Guest post by MJ Vijayan

The recent statement issued by members of the Althea Feminist Friendship Collective on the forthcoming Zero Tolerance (ZeTo) campaign in Kerala[1] deserves a serious and thoughtful response. I hope it will not be taken as a hostile document. Far from that, it is, in many ways, an anxious one – anxious about the state, about punitive excess, about the global history of ‘zero tolerance’ policies and campaigns, and about the risk of reinforcing authoritarian or brahminical patriarchies in the name of justice.

Those anxieties are not frivolous. Feminist history teaches us to be wary of state power. Yet feminist history also teaches us that structures do not shift without public contestation, moral clarity, and organised political pressure.

As a cis male articulating within feminist and progressive left traditions, I do so with caution. I am conscious that feminism is not my intellectual inheritance to define. It is a movement and epistemology built by women and gender minorities through struggle, often against men like me. Yet it is precisely because feminism is not merely identity but political practice that it demands engagement across genders, including critical engagement.

The core question raised by Althea is whether ‘zero tolerance’ risks becoming punitive spectacle, selective prosecution, or an expansion of unchecked state power. This concern is articulated through reference to the Reagan-era war on drugs in the United States, and to the dangers of authoritarianism in contemporary contexts.

Let us take that argument seriously.

At the cost of sounding like listing out diverse and multi-disciplinary thought processes, let me try to braid them. Michel Foucault warned us that disciplinary regimes often operate under the language of reform. Angela Davis has long argued that carceral expansion cannot be mistaken for justice. Mariame Kaba reminds us that accountability cannot be reduced to incarceration. In India, feminist legal scholarship, from Flavia Agnes to Ratna Kapur, has repeatedly interrogated the paradoxes of criminal law as both protection and instrument of control.

But we must ask: is the present moment in Kerala (and India/South Asia) characterised by excessive punishment or by unjust tolerance? Kerala just witnessed the trial court verdict in the actor assault case, wherein the state could not prove that there was any concerted mastermind behind the sexual violence, and has convicted all the men involved in the implementation of the violence.

Marx cautioned that ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class. In the terrain of sexual violence, the ruling idea has too often been administrative delay, procedural opacity, and protection of those embedded within institutional power. The contradiction in Kerala is not one of punitive overreach; it is one of selective inertia.

To name this is not to deny the dangers of state power. It is to situate analysis in material conditions.

Althea’s statement emphasises that gender-based violence is structural. That is absolutely correct. Here, Catharine MacKinnon’s argument that sexuality under patriarchy is structured through inequality remains foundational. Bell Hooks insisted that patriarchy is a political-social system that insists males are inherently dominant. Silvia Federici traced how control over women’s bodies was central to the birth of capitalist accumulation. In the Indian context, Sharmila Rege’s reading of Ambedkar reminds us that caste patriarchy is not incidental but constitutive of social order.

My argument, in extension, is that if sexual violence is structural, then institutional shielding is structural too, and well within the institutional framing of patriarchy itself. And am convinced from the charter of ZeTo that this is precisely part of the problem that ZeTo is trying to confront.

To me, the ZeTo campaign’s invocation of ‘zero tolerance’ is not an abstract import from American policy vocabulary. It emerges from concrete experience: accusations raised through proper channels; internal mechanisms activated; political networks mobilised; and administrative consequences deferred. In such a context, demanding zero institutional cover-ups, zero retaliation against complainants, and zero procedural opacity is not carceral maximalism. It is democratic minimalism.

Ambedkar, in his speech on constitutional morality, warned that democracy in India is a “top-dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic.” Constitutional morality requires constant cultivation. It does not survive on paper declarations alone. When institutions fail to act against sexual violence within their own ranks, constitutional morality erodes.

It is worth recalling that Ambedkar also insisted that social reform must precede political reform. Feminist accountability campaigns, when grounded in democratic safeguards, are precisely forms of social reform.

The anxiety that ‘zero tolerance’ may become ‘zero context’ deserves reflection. Context matters. Due process matters. Caste and class bias matter. Yet context cannot become alibi. Discretion cannot become delay. Most importantly, the fear of authoritarianism should not be allowed to paralyse feminist intervention.

Rosa Luxemburg cautioned against reformism that stabilises injustice. But she also warned against abstraction detached from mass life. Feminism conducted exclusively within discursive chambers risks becoming what Marx once called “critique turned inward.” Praxis demands entry into messy democratic arenas including parties, unions, campuses, cultural institutions and so on, where contradictions are not theoretical but lived.

Here, a difficult question must be raised gently. There is, within certain strands of elite feminism, a tendency to equate mass mobilisation with populism, and public norm-setting with spectacle. Hashtags are dismissed as superficial. Campaigns are viewed as insufficiently theorised. Younger activists are sometimes regarded as insufficiently cautious.

This disposition, however unintentionally, can reproduce hierarchies within feminist sorority. It can generate an atmosphere where emerging initiatives are subjected to a purity test rather than constructive engagement.

Feminism has always been multivocal. Dalit feminism challenged savarna feminism’s blind spots. Adivasi women challenged developmentalist narratives. Queer movements unsettled heteronormative assumptions within women’s movements. Each wave was initially regarded as excessive, impatient, or disruptive.

The question, then, is not whether ZeTo is perfectly framed. No campaign is, in my experience. The question is whether we are prepared to engage it as evolving praxis rather than dismissible slogan.

Althea rightly insists that feminism must not strengthen unchecked state power. That is a non-negotiable principle, already reflected well in ZeTo arguments. But feminism must also not become so wary of power that it withdraws from confronting it. The state is not the only locus of patriarchy. Parties, cultural institutions, civil society networks, and intellectual circles all reproduce hierarchies.

Karl Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach reminds us that the point is not merely to interpret the world, but to change it. Interpretation without intervention risks becoming contemplative radicalism, sometimes even intellectual terror inflicted on lesser mortals.

To be clear: ZeTo must articulate safeguards. It must define due process. It must guard against caste and class bias. It must resist media trials. It must remain accountable. On these points, the critique is constructive.

But let us also ask whether intellectual honesty requires acknowledging that many survivors do not encounter excessive punishment of perpetrators. They encounter indifference, delay, disbelief, and negotiation. In the present conjuncture, the greater danger may not be punitive excess but reputational management – as is evidently what has happened in the accusation made by Dr. Asha Joseph against Mr. PT Kunju Mohammed (former MLA and IFFK Jury Selection Committee Chairperson).

As a cis male aspiring feminist, I am conscious that male voices often dominate debates even within feminist spaces. That is not the intention here. Rather, the intention is to resist a binary in which mass campaigns, or possible movements, are treated as inherently suspect and discursive caution as inherently superior.

Feminism is not protected by insulation, it is strengthened by engagement. I am certain the young organisers, cultural workers, trade unionists, and survivors involved in ZeTo are not naïve about state power. They are responding to lived contradictions. If their language is urgent, it is because their experiences have been urgent. If they are critical against a government unconcerned of the party’s flag colour, it is not naivety or lack of geopolitical situations, it is their political necessity.

Ambedkar urged us to educate, agitate, organise. Education without agitation stagnates. Agitation without organisation dissipates. Organisation without democratic ethics corrodes. The task must be to hold all three together.

A feminism that protects democracy protects women. On that, there is agreement. But democracy is not only protection from state excess. It is also protection from institutional impunity.

Zero tolerance, defined carefully, can mean zero tolerance for shielding, zero tolerance for retaliation, zero tolerance for administrative evasion. It need not be interpreted as zero tolerance for context or zero tolerance for rights.

If feminist movements fracture at every emerging initiative, patriarchy will not need to defeat them; it will merely wait.

The conversation opened by Althea must continue. It should sharpen the ZeTo manifesto, not shadow the movement. It should refine definitions, not foreclose mobilisation. It must further accountability at all levels – and within feminist spaces too.

In the end, the question is simple: are we willing to allow younger formations to experiment with democratic feminist architecture, even if imperfectly? Or must every initiative first pass through the gatekeeping of theoretical comfort?

Revolution, as both Marxists and feminists have taught us, is not conducted in ideal conditions. It is conducted amid contradiction. The work ahead is not to choose between theory and mobilisation, but to braid and blend them. If ZeTo fails to remain democratic, it must be critiqued. If it succeeds in shifting institutional norms, it must be supported.

Feminism, like democracy, survives through tension – not silence. The task now is to transform tension into collective labour.

One must not stop with sharing verbal solidarity with survivors like Dr. Asha A Joseph and Sr. Ranit MJ, and be intellectually and emotionally willing to give them space to fight patriarchy in their own ways. They may not be feminist theoreticians, but we must trust, and hope that they are capable of taking us forward in this long march to freedom and liberation.

The Delhi-based author heads Participatory Action Research Coalition of India (PARCI) and has been closely associated with diverse people’s movements and solidarity initiatives

[1] The Zero Tolerance to Sexual Violence #ZeTo #ZeToKeralam is being launched on the 7^th March in Kochi. ZeTo concept note, manifesto demands from political parties, objectives and demands, etc. are being made accessible through the insta page (@zetomovement) of the campaign, multiple Whatsapp groups, and the upcoming Press Conference on 4^th March.