, exit, dignity, or justice are pushed aside by a more basic question: does this woman still count as the right kind of woman? That is a form of monetary silencing—substituting the management of symbolic exchange for the provision of real social capacity.
This is also what makes Hindutva’s gender politics feel less like “safety” and more like market regulation: the state and its allied moral economies intervene most aggressively when women’s intimate choices threaten to move across the boundaries that sustain majoritarian identity. The “love jihad” narrative is legible in exactly these terms: it treats interfaith intimacy as a form of illicit transfer—women as community property being “taken”—and it authorizes governance over gender and intimacy as a protective duty (Nielsen & Nilsen, 2021; Sonkar, 2022). Meanwhile, the violence most statistically concentrated in the home becomes normalized as the internal discipline of the exchange itself—part of what Deniz Kandiyoti called the “patriarchal bargain,” where women’s constrained security is purchased through compliance within a system that reserves coercion as enforcement (Kandiyoti, 1988). In other words: when women are treated as cultural currency, the state can perform “protection” against an externalized enemy while leaving intact the ordinary, intimate violence that keeps the currency under control.
If India is serious about women’s safety, the test is simple: does “safety” expand women’s freedom, or does it shrink it? Does it strengthen survivors’ access to justice, or does it strengthen society’s power to supervise women’s choices? Does it confront the violence of the home, or does it distract us with the theater of public protection? The official data already points to where the emergency lives: in households, in marriages, in everyday coercion (MoSPI, 2023; Ministry of Home Affairs, 2025). Any politics that cannot face that reality—any ideology that prefers to police women rather than protect them—will keep India stuck in the same loop, decade after decade: grief, fury, forgetting.
A republic organized around public responsibilities would reverse this logic: it would treat women not as the units being measured but as co-authors of the measures themselves—what safety means, what harm counts, and what institutions are obligated to provide. That means treating media and political rhetoric as public responsibilities too: building institutions and norms that expand what women can say, report, and be believed about—rather than letting “tradition” be monopolized as a weapon of control. It would treat women’s freedom not as a risk to be managed, but as a public standard the state must help build and maintain. Women do not need a nation that guards them as symbols. They need a republic that recognizes them as citizens.
References
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Chigateri, S., & Kundu, S. (2024). Virulent Hindutva, vigilante state: Situating backlash and its implications for women’s rights in India. IDS Bulletin, 55(1), 101–116. doi:10.19088/1968-2024.109
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Ministry of Home Affairs. (2025, December 3). Crimes against women and children (Rajya Sabha Unstarred Question No. 390) [Parliamentary question]. Government of India.
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Sonkar, S. (2022). Policing interfaith marriages: Constitutional infidelity of the love jihad ordinance. Journal of Law and Religion, 37(3), 432–445. doi:10.1017/jlr.2022.37
Yuval-Davis, N. (1997). Gender and nation. SAGE Publications.
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