You belong to yourself: Rahul Gandhi’s shoutout to women power

At a women-only edition of his 'Chhatron Ki Goonj' outreach in Pune on Saturday, 22 August, Rahul Gandhi delivered one of the most unambiguous feminist statements by a national leader in recent Indian political memory. Addressing thousands of young women at the AISSMS ground, the Lok Sabha Leader of Opposition framed women’s autonomy as the core of India’s strength and called on them to “smash the patriarchy”.

His central refrain — “You don’t belong to anyone else, but yourself” — cut through the usual political platitudes about women as mothers, sisters or daughters, and instead asserted a woman’s primary ownership of her own life. In doing so, he placed the question of who controls women’s bodies, time and ambitions squarely at the centre of democratic discourse.

Gandhi began by challenging conventional answers to the question of India’s “greatest strength”. Where many would cite the economy, the military or demographic heft, he insisted: “India’s 70 crore women are the nation’s biggest strength and asset.”

He described these 70 crore women not as a monolith but as “70 crore unique journeys, unique imaginations, and unique dreams”, rejecting any narrative that reduces women to a single, state-approved identity. This formulation counters a political culture that often celebrates women symbolically while circumscribing their choices in practice.

The sharpest edge of Gandhi’s speech was his direct attack on what he called the “Manusmriti mindset”. He recalled the ancient text’s prescription that a woman must live under the authority of her father in childhood, her husband in youth and her sons in old age, and called this notion “shameful”. “The mindset of suppressing women comes from the Manusmriti, and today our fight is against this very mindset,” he said, adding that forces aligned with the BJP-RSS want girls and women to remain caged.

By naming the Manusmriti explicitly, Gandhi linked contemporary controls over women’s mobility, work and sexuality to a longer history of patriarchal codification.

Gandhi backed his moral argument with stark figures that underscored how deeply embedded this control remains. He noted that 99 per cent of sexual violence cases in India go unreported, that 84 per cent of women need permission to go to work, and that women earn roughly 25 per cent less than men for comparable jobs. These numbers sketch a country where formal rights coexist with everyday unfreedom, where a woman’s access to public space, paid work and even her own earnings is mediated by male approval.

In this context, his call to “break the cage” was not abstract. He spoke of women being trapped through violence, disrespect, control and the theft of their time — of the double burden of employment and domestic labour, and of social pressure and online abuse that young women routinely face.

Gandhi’s exhortation to young women — “Be loud, be proud, fight for your space in society” — was a deliberate politics of presence. He asked why men seek to control women and why women are sidelined when it comes to sharing power within the family, pushing the audience to interrogate the micro-politics of household authority as much as the macro-politics of the state.

The format of the event itself reinforced the message. Organisers expected nearly 10,000 participants, making this the largest and first women-only 'Chhatron Ki Goonj' gathering after earlier editions in Kota, Dehradun and Prayagraj. By creating a space where only women students and employees were invited to engage directly, the event signalled that women’s voices did not need to be filtered through male intermediaries to be heard.

What made the Pune address stand out was not just its content but its tone and positioning. Gandhi did not merely “support women’s empowerment” in the generic sense; he articulated a feminist critique of power, property and personhood. He insisted that a woman does not belong to her father, husband or son, but first and foremost to herself — an assertion that cuts against both traditional patriarchy and modern forms of moral policing.

In a political landscape where women are often invoked as symbols of culture, honour or demographic destiny, this was a reminder that feminism, at its core, is about autonomy.

The resonance of Gandhi’s message is already visible in the enthusiastic response from young women in Pune and the wider conversation it has sparked on social media and in newsrooms. Yet the test will be whether this rhetoric translates into concrete political practice: in candidate selection, internal party democracy, policy priorities and the everyday functioning of institutions that shape women’s lives.

A country that claims to celebrate 'nari shakti' must do more than invoke women as voters or victims; it must treat them as full citizens with an inalienable right to self-determination.

In that sense, the Pune event is less an endpoint than a beginning: a moment when a national leader chose to put feminism, in its most demanding sense, at the heart of political discourse. Whether India rises to match that ambition will determine not just the fate of one party or leader, but the future of its democracy itself.

Hasnain Naqvi is a former member of the history faculty at St Xavier’s College, Mumbai. More of his writing here