Women’s Rights and Mobilisation in India: A Historical Perspective

The story of women in Indian politics is not just about laws passed in Parliament. It is about a long struggle that began in classrooms run by reformers, moved through forests where women hugged trees, and reached the streets of Delhi after a horrific crime in 2012. Understanding women’s rights and political mobilisation means tracing how women moved from being objects of reform to becoming agents of their own change. This journey touches three interconnected areas: property and economic rights, protection from gender-based violence, and representation in political institutions.

The roots: 19th-century social reform 🔗

Women’s issues entered public debate long before independence, but in the 19th century they were mostly raised for women rather than by them. Male reformers campaigned against practices like sati, child marriage, and the ill-treatment of widows. The crucial shift came when women themselves began to lead.

Savitribai Phule and the power of education 🔗

Born in 1831 in Maharashtra, Savitribai Phule is widely regarded as the first female teacher of modern India. Along with her husband, the reformer Jyotirao Phule, she established one of the earliest modern schools for girls in Pune in 1848. This was a radical act. Educating a girl, especially one from a marginalised community, directly challenged the social order of the time.

Phule faced intense hostility for her work, yet she expanded it. She campaigned against child marriage, supported widow remarriage, and opened a shelter for destitute women. Her contribution went beyond teaching the alphabet. She understood that education was the foundation on which women could later claim other rights. She is often called the mother of Indian feminism, and her legacy connects the fight against caste discrimination with the fight against gender discrimination, two struggles that remain linked even today.

Property and economic rights 🔗

Economic independence is central to any meaningful idea of equality. For decades, however, the law itself kept women dependent. Under traditional Hindu law, ancestral property was held through a coparcenary, a joint family arrangement in which only male descendants gained a right in the property by birth. Daughters were excluded.

The Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005 🔗

This long-standing inequality was finally addressed by the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005. The amendment changed Section 6 of the original 1956 Act so that the daughter of a coparcener became a coparcener in her own right, by birth, in the same manner as a son. In practical terms, daughters now have the same rights and liabilities in ancestral property as sons, regardless of marital status.

The change had effects beyond a single family’s wealth. Property ownership gives women bargaining power within the household, access to credit, and a measure of security if a marriage breaks down. The Supreme Court later strengthened this principle in the Vineeta Sharma judgment of 2020, clarifying that a daughter’s right flows from her birth and does not depend on whether her father was alive when the 2005 amendment came into force. Law on paper, of course, does not always translate into practice, and many women still face family pressure to give up their share.

The 1970s: women take to the streets 🔗

The decade of the 1970s marked a turning point. This was the era of new social movements, when groups across the country began organising around issues that older political parties had ignored. Women were at the centre of several of these mobilisations, and for the first time a distinctly autonomous women’s movement began to take shape.

Rising prices triggered one of the earliest mass actions. In 1973, Mrinal Gore and others formed the United Women’s Anti-Price Rise Front, which grew into a movement demanding consumer protection. Around the same time, women within political parties began questioning the patriarchal attitudes of their own organisations. The autonomous women’s groups that defined Indian feminism largely emerged after the Emergency ended in 1977.

The Chipko movement 🔗

Perhaps the most iconic mobilisation of this period was the Chipko movement. The Hindi word chipko means “to hug” or “to cling to,” and it described the demonstrators’ main tactic: embracing trees to stop loggers from cutting them down. The movement began in the Himalayan region of Uttarakhand in 1973 and was joined by women in large numbers from 1974.

Chipko was first an environmental and economic protest. The forests provided fuel, fodder, water, and food, and commercial logging threatened the very survival of hill communities. But because women bore the burden of collecting these resources, they had the most at stake, and they took the lead. Figures like Gaura Devi led rural women in confronting contractors. The movement showed how environmental concerns and women’s concerns could be deeply intertwined, an idea later described as eco-feminism. More importantly, it demonstrated that ordinary rural women, often dismissed as powerless, could organise and win.

Protection from gender-based violence 🔗

As the movement matured, attention turned sharply to violence against women, an area where the law had long been inadequate. Two major legislative reforms stand out, and one tragic event reshaped the entire national conversation.

The Domestic Violence Act, 2005 🔗

For a long time, violence within the home was treated as a private matter. The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005, changed this. It recognised that abuse could be physical, emotional, sexual, or economic, and it gave women the right to seek protection orders, residence orders, and monetary relief. Crucially, it protected a woman’s right to remain in the shared household, addressing a common way in which abused women were rendered homeless.

The Nirbhaya case and the law of 2013 🔗

On 16 December 2012, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student was brutally gang-raped on a moving bus in Delhi and later died of her injuries. The case, in which the victim came to be known as Nirbhaya, triggered nationwide protests and outrage. Thousands took to the streets demanding swifter justice and stronger laws. This was a moment when public anger directly forced a legislative response.

The government set up the Justice J.S. Verma Committee to recommend reforms. The committee, which examined tens of thousands of public submissions, produced its report within a month. Its recommendations formed the basis of the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013. The Act broadened the definition of rape, introduced harsher penalties, and created new offences such as stalking, voyeurism, and acid attacks. The committee notably reframed sexual violence as a violation of a woman’s autonomy rather than her “honour,” an important conceptual shift, though some recommendations, such as criminalising marital rape, were not adopted.

The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act, 2013 🔗

The same year saw another landmark law focused on safety in the workplace. The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013, made it mandatory for employers to set up Internal Complaints Committees to handle complaints. It built on the earlier Vishaka Guidelines laid down by the Supreme Court and gave women a formal mechanism to seek redress, recognising that economic participation requires safe and dignified working conditions.

Representation in political institutions 🔗

Rights on paper mean little without a voice in the institutions that make decisions. This is where progress has been slowest and the challenges most stubborn.

Reservation at the grassroots 🔗

The first big breakthrough came at the local level. The 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments of 1992 reserved one-third of seats in rural panchayats and urban local bodies for women. This brought over a million women into elected positions, an achievement that is remarkable by any global standard. In some states, such as Karnataka, women have won well beyond the reserved quota.

The challenge of proxy power 🔗

Yet reservation has not automatically translated into real authority. A widespread problem is the “Sarpanch Pati” phenomenon, where a woman is elected on paper but her husband or other male relatives actually exercise the power. This proxy governance defeats the very purpose of the reservation. The issue remains serious enough that in 2025 the National Human Rights Commission summoned officials from numerous states for failing to curb it, and the Ministry of Panchayati Raj has run awareness campaigns against the practice. The lesson is clear: changing who holds the title is easier than changing who holds the power.

The Women’s Reservation Bill 🔗

At the national and state legislative level, women remain badly underrepresented, holding only a small minority of seats despite being nearly half the population. The long campaign to fix this finally bore fruit with the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, passed as the Constitution (106th Amendment) Act in September 2023. The law reserves one-third of seats in the Lok Sabha, state legislative assemblies, and the Delhi assembly for women, including within seats already reserved for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.

The journey to this point was extraordinarily long. The bill was first introduced in 1996 and repeatedly lapsed over the decades. Its passage was historic. However, a major caveat remains: the reservation will take effect only after a fresh Census and a subsequent delimitation exercise are completed, which means the actual year of implementation is still uncertain. For now, the most significant legal step toward women’s political inclusion exists, but its transformative effect is still waiting in the wings.

Connecting the threads 🔗

Looking across this history, a pattern emerges. Progress for women in India has rarely come as a gift from the state. It has come through mobilisation, whether by a lone teacher opening a school in 1848, rural women hugging trees in the 1970s, or crowds protesting in 2012. Legislation tends to follow public pressure rather than precede it. At the same time, every law reveals a gap between what is written and what is lived. Daughters have property rights but face family resistance; women head panchayats but proxies hold the reins; a reservation bill exists but awaits a Census. The work of mobilisation, in other words, is far from finished.

What do you think? Does increasing the number of women in legislatures and panchayats automatically lead to better representation of women’s interests, or does genuine empowerment require deeper social change first? And when laws and lived reality diverge so sharply, where should reformers focus their energy: on passing stronger legislation, or on changing the social attitudes that decide whether those laws actually work?

References

1. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Chipko-movement
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3. https://data.unwomen.org/global-database-on-violence-against-women/country-profile/India/measures/The%20Hindu%20Succession%20Amendment%20Act%202005
4. https://cleartax.in/s/hindu-succession-act
5. https://www.scconline.com/blog/post/2026/02/03/daughters-property-rights-before-and-after-2005-amendment/
6. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/soc14/chapter/womens-movement-in-india/
7. https://sociology.institute/sociology-in-india/evolution-social-movements-old-new/
8. https://www.thequint.com/videos/nirbhaya-case-changes-to-criminal-law
9. https://prsindia.org/policy/report-summaries/justice-verma-committee-report-summary
10. https://blog.ipleaders.in/criminal-law-amendment-act-2013/
11. https://www.orfonline.org/research/elected-women-representatives-in-local-rural-governments-in-india-assessing-the-impact-and-challenges
12. https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/india/report-on-sarpanch-pati-proxy-practice-in-local-bodies-nhrc-directs-states
13. https://www.newsonair.gov.in/parliament-passes-womens-reservation-bill
14. https://www.drishtijudiciary.com/editorial/women-reservation-bill-2023