The Partition of British India into the sovereign territories of India and Pakistan was accompanied by widespread violence—much of which was on women. Thousands of women were murdered, abused, raped and abducted, forcibly converted, often separated from their families and, at other times, killed by their own families/communities. The Abducted Persons (Recovery and Restoration) Act 1949 was created under the assumption that any conversion (of women) taking place after 1947 was forced conversion, and any such woman would be recovered and rehabilitated according to their respective religions, that is, a Hindu or Sikh woman, unaccompanied by her family, and converted into Islam in Pakistan, would be repatriated to India. Mixed marriages of Hindu or Sikh women to Muslim men would be treated as forced unions, the women ‘recovered’ and returned to their families. An abducted person was by definition a male child under the age of 16 or a female of any age, who had become separated from her family at any time between 1 March 1947 and 1 January 1949. By the time the act was repealed in 1957, 20,000 women were claimed to have been recovered by activists and police on both sides of the border in the west. This act and subsequent action placed women’s agency, citizenship and subjectivity in a nexus, in which their citizenship was determined by the citizenship of their father and husband, the naturalness of their religion vis-à-vis that of the state they are in, and never on the basis of their desire and agency. This Act was not implemented in eastern India, and in fact faced steep opposition from women activists there.