In the humid evening air of Pune’s AISSMS College ground on 22 August 2026, thousands of young women gathered under the banner of Congress’s “Chhatron Ki Goonj” outreach programme. They came seeking inspiration, perhaps answers to the real pressures of education, safety, and opportunity. What they received instead was a carefully staged performance of moral outrage. And the funniest part is not even what they were told. It is that they actually believed it.
Rahul Gandhi, Leader of the Opposition, rose to declare that India’s 70 crore women are the nation’s “biggest asset,” more sensitive, gentle, compassionate and forward-looking than men. He then pivoted to an ancient text, quoting Manusmriti to the effect that a woman in childhood belongs to her father, in youth to her husband, and after his death to her sons, and that she must never be independent. These words, he pronounced with theatrical gravity, “are a shame… should never ever have been spoken.” Women, he insisted, belong to nobody except themselves. The crowd cheered. The slogans of “smash the patriarchy” rang out. And once again, a complex social reality was reduced to a convenient political slogan.
The speech was not an isolated moment of progressive insight. It was a calculated exercise in selective history and political theatre that ultimately does women and the society they inhabit—a disservice. Below are the principal points that demand critical scrutiny.
Gandhi presented the Manusmriti passage as a direct, unambiguous endorsement of female ownership and lifelong subjugation. The verses he invoked state that a woman should remain under the protection or authority of male relatives and is not suited to independence.
Yet the same text contains multiple injunctions that women must be honoured, that where women are honoured, there the gods rejoice; where, on the other hand, they are not honoured, there all rites are fruitless; if the wife is unhappy, the whole family suffers; if she is happy, the family flourishes; the state must protect women who are alone, widowed, childless, unwell, or whose husbands are away. Anyone who robs their property should be strictly punished and the property restored and countless other verses. To extract only the restrictive verses, interpret them out of context while ignoring the honouring ones is classic cherry-picking. Ancient legal texts across civilisations, from Hammurabi to the Old Testament to classical Roman law, contain hierarchical and patriarchal prescriptions reflecting the social conditions of their time. Presenting one passage as the eternal essence of “Hindu mindset” while erasing the rest is not ‘scholarship,’ it is ‘propaganda.’
Manusmriti is neither the Indian Constitution nor is it enforced by any court, police station or government department. Post-Independence India operates under a secular legal framework that guarantees equality, equal inheritance rights (after successive reforms), the right to divorce, protection against domestic violence, and affirmative action.
Gandhi’s repeated invocation of Manusmriti as the hidden operating system of contemporary society functions less as social analysis and more as a political dog-whistle: it allows him to tar the BJP ecosystem as the ideological heirs of an ancient text while absolving the broader cultural, economic and administrative failures that actually constrain women’s lives. If the problem is “Manusmriti mindset,” why has female labour-force participation remained stubbornly low, why do safety statistics remain grim, and why does the dropout rate after secondary education remain high even in states long ruled by Congress or its allies?
Is Mr Gandhi going to answer these questions?
Gandhi’s own logic undercuts his emancipatory claim. He declared women “by nature more sensitive, more gentle, more compassionate and more forward-looking than men.” This is soft biological essentialism dressed up as praise. If women’s superior qualities are “by nature,” then differences between the sexes are not purely social constructs. Why does a woman have to be declared naturally more compassionate to establish her importance?
And if these qualities are supposedly natural, then he is himself acknowledging differences between men and women and that makes his whole argument rather amusing. Women do not need to be told they are “better” than men in some emotional category. They only need to be treated as individuals. They can be gentle, aggressive and ambitious; just as they can be unemotional, they can lead, they can fail and they can succeed.
The assertion that “you belong to nobody except yourself” has a seductive ring of absolute autonomy. In practice, human beings—men and women alike exist in webs of mutual obligation. Fathers invest decades of resources and emotional labour in daughters, husbands and wives form economic and emotional partnerships, sons are expected to care for aging parents. To frame all these relationships solely through the lens of male ownership is to ignore female agency within them and the reciprocal duties that bind both sexes.
A society that teaches young women that any familial claim is a form of possession risks hollowing out the very institutions that still provide the primary safety net for the majority of Indian women, especially outside metropolitan elites.
Autonomy is valuable, but atomization is not.
And Congress’s own record on women’s issues is mixed at best. The party ruled India for the bulk of the post-Independence period. Dowry deaths, female foeticide, and low female literacy rates were national scandals during those decades. The Women’s Reservation Bill lingered for years under successive Congress-led governments. Gandhi’s family dynasty itself has operated within traditional Indian political culture where lineage and surname confer authority—hardly a pure expression of individual self-belonging. To suddenly discover the horrors of “Manusmriti mindset” only when in opposition, while remaining largely silent on parallel patriarchal practices in other communities or in Congress-ruled states, suggests electoral calculation more than consistent principle.
Rahul Gandhi cited alarming figures—hundreds of thousands of female foeticides annually, high rates of harassment, low property ownership, fear of stepping out alone. These problems are real and demand serious policy responses. Yet the speech offered no granular analysis of regional variation, urban-rural differences, the role of economic development, police reform, or the failure of successive governments including those of his own party) to implement existing laws. Numbers were presented as proof of an ancient civilisational disease rather than as symptoms of incomplete modernisation, weak institutions, and cultural lag that require pragmatic solutions, not some slogans.
And his epic line “Be loud. Be proud. Fight for your space. Smash the patriarchy!” is effective stagecraft. It is less effective as a governing philosophy. Real empowerment is measured in rising female labour-force participation, declining sex-ratio imbalances, safer public spaces, higher secondary completion rates, and genuine choice in career. These require economic growth, better policing, educational quality, and cultural negotiation, not the continuous excavation of a thousands-year-old text for applause lines.
Gandhi’s Pune speech will be remembered by his supporters as a bold stand for women’s autonomy. A more rigorous reading reveals it as another instalment in a long pattern and it is the reduction of complex civilisational inheritance to a simple morality play, the substitution of historical grievance for institutional reform, and then the elevation of emotional rhetoric over practical governance.
Women do not need to be told they belong only to themselves. They already know they are individuals. What they need are safer streets, better schools, functioning courts, economic opportunity, and a political class willing to treat their problems as policy challenges rather than as props in an endless culture war. Until that shift occurs, speeches that begin with ancient shame and end with modern slogans will continue to generate headlines and leave the underlying realities largely untouched.
