The Green Gang: The Polarising Story Of A Dalit All-Woman Vigilante Group In UP

The first time Angoori Dahariya wielded a stick of bamboo to beat a man was in an act of self-defence against her landlord. Living in an upper-caste area in Uttar Pradesh as a Dalit woman, the eviction had been years in the making. Her neighbours had weaponised her caste against her, using it as a bigoted excuse to drive Dahariya out of the home she had spent her life savings on. On a day that exceeded 40° Celcius, her landlord, accompanied by five other men, violently assaulted Dahariya and her family to drive them out of their home. Rather than taking the beating and accepting her maltreatment as an inevitability of her social status, she tried to fight back. While she didn’t know it then, this moment would eventually be a turning point in her transformation from a housewife to the leader of an all-woman vigilante gang.

In her 2024 book The Furies: Women, Vengeance, and Justice, American journalist and author Elizabeth Flock tells the true stories of how three women from across the world used violence to seek vengeance against their oppressors. Her second story follows Angoori Dahariya through the development, peak, and eventual dissolution of her gang, the 'Green Gang'. After experiencing firsthand how corrupt police forces and government officials turned a blind eye to upper-caste men’s mistreatment of women, Dahariya decided to take matters into her own hands. She formed the Green Gang in 2010 to punish domestic abusers and wrongdoers, particularly when the police refused to do so themselves.

Hailing from Tirwa, a town in the Kannauj district of Uttar Pradesh, Dahariya travelled by foot to neighbouring towns to recruit women for her cause. Though few joined her initially, the gang’s first act — the assault of an electrician overcharging community members to siphon funds into his account — immediately made them legends. The gang, comprised of only a dozen women at the time, went to the electrician’s home wearing matching green sarees and brandishing lathis, bamboo canes akin to what Dahariya used to hit her landlord years prior. As they beat the electrician, they also dressed him head to toe in a woman’s garb, complete with a bright red bindi planted on the centre of his forehead. At that moment, the conman electrician, dressed as a woman, became as powerless as the gang members before him once were. 

After this incident, the Green Gang ballooned in size and went on to seek justice through more acts of intimidation and violence. They were called upon by women in need, with many cases coming from those who faced domestic abuse at the hands of their partners or in-laws. In one instance, the gang kidnapped the mother of a rape victim to force her to testify in court. In another, they burned down the police station where a woman’s husband was horrifically detained and murdered by its officers. At its peak, the Green Gang had well over a thousand members, expanding its membership reach from within Uttar Pradesh to Rajasthan, Haryana, and New Delhi.

The Green Gang eventually dissolved after the pandemic, as their actions slowed and Dahariya sought political power by backing the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh only to lose in the election. By this point, the Green Gang had grown past a manageable size and faced immense criticism after a video went viral of them beating a young girl and forcing her into a second marriage to punish her for having an affair. The gang’s actions weren’t black and white; on the one hand, their actions could be seen as nothing but a response to the violence they, as predominantly lower-caste women, experienced on a daily and systemic level. On the other, the group’s ascent to power was marked by missteps like moral policing and acts of corruption, such as allegedly accepting bribes.

It’s easy to get lost in the exciting narrative woven around Angoori Dahariya. After all, she’s somewhat of a feminist Robin Hood, a woman who turned the barest of circumstances into an opportunity to hold power against her oppressors. But Dahariya is more than a character written for us to root for. She’s a flawed, whole human being, capable of the same wickedness she sought to destroy. At its core, her story is a tragedy. The fact is, she never should have had to take matters into her own hands. Dahariya, the thousands of other women in the Green Gang, and the millions of women and lower-caste people across our country are victims of a broken system. Sexism, casteism, economic marginalisation, and corruption brought us here. And as moving as it can be to watch women forge their own destinies despite the oppressive forces in their ways, their stories should not distract us from the real, systemic problems that force them to resort to acts of violence. 

Read more about Angoori Dahariya’s story in The Furies: Women, Vengeance, and Justice.

Follow Elizabeth Flock, author of The Furies, here. 

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