The ‘Beti’ lexicon: how India’s policy language shackles political autonomy

By Komal Karwa

Women’s empowerment has taken on strange connotations in present-day India. While the system often turns a blind eye when it comes to women’s constitutional rights as autonomous individuals, women are frequently treated as vulnerable dependents, or betis (daughters), who constantly need state protection.

This patronizing lens is clearly visible across the language used for major legislative benchmarks and welfare campaigns launched over the last decade. When welfare schemes prefix their intent with the word Beti (daughter), they construct a highly restrictive prototype of the deserving woman.

Consider schemes like Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (Save the Daughter, Educate the Daughter), Sukanya Samriddhi Yojana (Good Girl Child Prosperity Scheme), or state-level initiatives like Beti Hai Anmol (Daughters are Priceless) and Ladli Laxmi Yojana (Beloved Laxmi Scheme).

This rhetorical strategy encourages a kind of benevolent, institutionalized patriarchy, a politics that goes beyond skillful political speech writing. The state inscribes domestic roles into national policy, thereby establishing an implicit contract: women are given resources, safety measures and political space but only as long as they remain within the invisible lines of the traditional household.

We are now in a very peculiar parliamentary pause. The Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam (Salutation to Woman Power Act, popularly known as the Women’s Reservation Bill) passed in September 2023 is on hold for implementation until the next round of seat delimitation exercise. That delay provides an important window to look beyond the policy’s shiny veneer.

We must examine the linguistic foundations of this political inclusion before parliamentary seats are physically arranged. If democracy’s gatekeepers only welcome good, compliant daughters into legislative corridors, a historic reform risks devolving into tokenistic representation.

The domesticated ballot

The underlying premise of the Beti nomenclature is that the girl child is valuable primarily because she belongs to a family unit that must be financially incentivized to keep her alive, safe and educated.

While these welfare programs no doubt provide tangible material benefits, their language reduces a woman’s worth to her relational utility within the domestic sphere. This way of thinking mostly only makes room for women who live in the usual kind of family home (with a husband and children).

It makes us wonder how this kind of talk pushes aside women who are single, queer or trans, and makes it harder for them to take part in public life and community decisions.

The way the government talks about rights obliquely leaves out people who don’t fit the heteronormative family picture. It treats rights as if they only come from doing family duties, instead of belonging to every person. Access to public spaces and state welfare is contingent on how much a woman performs the role of an obedient daughter, domesticating her political agency.

Geographies of exclusion

India’s vast socio-political landscape means that protectionist policy language yields vastly different ground realities. A clear contrast exists between New Delhi’s policy spaces and the lived experience of women on the geographic margins. In urban centers, state safety measures, such as women-only transit coaches or helpline numbers, are framed as protective provisions, even if structurally flawed.

But in the marginalized or conflict-heavy spaces such as parts of central India and the northeast, this protective rhetoric takes a dramatic turn. On the ground, macro-level policy language of protection and preservation becomes counter-insurgency, intensive surveillance and authoritarian policing.

When policy language frames women as fragile assets requiring guardianship, heavy state monitoring becomes normalized. Women in militarized or deeply conservative pockets do not experience the Beti lexicon as empowerment.

Rather than acting as a benevolent parent, the state functions as an omnipresent monitor that views a woman’s physical mobility with suspicion and her political dissent as a threat to public order.

Goddesses versus subjects

Historically, the state has also relied on deifying women to avoid granting them genuine institutional authority. A primary example is the recent reservation bill itself, titled the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam. The policy text also subtly reconfigures a woman’s being from a secular political subject to a revered being through the invocation of Shakti, a word that is deeply associated with divine, sacred female energy and goddess iconography.

Here’s the trap: a goddess does not need constitutional rights and legal responsibility from the state. To put a woman on a pedestal is to admire her from afar and silence her voice. When the secular language of individual citizenship in political dialogue is replaced by the religious vocabulary of deification, democratic demands become diluted.

Women entering politics are not spiritual saviors tasked with magically cleansing a corrupt system; they are human political actors. To challenge the current political establishment, women do not need divine pedestals – they need executive power, legislative leverage and structural backing.

Moving beyond the family unit

The biggest problem with the Beti lexicon is that it blinds policy structures to women as autonomous economic and political units. If we are to realize the full democratic potential of the upcoming 33 percent legislative reservation for women, the discourse must change fundamentally and abandon the vocabulary of household patronage.

Paternalistic states cannot grant their daughters a real political autonomy; it must be demanded as an immediate right by equal citizens. Democratic inclusion will be complete only when the language of policy does not position women in a domestic context, but addresses women as autonomous individuals.

Komal Karwa is a political science researcher and Master’s candidate at Amity University, Noida, India. She specializes in public policy, gender governance and legislative affairs.