Unequal Citizenship

Chapter 3 focuses attention on women’s unequal experience of the Indian state through an examination of the debates surrounding the 2012 gang rape. Chapter 3 examines both the progressive political opening and the retrenchment of patriarchal norms following Jyoti Singh’s murder, and argues that this opening and retrenchment are emblematic of the Indian state’s radical promise of equality and its horrific failure to achieve this equality. An analysis of politicians’ responses demonstrates how gendered norms operate to exclude women in the name of inclusion. This analysis highlights the difficulty of eradicating gendered violence through legal reform, demonstrates the unpredictability of the political process, and shows how gendered norms operate in the public sphere to undermine and frustrate progressive change. The chapter outlines the difficulty of turning to the law as a liberatory strategy in a liberal democracy and shifts attention to other spheres of life as potential sources for more egalitarian social relations.

Politics in Unusual Places

Chapter 1 recounts the 2012 gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh to highlight the contradictory nature of Indian democracy—which gravely affects its institutions and puts its citizens at risk. The book asks, why do we find pervasive gender-based discrimination, exclusion, and violence in India when the Indian Constitution builds an inclusive democracy committed to gender and caste equality? To understand women’s unequal experience of Indian democracy in multiple domains, the introduction weaves an analysis of the 2012 gang rape with ethnographic data from the Sikh community to call attention to the dangers of gender-based violence, from its most horrific expression to the more commonplace. In doing so, the book highlights similar logics at play along the spectrum of gender-based violence and explains how these logics cause women’s lives to be at risk in all spheres of life—state, civil society, religious community, and home.

Understanding Exclusionary Inclusion

Chapters 4 utilizes interview and participant observation data to focus on Sikh women’s lived experience of exclusionary inclusion in civil society and the home. Chapter 4 demonstrates how research participants construct the category of woman in relation to home and marriage, and how they naturalize exclusionary inclusion through the following unwritten and informal rules: (1) women’s rights and duties, (2) public policies, (3) women’s religiosity, (4) women’s purity, and (5) women as perpetual outsiders. A majority of research participants understand gender equality and religious autonomy as competing goals, which makes it more difficult to achieve equality. The ethnographic data reveals that Sikh women do not experience civil society as an uncoerced space of voluntary associational life, and they do not experience the home as a place of safety, security, and respect. Rather they experience exclusionary inclusion in both these spaces.

Situated Citizenship

Chapter 2 advances situated citizenship as a general theoretical and methodological framework to study the lived experiences of unequal democracy across subordinated demographics and to understand gendered and racialized citizenship in different locations across the world. In developing a framework of situated citizenship, chapter 2 reviews democratization and legal studies literatures, identifies the major limitations of these literatures, and explains how a theory of situated citizenship overcomes these limitations. Chapter 2 argues that institutional indicators and formal rights fail to tell the full story—and hide more than they show because through nominal female inclusion these formal institutions often render the mechanisms of exclusionary inclusion invisible. In contrast, situated citizenship explains how uneven and unequal experiences of citizenship are created, maintained, and challenged in the private and public spheres through concrete face-to-face social practices often compounded by intersecting categories like gender, caste, class, religion, and nation.

Conclusion

The concluding chapter returns to the 2012 gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh to reanalyze this horrific incident in light of the research findings, and to discuss the implications of the analysis for the study of gender equality, citizenship, and democracy in India and beyond. Behl puts her experience of SGBV in direct relation with the gang rape case and with the findings from the Sikh community to call attention to the dangers that lurk in every case of SGBV, from its most extraordinary to the more mundane expression in daily life. She shares her own experience to critically reflect on her positionality as a diasporic researcher, with attention to the ways participants and she coconstruct the data, and to the ways her own blind spots impact the research process. Lastly, she asks if political science as a discipline is willing to listen to new forms of knowledge production.

Challenging Exclusionary Inclusion

Chapter 5 uses interview and participant observation data to demonstrate how Sikh women uphold and resist exclusionary inclusion in religious community. Sikh women often struggle to escape contradictory gendered norms that essentialize women as inferior, polluted, and suspect. Yet, for some women, membership in Sukhmani Seva Societies (devotional organizations) is an unexpected resource for active citizenship, where they sometimes reinforce but sometimes also resist socially prescribed gender roles. These women enact their citizenship rights through acts of devotion, which upends long-standing assumptions about religious space as inherently undemocratic. Sikh women envision and enact more egalitarian interpersonal and community relations through their devotional practices, which understand gender equality and minority rights as coexisting and human and divine agency as interdependent. Their experience suggests that religious practices can be understood as a form of active citizenship that can potentially challenge exclusionary inclusion and negotiate between state, community, and gender in new ways.