Rahul Gandhi’s call to “smash the patriarchy” has produced an unusual kind of disagreement among feminists, where the argument unfolding online is less about whether patriarchy is real and more about what feminists should do when a mainstream political leader begins speaking in the language that generations of feminist movements fought to make part of public life.
For some feminists, when a politician as electorally consequential as Gandhi makes patriarchy a public political issue, the instinct is to recognise the significance of that shift rather than interrogate the credentials of the man making it. Others have been far less willing to separate the statement from the political ecosystem it comes from, and are arguing that feminists should not mistake the adoption of feminist vocabulary for a transformation in the politics behind it.
Unfortunately, proponents of the latter have begun to treat any willingness to engage with Gandhi’s intervention as a compromise of feminist integrity, as though refusing to choose between an imperfect opposition and an intolerable status quo were itself the more ethical position.
Can Feminists Afford Political Purity?
That disagreement followed Gandhi’s 22 August address to thousands of women and girl students at the ‘Chhatron Ki Goonj’ programme in Pune. He told them to smash the prevailing patriarchy, citing how Indian women continue to face restrictions on their movement, education, employment, and autonomy.
He criticised Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent expression of “cultural shock” at women protesters using abusive language during the Jantar Mantar student protests, and pointed out the familiar double standard in which behaviour considered ordinary for men becomes a moral crisis when women do it.
He also invoked the Manusmriti’s prescription that women remain under the authority of their fathers, husbands, and sons, insisting that a woman belongs to nobody but herself.
While demanding greater accountability from people in positions of greater power is rarely a bad thing, the particular standard of accountability being demanded here begins to look less like feminist scrutiny and more like political purity, raising the question of whether feminists can, in fact, afford such a reaction at a juncture when the consequences of India’s political direction are already being felt most acutely by those with the least insulation from power.
The erosion of democratic institutions is not an abstract constitutional concern for everyone equally; its costs are borne disproportionately by people whose caste, class, religion, gender, or economic position already leaves them with less power to resist the state.
When political power is this unevenly distributed, insisting that an Opposition leader must first satisfy an immaculate feminist standard before his interventions can be acknowledged risks turning feminism into a politics of abstraction.
Who Gets to Name Patriarchy & Why Does it Matter?
“India has had reformers who challenged patriarchy in clear words. But it has lacked national party leaders who did so from a public stage, as a live political demand, and not as a footnote in a policy paper,” Gurdeep Singh Sappal, a permanent member of the Congress Working Committee, wrote in The Wire, adding, “[Gandhi’s speech] is significant because it is rare for the sitting head of a national party to use the word patriarchy so bluntly as a political line, rather than the softer language of women’s welfare that most mainstream leaders prefer.”
For decades, feminists had to fight to make words such as patriarchy, consent, sexual autonomy, gendered violence, and misogyny legible in public life. The mainstreaming of those ideas was itself a political objective.
If feminism remained intelligible only within feminist circles, it could critique society without necessarily changing it. Political language matters because it determines what can be demanded, what can be named and, eventually, what institutions can be held responsible for.
The arguments in Gandhi’s speech are hardly novel to Indian feminists, reformers, or anti-caste thinkers, who have challenged patriarchal power for generations, often in language far more radical than anything a contemporary mainstream politician would risk using.
What is unusual is their arrival, in this vocabulary, on a major national political stage. That is why the speech has generated such a heated response both online and across the country’s political corridors. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) questioned Congress’s own record on women’s representation and accused Gandhi of hypocrisy, while Congress turned the question back towards the BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's (RSS) ideological relationship with patriarchy and the Manusmriti.
Acknowledging Progress is Not Granting Absolution
While it’s true that Gandhi’s speech doesn’t suddenly make Congress an out-and-out feminist party, the fact that a major national political leader can make patriarchy itself the object of a political appeal is evidence that feminist language has crossed a boundary.
This becomes especially relevant at a time when the ruling political ecosystem has perfected a vocabulary of women’s protection and cultural respectability, where a woman is celebrated only as long as she embodies the virtues prescribed for her by patriarchy, and becomes threatening the moment she even considers exercising her agency to refuse those prescriptions.
The outrage over women protesters using abusive language during the recent national protests that Gandhi referred to in his speech is just one small expression of this.
Not only that, but right now, the meaning of gender itself is at stake under BJP’s rule. In March, Parliament passed the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026, narrowing who qualifies as transgender and introducing medical-board scrutiny for legal recognition.
For a feminist movement, this cannot be a peripheral concern. We cannot treat it as just another cost to be absorbed until our utopian fantasy of a politically immaculate alternative has arrived. While we sit here debating whether Gandhi has earned the right to call for smashing the patriarchy, or whether Congress has done enough to deserve feminist support, trans people are already living with the consequences of this government—an undeniably un-feminist, misogynistic one—being in power and exploiting it.
The Politics of Purity Has Real-World Consequences
For people with the least power, politics is not an exercise in choosing the most ideologically immaculate ally. It is often a calculation about who will have the power to make their lives harder, and who might have the power to make them better.
That does not mean feminists should immediately become Congress’ cheerleaders. There is a difference between an ally and an allyship strategy. There is also a difference between strategic voting, tactical cooperation, or recognition of a political opening and ideological surrender.
However, there is a growing tendency in progressive spaces to treat every political compromise as though it carries the same moral and political consequences. If a political actor is imperfect, the argument goes that feminists should refuse to endorse them; if a party has a patriarchal record, it should be treated as disqualified; if an ally does not perfectly embody feminist politics, supporting them becomes a betrayal of feminist principles.
Not a Level Playing Field
But power does not operate on a level playing field.
Feminism itself teaches us this. We understand that a sexist joke from a stranger and sexual harassment by a boss cannot be assessed without considering the power relationship between them. We understand that a woman’s “choice” cannot always be separated from the economic and social structures surrounding it. We understand that institutions with vastly different capacities to inflict harm cannot be analysed as though they occupy identical positions.
Political actors deserve the same analysis, and it’s true that applauding Rahul Gandhi like he gave feminism its language veers dangerously close to yet another instance of political hero-worship.
So, yes, Gandhi saying “smash the patriarchy” does not absolve Congress of the many ways in which it has failed to dismantle it. But there is a difference between recognising political progress and granting political absolution.
As feminists, we should be able to acknowledge when feminist ideas enter the political mainstream without surrendering the capacity to interrogate the politician carrying them.
Feminism gave Indian politics a language it can no longer pretend not to understand. The question now is whether we will use that language to applaud power or to hold it to account, and whether, in our pursuit of the latter, we can resist mistaking political purity for political clarity.
(DevRupa Rakshit is a queer, autistic individual, ARTivist and independent multimedia journalist based in Bengaluru. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)