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Angry In Pink
In rural India, a group of women calling themselves the Gulabi Gang are using vigilante justice to make their voices heard in a man’s world.
On a broiling afternoon in Atarra, India, a throng of nearly two dozen women, all nattily uniformed in candy-pink saris, gather beneath the cool shade of a gnarled banyan tree. They listen raptly as a sinewy but robust woman—whom they hail as “commander”—stands in the middle of the group, delivering what seems like a military briefi ng. “If your husband beats you for stepping out of the house, you fi rmly tell him you are not his slave,” she thunders, her face beet-red. “You tell him that he should sit at home and take care of the kids.” All heads nod in agreement.
The “commander” is Sampat Pal, a 46-year-old woman with an eighth-grade education who heads an all-female, pink-sari-clad vigilante group that seeks to strike fear into the hearts of “wrongdoers.” Pal started the Gulabi Gang (in Hindi, gulabi means pink) three years ago to confront those who continuously commit grave social injustices against the poor, particularly women. At fi rst a localized group in the village of Banda, an impoverished and lawless district in the rural interiors of Uttar Pradesh, the Gang has since grown to include thousands of women across 600 villages, all of whom informally joined up and communicate through wordof- mouth, showing up whenever and wherever they hear their presence is needed. In the past two years, these women have gone after wife-beaters and rapists with lathis (traditional Indian bamboo batons used by Indian police to scare off crowds), taken up cudgels (heavy sticks) against corrupt law enforcement, and, in this overlooked rural landscape where bureaucracy only makes life more diffi cult, have even goaded apathetic government offi cials into action by publicly shaming them.
Last year, for instance, the Gang unearthed corruption in the local public food distribution system. A government-run shop was siphoning off tons of grain that was meant to be handed out free to the poor and selling it on the black market—until the night neighboring Gulabi Gang members, alerted by Pal through a messenger, stopped two trucks loaded with grain. The trucks were headed for the market, where the shop owner intended to sell the grain and pocket the profi ts. But despite threats from two knife-wielding drivers, the women managed to defl ate the truck’s tires and confi scate their keys. The pink vigilantes then successfully pressured their local government to seize the grain and properly distribute it.
“We function in a man’s world, where men make all the rules,” Pal says. “Our fi ght is against injustice.” This fi ght takes on an added urgency for Pal when she is called upon to aid abused women. In 2007, for example, a girl was raped by her landlord in an impoverished town in rural western Uttar Pradesh called Bulandshahar. The police in this area, paid off by the landlord, refused to register a case against him, despite the fact that the girl’s family lobbied tirelessly for his arrest. Exasperated, the family fi nally telephoned Pal, even though she was hundreds of miles away. Moved by the family’s pleas, Pal called Bulandshahar’s superintendent of police, though she was sure she had no infl uence in that area. “To my astonishment,” she says, “I did not need to introduce myself. He had heard stories about how I had shaken up the offi cials in my district.” Fearing that he would be mobbed by a group of pink-clad women, the superintendent immediately registered the case and promised to investigate.
The Gang’s unconventional ways have ignited the imaginations of Banda’s locals, who widely hail the women as heroes for giving a voice to the voiceless in this feudalistic region. Banda is among the poorest districts in India, and over one-fi fth of its 1.6 million citizens across 600 villages lie at the bottom rung of India’s caste hierarchy. In this socially fractious and inequitable part of the world, caste defi nes identity. Lower castes have been socially ostracized and, in many cases, treated like untouchables at the hands of upper-caste landlords. “There is a pervasive feeling of helplessness here,” Pal says. “A collective belief that fi ghting back is just not possible. But that is slowly changing.”
For Pal, the seeds of rebellion against an oppressive social order were sown young. Though she started school when she was four, her parents forced her to quit when she was nine. She protested by scribbling on the village walls and fl oors. Her parents fi nally relented, sending her back to school until she was forcibly married at 12. That year she went to live with her husband, an ice-cream vendor substantially older than Pal, and at 13 she had her fi rst of 5 children. But she was too ambitious to remain hidden behind the traditional Hindu ghunghat veil all her life or blend into a patriarchal society that still locks women away into a lifetime of subservience to their husbands and often requires the quiet endurance of horrifi c domestic abuse.
Moved by the plight of women in her area, Pal began engaging with local non-governmental organizations to combat common social ills like child marriages, dowry issues, and domestic abuse from alcoholic husbands. But she realized quickly that dealing with the red tape surrounding bureaucratic women’s-aid programs in India made her efforts slow and ineffective. Complicating matters further, her region’s staunch patriarchal system seeks to hobble the will of women, demanding that they stay home, and Pal’s husband was strongly opposed to the idea of her going out, especially unveiled. But she says, her “zeal changed his attitude.”
Still, Pal’s impatience with the ineffective channels of traditional activism pushed her to become more radical and emboldened her to form her own fi ery pink vigilante group, run solely by women. First dedicated only to the fi ght for the emancipation of women, the Gang’s mission later broadened to include combating corruption and graft. Since its inception three years ago, thousands of women have come forward to join Pal’s pink sorority, and many are victims of domestic abuse and violence. There is no registration process to join the Gang. Once word of Pal’s efforts reaches their village (either by phone or messenger and then by word-of-mouth), women just need to don a pink sari to become a part of the Gang. They aren’t bound to attend every operation Pal orchestrates. But most pay close attention to what she advises and look up to her as their “commander.” For Chuniya Devi, a diminutive 30-year-old mother of 6, joining the Gulabi Gang meant learning to fi ght her husband’s violent, alcohol-fueled outbursts. But observing Pal, she says, was enough to inspire her to challenge her man’s abusive ways.
On the afternoon her leader summoned her under the banyan tree, she was about to leave home, when her husband, Seevan, a broad-shouldered, middle-aged man, blocked the entrance, fuming with visible rage to see her leave the house without shrouding her face behind a ghunghat. “Don’t you have any shame going out uncovered?” he barked. “You don’t care if men gawk at you?”
Chuniya Devi’s face puckered. She tottered toward her husband to belch a fi tting reply: “Don’t men gawk at me when I go out in the fi elds?” referring to the fact that women are not expected to cover up while doing the necessary manual labor often expected of those with farm land to tend. Dazed, Seevan stepped aside and let her pass. Under normal circumstances, this kind of exchange would have surely provoked a beating for Devi. But though obviously incensed by being spoken to this way by his wife, Seevan, like other husbands in the district, is now too fearful of being stormed by the Gang to physically retaliate. Before she joined the Gulabi Gang, Devi acknowledges that she dreaded talking back to her husband, but she now says confi dently, “People often spout nonsense about the need to lock a woman in a veil. The more you suffer silently, I realized, the more your oppressor will oppress you.”
After months of emboldening women to stand up against their husbands without fear, beating up wife-beaters, forcing offi cials to go after rapists, and compelling men to take back wives who were kicked out of their homes for other women, a realization dawned upon Pal that their fi ght should not just be against abusive spouses. Corruption, she says, is a “cancer” that is eviscerating their economy. And bribery, she adds, has made it all the more diffi cult to bolster her country’s fl agging infrastructure. In fact, Transparency International, a watchdog group headquartered in Berlin that addresses worldwide corruption, estimated that Indians, particularly the poor, paid over 200 billion rupees (about $4.5 billion) in bribes in 2005 just to get basic needs met that are legitimately due to them.
To illustrate this point, Pal reminisces about how locals in Atarra desperately pleaded for years with the local administration to pave one of the village’s deeply rutted dirt roads. But their requests incited no response. “They will not act until their palms are greased,” Pal says. “The system reeks of corruption.” In 2006, the pink-clad women took it upon themselves to get the job done. They swarmed the offi ce of the local district magistrate, G.C. Pandey, with the relevant sheaf of papers, and Pandey was held down and had his face smeared with black paint in an act of public shaming. He fi nally relented, signing the papers and authorizing the road to be built. The villagers were jubilant.
After the attack on Pandey, Pal was formally charged with 11 offenses, including rioting, assaulting a government employee, and obstructing an offi cer in the discharge of duty. In true Indian fashion, however, trials drag on indefi nitely, and Pal has spent the years since the incident out on bail, engaging in more vigilante justice while her criminal charges remain outstanding. “She is a bold woman,” says Ashutosh Kumar, Banda’s superintendent of police. “But she works like a kangaroo court.” Kumar admits he admires her grit but says her gang is under suspicion for being communist or Maoist sympathizers.
Pal disregards such allegations, though, calling them a conspiracy against her. “To face down men in this part of the world, you have to use force,” she says. She concedes it’s her reputation for getting things done that scares offi cials into action, so she’s better able to “get justice done without using force.” Increasingly, she’s being called upon by far-fl ung villages for help—very often, by men.
“Come help us,” is the SOS message she receives on her cell phone on a recent afternoon from Kalyanpur, an impoverished village in the neighboring Chitrakoot district. Apparently, villagers’ requests for work, under the rural employment guarantee, have fallen on deaf ears for months. Under this ambitious antipoverty project launched by the Indian government in 2005, the program promises 1 member from every rural Indian family at least 100 days of employment. The work usually involves building infrastructure; the government is required to pay a daily wage, and everyone is entitled to it. But the program is plagued by corruption, and very often, offi cials concoct false employment registers and swallow the money. In this case, Kalyanpur’s villagers are legally entitled to the 100 days of work, but the program isn’t being implemented, so they worry offi cials have siphoned off the money. And that’s why Pal has been called in to help.
Pal dashes to Kalyanpur, this time leaving her pink-clad platoon behind. After hearing the villagers’ grievances, she dials the district magistrate’s number. He is busy in a meeting. Getting through to offi cials can be diffi cult. And it’s widely understood that the district magistrate won’t talk to a “nobody.” Pal bites her lip and waits. But moments later, her phone trills. It’s the magistrate himself. She murmurs something into the phone and seconds later, she hangs up. Turning to the gathered villagers, she assures them in the same powerful voice that transformed her in a few short years from a child bride into a feared and respected gang leader, “Your work will be done.”
Photographed by Sanjit Das
