Politics in Unusual Places

Chapter 1 recounts the 2012 gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh to highlight the contradictory nature of Indian democracy—which gravely affects its institutions and puts its citizens at risk. The book asks, why do we find pervasive gender-based discrimination, exclusion, and violence in India when the Indian Constitution builds an inclusive democracy committed to gender and caste equality? To understand women’s unequal experience of Indian democracy in multiple domains, the introduction weaves an analysis of the 2012 gang rape with ethnographic data from the Sikh community to call attention to the dangers of gender-based violence, from its most horrific expression to the more commonplace. In doing so, the book highlights similar logics at play along the spectrum of gender-based violence and explains how these logics cause women’s lives to be at risk in all spheres of life—state, civil society, religious community, and home.