Abstract

 Women’s presence in right-wing movement in India remains a site of contradiction and tension. Multiple frameworks have been applied to understand this presence as a case of complementary gendered agency to the masculinised politics of right-wing parties such as the BJP and to understand the motivations for women actors who align their interests with these movements. This paper will focus on women’s claims to political participation within the BJP and how these everyday contestations and modes of participation contest and negotiate within the ideological framework of the party and its stated aims. The paper will incorporate ethnographic data to understand how women activists refashion themselves as capable politicians to refigure their political presence in these spaces.