That was where our conversation begins. I ask Sood what, after looking back over half a century, she believes the law has actually achieved. “One of the central themes of the book is the gap between the promise of the law and what it has actually achieved,” she says. But she does not give up on law. In a country marked by deep inequalities of power and access, “the power of the law cannot be ignored. The law has immense reformatory and regulatory power. And while it may not always be the perfect tool, it is perhaps the strongest tool we have at our disposal.”

One place where she sees real movement is constitutional morality. “Morality” is routinely invoked in India to tell people how to live, whom to marry and how women should behave. Constitutional morality offers another standard: liberty, dignity, equality and fraternity rather than public sentiment. “To limit [morality] to constitutional norms rather than public sentiments is pretty revolutionary,” she argues. Whether that understanding survives the pending nine-judge Sabarimala reference worries her. The Supreme Court reserved judgment on May 14, 2026, after 16 days of hearings.

Sexual violence runs through Courting Equality. Sood had not decided in advance to leave out a separate chapter on rape. While writing, she found rape was already everywhere: Mathura and custodial violence, marital rape, workplace harassment, MeToo, sexual threats online and even the Sabarimala discussion about placing the burden of male celibacy on women. “I realised it was just coming up everywhere,” she says. “It is a part of the everyday navigation that women have to do.”

I ask whether, from Mathura and the 1978 Hyderabad gang rape of Rameeza Bee to Nirbhaya and MeToo, India still responds to rape as an event requiring tougher punishment instead of looking at the inequality that makes such violence possible. Her answer goes to one of the book’s sharpest phrases: “rage, reform, repeat”. Something terrible happens, outrage follows, a law is changed or a punishment increased, and attention moves on. “The real work of reform never happens in that cycle,” she asserts. Feminists are then criticised for not automatically backing harsher sentences. “The fact is, we know it’s a distraction. It’s a spectacle.”

Real gaps in law still need fixing, she stresses. The old narrow definition of rape was one. But simply moving from ten years to twenty, then life imprisonment and then the death penalty can become an “easy pass” for failures of governance. “What helps women is steps that actually improve and empower their day-to-day lives.” Financial independence, work, equal inheritance and the ability to leave an abusive home all matter. “Violence is, after all, just a symptom of the inequality that women face.”

Mathura and Rameeza Bee also led us to the question of whose experience the women’s movement was able to see. Mathura was Adivasi; Rameeza Bee was Muslim. But those identities were not central to the feminist analysis around their cases. Sood is careful about judging the 1970s by today’s language. There was a strong need then for solidarity and a fear that emphasising differences would splinter the movement. Indian social movements, she feels, were in some ways already conscious of class and religious differences even without using the word “intersectionality”. Today, “the umbrella, the tent is wider. It may not be as close-knit.” There is greater diversity, even if there is less of the old unity.

From there we move to Shah Bano and the long shadow of the Narasu Appa Mali judgment, which kept uncodified personal law largely outside a direct fundamental-rights test. The book shows how quickly women’s equality can become ammunition in battles over religious identity. “Women’s rights are weaponised all the time,” says Sood, who sees an important difference between politics around women’s agency and protecting women. The first asks how to get more women into jobs, make public transport safer, improve public spaces and widen access to justice. The second can end with censorship, surveillance, restrictions on work and attempts to control women’s sexuality. Sood traces this tension through the growth of right-wing women’s organisations as well as older feminist campaigns. Her larger point is that two groups may both claim to be protecting women from violence while having very different ideas of what a free woman looks like.

The Uniform Civil Code (UCC) is one of the clearest examples. Once supported within secular feminist politics as a route to equal family law, it can also serve a very different political project. Sood is particularly critical of the Uttarakhand model and its regulation of live-in relationships, including the space it creates for officials and third parties to question adult choices. In the book, she argues that such provisions can allow parents, neighbours and others to intrude into relationships the law should be protecting from outside interference. I ask what a genuinely feminist UCC might look like. She is careful not to offer an instant blueprint for something that would require detailed work across communities and laws. At its most basic, though, “it should be a far more minimalist code”.

People should remain free to follow marriage ceremonies, rituals and customs as long as they are lawful and do not conflict with fundamental rights. The state should concern itself with essentials such as age, consent, legal status, equality and registration. It should not be deciding whether an adult woman has been “brainwashed” because she chose a partner outside her family or community. Administrative discretion will exist, Sood says, but it should be governed by “individual autonomy” and “constitutional morality”, rather than social morality or community pressure.

This brings us to judges themselves. Courting Equality records judgments coloured by assumptions about respectable women, sexuality, family and proper behaviour. Sood recalls the judge in the Section 377 litigation who asked whether lawyers even knew a gay person, as if the lives being discussed were somehow outside ordinary society. India, she believes, gives considerable room to paternalism when it comes from authority figures. Even after accepting that somebody has a right, the question often becomes: why do you have to exercise it? “It’s really not for anybody to ask why I would like to exercise a right,” she says. That is why constitutional morality matters so much to her. It gives judges, lawmakers, police and administrators a framework based on rights instead of allowing decisions to turn on an individual authority’s picture of how society ought to conduct itself.

Sabarimala brings many of these arguments together. Sood makes a strong case that excluding menstruating women can be examined through Article 17, which abolishes untouchability. Article 17 is unusually absolute. Unlike several other fundamental rights, it has no reasonable-restriction clause and operates against private actors, too. During the Constituent Assembly debates, proposals to expressly confine untouchability to caste were not accepted. Professor K.T. Shah even raised the example of the untouchability faced by menstruating women to argue for a narrower definition limited to caste. His proposal was rejected.  For Sood, that history creates “a very, very strong argument” for understanding menstrual exclusion as a form of untouchability.

She is equally critical of the Supreme Court’s “essential religious practices” test. Declaring something essential can freeze a religious practice and make reform harder. It can also hurt people inside the faith who do not wish to follow it. She gives the hijab as an example: if a court declares wearing it essential to Islam, where does that leave Muslim women who choose not to wear it? But declaring something non-essential can leave otherwise lawful religious practice open to state interference. “The court is not at all equipped to get into these questions,” she says. It should instead “restrict itself to the question of rights”.

She prefers a more individual-centred approach, closer to the anti-exclusion principle discussed in the Sabarimala litigation. Communities may follow their religious practices, but those practices should face scrutiny when they exclude people, damage their dignity or deny access to public goods. A group-centred approach tends to strengthen those who claim to speak for the community, she argues, and they are often male, clerical and conservative. The individual dissenter within that community can simply disappear. Her criticism of the essential-religious-practices doctrine runs through the book as well: courts, she argues, are far better placed to decide questions of rights than to decide what is or is not the true essence of a faith.

Autonomy becomes even harder inside marriage. Sood’s discussion of Joseph Shine, an Indian-origin hotelier based in Italy who filed a landmark public interest litigation (PIL) leading the Supreme Court of India to strike down the colonial-era adultery law, is central here. The old law effectively understood adultery as a wrong by one man against another. The husband was the injured party, the outsider male the offender, while the wife was inside the structure almost as property. Joseph Shine rejected that understanding and placed a woman’s dignity, individuality and sexual autonomy at the centre. 

I ask what that reasoning means for two issues she discusses in the book: restitution of conjugal rights and the marital-rape exception. “To my mind, neither of these provisions can stand,” she says. If the Court does not strike down the marital-rape exception, Sood expects it may fall back on the argument that creating a criminal offence is Parliament’s job. She strongly disagrees. Rape already exists as an offence, she points out. The law has carved out an exception for marriage. Removing an unconstitutional exception is not the same as creating a new crime. “That is exactly their job,” she says of the courts. Passing the issue back to Parliament, in her view, would amount to “abdicating their duty”. The book makes the same argument while examining the government’s defence of the exemption and the 2022 split verdict of the Delhi High Court.

The timing of that discussion could hardly have been more relevant. On September 9, the Supreme Court said final hearings on the marital-rape petitions would begin in three weeks. The bench acknowledged that marriage does not extinguish individual autonomy, while asking how prosecution can proceed while the statutory exception remains and before its constitutional validity has been decided. It said it would consider both the validity of the exemption and the question of prosecution. 

Dowry took our conversation from constitutional doctrine back to money. Sood first corrected the premise of my question. Public debate, she says, has not simply focused on tougher punishment. It has focused excessively on supposed “misuse” of dowry laws. A prosecution that fails is frequently presented as evidence that the original complaint was false. “An unsuccessful prosecution is not necessarily a false accusation,” she says. Cases fail for many reasons: evidence can be difficult to produce; investigations can be poor; women can be pressured into reconciliation or withdrawal; complainants may not have the money or independence to keep fighting.

The larger connection Sood draws is between dowry, inheritance, property and dependence. If daughters are denied their share of natal property and are still expected to “belong” to another family after marriage, harsher punishment addresses the violence after it has occurred without changing the economics behind it. The book argues that son preference, dowry and unequal inheritance are tied together, including in families where daughters technically possess equal legal rights but are pressured to give up their share.

Sood links this to what she considers one of the deeper insights of the Justice Verma Committee: violence is part of a continuum of inequalities that begins far earlier in a girl’s life. She was herself part of the committee’s research team. Much of the public argument in 2013, she feels, centred on which criminal-law recommendations were accepted or rejected. Its wider thinking about equality, institutions and social attitudes did not receive the same attention. 

MeToo exposed another failure of formal systems. Sood does not accept the argument that every public disclosure should be judged by the evidentiary standards of a criminal trial. “Legal redress was not always what was being sought,” she says. For many women, speaking offered “a different form of justice”, one that was “more cathartic than legalistic”. The movement also exposed why many women did not trust formal routes in the first place. In Courting Equality, she returns to Priya Ramani, Ghazala Wahab and other women who spoke years after the events they described, and to the way delay itself was repeatedly used to question credibility. She also points out how few of the powerful men named during MeToo suffered consequences.

That leads us to POSH. Sood is critical of making Internal Committees the main route for workplace sexual-harassment complaints, and she speaks from experience of serving on them. Management chooses the members. The accused is often senior and closer to those running the organisation. The complainant may be far easier to replace. The external member has no veto. Sood says she has sometimes entered committee meetings and realised that internal discussions had already happened without her. Organisations, she feels, can become more interested in showing that no harassment was proved than in showing that a complaint was fairly investigated and wrongdoing dealt with.

The Verma Committee recognised many of these problems and suggested an external employment tribunal, a specialist forum outside the organisation that would not carry the burden of a full criminal trial. Sood thinks that idea is still worth examining. The book itself questions whether a complaints mechanism controlled largely from inside the same workplace can deal fairly with the power imbalance that often produced the harassment in the first place.

Most importantly, Sood says, the route should belong to the survivor. She may choose an internal process, an external forum or criminal proceedings.  “These things should be done at the choice of the survivor,” she says. “You cannot address violence without first addressing inequality.”

We end with representation. Women remain badly under-represented in Parliament and in the higher judiciary. Justice B.V. Nagarathna is in line, under the present seniority convention, to become India’s first woman Chief Justice in September 2027. Her tenure would last only 36 days. I ask how much change we can expect when those making and interpreting the law remain overwhelmingly male. “Not much, frankly,” Sood replies. For her, representation is about the quality of decision-making. Justice is “a very social, very humanistic enterprise”, where different lives and experiences matter. “At least when it comes to law — whether it is legislating, implementation or enforcement — merit by definition includes diversity.” 

She knows women can carry patriarchal thinking, too. The book itself contains examples of women judges taking conservative positions. But that, she says, cannot become an argument for fewer women. When women are rare in powerful institutions, they can operate from “a scarcity mindset”. They may feel they need to behave as much like the men already there as possible, and avoid subjects that might reduce them to being seen as a “woman judge” or “woman parliamentarian”.

Sood links this to the professional culture of the 1990s she writes about in the book, when successful women often felt pressure to show that they were “one of the boys”. A woman judge may hesitate to speak particularly about women’s rights because she does not want her work reduced to gender. The only way out, Sood argues, is to have enough women in these institutions that no single woman has to stand for all women.

My final question is about women’s reservation and the 2026 attempt to link its implementation to a new delimitation route. Sood does not believe the government’s move showed a serious commitment to women’s reservation. In her reading, the political momentum around women’s representation was also being used to push the government’s delimitation agenda. She thought it significant that Opposition parties resisted despite the obvious risk of being portrayed as opponents of women’s reservation. The delimitation-linked constitutional amendment failed to secure the required two-thirds majority in the Lok Sabha earlier this year.

In the end, we come back to ‘the unfinished revolution’. Courting Equality does not offer a history in which every new law improves on the last. There are gains and reversals, judgments that move the law forward and others that retreat, public movements that force institutions to act and institutions that learn how to resist change. “That’s the way history unfolds,” Sood says. “The line of history is never a linear progression.” What is needed, she adds, is a certain patience, but also “clarity about where we have to go”.

That is perhaps the clearest way to read Courting Equality. Sood has no illusion that law will rescue women on its own. She is equally unwilling to give up on it. The unfinished part of the revolution lies in making legal equality mean something in the places where women encounter power every day: inside the family, at work, within communities and institutions, and in matters of controlling money, property and their own lives.