Abstract This article introduces the concept of patriarchal forestalling to explain why formally rights-protective systems frequently deliver recognition without remedy in cases of domestic abuse. Forestalling denotes an anticipatory repertoire through which legal and paralegal institutions diffuse and neutralise claims via five recurrent dynamics: normative socialisation, relational surveillance, pre-emptive discrediting, institutional redirection and procedural dereliction. Drawing on British Academy-funded qualitative research conducted across Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, the article demonstrates how these mechanisms sustain the appearance of responsiveness whilst withholding meaningful protection. Addressed to a general legal readership, the article makes two principal contributions. Conceptually, it shifts the analysis from doctrinal design to the broader institutional ecology within which rights are operationalised. Methodologically, it provides a vocabulary for identifying when practice reconstitutes rights as matters of discretion. Although grounded in the Indian context, the framework travels beyond it, offering insight into how liberal legal orders may affirm rights at the level of principle while remaining structurally configured to forestall gender-equalising change.
Shazia Choudhry (Tue,) studied this question.