The uncomfortable gender politics behind the accusations against a war widow

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For the last two weeks, television channels and social media have seen a heated debate over who has the greater claim to financial entitlements – the widow of a dead soldier or his parents.

Earlier this month, the parents of Anshuman Singh, an Army doctor who died on duty in July last year, alleged that their daughter-in-law had cut ties with them, taken away their son’s belongings, including his gallantry award, all the while receiving family pension as the legal “next of kin”.

Many came out in support of Smriti Singh, Anshuman Singh’s widow, while several others criticised her and accused her of betraying her husband’s family.

On July 5, Smriti Singh and her mother-in-law had received the Kirti Chakra honouring Anshuman Singh from President Droupadi Murmu. Soon after the event, Anshuman Singh’s father, Ravi Pratap Singh, told news channels that he never even got to hold the gallantry award while his wife, Manju, was only allowed a photograph with it.

The soldier’s father even approached Defence Minister Rajnath Singh seeking a change in the Army’s next-of-kin rules, under which parents of a person serving in the defence services are considered the next of kin up until he gets married. After that, the spouse’s name replaces that of the parents.

The parents complained that their daughter-in-law had “left the family” after being married for only five months. “A mother raised her son and handed him to the government without asking for anything,” Anshuman’s mother Manju Singh told a news channel. “He was martyred and now you are receiving [the financial benefits].”

Manju Singh added that things might have been different had Smriti Singh come from “their cultural background”. “She would have looked after us,” said Manju Singh. “She would have forgotten to care for herself in looking after us had she been from UP or Bihar.”

The episode, as it played out on social media, raises uncomfortable questions about how Indian society views a woman’s place in her marital family – especially when daughters-in-law refuse to toe the family line.

For one, the idea that parents and relatives have greater claim to a man’s inheritance as his “real family”, foregrounds how the woman is considered part of a family only by way of her ties to male family members: her husband, father, or male child.

Implicit in Anshuman Singh’s parents’ allegations is also a gendered idea of marriage and the labour it entails – men are providers while women must forget their needs in caring for family members.

Past instances

The discomfort over the choices of war widows has come to the fore in the past as well.

In 2019, after the Pulwama attack that killed 40 personnel of Central Reserve Police Force, the family members of a constable from Karnataka who died in the attack told his widow to marry her husband’s brother. This would have ensured that the compensation and pension money would remain in the family.

Ravi Pratap Singh, too, claimed that he had offered Smriti Singh the option of marrying her brother-in-law or anyone else she wished to. “She is our daughter, not just our daughter-in-law,” Ravi Pratap Singh said in his interview. “Had she said that she does not want to marry outside but within the family, my [other] son was only two years younger.”

Even the state’s understanding of the role and agency of the “veer nari”, or war widow, once reproduced similar assumptions.

Up until 2017, military law stipulated that a war widow was not entitled to the family pension if she remarried someone other than the brother of her late husband. In November 2017, after several legal representations, the Ministry of Defence struck down this provision.

Gender, nation and state

Scholar Sayantani Sur notes that in constructing the idea of the “veer nari”, or war widow whose husband died in service of the motherland, the state endows the widow with the masculine valour of her husband.

In the gendered imagery of nationalism, if it was the husband who dedicated his life to the motherland, the “veer nari” now takes his place and is expected to “take responsibility of the extended family economically, socially, reproductively”, limiting her identity to being the widow of a martyr.

Sur refers to a study by Leena Parmar of Kargil war widows in rural Rajasthan which found that 90% of women were informally married to their husband’s brothers through the “chura pratha” custom.

Over the years, the rules have changed – for the better, and in a way that the widow’s rights are protected irrespective of who she later remarries.

For instance, a widow receiving a special family pension, which is awarded for death aggravated by military service, is supposed to get full entitlements if she has no children, as well if she has children and continues to support them upon remarriage. If the widow does not support children upon remarriage, the children are entitled to a share of the pension as well.

The rules reflect the reality of a society where a man is often the sole breadwinner of the family with a wife and children as dependents. And it is, perhaps, to shield the widow from possible abuse, exploitation or destitution by the marital family that her claims to financial entitlements are placed above that of other dependents.

Women as villains

And so, familial discord and dispute over pensions and compensation becomes the last resort to restore the status quo that privileges the claims of the husband’s family.

Underlying this is the view that women’s rights are subordinate to the family and that she must make sacrifices for them. In demanding an equal share in or access to money and property, a woman undermines the basis of conventional marriage and familial relations and is in blatant violation of her cultural and spiritual duties – a view that has a long history

In her book A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia, developmental economist Bina Agarwal recalls what an Indian agriculture minister said to her at a conference in 1989: “Are you suggesting that women be given rights in land? What do women want? To break up the family?”

At least 100 years ago before Agarwal’s interaction, nationalist leaders struck a similar tone in criticising Rakhmabai, a young woman who infamously refused to discharge her marital duties to the man she was married to as a child. Historian Uma Chakravarti writes that Rakhmabai was attacked for being a “spoilt Western-education woman, parodied as flying to her piano, and reading Milton rather than nursing her ailing husband”.

Even today, any attempt by women to secure their own lives, like in cases of divorce, is met with similar accusations of “destroying the family” and eyeing the husband’s money.

In her post calling Smriti Singh a “family breaker” and a “fortune hunter”, academic Madhu Kishwar illustrates how entrenched these misogynist ideas are. On July 13, days after the parents’ allegations gained traction in the media, Kishwar on X claimed that after taking money from the gallantry award, Smriti Singh had “scooted off to Australia to trap another rich and handsome man”.

Though Ravi Pratap Singh had claimed that Smriti Singh plans to move to Australia, this has not been independently verified.

Behind this vilification of a woman as a “gold-digger” is a fundamental resistance and even fear of how independent women with resources could alter power equations within the family.