Hundreds of women visit the house annually for a variety of reasons such as dowry demands, domestic violence, illegal harassment of family members, etc. Attara is home to one of the largest, most powerful, and most influential feminist vigilante groups in the world. The Gulabi Gang. These people have become well-known to some and empowering to others by using their neon pink sarees, pink police batons, and intimidating mob mentality presence to try to obtain their fundamental rights as women. 

Since the word "gulabi" in Hindi means "pink," the Gulabi Gang is also known as "The Pink Gang." These women would all appear with a pink baton and fierce pink sarees when they faced a challenge. That's where the name came from. The colour serves as an outward visual cue to others about their identity. They are not intimidated by their status or the way they exercise power. The members enjoy being called a "gang" because it fosters camaraderie. Devi, a member of the Gulabi Gang, demonstrated the emotional impact of the term when she responded, "We are not a gang in the usual sense of the term," when asked what she thought the term "gang" meant during an interview.

True Stories of The Gulaab Gang's Rebellion of Anger

Examples of the Gang's Tactics Case Study 1:

This case study was the basis for the Gulabi Gang article in Gulf News. A man was brutally beating his wife in public. In a place where male chauvinism is pervasive, the woman was passively accepting the assault. Even worse, no one offered to help. Heads bowed, dozens hurried past, desperate to stay out of the fray. But after being disgusted by the attack and the disrespect for it, a local woman named Sampat Pal Devi decided to act. She says she had seen this incident before and had not reacted, but this time she was incensed at seeing the man mistreat his wife.

Sampat, who was 43 at the time, went up to the man and quietly but firmly told him to stop abusing his wife. Before he began beating his wife, he yelled, "Don't you dare interfere," and threw a few expletives at her. Then Sampat turned to the woman and told her to defend herself. But if there was more reprisal, the wife was too scared to protest. For Sampat, who married at the age of twelve and had five children by the time she was twenty, it was a watershed moment. 

 "I had seen a lot of injustices, like girls not being able to receive an education or the rich stealing a poor person's land, which I was powerless to stop," She enlisted some local women and gave them long bamboo sticks called lathis. Sampat returned to the man's home with the women later that evening. "Why did you beat your wife?" she demanded as she dragged him from his house. There, as he flinched, she and the other women beat him with their sticks; they only stopped when he swore he would never hit his wife again. He was bruised just slightly, but his pride was severely hurt. The man and Sampat both learned something from it.

The Ostracism of Gulab Gang - Balancing the disparity between empowerment and vigilantism

One of the main grievances of the Gulabi Gang is that they employ violence to obtain what they are after. They are knocking around men with police truncheons. This issue is perhaps the most usual censure of the Gulabi Gang, therefore despite not being extensively addressed by any newspapers or articles, it should be spoken of. Physical violence is always deplored both by society and the law. Even though the state might be in trouble, substituting the work of a police officer can cause serious problems in the future and endanger public safety. Considering how the actors of nonviolent civil disobedience during the Civil Rights movement kept getting punished severely, The other issue is that their method of responding to domestic violence is more "soft feminism." They place these husbands in their rightful positions, but they never urge women to divorce their husbands; they merely give each woman her choice. They are not fully radical and liberating. Instead, they are trying to improve the system so that it will be safer and easier for these domestic women to continue their way of life. Rather than abandoning the systems they have developed in these rural communities, they are attempting to advise these women to dissolve the oppressive ties they now have with their family unit.

One of the problems with the brand of vigilantism by the Gulabi Gang is that it is a violation of the social contract. You enter into a social contract when you join a state where you forego your natural rights for legal rights to be secure. Put differently, they withhold from you the natural right to defend yourself. Vigilantism is the nightwatchman state, meaning they only protect but don't provide welfare or other safety nets. Where concepts such as the sovereign or the social compact are disregarded. The Gulabi Gang, for instance, began their vigilante group because they believed not everyone enjoyed the social compact that they were a member of equally. They therefore resorted to violence to compel the social compact to give them more rights. Another example of how a lack of accountability can be problematic is when there is no clear distinction between what is safe and what instead causes fear.

Considering the opposite end of Gulab Gang's endeavours, it is assumed that, even in the State of Nature, an imbalance in power structures keeps people from receiving equal treatment. In a village like the Gulabi Gang, the cycles of oppression are so embedded in the culture that creating an even playing field would be impossible due to internalized misogyny and classism. Men and women would not be equal because they would not inherently understand equality. Because men of lower castes would not even converse with men who were of higher castes, not only is there a lack of equality between the sexes, but also between the different classes of the same sex. Furthermore, if people were not treated as individuals rather than based on their gender or caste, self-serving behaviour would be more prevalent. A man from a higher caste is unlikely to understand the issue of mistreating or hurting a woman from a lower caste because of the belief that women are inherently inferior to men. 

The social contract can also be detrimental rather than helpful in the way the state enforces it. If the state is abusing you and giving you few rights in return for few benefits, rather than protecting you, you are at a greater disadvantage. You have fewer rights and you are still trapped in this abusive relationship. You don't even have the right to recover the rights that you already lost. Why would an oppressed individual ever assume that the government would bestow benefits upon them? This is another show of how the social contract is not very effective if its ground isn't necessarily equal. Anyone could think that the acts of civil disobedience by the Gulabi Gang would be legitimate based on that definition, especially in their situation.

Conclusion

In most cases, the violence is justified. If the husband disobeys these women, the last resort is violence. Once more, the terms are fair; they ask that the husband desist from abusing his wife and transform his violent attitude. If he thinks that is not sensible, the women will beat him. They are attempting to offer women in their culture more alternatives than beating up nasty men. These conditions are employing women, rescuing battered housewives, and dealing with the dowry—the amount that the bride gives to the groom for marrying into her clan. In deposing patriarchy, they are not attempting to persuade these housewives and mothers to give up their allegiance to their present state and become members of the nasty, oppressive government. 

Rather, they seek to provide a safe setting that empowers disadvantaged women. With this, there should be some limit to how much violence is possible without becoming a problem, and it should be taken off its present threshold of tolerance. The Gulabi Gang is said to be likely to tread along the line of complete despotic destruction that has been witnessed. When you are struggling with something that is not only political but cultural and very normative, struggling for blood and death will not enhance such social pressures but worsen them instead.

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