Letter from India Rahul BediA group of vigilante women dressed in pink saris and armed with sticks and axes have declared "war" on corrupt officials, caste discrimination and chauvinistic males in one of India's poorest and most backward regions in northern Uttar Pradesh state.
Striking fear in the hearts of wrongdoers and earning the grudging respect of locals and officials in Banda district, 150km south of the state capital, Lucknow, the several hundred strong "gulabi" or pink gang mercilessly expose corrupt officials and at times, even publicly thrash and humiliate men who had either abandoned or beaten their wives.
Recently, the shrieking pink brigade stormed a police station after its officers arrested and maltreated a low-caste man, a common phenomenon in the district.
Over a fifth of Banda district's 1.6 million people living in some 600 villages are untouchables or Dalits, treated harshly, often inhumanely, by the upper castes and the local administration.
Dalits occupy the lowest rank in India's 3000-year-old caste system that discriminates against nearly a fourth of the country's billion-plus population.
And though the Indian constitution, adopted in 1950, prohibits discrimination based on caste, the practice still pervades society, defining social arrangements, marriages and food habits.
Across Banda the lower castes are forced to live in ghettos and in some areas not allowed even to draw water from the village well or worship in the local temple.
Women bear the brunt of the poverty and discrimination in the region's feudalistic and male-dominated society. Dowry demands and domestic and sexual violence are common.
"Nobody comes to our help in these parts. The officials and the police are corrupt and anti-poor so at times we have to take the law in our hands. At other times, we prefer to shame the wrongdoers," the pink gang's founder leader, Sampat Pal Devi, said.
All members, she said, are taught to wield the traditional Indian "lathi" or thick bamboo stick in self-defence.
The wife of an ice cream vendor and mother of five, the wiry Devi emphasised that they were not a gang in the normal sense, but a group to which dispossessed locals looked for redress. "We are a gang for justice," she declares, adding that they distrusted political parties and non-governmental organisations as they were corrupt and repressive.
Like many Pink Gang members Devi was married off at the age of nine in a region where child weddings are common. At 12 she went to live with her husband and at 13 bore her first child. "Village society in India is loaded against women. It refuses to educate them, marries them off too early, bartering them for money," declares Devi.
Rural Indian women need to study and become independent, says Devi while listening to a mother accompanying her weeping daughter who was regularly beaten and eventually thrown out by her husband for her inability to persuade her parents to meet his demand for 20,000 rupees (€345).
"He married me for the love of money," sobs the maltreated Malti.
Devi offers reassurance, telling her that the "gang" will soon march to her husband's house and demand an explanation from him.
"If he does not take her back and keep her well, we will resort to other measures," she says ominously without elaborating.
The Pink sorority claims to have restored at least 11 girls to their spouses who were similarly thrown out. "After all, women need men to live with," Devi states, matter-of-factly dismissing the notion that the Pink Gang was anti-male.
Women vigilante groups have been active and effective in other parts of India also. In the early 1990s the fiery women of northeastern Manipur state, bordering Myanmar, launched a successful temperance movement that still holds sway.
Known as the Meira Paibis, after the lighted torches they carried on their nightly patrols, these women would ambush men who were drinking, strip them, tie them atop donkeys and parade them through the streets with their faces blackened.
The broken and in most cases wailing men would then be handed over to the co-operative local police and locked up for the night to sleep off their drunkenness.
Positioning themselves at strategic street corners across the state, these temperance squads would whistle up reinforcements within minutes if confronted with a clutch of drunken males. They forced their victims to tell them the location of their local still, which was then destroyed, after which the "donkey" treatment began for the hapless victim.
Soon after similarly determined female squads in southern Andhra Pradesh went on the offensive against their liquor-addicted menfolk by forcing them not only to chew red chili powder - available locally in great abundance - but also stripping them and stuffing all their orifices with it.
Few who had undergone this rather harsh handling dreamt ever again of drinking.
And though Andhra's women managed to force the state government to enforce prohibition, it lasted barely two years during which relative calm prevailed.