Read Nation and Family: Personal Law, Cultural Pluralism, and Gendered Citizenship in India for Free Online Page A

entitlements because changes in social practice, civil society mobilization, and the public ethos led them to value these ends more.
    Until the 1960s, ruling elites focused on determining the basic features of the polity, building state institutions, and pursuing ambitious strategies of economic development and social change. The consolidation of democracy and the postcolonial state’s authority led policy makers to shift their attention thereafter to addressing demands pressed by a more mobilized civil society, the pressure to do which became stronger as party competition intensified. An aspect of this revised approach to governance was a shift from the wide-ranging personal-law reforms proposed in the 1940s and the 1950s to periodic changes in specific legal provisions that mobilizers, patterns of litigation, and emergent values and social practices suggested were urgently needed. Such focused legal changes seemed unlikely to cost parties much electoral support; this seemed particularly so regarding Hindu law because conservative Hindu elites devoted less attention to family law after the 1950s. Modernist political elites became more willing to introduce such changes as a result.
    Rights organizations proliferated and grew larger, became more autonomous of political parties, and addressed a wider range of policies, especially after India’s brief authoritarian “emergency” of the mid-1970s. They included women’s organizations and other organizations that addressed women’s rights, religious and other cultural norms, and family law. Various civil-society organizations built networks with legislators, judges, and bureaucrats. Some of their intellectuals and leaders became members of policy bureaucracies, such as the Law Commission and the Minorities Commission, that addressed personal law at times. Many of them were members of commissions engaged with gender-relevant policy, such as the Committee on the Status of Women in India (CSWI), formed by the Ministry of Education and Social Welfare in 1971; the Department of Women and Child Development, established in 1985 as part of the Ministry of Human Resource Development and turned into an independent ministry with access to greater resources in 2006; and the National Commission for Women (NCW), formed in 1992. The CSWI assessed women’s condition and the impact of policies meant to improve their circumstances, and many later initiatives to promote women’s rights and status drew on its report. 2 The functions of the Department of Women and Child Development and the NCW included the assessment and promotion of women’s legaland constitutional rights. The proposals of these institutions contributed to certain changes in personal law over the past two decades.
    Women’s organizations and rights organizations gained some influence over the deliberations in certain parties regarding gender-relevant policies. Moreover, their growth contributed to the emergence of a public ethos favoring greater women’s rights in various social arenas. This made many parties wary of advocating policies clearly contrary to women’s interests. For instance, it led Hindu nationalists, who had steadfastly resisted Hindu law reform in the first postcolonial decade, to support certain initiatives to empower women. Thus, over the last decade, the BJP supported giving Hindu women greater access to their parents’ shares in joint property and opposed enabling no-fault divorce because it seemed this bill would not safeguard the interests of women and children adequately. The changes in the public ethos also tempered the opposition of parties based among the middle castes and lower castes of northern India (the Samajwadi Party (SP), the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), the Janata Dal (United), and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP)) to giving married daughters shares in joint property and rights to live in and partition the ancestral home, and to a quota for women in political representation. 3
    The growth