For most of her life, Gulfisha Fatima showed little interest in anything beyond academics. By late 2019, the 27-year-old Delhi resident had finished her M.B.A. and was getting ready to apply for a Ph.D. Even as a student, she stayed away from activism. “Her world,” her brother Aqil told me, “revolved around books.”That began to change in December of that year.
On July 1, a few days after a woman in India registered for an account on the careers site Naukri.com and uploaded a resume, a recruiter called her: One of the country’s leading real-estate companies was hiring for a senior position, and more details would follow soon.The woman had posted her details on the site, whose name means “job” in Hindi, because she feared losing her current role as a mechanical engineer.