Navigating the Squeeze: Women’s and Anti-Gender-Violence NGOs, Shrinking Civic Space, and Differentiated Resilience in Urban India

• In Event: Sociology of Development Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 1: Development & Gender

Abstract

Women's rights and anti-gender-based violence (GBV) organizations in India operate within a landscape of multiple, overlapping constraints: patriarchal norms normalizing intimate partner violence and sexual assault, pervasive victim-blaming, survivor stigma, and caste, class, and religious hierarchies shaping both experiences of violence and access to support. Additionally, successive amendments to the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA) have revoked the licenses of over 19,000 NGOs since 2014 and now bar foreign-funded organizations from publishing any news content (FCRA Amendment Rules, 2025). The 2025 cut-back of USAID funding has led to mass layoffs and program closures across the civil sector, while India's ranking of 151st out of 180 countries on the World Press Freedom Index reflects a media environment increasingly hostile and often dangerous to those who aim to hold the state and powerful actors accountable (RSF, 2025).
Drawing on 55 in-depth, semi-structured interviews across more than 30 NGOs and community service organizations in Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Thiruvananthapuram (September 2025–February 2026), this paper argues that these overlapping conditions have produced not uniform collapse but an uneven, unequal, and differentiated landscape of adaptive repertoires and survival strategies. Engaging resource mobilization theory (McCarthy & Zald, 1977), organizational repertoires (Clemens, 1993), contingent symbiosis (Spires, 2011), flexible austerity (Brewer, 2024), and critiques of the resilience-resistance binary (Banerjee, 2023), the paper advances the concept of differentiated resilience: organizational outcomes are structured by the intersection of funding access, constituency demographics, subnational political context, and communicative capacity. Preliminary findings identify four patterns: compounding rather than additive constraints; the emergence of "discourse deserts" where NGO-produced information collapses alongside mainstream media coverage, the role of subnational political mediation and variation across the four cities; and structurally constrained — rather than freely chosen — adaptive strategies that reflect class, caste, and religious inequalities of the Indian feminist movement and contemporary Indian society. The full paper will develop these findings through extended interview data, organizational case studies, and fuller thematic analysis.

Author

• Nandini Maya Krishnan, McGill University