The Gulabi (Pink) Gang

I love this story in the San Francisco paper about a group of women in a remote and poor part of India who are standing up for justice. They take on abusive husbands and corrupt public officials, wielding a big stick.

Sampat Devi

Checking on the web, the first story I found about them was one from two years ago on a reproductive health site that discussed the use of increasingly cheap and easy-to-use American sex determination kits. These kits make it much easier for parents to abort girl babies and try again for a son, a choice arising in part from the dowry system that makes a girl more expensive than a boy, as well as other reasons. It’s a calculated choice for many people in an unreasonable situation (and I might have known American business was making it worse). The author cited the Gulabi (Pink) Gang as one of the signs of hope that women were themselves trying to change the culture.

Bottom 2 photos: by Sanjit Das

The BBC has the best article on them I have found. A quote from the founder of the gang, a mother of five, Sampat Devi: “Nobody comes to our help in these parts. The officials and the police are corrupt and anti-poor. So sometimes we have to take the law in our hands. At other times, we prefer to shame the wrongdoers.”