Summary
An opinion piece by Congress spokesperson Ragini Nayak, responding to Rahul Gandhi's address at Pune's "Chhatron Ki Goonj" women-only conclave, argues that India's discourse on women's safety functions as guardianship rather than genuine protection - citing the Manusmriti's prescription that a woman be under her father's, husband's or son's charge across her life and arguing that India's growing 24/7 service economy has pushed women into night shifts without the lit streets, safe transit and clean public infrastructure that would make that mobility genuinely safe rather than merely tolerated out of economic necessity.
WHY IN NEWS FOR UPSC & STATE PCS
The piece reframes a recurring public debate - how should India keep women safe - around a sharper distinction with real policy consequences: is "safety" being delivered as infrastructure the state builds or as restrictions placed on women's own movement and choices. With India's service economy structurally requiring more women to work night shifts than ever before, the piece argues this is no longer a philosophical question but a live test of what kind of protection the state is actually providing.
Standard News
Two Kinds of "Protection" That Get Called the Same Thing When a
government or a family says it wants to keep women "safe," that word is doing two entirely different jobs depending on what happens next. One version builds a lit bus stop, a working streetlight, a safe last-mile shuttle - protection as infrastructure, something added to the world so a woman can move through it freely.
The other version tells a woman what time to be home, which routes to avoid, which shifts not to take - protection as guardianship, something subtracted from her choices instead. India's expanding night-shift economy is forcing a choice between these two, whether or not anyone names it that way.
Why This Distinction Is Not Abstract Consider the
specific women this affects: those in IT, aviation, healthcare and journalism sectors that now run around the clock, who did not choose night shifts out of adventure but because that is where the jobs are. For them, "protection as guardianship" is not a hypothetical old text - it shows up as an employer reluctant to roster them at night, a family insisting they quit rather than travel after dark, a policy response to any incident that recommends women avoid certain hours rather than fixing the streets.
Each of these responds to a real risk by relocating the cost onto the woman's freedom rather than onto the infrastructure gap that created the risk in the first place.
The Historical Weight Behind the Modern Framing The
Manusmriti's formula - protected by father, then husband, then son, never independent - is centuries old, but the logic recurs every time a safety recommendation defaults to restricting a woman's movement instead of improving the conditions around it.
That is precisely feminist theorist Catharine MacKinnon's argument: dominance operates most effectively when it is offered and accepted as protection, not imposed as control. A curfew framed as care still functions as a cage; the intention behind it does not change what it does to a woman's actual freedom of movement.
What the Night-Shift Economy Actually Tests India's
24/7 service sector has created, almost by accident, a genuine empirical test of which model the state is actually building. If ten years from now dark transit stretches remain unlit, last-mile connectivity remains unsafe and public restrooms remain absent, while the advice to women remains "be careful," that is protection-as-guardianship persisting under a modern economic guise.
If instead cities invest in lighting, safe transit corridors and accountability for harassment on night commutes, that is protection-as-infrastructure - the version that expands what a woman can do rather than narrowing it.
For an aspirant, the exam-relevant insight is precise: economic necessity pushing women into night work is not the same as emancipation. Genuine freedom requires the state to build the conditions for safety, not merely tolerate women's presence in spaces it has done nothing to make safe for them.
Quick Facts
Key numbers & takeaways — revise these first
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Congress leader Rahul Gandhi addressed the "Chhatron Ki Goonj" women-only conclave in Pune on August 22, 2026, publicly criticising the Manusmriti's prescriptions on women's guardianship.
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The cited verse states a woman is protected by her father in childhood, her husband in youth and her son in old age and "does not deserve independence." 3.
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RSS ideologue M.S.
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Golwalkar had earlier described Manu as the "first and greatest lawgiver of the world." 4.
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Article 19(1)(d) of the Constitution guarantees the right to move freely throughout Indian territory and Article 21 has been read to include personal autonomy and dignity.
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The international "Take Back the Night" movement, asserting women's right to safe mobility after dark, began in the 1970s in Europe and the United States.
Connect the dots for your UPSC preparation.
Standard news covers the event. Log in to read our comprehensive analysis and uncover the hidden constitutional, structural, and ethical dimensions of this topic:
The Strongest Counter-Argument this piece must survive - that urging "unconditional freedom" before infrastructure exists risks asking individual women to absorb real, present danger for the sake of a principle.
Why That Position Still Holds even after taking the safety-realist objection fully seriously and where its own logic runs out.
How Article 19(1)(d) and Article 21 jurisprudence, including Puttaswamy and Joseph Shine, actually ground a legal claim to unrestricted mobility, not just a moral one.
What a genuine "protection as infrastructure" policy agenda would concretely require India's cities to build in the next decade.
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