The Silent Siege, On the Structural Undermining of Women’s Aspirations in India

The Silent Siege, On the Structural Undermining of Women’s Aspirations in India

In the winter of 2025, the dreams of fifty young medical aspirants in Jammu and Kashmir were abruptly deferred. The National Medical Commission withdrew permission from the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Institute of Medical Excellence (SMVDIME), citing infrastructural deficits. Among the affected was Bilkis Manzoor from Budgam, a young woman who had bridged geography and socio-economic barriers through sheer will, poised to become her family’s first doctor. Her story, echoing the poetic resilience of Lucille Clifton, is not merely one of administrative failure; it is a stark emblem of a pervasive, often unspoken crisis in India: the structural and quiet erosion of women’s pathways to public life. While the nation has, in recent years, learned to erupt in rightful outrage over horrific acts of physical violence against women, it remains eerily indifferent to a more insidious form of violence—one perpetrated through policy whimsy, institutional collapse, and political calculus. This violence leaves no visible bruises, only erasures. It does not make headlines with brutality but enacts a slow, suffocating narrowing of possibility. This current affairs analysis argues that India’s gender discourse suffers from a critical blind spot: a preoccupation with protectionism that neglects and often actively undermines female agency, participation, and the fundamental right to aspiration.

The SMVDIME Closure: A Case Study in Gendered Fallout

The SMVDIME incident is a multifaceted tragedy. The college had been politically contentious, its Muslim-majority student body drawing scrutiny after the Pahalgam terror attack. The official reason for closure—infrastructure—may be legitimate, but the timing and consequence are deeply politicized. For the displaced students, the disruption is a severe academic and psychological blow. But as Paromita Chakrabarti notes, the costs are “unevenly borne.”

For young women like Bilkis Manzoor, admission was more than an academic milestone; it was a gateway to autonomy. It represented a sanctioned escape from the circumscribed roles often prescribed in conservative settings, a chance to build an independent identity as a professional. The closure of the institute doesn’t just delay a degree; it re-imprisons ambition. It sends a message that their hard-won foothold in the public sphere is precarious, subject to political winds and administrative apathy. When intellectual aspirations are “dismissed or disrupted,” the vacuum is filled by a “narrower imagination of women’s presence in public life, one that reduces them to risks rather than possibilities.” Their bodies cease to be vehicles of their own ambition and become, instead, “the site of collective anxiety”—to be protected, controlled, or withdrawn.

This is the core of the silent siege: the conversion of women’s potential into a problem to be managed, rather than a resource to be nurtured.

The Protection-Participation Paradox: India’s Gender Blind Spot

India’s public discourse on women is caught in a debilitating paradox. On one hand, there is a powerful, often performative, rhetoric of nari shakti (woman power), of veneration, and of protection. On the other, there is a systematic failure to create and safeguard the conditions necessary for women to exercise meaningful agency.

• The Theatre of Outrage vs. The Culture of Indifference: Society has been tutored to respond to episodic, physical violence—the 2012 Delhi gang rape, the 2024 RG Kar Medical College murder—with mass protests and legislative action (however flawed in implementation). This outrage is necessary and just. However, this conscience seldom extends to structural violence. The hijab ban controversy in Karnataka (2022) was largely debated through the lens of religious identity and secularism. Lost in the noise was the tangible consequence: girls stopped going to school. Their education, their aspirations, were the “collateral.” The policy, regardless of intent, functionally edged them out of the public space of the classroom. There were no bruises, no crime scenes—just a quiet retreat, a dissolved future met with societal indifference.

• The Illusion of Progress Masking Persistent Barriers: There are more women graduating from medical colleges than ever before. This is celebrated as progress. Yet, studies consistently show this does not translate into a proportional increase in practising women doctors. Why? The barriers shift form: unsafe and unsupportive work environments in rural postings, entrenched sexism in hospital hierarchies, the disproportionate burden of domestic labour and childcare that forces career breaks or dropouts. The system facilitates entry but impedes sustained participation. The pathway is opened, then littered with obstacles.

• The Absence from the Tables of Power: The consequences of this impeded participation are circular and devastating. Women hold a sliver of seats in Parliament and state assemblies and an even thinner slice of C-suites in corporate India. The female labour force participation rate remains among the world’s lowest. When women are absent from decision-making tables—in legislatures, corporate boards, university senates, and policy think tanks—the policies crafted are inherently myopic. They are made without women, and often against their long-term interests. The 2023 Wrestling Federation of India scandal is a poignant example: elite women athletes had to wage a heroic, agonizing public battle to topple a predatory chief, only to see his proxy return to power. The system, designed by and for men, quickly re-calibrated to neutralize their hard-won victory.

The Tangled Web of Agency: Beyond Neat Binaries

The analysis rightly states that women’s agency “isn’t a neat binary.” It is not simply a question of being empowered or victimized. It is a “tangled web” of social codes, economic dependencies, political realities, and personal courage.

• A woman barred from a classroom today (by a hijab ban, by the closure of her college, by lack of safe transport) is a woman impeded from economic independence tomorrow.

• A woman unable to become a practising doctor means poorer healthcare access for other women who prefer female practitioners, perpetuating a cycle of neglect.

• Fewer women with independent incomes means fewer exits from abusive marriages or oppressive family structures.

Each act of structural exclusion weakens the entire web, making it harder for all women to claim their place. The case of SMVDIME’s women students is so unsettling precisely because it represents this narrowing of possibility at its source—the point of education and skill acquisition. It attacks the root of agency.

Re-framing the Discourse: From Bodily Anxiety to Civic Entitlement

To break this cycle, India’s public conscience must expand. It must learn to recognize and revolt against the violence of paperwork, the aggression of indifference, and the politics of exclusion.

1. Recognize Educational Access as a Gendered Issue: The closure of an institute like SMVDIME cannot be seen as a neutral administrative act. In a conflict-scarred region with complex gender dynamics, it is a political act with a gendered fallout. Policy impact assessments must routinely include a gender lens. Who benefits? Who is displaced? What are the long-term consequences for women’s mobility and employment in the area?

2. Shift from Protectionism to Participation: The state’s primary role should not be to curtail women’s freedom in the name of safety (which often translates to control), but to create conditions for safe participation. This means investing in safe, reliable public transport, ensuring well-lit streets, enforcing strict anti-harassment laws in workplaces and campuses, and promoting infrastructure that acknowledges women’s needs (like adequate toilets).

3. Implement Enabling Policies for Sustained Participation: Celebrating enrollment numbers is empty without mechanisms to ensure retention and growth. This requires:

   • Mandatory and lengthy paternity leave to redistribute domestic care.

   • Strict enforcement of sexual harassment committees in all institutions.

   • Incentives and support systems for women professionals in male-dominated fields.

   • Quotas not just in student enrollment but in faculty positions, institutional leadership, and political tickets.

4. Amplify the Language of Aspiration: The media and popular culture must move beyond portraying women solely as victims or goddesses. Stories like Bilkis Manzoor’s—of striving, of intellectual ambition, of navigating structural hurdles—need centering. The narrative must celebrate the labor of self-creation, the “bridge between starshine and clay” that Clifton wrote of, which women build every day against formidable odds.

Conclusion: The High Cost of Indifference

The fate of SMVDIME’s women students is a microcosm of a national ailment. A society that allows educational and professional pathways for women to collapse, be blocked, or be rendered inhospitable without significant protest is a society that actively chooses inequality. It should “not be surprised when inequalities harden elsewhere”—in boardrooms, in legislatures, in household dynamics.

Talking about women in India cannot only be about reacting to the horror of rape or celebrating symbolic power. It must be about the mundane, critical work of defending the classroom seat, the hospital residency, the factory floor job, and the political nomination. It must be about recognizing that every time a Bilkis Manzoor is turned away, the collective imagination of what a woman can be shrinks a little more. The real test of nari shakti is not in how fiercely women are protected from the world, but in how seriously the world is restructured to welcome their unbridled, ambitious, and necessary participation. The bridge they are building with their own hands deserves a foundation more solid than the shifting sands of political expediency and societal neglect.

Q&A: The Structural Undermining of Women’s Agency

Q1: How does the closure of the SMVDIME medical college exemplify a form of “violence” against women that is distinct from physical sexual violence?
A1: The closure represents structural or systemic violence, which operates through policies and institutional failures rather than direct physical force. Unlike the visible, episodic horror of sexual assault, this violence is silent and bureaucratic. It “leaves no bruises, only erasures.” For women like Bilkis Manzoor, it destroys carefully built pathways to autonomy and professional identity. It dismisses their intellectual aspirations and reinforces a societal view that reduces women to “risks” requiring management rather than “possibilities” deserving investment. This form of violence is pernicious because it is often masked as neutral governance, making it harder to mobilize the public outrage that physical violence rightly provokes.

Q2: What is the “protection-participation paradox” in India’s gender politics, as described in the analysis?
A2: The paradox lies in the contradiction between a rhetoric of protecting women and the reality of restricting their participation. Indian society and the state often prioritize protectionist measures (like curfews, restrictive clothing debates, or withdrawing women from “unsafe” situations) ostensibly to safeguard women. However, these measures frequently curtail women’s freedom, mobility, and access to public spaces and opportunities. The analysis argues that true safety comes from enabling participation, not from imposing restrictions. The paradox is that in the name of protecting women from risk, the system often ends up protecting the status quo of patriarchal control, denying women the very agency needed to become independent, equal citizens.

Q3: The article states that “women’s agency isn’t a neat binary… it is a tangled web.” What does this mean, and how does the SMVDIME case illustrate this?
A3: This means that a woman’s ability to act autonomously is not a simple switch between “empowered” and “disempowered.” It is a complex interweaving of social, economic, educational, and political threads. The SMVDIME case shows how pulling one thread unravels others:

• Educational Thread (Cut): The college closure disrupts the specific ambition to become a doctor.

• Economic Thread (Weakened): Without the degree, the path to financial independence and a professional career is blocked or severely delayed.

• Social Thread (Constrained): The forced return home or transfer to another institution may re-subject the woman to restrictive family or community norms she had temporarily escaped.

• Psychological Thread (Damaged): The dismissal of her hard work and aspiration can diminish self-belief and narrow her future imagination.
  Thus, an administrative decision (closing a college) doesn’t just affect education; it tangles and weakens the entire web of agency that supports a woman’s journey into public life.

Q4: According to the analysis, why does increased female enrollment in higher education (like medical courses) not automatically lead to greater gender equality in the workforce?
A4: Increased enrollment is only the first, and easiest, hurdle. The analysis points to a failure to translate educational gains into professional participation due to persistent systemic and cultural barriers that emerge after graduation:

• Hostile Work Environments: Sexism, lack of safety, and inadequate support systems in workplaces (especially in rural postings for doctors) push women out.

• Disproportionate Domestic Burden: The expectation that women bear the primary responsibility for childcare and housework forces many to take career breaks or drop out of the workforce entirely, a phenomenon exacerbated by insufficient paternity leave and social stigma.

• Lack of Representation in Leadership: The absence of women in decision-making roles (in hospitals, medical administrations) means policies are rarely designed to support women’s career continuity.
  The system facilitates entry but fails to ensure retention and advancement, creating a leaky pipeline where women’s potential is educated but then sidelined.

Q5: What fundamental shift in perspective does the article advocate for in India’s gender discourse?
A5: The article advocates for a fundamental shift from a discourse centered on women as vulnerable bodies to be protected, to one centered on women as autonomous citizens entitled to participate. This requires:

• Expanding Public Conscience: To recognize and revolt against structural injustices (like institutional closures, discriminatory policies) with the same vigor as reactions to physical violence.

• Reframing Safety: Viewing safety not as a reason to restrict women, but as a prerequisite for their participation, necessitating investment in safe infrastructure and enforcing anti-harassment laws.

• Focusing on Enabling Agency: Prioritizing policies that enable women’s sustained presence in education, the workforce, and politics—such as support for care work, quotas in leadership, and gender-sensitive impact assessments for all policies.

• Celebrating Aspiration: Shifting cultural narratives to celebrate women’s intellectual labor and ambition, as exemplified by Bilkis Manzoor’s story, rather than reducing their narratives to victimhood or domesticity.