Beat your wife in India, and you’ll be beaten back. By a mob of women in pink saris.

They are the Gulabi (’Pink’) Gang, in one of India’s northern states and poorest regions. Theirs is an area comprised of 20% untouchables, beset by drought and unemployment, and targeted in the past for a massive jobs-for-work program. But local government officials regularly come down against the poor: a policeman recently arrested an untouchable, but didn’t register a case against him. The Gulabi Gang stormed the precinct, and gave the policeman a thrashing.

Their spitfire leader says they are ‘a gang for justice.’ Sampat Pal Devi was forced into marriage at the age of 12, and had her first child when she was 13. This is hardly unusual: in village society, the deck is heavily stacked against women’s rights and education. She worked as a government health worker, organizing meetings with neighborhood women on her own time.

They aren’t all women. Men speak with equal passion not just about dowries or child marriages, but about diminishing water resources and farm subsidies. The Gulabi Gang leaped into the spotlight only after it intercepted three tractors of wheat being pilfered from a public distribution program. They beat the thieves with lathis - traditional Indian sticks - and sandals.