‘Equality between daughters & sons must start at home. But, instead, it’s discrimination that starts at home. Parents are more focused on restraining their daughters and not their sons,”– Justice B.V. Nagarathna
BETI Bachao, Beti Padhao is not just a slogan; it is a story the state tells about itself. A story in which the nation is a benevolent guardian, the girl child is vulnerable but redeemable, and power is cast as protector rather than participant in the conditions that produce her vulnerability.
That framing is not accidental. It is ideological.
Under the Bharatiya Janata Party, as with many political formations before it, the language of women’s empowerment has been carefully curated to avoid a more uncomfortable truth: that gender inequality in India is not a problem of neglect alone—it is a problem of patriarchy embedded in family, community, and state institutions themselves.
The slogan says “save the girl child.” It does not ask: save her from whom?
From the very social order that produces son preference, controls female sexuality, polices women’s mobility, and treats their autonomy as negotiable. From a structure where violence is not an aberration but a method of enforcement—of obedience, honor, and hierarchy.
By casting the state as savior, the slogan quietly erases the state’s complicity in maintaining that order.
Patriarchy is not just about individual acts of violence; it is about who gets believed, who gets protected, and whose suffering becomes politically inconvenient. It is also about how justice is mediated—through police stations that may discourage complaints, courts that move slowly, and public narratives that scrutinise the victim more than the accused. And this is where the critique of hypocrisy deepens into something more systemic.
Because when institutions hesitate to act against powerful men, when political calculations shape responses to gender violence, when narratives shift depending on the identity of the accused, what is being defended is not just a party—it is a hierarchy. A hierarchy in which male power, especially when politically useful, is insulated.
This insulation is not merely cultural; it is institutional. It is visible in the uneven implementation of laws meant to protect women, in the selective urgency with which cases are pursued, and in the quiet normalisation of misogyny within public life. Even moments of outrage are often fleeting, absorbed into a cycle of spectacle rather than sustained reform.
This is why welfare schemes, however useful, cannot be mistaken for transformation. Giving a girl a bank account or a scholarship does not dismantle the patriarchal bargain that governs her life. It may even coexist comfortably with it. She can be educated—and still controlled. Visible—and still unsafe. Included—and still subordinate.
The contradiction is not incidental; it is structural.
Even the celebration of women in politics—through measures like the Constitution (106th Amendment) Act, 2023—sits within this tension. Representation matters, but representation without autonomy risks becoming symbolic. If women enter political spaces that are already shaped by patriarchal norms—where loyalty outweighs dissent, and image outweighs accountability—the presence of women does not automatically translate into the transformation of those spaces.
Patriarchy adapts. It does not simply disappear when women are included; it reorganises itself around them.
There is also a deeper cultural layer. The dominant political imagination often celebrates women as symbols—mothers, daughters, embodiments of sacrifice or honor. This symbolic elevation coexists with real-world control. Women are revered in abstraction and regulated in reality. The “good woman” is protected; the “deviant” one is questioned, blamed, or abandoned.
This duality allows power to speak the language of respect while practicing the logic of control.
It also creates a moral economy in which women’s rights are conditional—granted insofar as they align with socially sanctioned roles. Those who step outside these roles—by asserting sexual autonomy, choosing partners across caste or religion, or challenging authority—often find themselves outside the protective framework the state claims to offer.
Figures like Deendayal Upadhyaya envisioned a society rooted in moral order, but that moral order was itself shaped within a deeply gendered framework—one that emphasised harmony over conflict, duty over autonomy. The problem is not simply that these ideas exist, but that they can be mobilised to contain demands for gender justice by reframing them as disruptions rather than necessary challenges.
So when the state says “save daughters,” it is not merely offering protection. It is also defining the terms on which that protection is granted.
And those terms rarely include a serious confrontation with male power—within families, within communities, or within political institutions themselves. Nor do they adequately engage with intersecting hierarchies of caste, class, and religion that intensify women’s vulnerability in different ways. A Dalit woman, a Muslim woman, or a woman from a poor rural household does not experience patriarchy in the same way as an upper-caste urban woman—and yet policy discourse often flattens these differences into a single, sanitised category of the “girl child.”
That flattening is itself a form of erasure.
It allows the state to claim success through aggregate indicators while leaving untouched the deeply unequal social terrain on which those indicators are produced. It replaces structural change with measurable outputs, and justice with optics.
That is why the gap between rhetoric and reality persists.
Because you cannot dismantle patriarchy with paternalism.
You cannot “save” women while leaving intact the structures that subordinate them.
And you cannot claim empowerment while avoiding the fundamental question: who holds power over women’s lives—and what would it take to change that, not symbolically, but materially?
Until that question is faced directly, every slogan, however well-intentioned, risks becoming part of the problem it claims to solve.
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Ranjan Solomon is a writer, researcher and activist based in Goa. He has worked in social movements since he was 19 years of age. The views expressed here are the author’s own and Clarion India does not necessarily share or subscribe to them. He can be contacted at ranjan.solomon@gmail.com
