From silence to constitutional scrutiny: 10 key moments of India’s anti-FGM/C movement

Image credit: Reya Ahmed

By Fiza Ranalvi Jha, WeSpeakOut

A little over a decade ago, there was barely any public language around female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C), or khatna, in India.

Within the Dawoodi Bohra community, where the practice continues to be carried out on its young girls, it existed largely in silence — folded into ritual, secrecy, and intergenerational obedience. Many women did not grow up thinking of it as violence. For  many young mothers and grandmothers it was a regular ritual performed to maintain status quo and tradition, for some it was a vague childhood memory, for others, something understood only much later through conversations with friends, partners, therapists, or other Bohra women.

There were no open conversations within households or the community, let alone any government studies; almost no legal debate, very little media reporting, and limited recognition from mainstream feminist or public health spaces.

There had, however, been earlier sparks of dissent and documentation. In 1998, researcher Rehana Ghadially, Professor of Psychology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, published one of the earliest known studies on khatna among Dawoodi Bohra women, based on interviews with fifty women. Cut to 2011, Bohra women launched an anonymous online petition asking community leadership to prohibit the practice. In 2013, then a student filmmaker, anti-FGM activist Priya Goswami’s documentary A Pinch of Skin became one of the first films to publicly centre Bohra women speaking about khatna in their own voices.

But it was around 2014 and 2015 that something more sustained began to take shape. Survivors in India and across the diaspora slowly began finding one another – first through written accounts published online, then through safe spaces of WhatsApp groups and internet forums. Slowly, despite very real fears of community backlash, many started speaking publicly, organising collectively, and building a movement that would eventually expand across community dialogue, feminist organising, legal advocacy, public health research, media engagement, and international human rights spaces. An intersectional, independent, bottom-up and bold movement was born.

In development and public health spaces, FGM/C has long been treated primarily as an “African issue.” But over the last decade, survivors, researchers, NGOs, and civil society organisations globally have pushed for wider recognition of the practice’s presence across regions and communities. Ending FGM/C is now part of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and recent research by Equality Now, the U.S. End FGM/C Network and the End FGM European Network documents evidence of the practice in at least 94 countries, including across South and Southeast Asia and diaspora communities worldwide. 

This broader international recognition shaped advocacy in India as well. As Bohra survivors began organising publicly, their work increasingly connected to global feminist and human rights conversations around bodily autonomy, child protection, and religious freedom. Equality Now’s recent report on strategic litigation against FGM/C includes the Sunita Tiwari case before the Indian Supreme Court as part of a wider global history of using constitutional and human rights law to challenge the practice.

This month, after a seven year legal limbo, the issue of banning FGM is being heard before a nine-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India during hearings on freedom of religious belief and practice. In oral observations, judges questioned attempts to equate FGM/C with male circumcision, spoke about the impact of the practice on health and bodily autonomy, and suggested that constitutional protections around health may themselves be sufficient to scrutinise the practice. 

The observations do not amount to a final judgment, and India still does not have a specific law prohibiting FGM/C. But the hearings nonetheless mark an important moment in the longer trajectory of anti-FGM/C advocacy in India — and an opportunity to reflect on how a conversation that once existed almost entirely in whispers within Bohra homes and communities gradually entered feminist discourse, public health conversations, media reporting, political advocacy, and eventually constitutional debate.

What follows is not a comprehensive legal history, but a collection of key moments that capture the arc of India’s anti-FGM/C movement.

1. Survivors begin finding one another (2014–2015)

In 2015, Masooma Ranalvi published a personal essay on NDTV describing her experience of undergoing khatna as a child. Women across India and the diaspora began reaching out privately with stories of their own. Many had never spoken about the experience before.

As I wrote previously in FGM in India: A Memoir of a Movement, these conversations eventually moved into WhatsApp groups where Bohra women from different cities and countries began comparing memories, asking questions, and trying to make sense of experiences they had long understood only as routine or inevitable. The groups quickly expanded. Women from Mumbai, Surat, Udaipur, Nagpur, Delhi, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia began speaking to one another across geographies and generations. The movement that would later become publicly visible began taking shape within these conversations. 

2. Sahiyo and WeSpeakOut formalise survivor organising (2015)

Out of those early conversations came some of the movement’s first organised platforms.

In 2015, Sahiyo was formally established by Bohra women across India and the diaspora, focusing on storytelling, dialogue, research, and community engagement. Around the same time, Speak Out on FGM — later WeSpeakOut — emerged as a survivor-led advocacy platform focused more directly on legal reform, campaigning, and political engagement. 

Independent survivors, writers, lawyers, filmmakers, therapists, and researchers also became part of a growing ecosystem around the issue. The movement did not emerge from one organisation alone, but through overlapping networks of Bohra women and allies who brought different approaches and strategies to the work.

3. Community campaigns begin challenging silence (2015–2017)

As the movement grew, activists began experimenting with ways to bring conversations around khatna into Bohra social spaces.

Campaigns such as Each One Reach One, My Voice Against FGM, Thaal Pe Charcha, and later Men Against FGM created spaces for intergenerational discussion within families and communities. 

These conversations were often complex and loaded – many activists were navigating relationships with mothers, grandmothers, and relatives who had themselves undergone khatna and continued to see it as culturally necessary. Survivors were not only confronting a practice, but also negotiating questions of belonging, faith, gender, and family loyalty.

This phase of the movement also involved significant engagement with journalists and media organisations, as survivors pushed for more accurate and less sensationalist reporting on khatna.

4. The Australia case changes public understanding (2015–2018)

Around the same time, the landmark Dawoodi Bohra FGM prosecution in Australia began entering Indian public discussion in a much more visible way.

In 2015, a Sydney court convicted members of the Bohra community, including a religious leader and two women, under Australia’s anti-FGM laws after girls underwent procedures described during trial as involving injury to tissue around the clitoral hood. The case became one of the first major criminal prosecutions globally connected specifically to  khatna within the Bohra community. 

For many Indian activists and survivors, the case altered the terms of public debate around khatna. It challenged the argument that the procedure was merely symbolic or too “minor” to merit legal scrutiny, while also drawing attention to the transnational nature of the practice across Bohra diaspora communities.

Its effects were visible within community institutions as well. Following legal developments in Australia, Bohra community organisations in countries including the United States, Canada, and Australia reportedly began advising members not to perform khatna in jurisdictions where it was prohibited by law. Survivors and activists interviewed at the time described the ruling as an important moment for anti-FGM/C advocacy within Bohra communities internationally. 

5. Survivors begin producing research and legal evidence (2016–2017)

For years, activists encountered repeated claims that khatna was either symbolic, medically insignificant, or too rare to discuss seriously. Part of the movement’s next phase involved producing evidence that could enter legal, medical, and policy discussions.

In 2017, Sahiyo released one of the first major online surveys documenting the prevalence and impact of khatna among Dawoodi Bohra women. (This was followed by the first qualitative study published by WeSpeakOut : The Clitoral Hood: A Contested Site.

Research and legal analysis around the anatomy and impact of Bohra khatna also became increasingly important during this period. Publications such as The Clitoral Hood: A Contested Site and the Lawyers Collective Women’s Rights Initiative’s Guide to Eliminating the FGM Practice in India challenged claims that the procedure involved only a harmless “nick” and situated the practice within broader conversations around bodily integrity, consent, and constitutional rights.

What had previously circulated mainly through testimony and memory was increasingly entering institutional and legal discourse.

6. Political advocacy reaches Delhi (2017)

By 2017, the movement had begun engaging more directly with the Indian state.

Activists and survivors met political leaders including former Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi and MP Shashi Tharoor, while petitions signed by thousands were submitted to the National Commission Of Women.

WeSpeakOut, Equality Now, Lawyers Collective, and allied advocates also began sustained engagement with ministries, commissions, lawyers, and medical professionals around the legal status of FGM/C in India.

The significance of this period was not only that politicians responded, but that Bohra women had succeeded in moving khatna from the margins of private community conversation into national policy debate.

7. The Supreme Court takes notice (2017)

In May 2017, the Supreme Court of India issued notice in a PIL filed by advocate Sunita Tiwari seeking a ban on FGM/C. 

Soon after, WeSpeakOut founder Masooma Ranalvi became an intervening petitioner in the case, ensuring that survivor voices remained directly represented within the proceedings.

For the first time, khatna entered India’s constitutional discourse through questions of bodily autonomy, equality, dignity, child rights, and religious freedom.

8. Bodily autonomy enters constitutional language (2018)

The hearings in 2018 marked another important shift.

During proceedings, Justice D.Y. Chandrachud observed that “one has supreme authority over genitalia,” linking bodily autonomy directly to dignity and identity. 

For many survivors, the hearings were significant less because they resolved the issue — they did not — and more because they publicly acknowledged harms that had long been minimised or dismissed within both community and institutional spaces.

Soon after, the matter was referred to a Constitution Bench and remained in procedural limbo for years. But by then, the issue had already entered India’s constitutional vocabulary.

9. The movement expands across South Asia and international forums (2018–2023)

Even as the Indian case stalled procedurally, anti-FGM/C advocacy continued expanding through transnational feminist and human rights networks.

Organisations including Equality Now, Sahiyo, WeSpeakOut, the Asia Network to End FGM/C, ARROW, Orchid Project, began building broader South and Southeast Asian conversations around FGM/C through webinars, research collaborations, media trainings, UN advocacy, and cross-country dialogues. These collaborations brought together activists, lawyers, researchers, therapists, and survivors from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and diaspora communities.

In 2022, Bohra survivor-activists under the leadership of WeSpeakOut,  participated in advocacy around India’s Universal Periodic Review at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva. Later that year, Costa Rica formally recommended that India enact legislation against FGM and develop a national plan to eliminate the practice.

These developments were significant not only diplomatically, but because they helped establish that FGM/C in Asia — including within Bohra communities — was not an isolated or invisible issue.

10. A nine-judge bench in India’s Supreme Court hears the FGM matter: 2026

The Court’s remarks — that FGM “affects health” and “cannot be compared with circumcision” — reflect years of work by survivors, researchers, lawyers, journalists, filmmakers, therapists, and advocacy groups who insisted on documenting and discussing what many institutions initially ignored.

A final constitutional outcome remains uncertain. India still does not have a specific law banning FGM/C. Reliable national prevalence data remains absent. Many Bohra girls continue to undergo khatna in secrecy. Now there is new evidence of prevalence of FGM in some Sunni communities in Kerala, hitherto unknown. 

At the same time, the conversation around the practice has changed profoundly over the last decade. What once existed largely as an unnamed experience within private family and community spaces has gradually entered public, legal, feminist, and international human rights discourse — shaped in large part by Bohra survivors in India and across the diaspora who chose, often at considerable personal cost, to speak about it publicly.