Although India has over the last decade embraced neoliberalism, opening its economy to dictates of the free market, privatizing many social sectors under structural adjustment programs, the family as an institution continues to perform functions that have long been at least a partial responsibility of the state in developed countries. Women and girls within patriarchal family structures have always had the responsibility of taking care of the young, aged, sick, for the socialization of children and maintenance of so-called moral standards. In fact without women’s labor the costs of social reproduction would have been too expensive to cover for third world states like India.

In this paper I argue that the nation-state is a heterogeneous institution with competing interests; while certain functionaries within it may be seeking to extend the logic of the market to all aspects of life, others have continued to seek compromises between the market and the regulatory forces of local gender regimes. Illustrating with the example of the increasingly powerful Hindu right and its influences this paper explores how on one hand since the late 1990s the Indian state propagated a powerful discourse of market and modernity using the language of rights and empowerment attracting the middle class and educated women into the service sector, especially IT, but at the same time through the discourse of Hindutva and rhetoric of ‘traditional Indian cultural values’ it has attempted to maintain the social power differentials that aim to sustain women’s gendered role in social reproduction.