Resisting State Violence under the Regulatory Model of Sex Work Activism in New Delhi, India

Eurocentric feminist and sex-work frameworks inadequately capture the complexities of Southern sex-work movements. Unlike Western/European abolitionist (Dworkin 2003) and decriminalisation (Grant 2014) theories, India’s movement reflects a synergy of emotion, culture, politics, and nationalism. Drawing on ethnographic research in New Delhi (2020–2024), this paper foregrounds female sex-worker (FSW) activists’ narratives alongside those of NGO staff, paralegals, academics, volunteers, children of female sex workers, and other stakeholders, proposing a renewed feminist historiography. It challenges colonial moral frameworks, particularly the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act 1956 (ITPA), which position the state and police as protectors, and advocates a bottom-up politics of collective action, intergenerational solidarities (Roy 2009; 2015), and sisterhood rooted in the historical legacies of Indian prostitution (Mukherjee 1978). Sex-work non-governmental organisations (NGOs) emerge as mediating spaces linking grassroots realities with policy while amplifying marginalised voices.

However, this intergenerational sisterhood is embedded in historically exhaustive Hindu cultural traditions, and contemporary advocacy, especially under the right-wing BJP, risks re-inscribing Vedic moral hierarchies through oral storytelling. The paper critiques the radical politicisation and neoliberal co-optation of the regulatory model (Roy 2016), recentring grassroots advocacy that prioritises intersectional voices of FSW communities. By affirming affective and cultural legacies (Singh 2021), it contributes to a gender-inclusive, culturally grounded, and justice-oriented intersectional governance model, redefining feminist praxis from the ground up without invoking a politicised Hindu past.

Akangshya Bordoloi

Indian Sociological Research Scholar

I am an Assamese, Indian Sociological Research scholar that specializes in Southern Decolonial Feminist social policy and Gender-based violence. I did my PhD in exploring the lived dynamics between Female sex workers and the activism they practice while negotiating with the Regulatory model in Delhi, India from the Department of Sociology, Maynooth University. I was awarded the John and Pat Hume Doctoral Scholarship, the Department of Sociology Teaching Fellowship, the National University of Ireland Travelling Scholarship and the Laura-Bassi Scholarship for my PhD. I hold a Professional Certificate in Teaching and Learning and have 5 years of Lecturing and supervising experience in the Department of Sociology, Maynooth University, Department of Politics, Trinity College, Dublin and in the Department of Nursing, Psychotherapy and Community Health, Dublin City University. I am also involved in teaching and guiding students with their academic writing in association with Student Skills and Success, Maynooth University along with assisting them in their career and placements through the Placements office in Maynooth University.