When Law Decides: Debating Questions of Agency and Autonomy for ‘Abducted Women’

In the aftermath of the Partition of India, women on both sides of the border were subjected to a range of physical and psychological brutalities, mutilations and killings, and among them a very specific kind of violence-that of forcible mass abduction and conversion. This led to the codification of a special category of ‘abducted women ’in law by the state, with the specific aim of ‘rescuing and rehabilitating ’such women, and facilitating their return to their ‘original homes ’. Using the text of the original act and the arguments and accounts of survivors presented in the works of scholars like Urvashi Butalia, Kamla Bhasin, Ritu Menon, Veena Das and Dipti Misri, this paper makes the argument that in the Indian context, the state's response, although encased in a rhetoric of welfare, reflected a subversive form of violence towards these abducted women, which ignored their wishes and desires, silenced their voices and curtailed their autonomy. While this had debilitating consequences for women's status and rights as equal citizens of a newly born nation, the state's positioning as a ‘masculinist protector ’for the women was imperative for its own legitimation. By providing legal sanction to community notions of honour, dignity, purity and shame, however, the state not only endorsed paternalistic and patriarchal biases in law, but also set a precedent for future distortions, which continue to impact women's lives differentially even today.