Manu’s heirs can’t be champions of women

India has a new champion of women. He is loud about it. He wants you to believe it. And he is counting on you to forget everything that came before.

Don’t.

This self-styled champion presides over a party with among the lowest percentage representations of women in Parliament. His time in the prime minister’s office will be remembered for its weaponisation of misogyny. Prime Minister Modi talks of nari shakti and nari vandan and stays mum when convicted rapists are garlanded on their release from prison, when our champion women wrestlers are dragged through the streets for demanding an investigation of their allegations of sexual harassment by a party strongman.

The pattern is not incidental. It flows from an intellectual tradition that has never treated women as political equals. Savarkar, whose portrait hangs in Parliament’s Central Hall, did not merely neglect women’s rights. In Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History, he criticised Shivaji for treating captured Muslim women with chivalry and pointedly asked if Hindu kings should have done otherwise. This is documented, acknowledged by RSS-affiliated publications, and foundational to understanding the arguments that follow.

The ideology sees women’s bodies as the battleground of communal honour. From the targeted abuse of Muslim women on online platforms like ‘Sulli Deals’ and ‘Bulli Bai’ to the vicious trolling and targeting of Lenskart’s Hindu owner for his company’s allegedly anti-Hindu grooming guidelines is a coherent continuum.

A regressive world for women is coded in the DNA of this ideology, which no amount of outward championing of their empowerment can really conceal.

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To understand the depth of this duplicity, one must recall the time India’s democratic conscience was forged — during the freedom movement led by the Indian National Congress. At a time when Britain, the United States and France had not yet granted women the right to vote, the Congress was not merely including women in its ranks, it was elevating them to its highest offices.

The Congress made Annie Besant its president in 1917, Sarojini Naidu in 1925, Nellie Sengupta in 1933 — three women leading the national movement, before Independence, before the republic and its Constitution had come into existence. This was not tokenism but the natural expression of a movement whose foundational documents treated women’s rights as non-negotiable.

The (Motilal) Nehru Report of 1928, which represented the first Indian constitutional blueprint drafted by Indians, explicitly proposed equal rights for women, including universal adult franchise without distinction on the basis of sex.

The Karachi Resolution of 1931, drafted under the guidance of Mahatma Gandhi and proposed by Nehru, listed fundamental rights that included equality of gender and freedom of conscience and profession. These were not mere words; they were the architecture of a republic not yet born.

Mahatma Gandhi, whose civilisational philosophy the BJP claims to inherit (while systematically dismantling everything he stood for), wrote and spoke with extraordinary clarity on women’s autonomy. He wrote that if non-cooperation was to succeed, women must become equal partners. He famously declared that the awakening of women would be the most significant sign of the awakening of India.

In The Discovery of India, part history, part memoir, part political manifesto that Jawaharlal Nehru wrote during his incarceration in Ahmednagar Fort between 1942 and 1945, he argues that the status of women is the measure of the civilisation of a people.

When the Objectives Resolution was moved in the Constituent Assembly on 13 December 1946, Nehru’s vision of a sovereign, independent republic guaranteed ‘justice, social, economic and political’ and ‘equality of status and opportunity’ was understood by every member of the Assembly to encompass women without qualification.

The silence of the Sangh

The RSS was founded in 1925. For the next 25 years, through the entire drafting of the Constitution, it produced not a single substantive statement on women’s rights, women’s education or women’s political participation. Not one.

Women’s emancipation was never on their agenda. In the Sangh worldview, women were keepers of the domestic hearth and bearers of Hindu civilisational continuity, not active partners in lawmaking or administering justice.

When the Constitution was adopted on 26 November 1949, a document that guaranteed every Indian woman an equal stake in the republic, the RSS mouthpiece Organiser responded with contempt. In its editorial of 30 November 1949, it complained that the new Constitution had ‘no mention of the unique constitutional development in ancient Bharat’ and extolled the Manusmriti, whose injunctions on women include the doctrine that a woman must never be allowed to assert herself independently, that she must be guarded by her father in childhood, her husband in youth and her son in old age.

The RSS did not stop at editorials. When the Hindu Code Bill, seeking equal inheritance and divorce rights for Hindu women, came to Parliament, RSS workers burnt effigies of Nehru and Ambedkar, and called the Bill an ‘atom bomb on Hindu society’.

Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, founder of the BJP’s progenitor, the Jan Sangh, said the Bill would ‘shatter the magnificent structure of Hindu culture’. For the Sangh, equal rights for women was destruction of culture.

That inglorious tradition is not history. In January 2013, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat declared that marriage is a contract, and if a wife fails to look after the home, her husband may disown her. This was not a slip of the tongue, it was dogma articulated by the ruling party’s ideological supremo.

The Women’s Reservation Bill, when it finally came under BJP stewardship, was designed to indefinitely defer implementation. In the 2024 Lok Sabha, the BJP had the lowest proportion of women MPs among all major parties. That arithmetic tells its own story.

Borrowing the shell sans the soul

In any case, women’s reservation is not only about seats in Parliament. It is about whether a woman’s voice carries weight in the republic. The BJP did not discover women’s rights. It borrowed the cause, the language, the symbolism, the legislative frame from a democratic tradition it spent decades opposing.

India’s democratic tradition did not discover women’s rights in an election year. It was built on the shoulders of women who marched, argued, legislated and led — Sarojini Naidu, Sucheta Kripalani, Ammu Swaminathan, Hansa Mehta, Durgabai Deshmukh, Aruna Asaf Ali, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit — women who shaped the Indian republic.

The BJP and the RSS carry a different inheritance. They cannot point to a single woman as a leader in the freedom struggle. They can’t because they weren’t in it.

The record is public, the ideology is documented and the numbers do not lie. Manu’s heirs can’t be champions of women.

Gurdeep Singh Sappal is a Permanent Invitee to the Congress Working Committee. More by the author here