ABSTRACT
As an undergraduate student in India, Harjeet found herself so fascinated with political science that she elected it as her major. Some of her course work, naturally enough, involved closely studying her country’s constitution and political structure. But as interesting as those topics were to her, they had to remain a purely academic interest, for like most other young women her age growing up in a small town in India, she was essentially in a marital holding pattern, awaiting the inevitable match that her parents would arrange for her when it was time for marriage. Her studies were simply a way to add to her attractiveness as an accomplished young girl of marriageable age. Harjeet’s practice of politics was thus limited to the times when her fountain pen would furiously scratch across the ruled sheets of foolscap paper during her three-hour-long final exams.
