Gender and Anti-Discrimination Laws in India
The Constitution of India guarantees not only formal equality but also promises that entrenched power structures will gradually dissolve. However, forms of discrimination faced by women are not just a feature of our social fabric but are supported by the ambiguities of the legal-juridical framework that reinforce unjust gender norms. The persistence of gender discrimination as it exists in the wider societal sphere is expressed by the unevenness that marks women’s access to the legal system. The chapter reviews the contestations, the changing categories, and terms of feminist analysis in law. It turns to address the problem of equal rights in understanding the protection against vulnerability, and various forms the loss of liberty takes in different contexts of marginality about gender discrimination. In what follows, I begin by presenting some methodological concerns. Then I discuss the Indian jurisprudence on sexual harassment and assault. I then focus briefly on the right to temple entry and ‘honour’ crimes in recent years and the legal responses to them. In the last section, I address three strong challenges to my account of gender discrimination. My main argument is that the doctrinal history of harassment and rape in the Indian context points to the power and limitations of legal rights as a strategy for social change. Establishing a basis for legal liability can reshape consciousness about working environments, but this has not deterred those who harass, from using less formal means of attacking women rights. For legal feminists, the law remains a site of discursive struggle where dominant meanings come to inform not only juridical categories but also the social world that define our concepts and practices. The dilemma of preserving difference in law and yet not having disadvantageous effects to unequal parties remain.