In 2020, the Supreme Court in India ruled in favor of female officers in the Indian army that there had been discrimination against women in granting them permanent commission; angrily casting aside arguments that the rural rank and file were not prepared to be commanded by women (Singh 2020). This ruling has been widely heralded among liberal publics as good news for gender equality, a win for feminism. Indeed, ensuring equal opportunities for women and addressing multiple forms of discrimination at workplaces is central to feminist futures. Yet we must pause to ask what is achieved—and lost or erased—in discussing the issue of women in armed forces through such a frame of gender equality. I draw on my ongoing research on soldiering in contemporary India, particularly on women’s recent inclusion in the Indian BSF, to highlight two tensions that emerge in this narrative of feminism in uniform. 

In my research on women in the BSF, I encounter several uneasy contradictions. It is indeed a big win for young women—typically between 19–22 years of age—to get to hold such jobs within state institutions that appear to be powerful. Hailing from villages or small towns across the country, they are often the first in their extended families to obtain a salaried job in a central government institution and by far the only women in their communities to wear a soldier’s uniform. The young women I speak with are giddy with dreams and desires of what they can accomplish as they wear uniforms that they have longingly looked at in similar Republic Day parades on their TV screens or in Bollywood films. Talking to new recruits undergoing the nine-month long grueling basic training in the BSF, designed to transform them from civilians to soldiers, the stories of struggle to get to the point of recruitment and admission are undeniably moving and impressive.(1) These are struggles for education, against family pressures to marry young, to play and practice sports in public spaces, to strive for economic independence. The socially identifiable status of the soldier’s uniform is the promise of macho power to assert against these patriarchal social norms. But is this inclusion transformative? And if so, how, and who does it serve?

As young women settle into their jobs as soldiers in the BSF, they find that the uniform fits uneasily with all the roles they are expected to play in their professional and personal lives. Let’s take two of many examples that have come up through my research: (1) being deployed in limited roles as women, and (2) the expectations of being good soldiers and good mothers. 

Trained to be soldiers for ideally the full range of tasks in this Force, women are still deployed in limited capacities by a male leadership that is often hesitant to take the responsibility of risky postings at borders. The worst fear is the sexual assault of an Indian female soldier on duty: the harming of the female body by the enemy is tantamount to the harming of the nation and community honor. This is clearly in contrast to the recurrent harms and loss of life borne by male soldiers, that open up for them public recognition in heroism. This powerful gender ideology where women are a signifier of the feminized nation to be protected, while men are constructed as the protectors of the nation and thus the protector of Indian women, has its roots in anticolonial Hindu nationalism (Banerjee 2003). As such, female soldiers are associated with—and resented for—limited capabilities on full salaries, taking advantage of their gender and yet claiming equality, at the cost of their beleaguered male colleagues (Ghosh 2023). 

A quick look at scholarship on this topic reveals that such contradictory gendering of women in militaries is commonly encountered across a range of geographies, from high income countries such as the U.S., U.K., and Sweden, to postcolonial contexts such as India and South Africa (Woodward and Duncanson 2017). Even in the Israeli military, where the conscription of men and women is mandatory, women consistently suffer discrimination as less able and weaker individuals (Sasson-Levy and Amran-Katz 2007); it can be argued that structural and normative factors thus pressure them into performances of masculine bravado and macho militarism that not only equal but outdo their male counterparts, as we see in instances of outright cruelty in Gaza. On the African continent, South Africa has the highest number of women in the military, yet as Lindy Heinecken argues (2017), increasing numerical representation in a quest for “gender mainstreaming” has cemented the masculinist critique of women’s selections and progress “simply because they are women” (Cohn 2000). So in India, while women’s inclusion in the BSF is to ostensibly “soften” and improve the Force’s public image and its “soft skills,” female soldiers find themselves caught between the gendered feminine and less-valued positions and their own desires and goals of equaling their male colleagues in what are standards of masculine militarism.