Compassion, Female Victimhood and Abortion Legalization in Postcolonial India: Tracing Epistemic Heterogeneity in Abortion Politics

Abstract

This paper provides a revised history of an understudied event in the trajectory of Indian political modernity - the moment of the legalization of abortion in 1971. The existing scholarship on the event reads it as one that was motivated purely by a developmentalist vision of a modernizing postcolonial elite, to the extent that the latter regarded increases in human numbers as hindrance to economic growth and identified abortion-legalization as a key solution to this quandary. While merited, such interpretations do not account for the varied techniques of persuasion mobilized by the parliamentarians/ lawmakers responsible for debating the laws. With the help of extensive archival analysis of the parliamentary debates, the paper shows how the modes of reasoning put forth in these debates were not always pegged to a developmentalist paradigm but rather made unequivocal use of a heterogeneous idiom of “compassion” for the woman, victimized by male irresponsibility, to ground its case. The lawmakers’ mobilization of this concept further recognized that the victimized pregnant woman’s standpoint is epistemically inaccessible/ incommensurable to those who are responsible for adjudicating on the act of abortion. An acknowledgement of this incommensurability between the knowledge that the two parties hold, became the foundation for compassion. In the process of elucidating the use of the idiom of compassion broached in these parliamentary debates, the paper broadens our interpretations of global histories of welfare feminism in general and reproductive justice in particular.

Keywords:

• Abortion-legalization
• female victimhood
• non-identification
• compassion

[…] she is generally too shy to deliberately revolt against masculine bad faith; […] he commits the fault, but unloads it onto her (Simone de Beauvoir 2012, 606; also quoted in Ranajit Guha 1987, 59, emphasis added).¹

A woman is the victim of an unholy conspiracy by men, and the men do get away, it is the woman who suffers (A. P. Chatterjee, Rajya Sabha Secretariat, 1971a, 210, emphasis added).

This essay reexamines a key historical moment of postcolonial modernity in India – the moment of the legalization of abortion in the Indian Parliament in 1971. It enquires into the following problematic: How did the Indian state seek moral legitimacy to legalize abortion in India, independent of the articulation of reproductive rights by the Indian women’s movement?² The existing literature on this event has hitherto argued that this was possible predominantly because abortion-legalization was essentially a regressive population control measure, introduced by a modernizing postcolonial political elite, geared toward curbing the birth rate of the poor; an elite pegged to a state apparatus that gradually aimed at embracing capitalist economic development. This essay’s key aim is to show how this reading is essential but simultaneously inadequate to the extent that it is largely historicist.³ Instead, it argues that the legal discourse on this event, often took recourse to a specific idiom of compassion toward the pregnant woman, victimized by male duplicity, as one of the most crucial grounds for passing the Abortion Bill in the Indian Parliament. In order to take upon this task of revising the history of abortion-legalization and demonstrating how compassion played a crucial role in the trajectory of postcolonial India’s (bio)political modernity, I engage in a close textual analysis of the Parliamentary debates, both Rajya Sabha (Upper House of the Indian Parliament – RS hereafter) and Lok Sabha (Lower House of the Indian Parliament – LS hereafter), that took place between 1967 and 1971.⁴ I also briefly engage with some of the writings of Sripati Chandrasekhar, India’s then Health Minister who helmed the legalization of abortion. My primary contention is that the thrust of the developmentalist discourse of “population control” was dominant, and yet, could not hegemonize the governmentality involved in the event of abortion legalization in India, precisely because of the presence of this heterogeneous legitimizing principle of compassion, oriented toward revering the sheer state of female victimhood that an unwanted pregnancy induces; a notion of reverence that also appealed to the ethic of an epistemic unintelligibility and unknowability of the “truth” of the pain of the victimized sufferer (i.e. the pregnant woman seeking abortion). In the process of elucidating the knowledge-practice of compassion broached in these parliamentary debates, the essay thereby broadens our interpretations of global histories of welfare feminism in general and reproductive justice in particular.⁵

Background of the Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act (1971): Abortion Legalized under Three Conditions

Medical termination of pregnancy, also known as abortion, had been criminalized in India in the wake of the establishment of the Indian Medical Service (IMS) in 1763 during British colonial rule in India. In the phase after India gained its independence in 1947, Articles 312-316 of the Indian Penal Code that defined the legal apparatus of abortion, permitted abortion to the pregnant woman only when it was necessary to save her life. A United Nations Advisory Mission visiting India in 1965, acknowledged the then Ministry of Health and Family-Planning’s ardent endeavor to reduce the net birth rate; and it is via the UN’s effort to integrate family-planning and health objectives together, that the first proposals to decriminalize abortion were put forth in India. A committee by the name of the Shantilal Shah Committee was established a year later, which subsequently declared that abortion should be decriminalized since women seeking to terminate their pregnancies are already risking themselves in the hands of untrained professionals.

In the Rajya Sabha (Upper House) debate held on 29^th March 1967 on the Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Bill (also known as the Abortion Bill), Sripati Chandrasekhar, then Minister of Health and Family-planning, declared that since the Shantilal Shah Committee identifies the current law on abortion as “too restrictive,” it is time that it be “liberalized” to allow the termination of pregnancy by a qualified medical practitioner acting in good faith not only for saving the pregnant woman’s life but also:

(a) When the continuance of the pregnancy would involve serious risk to the life, or grave injury to the health, whether physical or mental, of the pregnant woman, whether before, at, or after the birth; or, (b) When there is a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped in life; or, (c) When the pregnancy results from rape, intercourse with an unmarried girl under the age of sixteen or intercourse with a mentally defective woman (RS Secretariat 1967, 1124).

Based precisely on these three grounds, the MTP Bill was passed in the Indian Parliament in 1971. As is evident, the liberalization of the Abortion Law did not mean that abortion was now granted on demand. Rather, before the woman could seek abortion, she had to be identified as an authentic or a legitimate victim; the aforementioned set of conditions had to be met. The reasons informing these set of conditions, as stated, were “health” (there is risk to the physical and mental health of the woman); “eugenic” (possibility of the birth of “crippled” children); and “humanitarian” (the woman has been a victim of “sex crimes” like rape, intercourse with a lunatic woman or unwanted pregnancy induced by the failure of contraception) respectively (RS Secretariat 1967, 1124). Thus, qualifying the right to abort by these series of conditions meant that the generic structure of the law was such that it was impossible to identify the woman as an agential subject who had full rights to her bodily integrity and legal personhood.⁶ However, as this paper contends, bringing all these three conditions (i.e. health, eugenic and humanitarian) together, within the single homogenized rubric of “family-planning” and “population control,” as the existing literature (described below) does, left the event of abortion-legalization insufficiently explained.

Existing Scholarship on the MTP Act: Constituting Abortion-Legalization as a Historicist Moment

The existing scholarship on the event of abortion-legalization has predominantly read it as a regressive, anti-feminist move, geared primarily toward controlling India’s demographic rate and thereby inducing the modern-developmentalist notion of the “small-family norm” in India. This scholarship reads the liberal governmentality associated with the event predominantly through, what historian Dipesh Chakrabarty calls, a historicist lens. Historicism, as Chakrabarty (2008), drawing primarily from Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” had shown us, is the idea that to analyze the mechanisms operative behind a particular historical moment under scrutiny, it has to be seen both as a “unity” or an integrity of conception throughout its existence and as something that attained full expression through a process of “development” in secular, historical time (23). Building upon the methodological insights of historian Ranajit Guha, Chakrabarty (2015) further argued that historicist positions pay less attention to the inherent dissonance between the principles of French structuralism that refuse to read a particular historical moment solely in terms of unity and development on one hand, and, liberal historiography’s stagist, sequential understanding of historical change on the other.

For example, commenting on the moment of abortion-legalization, sociologist Shilpa Phadke (1998) asked, to what extent the Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act was intended to operate as a “progressive measure for women and how much was motivated by the state’s desire to seek contraception at any cost?” (2) She further asserted that the MTP Act, which in law offers women greater power over their bodies, becomes an instrument of control when it is interpreted by the state as a mere means of family limitation (Phadke 1998, 2). According to the social scientist Mohan Rao (2004), “it was the overriding importance attached to controlling numbers that led to this progressive legislation” (41). Political scientist Nivedita Menon (2004) argued:

Access to abortion is upheld (a) through a sanctifying of social norms which are in fact antithetical to feminism, and, (b) on the grounds that overpopulation is the reason for mass poverty, an argument used by the ruling elites to justify the development strategy they have adopted (74).

Further, Menon (2004) read this liberal-governmental moment as a culmination of the inherent tension between growth strategies and distribution strategies adopted by the post-independent Indian state that had been reluctant to go for fundamental agrarian transformations. Similarly, anthropologist Sayantan S. Roy (2011), in his discussion of the parliamentary debates on the event, identified the moment of this legalization as a biopolitical one where biopolitics was understood largely as an impoverished tactic of controlling and targeting women’s bodies, thereby reducing them to their reproductive capacities. For Roy too, the moment was geared predominantly toward the modernizing state’s efforts at addressing the “overpopulation” issue and its concomitant existential “fear of large numbers” (Roy 2023, 204).

This existing scholarship’s apprehension about the moment of legalization is often reconfirmed by Sripati Chandrasekhar (1974) - the aforementioned Health Minister of India overseeing the legalization of abortion - who, in his book with the suggestive title “Abortion in a Crowded World” remarked,

the unwanted child who cannot be supported by his parents or even the larger joint family […] ends up on the pavement with a beggar’s bowl, and becomes a starving, disgruntled anti-social citizen, a burden to himself, society and the state (89).

It is significant to note here that the Indian state, in this phase, was simultaneously trying to achieve mortality decline leading to further population growth, as well as fertility decline. Precisely to this end, the crucial step of abortion-legalization, for Chandrasekhar (1974), could act as both a health measure as well as a demographic measure (81). This is because, as he further added, since research showed that millions of induced abortions took place every year at unhygienic insanitary clinics, this legalization could play the role of both a death control as well as a birth control measure. The phrase “death control” implied that those who wish to abort could procure a safe abortion from a qualified surgeon in a government registered clinic under sanitized conditions; and the phrase “birth control” was used because, according to him, there was “a direct correlation between abortion and the declining birth rate” (Chandrasekhar 1974, 81). In fact, for Chandrasekhar (1974), “delivering 20 million babies annually,” as he once proclaimed, “would be a greater strain on the nation’s medical services and economic resources than, say, performing one to five million abortions a year” (108). In this regard, scholars on histories of health point out how concerns for the pregnant woman experiencing unsafe abortions, during this phase, often became secondary to efforts at establishing a development-modernizer’s gaze of disgust toward “unprofessional” midwives or dais, i.e. women usually hailing from the “lower” castes, with the knowledge of alternative birthing practices (Ghoshal 2014, 28). They show how these women either needed to be “trained” in basic obstetrics, or their knowledge had to be actively denigrated and thereby obliterated from the sanitized vision of a future nation where birthing was only supposed to be based upon the “expert knowledge” of obstetrics (Ghoshal 2014, 28; Roy 2011). Chandrasekhar (1974) in fact argued that since the Indian masses were often acclimatized to living in abject poverty, putting forth the argument of the “larger demographic picture,” in order to legitimize the legalization, would not move these masses (112). Therefore, for him, foregrounding the discourse of “women’s health” could be a much more persuasive strategy for justifying the legalization (112).

Consequently, there is some very serious merit to the existing scholarship’s concern on how abortion-legalization was predominantly about addressing the larger state-led demographic objective of the reduction of “surplus” human numbers, i.e. reduction of the birth rate of the impoverished as the latter had least chances of getting converted into the demographic dividend. However, this paper shows how a heterogenous idiom was simultaneously operative in the legislative debates on the legalization; an idiom that did not just make a legal-(bio)political use of affect (in relation to the pregnant woman seeking to terminate an unwanted pregnancy), but rather an affective use of the legal-(bio)political. It was an idiom that did not necessarily identify the gesture of exhibiting compassion toward the pregnant woman as a mere political strategy or tactic, neither did it identify pregnant women seeking abortion as mere means to achieve the goals of hyper-rationalist planning programmes, oriented exclusively toward reducing the “absolute surplus population.”⁷ The rest of the essay will discuss how this radical heterogeneity, undergirded by a call for responsibility and call to protect the mother-to-be from social rejection, was manifested in the most explicit manner in the parliamentary debates on the Abortion Bill; heterogeneous detours (from the larger demographic anxiety about “surplus” humans) that would subsequently lead up to the passing of the Bill, and thereby to the legalization of abortion in India.

Dipesh Chakrabarty (2008), in his “Provincializing Europe”, distinguishes between two kinds of histories, History 1 and History 2. History 1 is the “universal and necessary history posited by the logic of capital,” and History 2s are “pasts encountered by capital as antecedents but not as belonging to its own life-process” (63). A closer examination of the parliamentary debates shows that the persuasive strategies involved in these debates, usually associated with processes of “development-modernity”⁸ (i.e. identified as falling exclusively within the rubric of History 1), often in the reproduction of itself, encountered and mobilized certain power relationships that did not necessarily belong to History 1’s own life process (the discursive apparatus of compassion for female victimhood, as we will see in the following section, being one of them). These are elements/ pasts that capital encounters as “antecedents,” are alien to its own life-process and yet capital needs to mobilize them for its sustenance (63). Under such conditions, the digressions that the mode of governmentality deployed in History 1 often needed to undertake in order to negotiate these power relationships for its own successful completion, presented the practices of development with, as Chakrabarty further suggests, “double possibilities” (64). He argues that these power relationships that were mobilized could be central to development-modernity’s self-replication (i.e. the discourse of compassion could be mobilized predominantly as a political tactic to use abortion-legalization as a mere tool for curbing the birth rate of the poor). And yet, as he adds further, it is also possible for these power relationships to be geared toward modes of governing that do not necessarily contribute to such processes of replication (i.e. the discourse of compassion could also be mobilized toward goals that had the possibility of dodging the linking of abortion legalization to the sole objectives of reducing “surplus humanity”). In other words, the political rhetoric of compassion for female victimhood could be mobilized to justify the proliferation of the liberal biopolitical state, the mobilization of compassion could also escape and/ or exceed the lifeworld of the liberal biopolitical state. Let us now move on to a close examination of the exact nature of the hitherto under-discussed varied techniques of persuasion mobilized in these debates.⁹

Parliamentary Debates on the MTP Bill I: Compassion for the Victim of “Masculine Bad Faith”

A key yet hitherto neglected aspect of both the Upper House and the Lower House Parliamentary debates taking place between 1969 and 1971 on abortion-legalization, something that I reckon as worth acknowledging, was their crucial effort to repeatedly argue that, firstly, the legalization of abortion should not be identified as a mere component of the nation’s developmentalist effort aimed at reducing “unwanted” human numbers; secondly, the legalization should not be treated as a mere, benign, family-planning measure; and thirdly, it should not be conceived solely as a function of women’s assertion of their reproductive “choice” (or rights). This was because, as the parliamentarians emphasized, the gesture of conceiving the legalization exclusively as either a population control or as a family planning initiative or even solely as an aspect of rights, undermines and diminishes the urgency of acknowledging the state and experience of victimhood that grounds the verity of the pregnant woman seeking abortion. These three gestures, for them, as I will demonstrate below, depoliticize the woman’s need to seek abortion to the extent that they do not recognize how the so-called “sexual” interactions that led to these unwanted pregnancies were predominantly pegged to an acute lack of the woman’s consent. They also depoliticize the act of seeking abortion in the sense that they do not recognize, as the parliamentarians further noted, that even when the woman was consenting to a sexual interaction, the very reality of an unwanted pregnancy often gestures toward the limits of such consent (i.e. “what forces lie behind a woman’s yes”), and toward the fact that she might have been, in fact, a victim of masculine carelessness, aloofness and/or dubiousness.¹⁰ And, in the process, all these three presuppositions (abortion as population control, as family planning and as choice), as they argued, disingenuously constitute the pregnant woman in need of abortion as, on one hand, a purportedly sovereign, desiring, sexual “agent” who is supposedly equally accountable for the undesirable pregnancy as the man, and, on the other hand, erroneously and often unjustly constitute abortion, in the words of Simone de Beauvoir (2012), as a benign, modern, mere “contraceptive practice” that women supposedly willfully engage in (605, emphasis added).

In the Lok Sabha debate that took place on August 2 1971, for example, Member of Parliament (MP hereafter) Biswanarayan Shastri argued, “This Bill […] should not be viewed as some sort of a family planning measure, it has much more social significance than that” (LS Secretariat 1971, 188).¹¹ In the Rajya Sabha debates held on 3^rd December 1969, Dr Chandrasekhar, a member of the Indian National Congress (INC hereafter), introduced the Bill thus: “a measure for the emancipation of Indian women from the miseries that they face through no fault of theirs;” miseries that could lead to “possible injury to their physical or mental or emotional health” (R.S. Secretariat 1969, 2717). In the Lok Sabha debates, an MP, founder of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research and the Deputy Minister of Health, Debi Prasad Chattopadhyay asserted that women who mostly under “circumstantial pressure” are impregnated, should be allowed to have the benefit of terminating their pregnancies (LS Secretariat 1971, 161). He further elaborated on this by reminding that during the event of the partition of India in 1947, many women were victims of forcible sexual acts, resulting in unwanted pregnancies; and since the Indian State could not intervene legally during that period and help those “unfortunate women,” it is imperative that the State acts upon now (161).

MP Chandrasekhar (1974) reinforced the above-mentioned argument of Mr Chattopadhyay retrospectively in his book where he argues that although abortion is a matter of choice between two evils, “when the choice is forced, the lesser evil is preferred.” (45). In fact, one of the best examples of this notion of “non-choice” being mobilized by Chandrasekhar to legitimize his decision of becoming a forerunner of abortion-legalization in India, would be his gesture of drawing from the Indian philosopher and first Vice President of India, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s interpretations of Hindu philosophy. Notable amongst these is Radhakrishnan’s (1953) argument that individuals should be careful in how they choose to use their intelligence while planning their families, not only because of the modern idea of rational choice, but also because intelligence or the human mind is a “gift of the divine” (16). The “mind,” for Radhakrishnan, resonating Mohandas Gandhi’s idea of trusteeship, is not something that an individual possesses as a matter of personal ownership (16).¹²

The other key moment of this heterogeneous idiom - based on, what I have identified earlier as, an affective use of the legal-(bio)political - being deployed by the Health Minister Chandrasekhar in relation to this legalization was his decision to challenge Hindu law by drawing from texts on ancient Hindu medicine (he mainly draws from ancient Indian physicians Susruta and Acharya Lolimbaraj). He engaged in this scrupulous exercise to show how, in these texts, replete with “humane and wise counsel,” although performing an abortion was generally not considered to be the “ideal code of behaviour” for the class of people identified as the “work-a-day ordinary-millions,” exceptions were made to address, what the texts called, “permissible” behavior (Chandrasekhar 1974, 44). Further, taking his cues once again from Radhakrishnan’s work, at a certain crucial juncture of his aforementioned book, Chandrasekhar brings the entire tradition of the Dharma-shastras (ancient Indian body of jurisprudence that is the fulcrum of the family law of Hindus, delineating the latter’s right course of conduct) and the Atharva Veda (one of the four Vedas, considered to be the oldest scriptures of Hinduism) - a Veda that constituted abortion as an indubitable sin - under question. He did this by drawing from the Katha Upanishad (an ancient Sanskrit text), to point out that since there is neither any birth nor any death of the “knowing Self,” and therefore since the fetus cannot die, abortion cannot be identified as a sin (Chandrasekhar 1974, 41).

Returning to the Parliamentary debates, in one of the Lok Sabha debates, another MP, Mukul Banerjee (member of the INC), argued that several young girls who are now employed and consequently venture out of their homes, “are forced to mix with the menfolk,” and therefore, “fall prey to victimhood and exploitation” (LS Secretariat 1971, 189). For this parliamentarian, “It is due to those reasons that she becomes pregnant, not due to her fault, but due to the fault of the society and also of other people” (LS Secretariat 1971, 189). She further identified pregnancies caused by such, what she called “unbridled male desire,” as consequences of “genuine mistakes” on the part of women (LS Secretariat 1971, 190). What is crucial to note is that more than abortion being identified as a “right” or a “choice” to be exercised, here it is perceived as a decision to be respected with what several MPs identified as compassion; a decision taken under compulsions, as a matter of necessity, where the question of choice itself had often been rendered inconsequential or redundant since choosing to abort, as the parliamentarians pointed out, is often the only option that these women are left with.¹³ Recognizing this key difference between the idiom of “choice” and that of “decision” vis-à-vis the abortion question seemed to be important for these parliamentarians.

It is this idiom of compassion toward the victim that once again got evoked by another MP named A. P. Chatterjee who expressed serious concern over the fact that although in one of the earlier versions of the Bill, the word “grave” did not precede the expression “injury to physical and mental health,” now, because of the introduction of this new word by the Select Committee, the woman, in order to be able to undergo abortion, must prove that the injury that this unwanted pregnancy is expected to cause would indeed be pernicious (R.S. Secretariat 1971a, 210).¹⁴ He expresses his staunch criticism toward this new qualification thus,

A woman is the victim of an unholy conspiracy by men, and the men do get away, it is the woman who suffers. And, why should the suffering woman not be allowed to terminate the pregnancy on just this ground that, ‘I have been the victim and so I do not want this child.’ (R.S. Secretariat 1971a, 210, emphasis added).

MP Bipinpal Das of the INC argued that husbands are stealthily using marriage as a “licence” to make wives suffer by impregnating them and then coercing them to not abort (RS Secretariat 1971b, 149). Rijak Ram of the INC, another MP from the State of Haryana, expressed his desire to legalize abortion and to identify such acts of impregnation as falling under Section 354 of the Indian Constitution dealing with cases related to “eve teasing,” molestation or sexual harassment (RS Secretariat 1969, 2729-2730).

All these MPs, in fact, construed “rights” as a limiting word that is incapable of taking into consideration the varied and difficult nuances involved in the act of seeking abortion. For instance, in one of the Rajya Sabha debates held on the MTP Bill in 1971, MP Pushpabehn Janardanrai Mehta expressed her grim concern over the fact that by “reducing” the question of abortion to rights, the parliamentarians are “toying” with the lives of young wives, with the following words: “We know what kind of burden abortion entails on a wife’s mind and body; what kind of sorrow it gives rise to and how their lives get destroyed” (RS Secretariat 1971a, 185). In fact, rights talk, for parliamentarians like Ms. Mehta, I suggest, would never be able to either do justice to or sufficiently legitimize the Indian state’s goal of legalizing abortion in the Parliament. Hence, she stresses, “This is not a question of haq or adhikaar (rights). This is a question of the lives of wives and children” (RS Secretariat 1971a, 185). What does the dominance of rights-talk, for these parliamentarians, do to this category called “lives of women” who decide to abort? Does lives-talk operate at the limit of rights-talk and thereby include but also exceed the conceptual world of the latter?

The aforementioned parliamentarian, Ms. Mehta, at a particular juncture in her speech (delivered in Hindi), recounted an important incident. She narrated the story of a young woman with a one-month-old child who once visited her and asked if she would be inclined to keep her baby. Upon being informed that Ms Mehta was incapacitated to do this, the woman went away and while departing insisted on taking the piece of cloth, on which she had previously placed the baby, along with her. On being enquired about the reason behind this insistence, the woman explained, “since this child is a product of rape, I do not want to leave any belongings of this baby with you” (RS Secretariat 1971a, 188). After sharing this story, Mehta requested the Parliament to spare a thought “for all such sisters” whom one should help and provide “all kinds of benefits” (188, emphasis added). Implicitly suggesting the Parliament to ponder upon, engage more closely with, and most importantly listen to this very structure of consciousness that is constituted by a deep-seated ideology of “victimhood,” Mehta further goes on to insist, “We should donate more money for this. Don’t destroy (barbad) the lives of our women in the name of family-planning” (188). She further adds, “I know that the population of our country should be less, but this is not the cure (ilaaj) for this” (187).

At one level, this can be read as a suggestion where, instead of treating abortion as a well thought out and willful family planning measure that pregnant women engage in - a measure that can then facilitate the state-led demographic goal of family limitation - she is urging the parliamentarians to consider the gravity of the helplessness that informs the woman’s efforts at seeking (or not seeking) an abortion. However, Ms. Mehta, I reckon, was also trying to suggest something else. At another level, she was tacitly articulating a certain desire and an urgent necessity to be compassionate toward the pregnant woman who is, as it were, unfree (in the sense of being mired in certain faith-based discourses surrounding an unwanted child that are usually prevalent in hetero-patriarchal societies), and, by the dint of dwelling in a patriarchal matrix is unable to or refuses to emancipate herself from the very ideological meaning of rape that constitutes the child - who is a product of rape - as “impure”. What is key to consider is that, instead of tutoring and training this purportedly “unfree” woman to bring her pregnancy to term by liberating herself from the very ideology of rape, abortion-legalization, for parliamentarians like Ms. Mehta, would be a gesture of listening to and thereby dignifying precisely this incapacitated woman’s interpellated structure of consciousness and the decision to abort that emanates from such interpellations. According to Ms. Mehta, one must show adequate concern for such a woman whose idea of self-interest or “self-realization” is pegged to the ideology of “self-purification,”¹⁵ and therefore - to borrow the words of the Indian psychoanalyst Ashis Nandy (2020) - whose “quests for freedom” do not necessarily match the “language of liberation” (276).

Mehta also pointed out that people refrain from undergoing abortion because they think children are the “burden of God” (“bhagwan ka diya bojha”), and as a result they assume that it is their responsibility to bring the pregnancies to term (RS Secretariat 1971a, 185). These people, for Mehta, will never be convinced about the “economic argument” that another parliamentarian had put forth for abortion earlier (185). However, in order to counter such “pro-life” (or “anti-choice”) views, she does not discard the faith-based nature of such arguments. Ms. Mehta, instead, turns this very religious argument in its head, not by discarding it, but rather by using it as a moral ground for granting abortion. She asks that under circumstances when the child is indeed a “divine” burden (“bojha”), should the responsibility of being faithful to that divinity only lie on women? (186)

Let us now turn to a relatively marginal voice within the parliamentary debates; a voice that criticized the aforementioned gesture of identifying compassion for the victim as a key ground for the legalization of abortion and vehemently interrogated the legalization’s subsequent delinking from the developmentalist discourse of the “small family norm”. This refers to the speeches made by a male MP named Man Singh Verma, a member of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh or the BJS [BJS was an Indian right wing political party and also the political arm of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu nationalist volunteer organization; it existed from 1951 to 1977]. For Mr. Verma, if abortion did not lead to the purportedly cultured, rational and “humane” practice of family-planning, then it should not be there in the first place (RS Secretariat 1971a, 197). In the Rajya Sabha debate held on 26^th May 1971, in order to rationalize his argument, linking three ideas together - namely, religion, humanity, and what he called, “culture” – Mr Verma remarked,

I have come here to vigorously oppose the Bill. I consider this Bill to be non-religious (adharmik), uncultured (asanskritik) and inhuman (amanushik). The previous speaker’s delinking of abortion from family-planning reconfirms my doubt. Section 123 of the IPC already legalizes abortion for the safety of the mother’s life and her protection. Then why do we need a new Bill at all? […] This Bill will escalate ill-mores (durachar) and the misuse of customs (byavichar) (RS Secretariat 1971a, 197-198).

He then adds,

If you legitimize this kind of freedom, then there will be no difference between animals and humans […] Sometimes she gets pregnant due to rape, sometimes for possessing fallen or loose morals […] You should not hide the personality of a person with loose morals. She should be opened up […] (RS Secretariat 1971a, 199).¹⁶

Mr. Verma further suggested that even under circumstances where the pregnancy has taken place due to rape, abortion should never be legalized. This is because, according to him, under such conditions, the woman should be enlightened enough to bring the pregnancy to term, the society should be tolerant toward such pregnancies, and the child born should therefore be respected and cherished (RS Secretariat 1971a, 199).

However, what is important here for my argument is that assertions like those of Mr. Man Singh Verma, put forth against the legalization of abortion, were not the dominant discourse in these parliamentary debates. The other parliamentarians’ views, as discussed above, which radically differed from those of Mr. Verma and which were shaped by a certain idiom of compassionateness (and not that of “culture”) toward the victimized woman, are what predominantly led to the legalization of abortion. These parliamentarians, mostly belonging to the Indian National Congress, primarily wished to pay attention to the concerns of the women who, by the dint of inhabiting in a patriarchal milieu, are often unable to transcend the meaning, implications and consequences that bearing a child born out of non-consensual sexual relations brings for them. Thus, instead of enculturing and pedagogically tutoring these women to emancipate themselves from the very ideological maneuver of rape, and using that discourse of “emancipation” [to draw from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (2000) words] as a self-evident confirmation of a “radical” subversion that dislodges “honour” or “izzat” from the woman’s body (318), the parliamentarians focused on exhibiting care precisely toward an (often) patriarchal understanding of the pregnant woman’s own self as a victim of “impurity”. As a result, the conceptual category of compassion, instead of “culture,” was mobilized and thereby became an integral aspect of this modern legislative process, and in effect, of a key episode of political modernity and welfare feminism in postcolonial India.

Parliamentary Debates on the MTP Bill II: Compassion Pegged to Non-Identification with the Victim’s Pain

A concluding crucial point, one rarely noticed, was raised in the Parliamentary debates and was related to this entire curiously consecrated effort of identifying the woman seeking abortion as a victim of “unholy” masculinist “conspiracy” (R.S. Secretariat 1971a, 210). The point was regarding a tacit acknowledgement in these debates of the fact that it is literally impossible for men (especially male doctors) to be compassionate toward the pregnant woman through the mere act of identifying with her victimhood-induced misery. In fact, one of the crucial grounds on which abortion was decriminalized was predominantly one of, what I shall call, non-identification, or the impossibility of the spectator of suffering mastering or being one with the sufferer’s misfortune. For instance, in the 1971 Lok Sabha debates, Nawal Kishore Sinha of the INC (from Muzaffarpur) recognized that it is next to impossible for the doctor - irrespective of their numerical strength and license-status - to “fully comprehend” if the woman, owing to her unwanted pregnancy, would suffer from mental anguish (“mansik yantrana,” as he calls it) or not (L.S. Secretariat 1971, 179). “No doctor can opine on this,” Sinha notes (179). Furthermore, the Bill had initially mentioned that in order to determine whether the continuance of pregnancy would involve the risk of injury to the woman’s mental health, the medical officials should prepare a credible account of the pregnant woman’s actual or reasonably foreseeable environment. The MP, Mr. Sinha, expressed serious discomfort with this legal vocabulary. The doctor himself, he notes, is so very much mired in, what Beauvoir would denote as, a dubious “male moral code,” that he will be incapable of making a decision on abortion or often end up making the wrong (i.e. unjust) decision. This is also because, for Sinha, the doctor will never be able to realize and “know,” merely from statistical information and observable knowledge, what the full-blown implications of the legal phrase “foreseeable environment” might be for the pregnant woman (L.S. Secretariat 1971, 180). In fact, Sinha notes that there might be several unforeseeable circumstances (i.e. incalculable circumstances that cannot be reasonably anticipated or expected before they actually happen), which could then impel the woman to decide to abort; and even if the doctors seek to plan about the consequences of some of these unforeseen circumstances, something else will have happened. Therefore, Sinha concludes, the doctors cannot be called upon to take such “impossible decisions” (180). In fact, another MP by the name of Laxminarayan Pandey argued that the decision of abortion should never be left to the “good faith” (“sadbhav”) of the doctor, because one never knows what the general rule or definition of this purported good faith will entail (180).

Social stigma that undergirds an unwanted pregnancy, another MP Ram Sahay Pandey of the INC further stressed, is a typical feature of modern “rationalized” societies, not “primitive” ones (he uses the English words “rationalized” and “primitive” in a speech that was otherwise delivered in Hindi) (L.S. Secretariat 1971, 192).¹⁷ “No action entails absolute truth, and no action is completely unscrupulous,” Pandey adds further (191). He then expresses his concern with the following words, “You have performed abortion, but after that, there is bleeding, there is suffering […]. If you don’t award these women (by setting up an Abortion Scheme Fund) for their act of truth-telling, who will take care of them? […] Men happily light the fire and then stay away, they do not suffer” (192). In fact, time and again, we find such allusions, in the Parliamentary debates, toward the bleeding female body, and an idea of, what can only be identified as, man’s epistemic non-access to the anguish of such bodies and minds. One of the best instances of the parliamentarians’ concern for the physical pain of the pregnant woman, apart from the aforementioned speeches of MP Nawal Kishore Sinha, was the manner in which another Member of Parliament from the INC, Dr. Mangla Devi Talwar, speaks of the “deep anaemia” and “general unconsciousness” caused by botched illegal abortions (RS Secretariat 1971a, 194). Talwar further adds,

[…] those who have come in touch with the hospital out-patient wards and the inpatient wards will hear me out and even the visitors to the maternity sections of the hospitals would know in what state of affairs a mother comes (194).

Crucially enough, Talwar also wanted to dissociate the status of attaining adulthood from one’s right to abort, thereby making a case for prioritizing the decisions of minor girls who wish to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.

In all these discussions, what becomes gradually evident is that the parliamentarians acknowledged that patriarchal “unholy conspiracy,” irresponsible cruelty and the sheer epistemic unknowability of the pregnant woman’s anguish (MP D. P. Bhattacharya used the phrase “moral psychology” to describe this anguish), will often not let men (especially the male doctor) know and master the abortion-seeking woman’s physical, social, and mental pain in its entirety. They seemed to recognize that there will and, more crucially, must be an element of unknowability and unintelligibility in the very process of knowing that pain; a necessary unknowability or ignorance that cannot be undone, conquered and mastered by “Man.” Man can therefore only act as a passive spectator to the “truth” of the pain of this victimhood, and never become its active master. Most crucially, compassion will be exhibited toward the woman, as the parliamentarians argued, not despite, but precisely because of the supposed incapacitation that this unintelligibility [and state of being a servant (and not a master) of the “truth” of female victimhood] causes in the man.

What is also key in this for my argument is that while the modern, liberal-biopolitical, statistical science of demographic control was premised upon a certain form of mastery of women’s fertility by the science of modern obstetrics and the expertise of modern medical personnel, then in order to legitimize and actualize itself, it had to take the help of abortion-legalization which, at least as we gather from some of these crucial Parliamentary debates, in some sense, discredited the politico-linguistic rhetoric of mastery and full comprehension of women’s fertile bodies. Instead, it premised its credibility on a discourse of a “pre-experiential,” non-evidentiary idea of compassion (daya)¹⁸ founded upon the aforementioned idea of unknowing, necessary non-identification with or non-mastery of the object of governance; an idea of compassion that often does not aim to pedagogically enculture this object of governance to “unshackle” herself from the very ideology of shame that an unwanted pregnancy entails, and instruct her to thereby bring the pregnancy to term. The following and final section on a conceptual engagement with the idiom of compassion will make this clearer.

Conceptualizing Compassion: Victimhood and Non-Identification

The idiom of compassion that has been broached in this essay so far can be best conceptualized through the anticolonial leader and thinker Mohandas Gandhi’s notion of the “force of compassion” or “dayabal.”¹⁹ For Gandhi, compassion or dayabal was primarily based upon two crucial ideas that have been key for this paper. First, the idea that the object of governance via compassion is a victim of larger politico-social processes helmed by a dominant group. Acknowledging the victimhood of the object of compassion informs the first aspect of this idiom of daya. And second, as I have argued elsewhere, the idea that the relationship between the one who is governing via the exhibition of compassion (also the spectator of suffering) and the object of compassion or the governed (also the sufferer) is primarily one of non-identification, i.e. the spectator of suffering not becoming one with and maintaining distance from the sufferer (Banerjee 2020).

Consider for instance this key passage from Gandhi where he is describing why identification and unification between a “lower” caste person and the brahmin in terms of their social rituals that they follow, is not just impossible but also not desirable.

It is absolutely of no consequence that a vast majority of Harijans are uninterested in our campaign. Only this morning Mr. D’Souza, leading a deputation of Harijans, told me that the Harijans were not so interested in temple-entry as in their political and economic amelioration and perhaps a rise in their social status. Naturally, they cannot think otherwise. For we are responsible for deadening their sense of unity with us and their desire to worship in common with us in our temples (106, emphasis added).

Gandhi here is compassionate toward the fact that the harijan wants “distance” from and not proximity with the brahmin. They do not seek unification based on identification with the brahmin any longer, and Gandhi wants to uphold this ethic of necessary unknowability or non-identification of the harijan with the Hindu brahmin. This is a point that historian Aishwary Kumar brings to our attention in his formidable book “Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy”. Kumar (2015) suggests that Gandhi’s emphasis on distance, measure, restraint or an “ethics of limit” (often identified by the term “maryada dharma”) between the oppressor and the oppressed, the victim and the perpetrator was the kernel of his idea of daya and also of the kind of anticolonial political thought that he upheld (Banerjee 2020). Most crucially, this meant that Gandhi, in a peculiarly perverse way, would often turn inequality or even discrimination itself into a political ideal (Kumar 2015: 46, also cited in Banerjee 2020). This implied that even when Gandhi was at his paternalistic best [Kumar exemplifies it by pointing out how while the brahmin could “become a shudra”²⁰, a shudra would not be able to return the gesture (i.e. become a brahmin)], his knowledge-practice of dayabal or “force of compassion” exhibited toward the victim/ sufferer (i.e. Kumar denotes the latter as the “most violated” harijan), would never be based on the spectator of suffering “identifying” with the victim/ sufferer (i.e. it would refuse to be based on sameness) (Banerjee 2020).

It is key to note that as opposed to this anticolonial Gandhian move of pegging compassion to non-identification, the liberal-imperialist idea of “sympathy” (which would go on to undergird the ideological apparatus of imperial conquest), broached primarily by the Scottish political economist Adam Smith (2006), grounds itself completely on “personal identification” of the spectator of suffering with the sufferer. Let us recall the lines with which Smith (2006) begins his “Theory of Moral Sentiments”:

I judge of your sight by my sight, of your ear by my ear, of your reason by my reason, of your resentment by my resentment, of your love by my love. I neither have, nor can have, any other way of judging about them (14).²¹

Further, what is also crucial to consider in the Smithian idea of sympathy is that Smith, unlike Gandhi, completely neutralizes and dismisses the state of victimhood as a necessary and more privileged ground for inducing concern (6). The sufferer, for Smith, in fact has often lost the reason to judge, been reduced to a condition of “wretchedness” (7), and thus is often incapable of evoking any sympathy in the spectator. Here, the sufferer is not perceived as a victim and therefore is not a moral agent. Secondly, precisely because the sufferer does not become a moral agent via their victimhood, sympathy toward them is directly proportional to the extent to which the spectator can “imagine” that suffering, and something in the “good fortune” of the sufferer “interests him” (4, emphasis added; also cited in Banerjee 2020). For Gandhi, precisely because the sufferer is always-already a victim and therefore a moral agent, compassion toward them is neither to be grounded on the spectator of suffering’s imagination of the torment of the sufferer, nor is it to be based on this spectator’s personal interest in that suffering.

Moreover, consider this second passage from Gandhi where he says,

If you open your temples to Harijans because they demand that they shall be so opened, you will not be doing any great thing. But if you open the temples to them because of a sense of sin for which you should atone, it becomes a religious act […] If it was demonstrated to me to my satisfaction that the political or economic regeneration of Harijans would be enough to retain the Harijans in the Hindu fold, I should still want to open the temples and remove every trace of inequality. Because for me it is, as it must be for you, a question of repentance and reparation for the wrong we have done to our fellowmen (106-107, emphasis added).

What is key here for our analysis is that the object of compassion (i.e. the harijan) here is acknowledged as a victim of larger social processes and also of the one who is exhibiting compassion (notably the brahmin), and the subject and the object of compassion are therefore in a political relationship with each other.²² This, I suggest, resonates with why the parliamentarians too were arguing that the question of abortion should not be recognized exclusively as a matter of right (i.e. the woman’s demand), but rather as a question of duty that stems from Man’s epistemic inaccessibility to the pregnant woman’s pain; men who refuse to take up the responsibility of an unwanted pregnancy, and male doctors who will never know what an unforeseen circumstance might be for a pregnant woman seeking to abort. What does an exclusive focus on the discursive apparatus of “rights” or “choice” take away from the question of reproductive justice? Drawing from Gandhi, firstly, it does not acknowledge how the decision to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is taken mostly when the notion of choice has become superfluous or inconsequential²³; and secondly, it undermines the duty of repentance, reparation and atonement of the oppressor (within the context of our discussion, the duty of repentance that should be the prerogative of “men who light the fire and then stay away,” to borrow from the speech of one of the parliamentarians). Within this framework, abortion should not be legalized only because women are demanding it. It should also be legalized because along with pregnant women demanding it, a hetero-patriarchal bourgeois structure (in which male physicians and doctors are complicit) has ensured that aborting the fetus becomes their only option. In other words, reducing abortion to a question of rights (or to the question of family planning or population reduction), undermines the duty of men and this hetero-patriarchal structure to acknowledge their complicity and implication in an unwanted pregnancy. Compassion here is therefore related to two crucial conceptual categories that form the premise of this essay: victimhood of the sufferer, and necessary non-identification of the spectator of suffering with the “truth” of the pain of that suffering.

Conclusion

To sum up, the essay has aimed to make three key interventions. First, it has shown how the event of abortion-legalization in India has hitherto been read predominantly as an elitist biopolitical move of a modernizing postcolonial state embracing economic development. Second, it has argued that this reading is necessary but insufficient to the extent that the parliamentary debates that led to this legalization often mobilized a distinct idiom of compassion, belonging to a heterogeneous discursive field, for the pregnant woman who has been a victim of male duplicity. Third, in these debates, compassion for the victim was aligned with a conception of the spectator of suffering’s non-identification with that victimhood; a non-identification that relates to Man’s epistemic unreachability to women’s suffering. This epistemic unknowability of a pregnant woman’s pain, what Beauvoir (2012) would describe as “the manipulated and bleeding womb, those shreds of red life, that absence of a child” (606, emphasis added), evoked a certain sense of humility, modesty and vulnerability in the parliamentarians; a vulnerability predicated on the ethic of necessary ignorance that in turn was identified as a crucial ground for legalizing abortion. Reexamining this predominantly modern postcolonial legislative moment through the lens of compassion pegged to victimhood and non-identification of the one who governs with the governed, would hopefully instantiate a possible way in which one can rid interpretations of postcolonial legislative modernities off the burden of historicism; a historicism that prevents even its well-meaning progressive critics from writing “affective histories of elite discourses,”²⁴ even when confronted by historical evidence of such affect in the archives.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported via a research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust at the University of Bristol; by the ESRC (SeNSS) Postdoctoral Fellowship at Goldsmiths, University of London; and by the School of Social Sciences, History and Philosophy (SSHP) Doctoral Scholarship, awarded by Birkbeck College, University of London.

Notes on contributors

Sreenanti Banerjee

Sreenanti Banerjee is a Senior Research Associate in the Department of History at the University of Bristol in England, United Kingdom. Prior to this, she was a United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) Postdoctoral Fellow in the Unit for Global Justice at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research interests include feminist critical theory and global social and political thought, with a specific focus on postcolonial feminism’s interrogation of the liaison between liberal political thought and empire. Her current research traces global histories of welfare feminism on one hand, and the relationship between intersectional feminism and welfare citizenship on the other.

Notes

1 I thank Dr Kiran Grewal and Dr Melanie Richter-Montpetit for their highly insightful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Further, a significant section of the paper was researched while I was affiliated to Birkbeck College, University of London. I thank Professors Samantha Ashenden and Diana Coole for all the discussions we had in relation to the findings.

2 See Nivedita Menon (2004) for an elaboration on this point.

3 The specific sense in which the essay uses the term “historicist” will be explained in a subsequent section.

4 It is important to add here that there have been two more debates on the abortion issue since 1971. However, the essay will be examining the debate that took place in 1971 only, since the recent developments are not related to my key arguments.

5 Ranajit Guha (1987) in “Chandra’s Death” had argued that traditional historiography, that is aimed at “big events and institutions,” often end up overlooking, what he called, “the small drama” and the “fine details of social existence” (36). However, using the methodological insights of what Guha called “a critical historiography,” I aim to understand the political elite’s approach towards precisely these “fine details”; that for which no evidence could be given, namely the pregnant woman’s (physical and mental) anguish. To that extent, as the essay will show, its methods directly resonate with the theoretical framework of compassion.

6 See Divya Cherian (2021) for a similar argument on how legal personhood in general and sexual personhood in particular was denied to women and “lower” caste people in pre-colonial South Asia.

7 Karl Marx (1995) described the “absolute surplus population” (504) as the lumpenproletariat or the pauper that comprised the unemployable mass, either because they are incapable of working or refuse to work, generally thrown into begging and criminality. The category, for Marx, is completely relative to the cyclical development of capitalist accumulation (Hansen 2015).

8 I draw the phrase “development-modernity” from Ghoshal (2014, 29).

9 The translations of the parliamentary debates are mine. I would like to extend my gratitude to Nazia Aslam and Virendra Chandel for reading out some of the speeches in Hindi to me.

10 My debt here is to Amia Srinivasan (2022) from whom I borrow the phrase (xiii).

11 A range of parliamentarians refused to view the legalization as a family planning measure, the most prolific articulation of this refusal being that of MPs Pushpa Mehta, Purabi Mukhopadhyay and D. P. Chattopadhyay.

The discourse of family planning, as MP P. Mehta argued, makes the woman solely responsible for planning the family (a responsibility that, in fact, should be shared). But the discourse of abortion (which is about saving women’s lives) has the potential to rid women off this responsibility, because abortion (even when the sexual act has been consensual) raises the question of a woman’s plausible victimization and exploitation (R. S. Secretariat 1971a, 186).

12 This, in fact, interrogates the existing scholarship’s view on Chandrasekhar, which largely identifies him as an indubitable modernist. For example, aligning himself with historian Sanjam Ahluwalia’s (2010) concept of “reproductive restraint” – a concept that explains how middle-class concerns about birth control in colonial India was primarily about the elites controlling the sexuality and birth rate of populations deemed “unfit” for reproducing themselves – anthropologist Peter Sutoris (2016) conceives the figure of Chandrasekhar as someone who was solely keen on turning “discourse into bio-power” (120), and who did this by ensuring that the “backward” Indians do not outnumber the “modern middle class” (119). Historian Matthew Connelly (2008), similarly, conceives Chandrasekhar’s endeavours vis-à-vis the population question as something that was made possible primarily through the deleterious marriage of eugenics and birth control initiatives (61).

13 While the term compassion and its synonyms like sympathy were directly used by D. P. Chattopadhyay (R. S. Secretariat 1971a, 181-182) and J. M. Gowder (L. S. Secretariat 1971, 176), almost every MP supporting the Bill gestured towards the need to exhibit a certain key notion of empathy for women victimized by male aloofness (MPs like D. P. Chattopadhyay, A. P. Chatterjee, G. A. Appan, A. D. Mani, Vikram Chand Mahajan were some of the key voices in this regard, along with the ones directly quoted in this essay).

14 Also see Nawal Kishore Sinha’s speech for a similar argument (L.S. Secretariat 1971, 179).

15 This conceptual distinction between the category of “self-realization” and that of “self-purification” was brought to my notice via Faisal Devji’s (2010) discussion of Gandhian moral-political thought (384).

16 See Durba Mitra (2020) for how Man Singh Verma’s speech distinctly matches with the colonial state’s arguments in British India about the act of abortion being an “inevitable criminal aftereffect” of women’s “deviant sexuality” and “civilizational backwardness” (103).

17 Also see Shrimati Lakshmikanthamma’s speech and Dr Melkote’s speech for a similar emphasis on the need to pay attention to the role that the Bill can play in removing the social stigma associated with abortion (L. S. Secretariat 1971, 185-187). A. P. Chatterjee added that in modern cultures, grounded upon a pernicious form of individualism where societies do not take care of unwanted children, women with an unwanted pregnancy are stigmatized and suffer much more than men (R. S. Secretariat 1971a; 212).

18 I borrow this phrase from Ranajit Guha’s (2010, 35) description of daya (empathy). However, while in Guha’s notion of daya, there is no distance between the spectator of suffering (judge) and the sufferer (judged), drawing from Gandhi’s notion of compassion, as the essay shows in the following section, distance or non-identification between the two is key.

19 I draw this translation of dayabal from Aishwary Kumar (2015, 69).

20 A Shudra is made to belong to the lowest of the traditional varnas (social classes) in India.

21 See my opinion piece in The Telegraph, India for a brief contrast between the Smithian concept of sympathy and the Gandhian notion of compassion (Banerjee 2020). Some of the arguments of this paper’s final section vis-à-vis Gandhi and Smith, as noted in the text, is drawn from this piece. However, the opinion piece does not read the Gandhian pegging of compassion to non-identification in relation to the abortion debate in India (the latter being the key focus of this paper).

22 See Devji (2010) for this crucial point in relation to Gandhi’s moral-political thought.

23 See Devji (2010) for an elaboration on this Gandhian position vis-à-vis the concept-metaphor of “choice” being rendered superfluous.

24 See Chakrabarty (2008) for a formidable deployment of this phrase vis-à-vis postcolonial modernity in India (18).