Contemporary Challenges Facing Women’s Movements in India

By the time India entered the 1990s, its women’s movements had already fought hard battles – against dowry deaths, custodial rape, and gender discrimination. But a new and more complicated decade was about to begin. Scholars have described the 1990s as the “Mandal-Masjid-World Bank” years – a shorthand for the three seismic forces that simultaneously reshaped India’s political economy: the caste upsurge following the Mandal Commission, the rise of Hindu nationalism culminating in the demolition of the Babri Masjid, and the structural adjustment programs dictated by the IMF and World Bank. Each of these forces created distinct and layered challenges for women’s movements, forcing activists to navigate terrain that was shifting in multiple directions at once.

The economic liberalization challenge 🔗

India’s economic liberalization in 1991 did not arrive as a neutral policy shift. For women’s movements, it fundamentally altered what they were fighting against and who they were fighting for. The movement countered the open economic policy of the 1990s with widespread agitation, focusing on the withdrawal of the state from the social sector, the erosion of food security, and the adverse effects of Structural Adjustment Policies (SAP) on women in India.

The economic picture was stark. Economic liberalization in the 1990s contributed to increased marginalization of women, with over 90% working in the informal sector lacking labor protections. Rather than delivering promised prosperity to all women, liberalization created a two-track reality. Contrary to expectations that economic liberalization would formalize employment, globalization often pushed women further into informal work – through outsourcing, subcontracting, and the downsizing of sectors like textiles where women had previously held formal positions.

Feminist scholar Mary John noted that the growing economic and social disparities characteristic of liberalization pointed to the reality that patriarchy in contemporary society is neither a single monolith nor a set of discrete unconnected enclaves, but rather a complex articulation of unequal patriarchies. In other words, liberalization did not simply add economic problems on top of existing gender issues – it entangled economic and gender inequalities in new ways that made them harder to address separately.

The NGO-ization problem 🔗

One of the most significant internal consequences of liberalization was what scholars termed “NGO-ization.” As state funding contracted and international donor money flowed in, many grassroots feminist collectives transformed into formalized non-governmental organizations. The relationship between NGOs and the women’s movement led to a loss of collective feminist politics which was based on autonomy, as seen in the 1980s.

As grassroots activists were replaced with well-paid professionals from elite universities who lacked a relationship with the communities they served, emancipatory goals were stripped of their potential for radical social transformation. Social issues became compartmentalized into short-term project deliverables. NGO-ization refers to the professionalization, bureaucratization, and institutionalization of social movements as they adopt the form of nongovernmental organizations – leading to the depoliticizing of movement discourses and practices. For a movement built on autonomous, radical politics, this was a significant structural blow.

The rise of communal and fundamentalist forces 🔗

While economic liberalization restructured the material terrain, the rise of Hindu nationalism posed a different kind of challenge – one that cut directly into the political space that women’s movements had worked to occupy. The rapid rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party as a major claimant for political power at the centre, fueled by the mobilization for a Ram Mandir at Ayodhya and leading to the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, marked a new wave of sectarian violence against Muslim minorities. This violence was repeated most devastatingly in the 2002 Gujarat riots.

With the rise of ideologies of religious nationalism like Hindutva during the 1990s in India, the secular elite leadership in progressive social movements, including women’s movements, began to reconsider their older positions on religion. The challenge was not simply that communal forces were anti-feminist – it was that the terrain of “women’s issues” itself became communalized.

The Uniform Civil Code dilemma 🔗

Nothing illustrated this more sharply than the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) controversy. Women’s movements had long demanded a gender-just civil code that would provide equal rights across all religious communities. But after the Shah Bano case in 1985 and the political backlash that followed, the UCC debate was captured by the Hindu right. In the aftermath of the Shah Bano judgment, the question of the Uniform Civil Code came to be cast by the Hindu right wing as reform in Muslim law – with oral talaq and polygamy highlighted as practices needing reform, rather than the unequal succession and property laws that existed among other communities.

Trapped between a government that reversed the Supreme Court’s progressive ruling for political gain and a Hindu nationalist movement weaponizing the UCC demand against Muslims, the women’s movement withdrew its demand for the UCC, arguing instead for a focus on achieving gender equality rather than uniformity, and proposing alternatives including reform from within religious communities. This was not a retreat from feminist principles, but a recognition that their demand had been politically hijacked – a dilemma with no clean resolution.

Communal violence and women’s bodies 🔗

The resurgence of communalism in India since the 1980s presented a serious challenge to secular Indian democracy, marked by severe communal riots in which at least 10,000 people lost their lives throughout the decade. Women’s bodies became sites of communal violence – both as targets and as symbols of community honor. Pro-liberalisation measures by successive governments were combined with compromises advancing the cause of fundamentalists, as politicians sought to offset public disenchantment by playing the “communal card” with each community. This political dynamic made it harder for women’s movements to hold governments accountable on gender issues without getting pulled into broader communal polarization.

Internal critiques: the question of who the movement speaks for 🔗

Even as women’s movements battled external forces, a profound internal reckoning was underway. The assumption of a unified “women’s movement” was under challenge from within – from Dalit women, Muslim women, tribal women, and others who argued that mainstream feminist organizations spoke primarily for upper-caste, urban, Hindu women.

Dalit women’s challenge to mainstream feminism 🔗

The 1990s were a watershed moment, particularly with the rise of the Dalit women’s movement, which highlighted the intersections of caste, class, and gender oppression. While the mainstream women’s movement focused on gender-based discrimination, Dalit women questioned its upper-caste bias, claiming that their battles were inextricably linked to caste-based violence and economic disadvantage. Organizations such as the National Federation of Dalit Women (NFDW), established in 1995, and the All India Dalit Mahila Adhikar Manch (AIDMAM) arose to address concerns including caste-based sexual abuse, labor exploitation, and political representation.

Dalit feminists argued that they faced discrimination not only from upper castes but also from within their own communities and from the patriarchal structures of the mainstream women’s movement itself. Many mainstream savarna-led feminist movements failed to include and amplify the voices of marginalized women, including Dalits, Bahujans, Adivasis, as well as Muslim, queer, and disabled women. The demand was not simply for inclusion but for a fundamental reorientation of feminist politics around caste-conscious analysis.

Muslim women and the politics of personal law 🔗

Mainstream feminism was challenged by various minority groups for not entirely addressing the needs of minority populations, with suggestions that it was upper-caste and Hindu in its orientation. This led directly to the formation of organizations like Awaaz-e-Niswaan (The Voice of Women) in 1987 in Mumbai. Muslim women faced the double bind of a patriarchal religious personal law and a mainstream feminist movement that did not adequately account for their specific religious and community contexts. The Shah Bano controversy exposed this sharply: Muslim feminist voices found themselves caught between conservative religious authorities, a vote-seeking state, and a feminist mainstream that could not always distinguish their concerns from those of the Hindu right.

The challenge of political representation 🔗

The 1990s also confronted women’s movements with the limits of formal political inclusion. The 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments of 1992 were a milestone for women’s political representation at the grassroots level, introducing a 33% reservation for women in Panchayats and Municipalities. But the demand for similar reservation at the national and state levels – the Women’s Reservation Bill – stalled in Parliament from its introduction in 1996 onward. Opponents argued it would entrench caste divisions or that women should attain positions on merit alone. The irony was pointed: the very political system that women’s movements sought to change was the system blocking their entry into it.

While economic liberalization and globalization introduced new opportunities, patriarchal institutions adapted to maintain control over women’s lives, particularly in domains such as marriage, reproductive choices, and public participation. Legal reforms like the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act (2005) were hard-won victories, but activists recognized that legislation alone could not dismantle the structural conditions enabling gender-based violence.

Navigating a fractured landscape 🔗

What makes the challenges of the 1990s and 2000s particularly complex is that they did not arrive one at a time. Women’s movements had to simultaneously fight the economic marginalization deepened by liberalization, resist communal forces that instrumentalized women’s rights, respond to internal critiques about caste and religious exclusion, and resist the depoliticization that came with NGO-ization – all while continuing to pursue unresolved legislative goals. The issues raised by the women’s movement in the 1970s and 1980s could not still be resolved – they remained, even confounded by the trends of globalization and communalism, as some of the major concerns of the 1990s.

The response of the movement was not paralysis but adaptation. Transnational organizing grew. Coalitions between caste-based and gender-based movements were attempted, however imperfectly. The advent of digital platforms from the late 1990s onward created new spaces for feminist activism, enabling women to share experiences, organize protests, and build solidarity across geographies. Dalit feminist voices, once marginal in mainstream discourse, became increasingly central to how gender justice was conceptualized.

The deeper lesson of this period is that women’s movements are not weakened by internal critique – they are strengthened by it, even when that process is painful. The recognition that caste, class, religion, and gender must all be addressed together is not a fragmentation of feminist politics; it is its maturation. The movements that survived and grew were those that could hold multiple oppressions in view at once, rather than reducing the complexity of Indian women’s lives to a single axis of analysis.

What do you think? Given that communalism and economic inequality continue to shape Indian society, how should contemporary women’s movements balance the demand for a unified political voice with the need to represent the very different experiences of Dalit, Muslim, tribal, and upper-caste women? And does the shift from grassroots activism to NGO-led advocacy ultimately weaken the radical potential of feminist movements, or can institutional structures be used to advance genuinely transformative goals?

References

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7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGO-ization
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10. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342437758_Changing_Terms_of_Political_Discourse_Women's_Movement_in_India_1970s-1990s
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14. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12250622/
15. https://www.orfonline.org/research/the-rising-fourth-wave-feminist-activism-on-digital-platforms-in-india