In May 2025, India launched “Operation Sindoor,” a series of retaliatory missile and air strikes against militant groups in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, which killed 26 people. The Indian government’s naming and public staging of this military action illustrates Hindu nationalists’ skillful use of gendered imagery. Hindu women apply sindhoor (vermilion powder) in the parting of their hair as a marker of marital status and a devotional act both to their husbands and to the goddesses Parvati and Durga. In Hindu mythology, the red color of sindhoor is associated with shakti (female power). By using sindhoor to describe a military strike, the government fused battlefield violence with gendered sacred symbolism. It framed male death as a rupture of domestic sanctity, which turns wives into widows and state retaliation into a means of restoring the honor of men and the nation. A key component of this symbolism was that the state coupled its military action with celebrating women as martial heroes by selecting Colonel Sofiya Qureshi of the Indian Army and Wing Commander Vyomika Singh of the Indian Air Force to provide the official briefing.
What might seem surprising at first glance is that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government would entrust Sofiya Qureshi, a Muslim, with national defense, given its claims that Indian Muslims harbor secret loyalties to Pakistan. On closer reflection, however, the decision implies that Muslims can demonstrate their right to belong in India through overt displays of patriotism, which, as we shall see, is especially significant in light of the government’s amendment of citizenship laws. Hindu nationalists celebrate Sofia Qureshi—secular, educated, professionally accomplished, and modern—while denigrating most Muslim women as stereotypically oppressed, devout, and traditional. The state’s message is clear: Nari shakti (women’s power) offers Muslim women a path to recognition through state defined secularism, nationalism, and military service.
Just months earlier, on January 26, 2025, the Indian government had celebrated India’s 75th Republic Day (commemorating its adoption of a constitution and secular, democratic principles). The government coupled its Hinduized celebration of democracy, Bharat Loktantra ki Matruka (India as the Mother of Democracy) and Viksit Bharat (India’s Economic Growth). The parade comprised armed all-women contingents in full military regalia from the army, navy, air force, and police, marching down a boulevard the British called Rajpath (King’s Way) and the present Indian government has renamed Kartavya Path (the Path of Duty) in the national capital, New Delhi. The parade associated nari shakti with the government’s increased recruitment of women into the armed forces.
We might mistakenly assume that Hindu nationalists are religious fundamentalists and old-fashioned patriarchs, but this would mischaracterize their approach to gaining and maintaining power. Rather they seek to demonstrate their modern values by selectively supporting women’s rights and secular principles while affirming what they see as core Hindu values. The term nari shakti, which is rooted in Sanskrit and Hindu cosmology, fuses biological womanhood (nārī) with the divine feminine power (shakti) of goddesses like Durga, Parvati, Lakshmi, and Kali. Since the late 19th century, nationalists have depicted India as a divine motherland or, more precisely, Bharat Mata (Mother Goddess.)Footnote 1 The deification of the pure, perfect mother reinforces patriarchal and upper caste ideals, marginalizes religious minorities, and mobilizes Hindus through powerful emotional appeals.
However, Hindu nationalism (also termed Hindutva) employs the concept of nari shakti in multiple, seemingly contradictory ways. Although it deifies motherhood (matru shakti), its most powerful women leaders are full time, unmarried, childless activists who are figurative mothers to the nation. Far from being passive and subservient, these activists challenge gender norms through their militancy and political ambition. Although the BJP depicts nari shakti as a project of liberating Muslim women from religious customary law, its governments, particularly in the state of Uttar Pradesh, have been custodians of Hindu social norms, permitting vigilante groups to violently police Westernized Hindu women. Its “love jihad” campaigns harass and forcibly separate interfaith couples, refusing to believe that their relations are consensual.
My paper examines how, why, and with what consequences Hindu nationalists have made nari shakti central to their political agenda. Who is appropriating from whom: Hindu nationalists from secular feminists or vice versa? What does Hindu nationalist appropriation reveal about the elasticity of religious nationalism and conversely, the constraints on secular feminism? Do all forms of appropriation undermine feminism? At first glance, Hindu nationalists appear to be solely responsible for appropriating feminist demands. On closer inspection, however, the question is more complicated. Hindu nationalists and feminists were both committed to liberal legal universal women’s rights quite independently of each other. Feminists have at times appropriated Hindu nationalists’ religious symbols. The clearest case of Hindu nationalist appropriation has been since the BJP attained national power in 2014.
I analyze three different sites of contestation around appropriation. The first section argues that both secular feminists and Hindu nationalists have historically supported secular civil rights on questions concerning the family. Neither one has appropriated the other. In fact, the BJP and its predecessor, the Jan Sangh, are the political parties that have most consistently supported the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) in place of the current system of religious laws on matters governing the family. Feminists dropped this demand to avoid lending support to ethnic majoritarianism. Thus, the BJP can combine secular demands with religious appeals to nari shakti whereas feminists have felt forced to choose between support for individual rights and minority rights.
As I argue in the second part of this paper, both secular feminists and Hindu nationalists have drawn on religious idioms to mobilize women. At the height of the autonomous women’s movement in the 1970s, feminists sometimes deployed religious symbols—which in turn provoked Hindu nationalists to use them even more. In this sense, feminism appropriated elements of nationalism, which led Hindu nationalists to appropriate feminism. However, the feminist slogans Hindu nationalists appropriated were rooted in 19th-century religious nationalist traditions. More significant are the consequences of this appropriation, which have benefited Hindu nationalists at the expense of feminists.
There is, however, a further twist to this story. Hindu nationalism has given rise to militant female ascetics who have appropriated nari shakti to seek freedom in their personal lives and power in the public sphere. Although their ambitions have been constrained by the terms the movement sets, they have sought to use nari shakti to achieve their own empowerment.
In the third part of the paper, I describe the most important instance of Hindu nationalist appropriation and redefinition of feminism. It concerns the way the BJP government since 2014 has branded major policies and programs as reflecting its commitment to nari shakti. Some of these programs align with longstanding feminist demands and goals, while others reflect and promote essentialist and exclusionary views of women. This state defined conception of women’s empowerment has pre-empted large scale feminist opposition. After evaluating state sponsored nari shakti, I reflect on the forms of resistance to Hindu nationalism that its appropriation invites and forecloses.
In the fourth section, I examine a protest movement against the government’s amendment of citizenship laws, which resisted state and Hindu nationalist appropriation. Muslim women organized this protest and thereby challenged Hindutva depictions of them as subjugated, Muslim men as tyrannical, and the entire community as antinational. Their slogans, songs, poetry, readings from the Constitution, hoisting of the Indian flag, recitations of the national anthem, and creation of communal kitchens embodied their commitments to pluralist democracy and inclusive nationalism.
1. Universal legal rights
A key dilemma—what the historian Mrinalini Sinha describes as a constitutive divide within colonial-era feminism—has enduring implications for liberal feminists in contemporary India.Footnote 2 Feminist demands for women’s rights risked echoing colonial claims that Indian society, and religion in particular, oppressed women. Yet failing to press for reforms—such as raising the age of consent for marriage—meant sacrificing women’s rights. This tension became apparent after the publication of Katherine Mayo’s Mother India, whose critique of Indian society for oppressing women cast a long shadow over subsequent debates on secular versus religious law. This moment also reveals a foundational problem concerning liberalism: The language of universal rights is entangled with projects of domination—colonial in the past and majoritarian in the present.
By way of background in India, the British colonial state linked religious law to community identity by codifying religious personal law in the 1930s. The Indian Constitution envisioned a single, secular legal framework governing family life. However, the Congress government retreated from creating it in face of opposition from conservative religious leaders, especially within the Muslim community. Demands for the passage of a UCC became dormant until 1985 when Shah Bano, an elderly Muslim woman, filed claims for alimony from the man who divorced her. The Supreme Court granted her alimony based on a provision of secular criminal law and the judge made disparaging comments about Muslim law. To assuage outraged, conservative Muslim leaders, the Congress government overrode the decision and passed a law that severely limited divorced Muslim wives’ rights to maintenance. The BJP revived its earlier demand to adopt a UCC and launched a massive campaign against the Congress party for appeasing Muslims.
Once the BJP attacked Muslims, many Muslim women—including Shah Bano herself—dropped their demand for a UCC, fearing that doing so would further stigmatize their religion.Footnote 3 Muslim women faced an agonizing dilemma: whether to demandrights as women at the risk of deepening internal divisions and reinforcing anti-Muslim sentiment or defend group rights at the expense of their individual rights. In solidarity, largely Hindu but secular feminist groups supported more consultative, community-based reform strategies in favor of top-down liberal legalism.
Years later, the BJP claimed a victory for Muslim women in the name of nari shakti. In 2019, the BJP government made triple talaq, which allows Muslim husbands to divorce their wives instantaneously, a criminal offense for which a husband could be imprisoned for up to three years. Feminists had in the past opposed triple talaq and supported the case going to the Supreme Court (which subsequently declared that it was unconstitutional). However, they criticized the BJP for including a punitive criminalization clause of the law and distanced themselves from its Hindu majoritarian stance.
The question of who was engaging in appropriation is complex because both the BJP and feminists had consistently supported a UCC prior to the Shah Bano case. Feminists demanded that secular civil laws should replace religious personal law in the pre-Independence era and continued to do so in the early 1980s. The BJP and even its predecessor the Jan Sangh claimed that a single set of laws were necessary to a unified national identity. However, after the Shah Bano case, the BJP stepped up its demand for the UCC and made opposition to Muslim law a key part of its strategy to defeat the Congress party. Feminists recognized that continued advocacy of the UCC was not only strategically unwise but also contradicted their commitment to pluralism and intersectional feminism.
Like its colonial predecessor, the Indian state protected minority identities primarily through the recognition of religious difference, concretely through the preservation of religious personal laws. The state’s equation of minority rights with the protection of religious personal law limited space for alternative imaginaries of minority rights. At multiple junctures—most notably in 1985 and 2019—Indian feminists felt compelled to choose between defending minority rights and advancing gender justice. Defending women’s rights through a universal legal framework risked aligning with majoritarian politics, while defending minority rights meant accepting gender-unequal personal laws. In contrast, no such contradiction existed for the BJP, which could simultaneously endorse secular legal reform and advance an exclusionary ethnonationalist agenda. By positioning itself as the defender of Muslim women, it reinforced negative portrayals of Islam—ironically echoing earlier colonial critiques that framed certain religious practices as uniquely oppressive to women. The broader implication is that liberalism cannot be understood simply as a neutral framework of rights. In practice, it is historically embedded, politically contested, and vulnerable to appropriation.
2. Agency and activism
A vibrant, vigorous feminist movement which emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s sought to resist appropriation by insisting on autonomy from political parties and the state. It organized street-level protests to expose families who had engaged in dowry-related murders, police who had raped women in custody, and doctors who had performed amniocentesis for sex selection. Rather than confining itself to political lobbying, it engaged in cultural activism through the media, arts, and street theater.
Some feminists sought to make their activism culturally resonant by drawing inspiration from powerful female deities. The country’s first feminist publishing house, Kali for Women, for instance, took its name from the fierce and transgressive goddess Kali—a symbol of destruction, renewal, and untamed female energy. Similarly, the Saheli Women’s Resource Centre invoked religious iconography in its campaigns, reimagining divine figures as symbols of resistance rather than submission. One widely circulated poster depicted a many-armed Durga, holding pots, pans and other domestic implements in her hands while waging a struggle against patriarchy. Feminists also invoked nari shakti in Hindi pamphlets and at rallies. Protesters in Delhi and Lucknow, for instance, shouted slogans like “Hamari maang hai ek—nari shakti, ekta ek!” (Our demand is one—women’s unity, women’s power!) and “Nari shakti zindabad!” (Long live women’s power!)
Through such visual and symbolic interventions, Indian feminists hijacked and reinterpreted nari shakti from a spiritual force associated with divine femininity into a powerful critique of gendered violence, social hierarchies, and state impunity. In doing so, they sought to make feminism resonate with local cultural idioms. However, Hindu nationalists reappropriated these symbols of Durga, Kali, and Bharat Mata in their speeches, publications, posters, and other publicity materials, leading feminists to stop using religious iconography and rhetoric. When Kali for Women dissolved, the two feminist publishing houses which emerged in its place were Women Unlimited and Zubaan (meaning language or voice). Saheli ceased to depict women as goddesses and instead called for nari mukti (women’s liberation) to emphasize political struggle over divine power.
The BJP’s appropriation of feminist religious imagery addressed a longstanding dilemma. From its founding in 1980 for nearly a decade, it was a marginal political force, constrained by its narrow social base and a lack of a clear political agenda. Its subsequent expansion, relative to that of the feminist movement, rested on its engaging in mass mobilization in which women and gendered religious imagery played key roles. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the founding umbrella organization of Hindu nationalists, created a women’s wing, the Rashtriya Sevika Samiti, and the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) or World Hindu Council which in turn created a women’s organization, the Durga Vahini (Durga’s Army or Brigade), in 1984.Footnote 4 Durga was an embodiment of nari shakti, or divine female strength and righteous aggression, and its brigade mobilized women to protect Bharat Mata. One of its slogans was, “Nari shakti jagao, rashtra bachao” (Awaken women’s power, save the nation). It organized training camps for women which taught them physical exercise, martial arts, and how to use firearms, and cultivated their loyalty to the Hindu nation. Organizationally distinctive but equally militant in service of Hindu nationalism was the women’s wing of the Shiv Sena in Mumbai. These organizations mobilized women to participate in processions from across the country to the northern Indian town of Ayodhya to avenge the wrongs they claimed Hindus had suffered when a 16th-century Muslim ruler built a mosque, the Babri Masjid, on what they claimed was the birthplace of Lord Ram. The movement they planned over several years culminated in their destroying the Babri Masjid amidst large-scale violence in December 1992.
Hindutva forces drew on the leadership of sadhvis (female ascetics) in the Ayodhya movement. They delivered fiery public speeches that drew on religious texts and mythologies to denounce Muslims and the political class. They embodied both female vulnerability—which enabled them to speak on behalf of the supposedly victimized Hindu majority—and female religious power—which enabled them to demean Hindu men for being cowardly and Muslim men for being sexual aggressors.Footnote 5 They appealed to angry Hindu men and devout Hindu women.
Hindutva activism enabled sadhvis to pursue their ambitions without having to marry or become financially dependent on fathers, husbands, or sons. A few of them achieved power in the BJP government as a result of their activism. Uma Bharti, for example, was elected multiple times to the state legislative assembly and became a chief minister and a cabinet minister in the first Modi-led BJP government (2014–2019). Bharti inspired a generation of Hindu nationalist women activists. She charted a path for women who lacked access to institutional power to gain voice and visibility. Bharti’s rise was particularly remarkable because she was outspoken in opposing the BJP’s misogyny. Her ascetic authority allowed her to transgress norms of feminine modesty and respectability, although male dominance and the movement’s majoritarian ethos ultimately circumscribed her power.
The question of whether feminists or Hindu nationalists first appropriated symbols of Hindu female deities is complicated. Although nationalists initially drew on mother goddess imagery in the late 19th century, it was only after feminists appropriated Durga and Kali that Hindu nationalists redeployed them to achieve electoral gain amidst the Ayodhya campaign. Both groups mobilized religious symbols, but the BJP did so more consistently, systematically, and effectively. Once Hindu nationalists appropriated symbols of Durga, Kali, and Bharat Mata in their speeches, publications, and posters, feminists recognized the dangers of doing so. However, women ascetics reappropriated nari shakti not only to support Hindu nationalists but also to pursue their own ambitions.
3. State appropriation
The Modi government’s appropriation of feminism had precedents in the 1950s. After Independence, anticolonial feminists formed national political organizations like the All India Women’s Conference, the National Conference of Women in India, and the Women’s India Federation, which sought women’s leadership, suffrage, and legal rights. Their close ties to post-Independence leaders enabled them to influence the Indian Constitution, which enshrined formal gender equality, alongside rights to education, employment, and political participation. Although these organizations became politically powerful, the state appropriated them because they shared its goals and depended on its financial support.
The BJP government which achieved power in 2014 claimed credit for reforms that feminists had demanded for decades but never collaborated with feminist organizations. A good example was what the government described as its greatest achievement for nari shakti: the September 2023 passage of the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam—which reserves 33 percent of seats in parliament and state legislative assemblies for women. The Bill’s passage broke a legislative impasse dating back to 1996. As the ruling party, the BJP controlled the legislative agenda, convened a special parliamentary session to debate the Bill, and secured Cabinet approval. It passed almost unanimously in both Houses of Parliament.
The Women’s Reservation Bill had long been a feminist demand. Although, as feminists note, it fails to address the barriers to Muslim and lower-caste representation, it is a major step toward rectifying the serious underrepresentation of women in national legislatures and could well lead to increased women’s substantive representation. Evidence from women’s reserved seats in panchayats (municipal councils) suggests that once women become a critical mass, they influence policy priorities and spending on health, education, childcare, and social welfare.
The government transformed the demand for women’s political representation into a ritualized celebration of Hindu womanhood. Parliament passed the Women’s Reservation Bill during the Hindu festival of Ganesh Chaturthi and officially named it Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam. The term Vandan, meaning “salutation,” evokes devotional reverence, signaling the state’s religious signification of its legal and political apparatus.
The Women’s Reservation Bill has yet to be implemented, but meanwhile, the BJP’s record on women’s political representation remains far weaker than its rhetoric suggests. Only 15 percent of its parliamentary candidates in the 2024 elections were women, an increase from 12 percent in 2019 but still far short of the 33 percent quota the BJP publicly endorses. The 2019 cabinet included 11 women ministers; by 2024 that number had dropped to 7, only 2 of whom held cabinet-rank portfolios. The BJP’s appointment of Draupadi Murmu, a Santhal tribal woman from a modest background, as the President of India was symbolically significant, but her ceremonial role underscores the limits of such gestures.
To a far greater extent than any previous government, the BJP has made women’s empowerment the central focus of its welfare and development programs. The National Commission for Women has incorporated nari shakti into its campaigns and policy documents. Key government programs include Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (Save the Daughter, Educate the Daughter), which promotes girls’ education to improve the sex ratio; Ujjwala Yojana, which provides clean cooking fuel to rural women to reduce health hazards from toxic smoke; Nari Sashakti Parivar (Healthy Woman, Strong Family), which supports women’s health and well-being; and Mission Shakti, a program with two components—Sambhal, focused on women’s safety and security, and Samarthya, aimed at women’s empowerment and welfare.
The Modi government has recognized what previous governments ignored: health hazards associated with cooking on kerosene stoves as well as the importance of attending to women’s dignity by creating public toilets. Even though the government has spent far more on promotion and publicity than on implementation, the government’s nari shakti-branded welfare initiatives have increased women’s electoral support for the BJP.
Government leaders continually extol nari shakti in their speeches. In her first joint address to both Houses of Parliament after becoming President in 2022, Draupadi Murmu drew connections between a poem titled “Nari -Shakti , ” written a century earlier, and the BJP’s commitment to women’s empowerment. Home Minister Amit Shah frequently referenced nari shakti in his speeches and social media posts—for example, on June 8, 2025, he tweeted: “Empowered women are the foundation of a self-reliant India… In #11YearsOfSashaktNari the Modi government has given a new boost…” Prime Minister Modi likewise invoked nari shakti multiple times each year in his domestic and international speeches, social media posts, election rallies, and radio program, Mann Ki Baat. He used the term to celebrate women’s achievements in science, medicine, sports, and the armed forces, as well as to highlight flagship welfare and development programs. A notable high point was when the government presented the Nari Shakti Puraskar (Women Power Award) on International Women’s Day, March 8, 2018.
By associating itself so closely with the term, the government implied that it was responsible for every progressive court judgment and policy benefiting women and LGBTQ+ people. A telling example was in 2018, when Oxford Dictionaries announced that nari shakti was the Hindi Word of the Year, noting that it “encapsulated the spirit of empowerment of women in India” after a year marked by “historic judgments, major campaigns, and unprecedented public debate about women’s rights and gender equality.” The BJP government implied that the Oxford Dictionaries selection was a direct result of its achievements. In fact, 2018 was a landmark year for feminism and LGBTQ activists but the BJP’s record was mixed. That year an actress, Tanushree Dutta sparked India’s #MeToo movement and the Supreme Court issued two landmark rulings: lifting the ban on women’s entry into the Hindu Sabarimala temple and decriminalizing same-sex relations. Many Hindu nationalists opposed #MeToo as well as both court judgments. 2018 was also the year 7 men, some of whom were BJP members, gang-raped and killed an 8-year-old Muslim girl in Kashmir. When 6 of the accused men were convicted, BJP leaders in Kashmir held protests opposing the verdict.
The BJP government celebrates some forms of nari shakti, like women’s military service, which are antithetical to feminism. Other policies and legislation for which it is responsible, like banning triple talaq, pit women’s rights against the well-being of the minority community. The BJP has used the term nari shakti selectively to honor certain women while ignoring or denigrating peaceful protests by victims of sexual abuse when the culprits are party or government leaders. Despite its proclaimed pride in women’s sports, the BJP failed to support women athletes who bravely protested sexual assault. In January 2023, women wrestlers organized a sit-in in New Delhi demanding the dissolution of the Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) executive committee and the arrest of its president, a BJP Member of Parliament whom they accused of sexual harassment. When the protesters marched peacefully to Parliament, the police beat and arrested them. A court order resulted in the WFI president’s resignation and the Indian Olympic Association dissolved the WFI’s executive body.
The BJP has also been notably silent about nari shakti when Dalit women have protested rape by upper caste men. For example, four upper-caste men brutally raped a 19-year-old Dalit woman in Hathras district, Uttar Pradesh, in September 2020. Dalit feminists emphasized that what happened in Hathras was not an isolated case. It exemplified the systemic collusion of state officials in protecting dominant-caste perpetrators of sexual violence by disposing of incriminating evidence, intimidating victims’ families, and refusing to take Dalit women’s testimony. Dalit feminists exposed how the BJP’s nari shakti rhetoric celebrates women’s empowerment while ignoring entrenched inequalities which make them vulnerable to violence.
The BJP’s nari shakti project reveals how majoritarian politics can absorb feminist vocabularies in a way that retains their emancipatory appearance while hollowing them out from within. By translating shakti—the divine feminine principle—into a register of state power, the BJP has recast empowerment as loyalty and devotion to the nation. It has rewarded women’s participation in the nation’s service while silencing those who contest its exclusions. This transformation is neither accidental nor merely rhetorical. The party’s selective invocation of nari shakti —to celebrate women soldiers and the criminalization of triple talaq but not Dalit women’s struggles or Muslim women’s citizenship claims—reinforces rather than dismantles caste and ethnic hierarchies.
Although the BJP seeks to demonstrate its commitment to women’s rights, its affiliated civil society organizations have engaged in violent attacks against women who stray from patriarchal, upper caste Hindu dictates. They have attacked women who go to bars without men as well as couples who display romantic attachments. The BJP government has promoted its commitment to women’s welfare and development but blocked foreign funding for NGOs which work with the most vulnerable women. It has upheld secular law to disparage the Muslim community but hollowed out secularism by making religion a criterion for attaining Indian citizenship.
4. Beyond appropriation
The growth of Hindu nationalism has led to a decline of the feminist movement. However, Muslim and Dalit women have become increasingly active in defending their rights. The hallmark of Muslim women’s activism was a peaceful protest at Shaheen Bagh in New Delhi to oppose the government’s passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). The sit-in began on December 14, 2019, and continued for 101 days through the bitter winter until the government forcibly cleared the site and arrested several of its leaders. As striking as the protest’s duration was its exuberant affirmation of inclusive nationalism and citizenship. The women recited the national anthem at midnight on New Year’s Eve, hoisted the Indian flag on Republic Day, invited Prime Minister Narendra Modi to “celebrate the festival of love together” on Valentine’s Day, and continually read aloud passages from the Constitution.Footnote 6
The women were protesting the CAA, the culmination of a series of steps the BJP government had taken to consolidate Hindu dominance and Muslim marginalization. The Act offers an accelerated path to citizenship for Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, and Christian immigrants who arrived in India before December 31, 2014, from neighboring Muslim-majority countries—pointedly excluding Muslims from its provisions. Soon after, the Cabinet approved the creation of a National Population Register (NPR) to document all Indian residents, citizens, and noncitizens alike. By requiring disclosure of parents’ birthplaces, the NPR implies that Indian lineage is the true basis of citizenship. Together with a proposed National Register of Citizens, the CAA empowers the state to revoke the citizenship of anyone unable to produce sufficient documentation, effectively disenfranchising Muslims while granting an expedited legal path to citizenship for non-Muslims.
The Shaheen Bagh protesters, in stark contrast to Hindu nationalist invocations of nari shakti, drew on inclusive, cultural, and religious idioms. They recited poetry and slogans that linked their struggle to those of other oppressed groups across time and space. Among the most popular were an Urdu poem and slogan that originated in Pakistan during the late 1970s in opposition to the military dictatorship of Zia ul-Haq. The Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz wrote the renowned poem “Hum Dekhenge,” which reinterprets religious doctrine to resist oppression. Drawing on the Islamic belief that people would be held accountable and rewarded on the Day of Judgment, the poem describes a “day of reckoning,” when the oppressed would punish tyrants and be vindicated. By reciting “Hum Dekhenge,” protesters implicitly drew parallels between the authoritarianism of the martial law regime in Pakistan and the BJP government in India as well as struggles for justice in both countries. Another widely used Urdu slogan was “Meri behne mange azaadi/Hai haq hamara, azaadi/Hum leke rahenge, azaadi” (My sisters demand freedom; freedom is our right; we will claim freedom, come what may), which also originated in Pakistan during the same period. Over time, diverse groups have adapted it to their struggles: feminists to call for women’s liberation, Dalit activists for freedom from caste oppression, and Kashmiris for political autonomy.
5. Final Thoughts
This paper has traced the transformation of nari shakti from a tool for political mobilization to a language of state power, to show that Hindutva’s political success lies partly in its capacity to appropriate feminist demands, reinterpret them through a majoritarian lens, and selectively institutionalize them within an exclusionary vision of the nation. The BJP has fused liberal rhetoric around women’s empowerment, legal equality, and development with religious symbolism, militarized nationalism, and ethnic majoritarianism, transforming nari shakti into a flexible political vocabulary capable of simultaneously legitimizing welfare provisions and coercive state power.
The history described here resists any simple narrative of unidirectional appropriation. Despite the incompatibility of their political projects, secular feminists and Hindu nationalists have sometimes used similar vocabularies, particularly around universal legal rights. Feminists at times deployed religious imagery to make their activism culturally resonant; Hindu nationalists then redeployed them more systematically through mass mobilization for electoral ends. However, the consequences of appropriation have been deeply asymmetrical. Hindu nationalism’s growing dominance compelled feminists to abandon religious idioms and retreat from universalist legal demands such as the UCC for fear of strengthening majoritarian politics. The BJP, in contrast, has occupied the ground feminists vacated by championing secular legal reform while simultaneously stigmatizing minorities in the name of protecting women.
Women’s agency and activism have assumed diverse forms. Female Hindu nationalist leaders have used nari shakti to claim forms of authority, visibility, and autonomy which would otherwise be unavailable to them. However, such empowerment is strictly conditional on their loyalty to the party, nation, and state. The protests against the CAA at Shaheen Bagh demonstrate a different kind of agency and activism in which Muslim women resisted both state and nationalist appropriation. They reclaimed public space, constitutional symbolism, and religious idioms without subordinating any of these to exclusionary nationalism—exposing the limits of the BJP’s monopoly on women’s empowerment and national identity.
The relevance of this study beyond the context of India should be clear. As Reference McClintockAnne McClintock famously observed, all nationalisms are gendered. They position women as symbolic bearers of nationalism—mothers of the community, guardians of cultural tradition, and reproducers of the nation—while reserving political authority and full citizenship for men. Nationalists appropriate feminism by treating women as cultural repositories. They depict women’s leadership, legal rights, and electoral participation as markers of the nation’s morality and modernity. However, if nationalism ultimately reinforces patriarchal hierarchies, it is not simply antithetical to feminism. Across diverse historical and political contexts, nationalist movements have encouraged women’s activism and promoted women’s legal and political rights.
Populism is also gendered, for example, in the ways it differentiates between “the pure people” and “corrupt elites.” The classic prototype of the strongman populist is aggressive and masculine; ironically, this is also the prototype of immigrant and minority men. The corollary is that right-wing populists depict women, especially Muslim women immigrants and minorities as passive, oppressed, and in need of saving from men in their community. They defend LGBTQ rights to justify anti-immigrant policies, border securitization, and restricted citizenship rights. The Erdoğan government in Turkey celebrates female soldiers and police officers as symbols of national unity while criminalizing Kurdish women’s movements. Israel invokes its commitment to gender equality and women’s military service to deflect attention from the Occupation. The United States justifiedi invading Afghanistan as a mission to liberate Afghan women. Populists mask their majoritarianism through claims of secularism, universalism, and civilizational superiority.
Clearly such appropriation does not translate into substantive gains for women. If a small number of women achieve increased political power because they embody dominant ethnic, religious, or familial ideals, they do so at the expense of other women. Nationalism and populism absorb the language of women’s emancipation and redirect it toward projects of exclusion, moral regulation, and national consolidation.
The story of nari shakti ultimately reveals the structural vulnerabilities of liberal feminism in deeply unequal and polarized societies. Demands for universal rights are always susceptible to appropriation by exclusionary political projects. Conversely, resistance to appropriation in the current political moment entails a critique of authoritarianism, a robust defense of substantive democracy, and leadership by marginalized communities.
Conflict of interests
The author declares no competing interests.
Author contribution
Writing - original draft: A.B.
Open access
