Madhu Kishwar

She then joined the Indian Council of Social Science Research as the Maulana Azad Professor. In 2017, she was appointed to the Academic Council of the School of Art and Aesthetics of Jawaharlal Nehru University. The appointment was perceived to be politically motivated with her domain-expertise being questioned and students protested in large numbers. Kishwar rejected the charges, describing them as whining of the leftist intellectuals, who were losing their clout.

She was a professor and a senior fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), until retiring in 2016. Post her retirement, she asserted the institution of being a chaotic fiefdom of the chosen few and alleged the higher echelons of CSDS to be ideologically biased towards left, who treated her unfairly for years due to ideological differences, and supposedly, even robbed her of a legitimate government awarded scholarship. The institute rejected the allegations, en masse.

She was also one of the fiercest critics of the highly acclaimed film Fire, which focused a spotlight on the lesbian community in India. Deeming that as ramblings of a self-hating-Indian that was meant to stereotype and vilify Hindus, she mocked the queer rights movements to be a Western import that went contrary to the ethos of Hindu public life and middle class values. Gradually, in the process, she joined a newly evolving group of (self-proclaimed) Hindutva scholars in asserting of biases in the western (and marxist) scholarship of Indic religions and weaponed Manushi as a tool during the California textbook controversy over Hindu history et al.—Anantharam notes a heavy intermingling of Hindutva and her works by the middle 2000s.

Anita Anantharam, an associate professor of Women's Studies at University of Florida, writing over Feminist Media Studies in 2009, deems Kishwar to subscribe to a brand of aggressively nationalist feminism that takes a highly holistic view of the local society, culture and traditions. She notes that as the editorial board of Manushi thinned out over the years for varied reasons and the journal came under near-absolute stewardship of Kishwar, it chose to embrace the contemporaneous rise of the right-wing-nationalism through the realms of Hindutva. This led to the introduction of religious and communal discourses into a hitherto secular and non-polarized space which vocally urged for a return to a golden atavistic past and amplified the "hierarchies of "East" versus "West", Indian womanhood versus western feminism, and Hindu versus Muslim identity" from the lenses of religion and ethno-nationalism.

Kishwar has been noted for her adulation of Narendra Modi, to the extent of comparing him with Mahatma Gandhi. She had also written a book that absolved him, a then prime-ministerial candidate of any involvement in the 2002 Gujarat riots and effusively praised him as a non-communal politician. Incidentally she used to be a vocal critic of Modi.

She has been awarded the Chameli Devi Jain Award for Outstanding Women Mediaperson in 1985.