Women are leading India’s protests—Are men still on the sidelines?

Historically, men have monopolised public spaces. But when women finally managed to make their presence felt in public spheres, they put up resistance against oppressive forces far more than men did as they are used to doing it even at home

On the night of 9 August 2024, the life of Dr. Kasturi Maiti (name changed to protect the identity of the individual)—a 30-year-old post-graduate trainee doctor at Kolkata’s RG Kar Medical College and Hospital—changed forever. She only didn’t know it yet.

As Maiti was getting ready to step out around noon the following day of 10 August, her phone started buzzing with the news of someone she knew—an acquaintance—lying dead in a pool of her own blood. She only vaguely remembers rushing to college next, clutching the hands of her female colleagues as they made their way to the institute’s seminar hall, now the site of the alleged rape and murder of the 31-year-old woman post-graduate trainee doctor. They watched people descend upon familiar corners of their institute to turn them into battlefields overnight. A lot of that memory now, she says, has been erased as a response to trauma.

The macabre nature of the violence in the Kolkata rape case has left the nation in the throes of rage against what has even been termed as ‘Nirbhaya 2’, “like a sequel to the 2012 Delhi gangrape case of Jyoti Singh…you know, because violence against women is like a film made to be consumed on prime-time television,” says Maiti. “And if I may add, it’s no coincidence that this is what the media discourse around violence against women is like, because almost every one of these top media houses is still being run by men,” she smirks.

Maiti has not been able to resume life as she knew it, ever since. The 41-day-long strike by Kolkata’s junior doctors at state hospitals ended on 21 September, after the Supreme Court of India ordered them to resume their duties on 9 September. But settling back into the groove hasn’t felt the same. Maiti is unable to focus on work—the words in her textbooks read like gibberish.

“It’s the price we women have had to pay after a month-and-a-half of tireless protesting and taking to the streets,” she says. “Don’t get me wrong—our male colleagues were there too, but sometimes more as protectors than allies. Who are they even protecting us from? Men like themselves?” asks Maiti. “We women outnumbered them on any given day, and we are also the ones who feel the heaviest after the noise has died down. My male friends have found it easier to resume normal life, but I really haven’t, and maybe I won’t rest easy unless justice has been served. Men have that privilege, we don’t,” Maiti trails off while walking back home from a congregation in South Kolkata on the 50th night of protests. Maiti is accompanied by a group of seven other women doctors—three of whom she has been friends with from her institute, and the others she met at the protest sites every day for the past month-and-a-half—and two men. “The other guys have stopped coming; we didn’t ask them why,” says Maiti. “But we all know why. This doesn’t really concern them, does it?”

What concerns women: Is every movement a protest for gender equality?

Everything, however, concerns women, even when the issue at hand may not necessarily be about them. “That’s because every issue, at its core, is a gender issue; because no matter what the problem is, women will always be affected much more adversely than men will, simply due to the fact that patriarchy ordains that that happen. It makes women among the most disenfranchised groups in the world,” says Dr. Nandita Dutta (last name changed on request), a psychoanalyst practising at a government facility in Kolkata. Dutta remembers when protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens (CAA-NRC) in 2019-20 took over the streets of India—a matter of national concern that one would imagine poses a threat to everyone, regardless of their gender identity. But it was the women of Shaheen Bagh in Delhi who emerged as the symbols of resistance against draconian state forces like no other.

“Historically, men have monopolised public spaces. But when women finally managed to make their presence felt in public spheres, they put up resistance against oppressive forces far more than men did because they are used to doing it even at home. It’s a survival instinct; it comes naturally to them because they feel and are, in fact, more vulnerable as a collective than men are at any given point in time,” says Dutta.

In January 2016, when 26-year-old PhD scholar Rohith Vemula committed suicide in his hostel room at the University of Hyderabad, preliminary investigations revealed caste-based discrimination faced by him on account of being Dalit. His mother, Radhika, became the face of not just a demand for justice for her son who died over institutional oppression, but also of a larger movement against caste-based atrocities in India.

Back in 2006-07, the farmers’ protests against the state government’s land grabbing in West Bengal’s Singur and Nandigram towns were fronted by women, including eminent figures like writers and activists Arundhati Roy, Mahasweta Devi, and Medha Patkar. Patkar is also the founder of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), a social movement that supports the tribals, Adivasis and Dalit populations—who derive sustenance and livelihood from the Narmada river—in their fight against the government setting up some of the biggest dams on the river. The NBA went on to become one of the most seminal people’s movements in the history of post-independence India, and Patkar became synonymous with it.

Urvashi Butalia—feminist publisher, writer, and founder of Delhi-based feminist publication Zubaan Books—loses count of the number of times she has seen and read about women taking to the streets to put up such acts of resistance for issues that seemingly didn’t concern them in the letter. “If you go a little further back in history, you’ll see that in movements of peace that have happened across the North East of India, while all the negotiations on the table were being carried out by the men, the ground movements were being largely managed by women—bonding across different factions and tribes,” Butalia points out, referring to the ‘Shed No More Blood’ campaign launched in 1994 by the Naga Mothers’ Association to bring different rebel groups to enter into a peace negotiation.

Are men really allies of women’s public resistance? 

Delhi-based Suprita Das, a former television journalist who currently manages the content and communication for an Indian Premier League (IPL) franchise, was in her hometown Kolkata when the first protest demonstration against the doctor’s rape and murder was organised on the midnight of 15 August. Marching at the protest reminded her of the 2020-21 Farmers’ Protests against the farm acts—passed in the Parliament of India in September 2020—on Delhi-Haryana’s Singhu border. “It was bitter cold, and there were a lot of women who became the faces of the farmers’ protests. It made a lot of (urban) people realise that women form a very big part of our country’s agricultural population,” points out Das. The women weren’t just allies, in this instance, but equal participants in one of the biggest people’s movements in India in the past decade, as it directly affected the way they ran their families. “It affected their livelihoods, but more so the livelihoods of the men in their families. So whether it’s something that impacts women directly or indirectly, they always fight,” she adds.

However, the same can’t be said about men, observes Butalia. “I mean, you can see what’s happening in the Malayalam film industry. How many men have really come forward and said anything of worth on a subject that doesn’t really affect them?” she asks, referring to the Hema Committee Report findings published in August this year that have led to FIRs being filed against prominent figures in the Malayalam film industry, including directors and actors, following accusations of sexual harassment. “Women will address issues that do not concern them, but men will barely ever take up any issue that concerns women. I don’t think there’s anything that stops men institutionally from being better allies, but just the contexts in which they are brought up and the conditioning they go through. Men are not taught to think beyond their narrow interests,” says Butalia.

To further illustrate her point, the scholar evokes memories of the Bodhgaya Land Movement in the 1970s—a students’ movement led by Jayprakash Narayan and the students’ organisation Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Vahini, which sought to dismantle the feudal land-owning system and implement the land reforms Bihar had signed up for. “They were all progressive students—both men and women who had allied and fought for a common cause—who succeeded in getting land back. But when they did get the land back, they realised that the land deeds were in the name of the men. So when the women claimed their shares, the men looked surprised!” recalls Butalia.

However, public resistance and protests such as these are performative in nature, as the sight of assembling bodies has performative impacts on two levels. First, when people are huddled together in protest, occupation, vigil, or demonstration, they perform contestation. Second, they also, in turn, become the object of said contestations, especially when congregating to challenge prevailing and exacerbating uncertainties. In the age of live-streaming on social media, this aspect of performativity in protests has also manifestly evolved. “I often feel men’s allyship is a little too performative to be genuine, and that only hurts the movement. It adds nothing to the discourse and only takes away from it because it often feels like men speak of feminism with an agenda, to gain some social validation,” says Upasana Chakraborty, a high-school teacher based in Mumbai, adding a mention of India’s #MeToo movement in academia in 2018, in which several men—including feminist scholars—were called out as alleged sex offenders.

The gender of protest

Chakraborty was at the forefront of the 2014 Jadavpur University Protests—also known as Hok Kolorob (let there be noise)—in Kolkata as a student of the institute. The movement demanded fair and transparent investigations into a case of alleged sexual harassment of a student on campus in September 2014, and Chakraborty remembers how her women friends on campus would mobilise people to act in a matter of hours, thereby reaffirming what Butalia says about women being effective organisers. “I think this drive comes from a point of shared traumas, where the pain of another becomes our own. Men still have the privilege of sitting back and thinking of a gender problem as not their own, but for women, the trauma becomes them,” says Chakraborty, adding that she associates anxiety more with women than with men, and perhaps it’s this anxiety that propels women to act more often and more swiftly. (Dutta corroborates Chakraborty’s observations. “Women, in fact, are twice more likely to be diagnosed with anxiety or anxiety disorders than men,” she says.)

But for Ruth Vanita, academic and co-founder of the feminist magazine Manushi, her experiences have allowed her to look at the landscape of protests as more gender-agnostic and contextualised. She, for one, doesn’t think that the women who appear as the “face” of a movement are in fact its leaders. “Often, it’s a strategy for a movement to put women in front and the media likes to feature women and ignore the fact that men—for example, in the Sikh farmers protesting against the Farm Acts, 2020—are actually in charge. In some movements, for instance, against cruelty to animals worldwide—yes, it’s true that women are in the forefront and genuinely leading,” she says. However, she warns against writing off men’s contributions to women’s political participation, leadership, and emancipation across the world.

Vanita states that most women in India who become big achievers in life, have done so because of support from their fathers or brothers. “Male support in the family is usually necessary because females in the family often do not have as much power,” she says. “For example, the hundreds of young low-income female couples who managed to marry each other over the last four decades, almost always had the support of a father or a brother. These men were all from lower-income and often tribal backgrounds,” says Vanita, adding that the women in the Nationalist Movement in India, or even in the Suffrage Movement, had staunch male allies. “The movements for formal women’s education, both in the West and in India, were initially led by men,” she says.

Chakraborty, however, wishes she could as easily remember the name of a man who has significantly contributed to social movements for women’s rights since Raja Ram Mohan Roy campaigned against the Sati system in 1829. “I am having to think really hard, and I am still drawing blanks,” she says with a laugh.

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