![]() ![]() Right wing TV channels like Republic claimed that the women were forcibly sent to the site of resistance by their husbands. Given this understanding of Muslim women, for the Hindu Right wing, the existence of Shaheen Bagh was a major provocation, with the assertiveness of Muslim women becoming something that must be destroyed at all cost. And this category of theoretical “Muslim women” which need saving is static and ossified (Kirmani 2013:141–67). And, they were not resisting just as members of the Muslim community but as Muslim women of the community.Ĥ The dominant discourse on Muslim women in the Indian public sphere revolves around the tropes of Triple Talaq, parda (veiling), and polygamy. 3 To add more to it, the Muslim women’s political protest reflected their location primarily in relation to their religious identity, not just their gender. Such a struggle in a democracy transcends ethnic boundaries. More importantly, the women were not focused on a strictly Muslim issue, but a wider movement in which others too joined in. However, at Shaheen Bagh the women were protesting against the CAA, 2019, which made citizenship conditional upon religion, for the first time in India. In sum, equal treatment of gender was the central plank in the battle for citizenship. Moreover, the political mobilization was two-pronged: It was against the state, and also against the community (ibid.: xvii). Unlike the case of Shaheen Bagh, many women who took part were “ urban, employed, educated and largely middle class” (Hasan 1994:xvi). The Committee for the Protection of the Rights of Muslim Women embodied the collective aspiration of Muslim women for equal citizenship, and it had organized public meetings in Calcutta, Trivandrum, Delhi, and other parts of the country to flag the issue of unequal treatment of Muslim women (Hasan 1989). In post-Independent India, Muslim women had come out on the streets to articulate their citizenship grievances in the wake of introduction of the Muslim Women Protection of Rights on Divorce Bill, 1986. ![]() ![]() ![]() British India did see such mass demonstrations, and one of these was the Muslim women’s pro-League political protest against the Khizar Unionist government (Willmer 1996). 3 Christophe Jaffrelot made this comment on the Shaheen Bagh movement in his talk on the first panel (.)ģ Here, I would hasten to add that this was not the first instance of Muslim women’s political mobilization.This paper seeks to unpack some of the narratives around Shaheen Bagh, ranging from its representation in the Hindutva-dominated public sphere to the voices of the protestors themselves. A variety of narratives abound around this phenomenon. The movement inspired many similar localized sit-ins by Muslim women across the country, apart from the larger anti-CAA protests. Instead, Shaheen Bagh has become an iconic symbol of resistance in defense of the Constitution. 101 days later, when the protest at Shaheen Bagh was dismantled by the Delhi Police in the midst of the Covid-19 lockdown, the site was no longer merely the name of a Muslim locality in South Delhi. Owing to the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown of Delhi in the third week of March 2020, the women had already evacuated Shaheen Bagh, and the space was just a site of symbolic resistance where around half a dozen or less women used to be present. It remained a site of resistance for 101 days. 2 Around 10 to 15 women and some men from this locality took to the GD Birla Marg, near the overbridge, on 15 December, 2019, the day the Delhi Police stormed Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI), a Central University in South Delhi. The name comes from the fact that the locality adjacent to Road 13-A is a thickly populated Muslim colony named Shaheen Bagh (Shaheen literally means falcon). 2 Shaheen Bagh including the Muslim localities like Zakir Nagar, Abul Fazal Enclave, Ghaffar Manzil, (.)Ģ The protest site popularly called Shaheen Bagh was only a small patch of the GD Birla Marg (Road 13-A) that connects Mathura Road to Noida via Kalindi Kunj. ![]()
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