Curator's Note - Backlash: The law’s betrayal of feminist gains
On International Women’s Day 2025, we are introducing a special issue curating writings that articulate the multi-faceted backlash against India’s feminist movements, effectuated through our courts, the legislature and the executive. As hard-fought feminist gains are resisted and diluted by dominant interests, this special issue makes a simple, but profound argument - if the law can betray, it can also be reclaimed.
Jhuma Sen
Published on: 8 March 2025, 06:51 am
THE grammar of backlash is precise. It speaks in the language of rights even as it erases them, mobilizes the rule of law to subvert justice, and hides behind neutrality while advancing patriarchy. The jurisprudence of backlash is, thus, not merely an inertial response to feminist legal gains; it is an active counter-revolution against the idea of justice itself. Every hard-won feminist victory is met with an equally forceful attempt to wrest it away, often through the same institutions that had once conceded to feminist demands. The courts, the legislature, and the executive all conspire—sometimes in tandem, sometimes through omissions—to undercut rights that feminist jurisprudence has carved out through tireless struggle. The law, thus, becomes both the site of feminist resistance and the terrain of its obliteration.
Feminist legal interventions have long been met with resistance. However, what we witness today is not just resistance, but an orchestrated backlash that seeks to erase the very legitimacy of feminist legal discourse. This backlash operates through multiple registers: judicial reversals, legislative rollbacks, and the discursive weaponization of "victimhood" by dominant groups. What is critical to understand is that backlash is not about justice—it is about the restoration of power to those who have historically wielded it.
This is not an accident of jurisprudence. It is an active project.
Each feminist legal victory, whether in the courtroom or through legislative reform, is met with immediate counter-mobilization. The system, so often resistant to acknowledging the existence of gendered violence, suddenly transforms into an efficient machine when it comes to rolling back women’s rights. It does so through procedural delays, evidentiary skepticism, and moral panic.
The judiciary, often considered the final bastion of constitutional morality, is increasingly betraying its own principles. We see a disturbing pattern where courts, instead of expanding the horizon of rights, engage in interpretive gymnastics to shrink them. Consider the shift in judicial discourse from a rights-based framework to one of "morality" and "tradition." Take, for instance, the judicial retreat on marital rape exemptions or the disinclination of courts to recognize caste-based sexual violence under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. These are not mere doctrinal choices. Rather, they are deliberate acts of erasure, reinforcing the patriarchal compact between state and society.
Legislative backlash, too, is a well-worn tactic in dismantling feminist legal gains. The dilution of the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PC-PNDT) Act, for example, has been justified under the garb of "ease of doing business" for medical practitioners, as though the fight against female foeticide is merely a bureaucratic hurdle. Similarly, the Forest Rights Act has been weaponized to erase the land rights of Adivasi women, reinforcing patriarchal and caste-based control over natural resources.
One of the most insidious recent legislative moves has been the attempt to frame child marriage as a matter of "community autonomy" rather than a blatant violation of human rights. The backlash against raising the legal age of marriage for women reveals the deep entrenchment of patriarchal interests that view women’s bodies as sites of control rather than as autonomous entities deserving of rights and dignity.
