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Rahul Gandhi raising the issue of patriarchy is apt and most welcome. Few politicians take it on so directly, and if his remarks pull the subject into mainstream political conversation, that’s useful in itself. But the discussion shouldn’t collapse into another round of the same old argument about Manusmriti, Hinduism, or which religion treated women worse. Patriarchy isn’t uniquely Indian, and any one religion did not invent it. Across civilisations, for centuries, women lived under systems overwhelmingly controlled by men. Yes, there were powerful queens, warriors and intellectuals, but they were exceptions, not the rule. For most women, male dominance simply was the norm.
War makes this especially stark. When kingdoms fell and battles took place, women were routinely raped, abducted, enslaved and humiliated. Sexual violence wasn’t incidental to conquest; it was a tool of it, a way of punishing and possessing the defeated. None of this was peculiar to India. It happened everywhere, across every religion and continent you care to name, and perhaps in even worse ways.
None of that is a defence of the Manusmriti. Its provisions on women and lowered castes are indefensible by any modern standard. But acknowledging that doesn’t mean pretending the rest of the world got it right either. And the deeper question is: why should a text like the Manusmriti, or for that matter the Bible, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Guru Granth Sahib, the Torah, the Avesta, and Buddhist and Jain texts have any say in how Indian women live now? It emerged from a completely different world.
India in 2026 cannot run on rules laid down millennia ago, and the same goes for every other tradition. All religions and India’s many traditions carry real wisdom, real moral depth and illuminating philosophy. But none of them were written with 21st-century ideas of democracy, gender equality, individual liberty or social justice in mind, and it’s unreasonable to expect them to line up neatly with those ideas now. We should take the wisdom from our traditions without becoming prisoners of them.
India has its own long history of pushing back against orthodoxy. Basavanna and the Sharanas questioned caste hierarchy and women’s inequality centuries ago. Sikhism challenged inequalities that were taken for granted around it. Reformers across the country fought untouchability, sati practice and the restrictions placed on women. And yet caste and patriarchy proved stubborn, which is exactly why independent India wrote itself a secular Constitution. For a modern Indian, that Constitution has to outrank scripture on questions of citizenship and rights.
Whatever any religious text says, it should not determine a citizen’s legal standing. Rights have to come from constitutional principles: equality, liberty, dignity and equal opportunity. But law alone won’t finish the job. We already have laws against dowry, domestic violence, sexual harassment and discrimination, and the problems persist anyway, because a law can punish an act but it can’t rewire an attitude. That takes education, economic independence and slow social change, and even then, there’s no guarantee.
Keralam has near-universal female literacy and excellent health outcomes, but patriarchal norms still hold on stubbornly. Karnataka does well on women’s economic participation but worse on household decision-making. Development weakens patriarchy; it doesn’t erase it. In parts of the north, the picture is worse still. For change to happen, it needs constant pressure from every direction: social, political, judicial and economic. There are no simple solutions.
There’s another uncomfortable piece of this: religious fundamentalism. Whether it shows up as aggressive Hindutva, radical Islamism, hardline conservatism within Christianity or any other faith, the pattern repeats: rigid religiosity narrows individual freedom, and women pay the highest price for it. The more open, educated and liberal a society becomes, the more room women actually get to decide how they study, work, dress, marry and live.
Which brings us to the Uniform Civil Code. Strip away the noise around it and the core question is simple: should a woman have fewer rights because of the religion she was born into? No. Marriage, divorce, maintenance, succession, guardianship and inheritance—these are areas where equality shouldn’t be negotiable. A Muslim woman, a Hindu woman, a Christian woman, or a woman of any faith ought to have the same basic civil rights as any man. A UCC done properly isn’t about imposing one community’s customs on everyone else. It’s closer to the opposite: it’s about putting individual constitutional rights above religious authority, regardless of which religion that authority belongs to.
Conservative voices in every community will resist this because religious establishments rarely give up authority on their own. But tradition isn’t a good enough reason to keep inequality in place. A Uniform Civil Code that actually guarantees equal rights to women, transgender people and everyone else, while still protecting individual freedom, is one worth supporting. The test is simple: does it increase equality, dignity and liberty? That’s the same test worth applying to the whole patriarchy debate.
We could spend endless hours arguing over what the Manusmriti is or fighting about a single verse in any ancient text. It makes for good television. It won’t free a single woman. The job isn’t to rebuild the past; it’s to build something better going forward, with the Constitution as the guide. The day every Indian woman, whatever her religion, caste or income, has the same freedom, dignity and opportunity as an Indian man, that will have done more to defeat patriarchy than a thousand debates about ancient texts ever could.
Dinesh Gundu Rao is a former minister and a Congress MLA from Gandhinagar constituency in Bengaluru. Views expressed here are the author’s own.
