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Friday, December 11, 2020

Anti NRC-CAA Protests: How it shattered the Stereotypes of “Voiceless Indian Muslim Women”

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Nishitha Mandava
Nishitha Mandava
South Asia

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Article Contributor(s)

Nishitha Mandava

Article Title

Anti NRC-CAA Protests: How it shattered the Stereotypes of “Voiceless Indian Muslim Women”

Publisher

Global Views 360

Publication Date

December 11, 2020

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Mural featuring Muslim Women in Shaheen Bagh

Mural featuring Muslim Women in Shaheen Bagh | Source: DTM via Wikimedia

The anti CAA-NRC protest that erupted in December 2019 across many places in India has broken many widely stereotypes associated with Muslim women. The most common narrative of Indian Women in general and Indian Muslim Women in particualar revolves around the oft repeated claims of them being oppressed at home, discriminated in society, and confined to the household. However the widespread participation of Muslim women in the pro-constitution anti-NRC-CAA movement has broken numerous stereotypes regarding women in general and Muslim women in particular. They did not limit their role to silent bystanders; instead, they were actively involved in every dimension of these movements and demonstrated that they are not only capable of understanding complex issues, but can also orchestrate grassroot movements to oppose the oppressive and discriminatory policies introduced by the government.

Shaheen Bagh, a neighbourhood in South Delhi, became a prominent symbol for their non-violent resistance. It was the longest protest site against NRC-CAA. “I hardly ever leave my house alone. My son or husband accompanied me even to the nearby market. So I found it tough at first to be out here. But I feel compelled to protest” said Firdaus Shafiq, one of the protestors at Shaheen Bagh. What made the protests unusual was that protestors like Firdaus Shafiq were not activists they were everyday Muslim women and mostly homemakers.

Shaheen Bagh inspired women across India to stand together. Muslim women in Central Mumbai came up with ‘Mumbai Bagh’ to express their solidarity to Shaheen Bagh. Mumbai Bagh included almost four thousand women protesting. These large scale agitations encouraged women to join from different walks of life and religion to protest for the shared cause of revoking CAA and NRC.

Safoora Zargar Leading a Protest | Source: thescrbblr.in

However, all these protests have come with a price. To repress these agitations, several women have been arrested, some under the draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA). Women like Safoora Zargar and Gulfisha Fatima who have become icons of dissent have been arrested under the same. Even though Safoora Zargar was given bail on humanitarian grounds since she was pregnant, Gulfisha Fatima’s petition was dismissed. What is highly unfortunate and surprising is that most of these arrests have been made when the country is going through a pandemic.

Muslim women in India have been predominantly labelled as veiled, submissive, uneducated and voiceless. Thus, their mass level involvement has come as a surprise to many Indians. These women have reclaimed their spot in the public sphere, but this is not a sudden change. On one level, their participation could be attributed to the growing anxieties among the Muslim community about NRC-CAA. Even though officially NRC is meant to act as a check against illegal immigration, there has been a growing belief that it is being used to marginalise the Muslims and strip them of their identity. Thus this fear of losing their home is one of the motivators for active participation of the Muslim women, but the origin for this high self-awareness among them also has several other reasons—one of the prominent one being the increasing rate of education among the women of the Muslim community.

The All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) report for 2017-2018 indicates the same. The enrolment rate in schools for Muslim girls has increased by 46%. The same survey also indicates that in the same period, 49% of Muslims that were enrolled in higher education were women. Such data suggest that anti-NRC-CAA protests acted as a portal to show the sociological changes that Muslim women were going through and that the belief that Muslim women are uneducated or illiterate is far from the truth.

Muslim women’s participation in these political movements has not only incorporated a sense of novelty to these movements but also helped women to recognise the strength within them and that they too can be the ones that lead change.  It has also challenged several social constructs of patriarchy and provided a more prominent place for women in India’s socio-political fabric.

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February 4, 2021 4:43 PM

Sweden’s No Lockdown Policy: How That Changed The Outcome

Sweden has gone against conventional wisdom in its response to the COVID-19 situation. While the neighbouring countries like Denmark, Finland and Norway imposed strict lockdown on the places and services frequented by the public, Sweden has chosen to not do so at all during the initial phases when COVID-19 started taking the shape of a worldwide pandemic. The public places like Cafes, restaurants, gyms, malls, playgrounds, ski slopes and some of the schools were kept open all across Sweden.

The country’s fight against the threat of pandemic was handled exclusively by the Public Health Authority, with no political interference. They believed that a lockdown only serves to delay the virus, which is not necessary since the health services are equipped to deal with the cases. They also made it clear that achieving herd immunity is also not their aim. The public authorities in Sweden instead relied on the public's sense of responsibility, and appealed to them to do frequent hand washing, observe social distancing and keep people over 70 years old from going out.

The state epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, made multiple statements about the state’s unusual approach, such as 1) “Once you get into a lockdown, it’s difficult to get out of it,”, “How do you reopen?  When?” 2) “There is no evidence whatsoever that doing more at this stage would make

any difference. It’s far better to introduce stringent measures at very specific intervals, and keep them running for as little time as possible” , 3) " As long as the healthcare system reasonably can cope with and give good care to the ones that need care, it's not clear that having the cases later in time is better”.

The assumption of public responsibility did not work for Sweden and there were people out on the streets, in cafes, restaurants and playgrounds. Not wearing a mask was the social norm instead of the reverse. The models for charting the virus spread given by the concerned authorities also turned out to be faulty forcing them to rescind it. Over 2000 Swedish researchers and doctors signed a petition which claimed that there was not enough testing,tracking or isolation in the country. They believed that the authority has clearly not planned their response and that the authority’s claim for herd immunity has very little scientific basis, even though the government has repeatedly claimed that herd immunity is not what they were aiming for.

Sweden’s lax approach to the combating of coronavirus forced its neighbouring Scandinavian countries to close the border for the Swedish citizens. Some of the Swedish officials were worried for the possible harm to the long term relations between Sweden and its neighbours.  Also, the plan of letting life go on as usual to avoid the economic recession occurring due to a lockdown also failed as it didn’t shield  the country from economic slowdown.

Here comes the question; was the lockdown successful or not? There are some comparisons that have been drawn which indicate more deaths per 100,000 people than in nearby countries with homogenous population, even though it is significantly lesser than some of the European countries. While the infections rates are double that of Denmark, the death rates in comparison are much higher. This difference has been attributed to the fact that approximately half of these deaths have occurred in old care homes despite the stated priority of the officials to protect the elderly. This has been in part to the volunteer program, which replaced symptomatic old age home cares with new volunteers, hence increasing exposure. Another factor is the lack of protective equipment in such homes, along with laws preventing administration of medical procedures without the presence of doctors. There were reports of people threatened with lawsuits for banning visitors.

All of this led to Mr.Tegnell claiming that the ideal policy would have been something between what Sweden adopted and what the other countries did, in the light of what they know now. However this claim of Mr.Tegnell will be put to test when the second wave comes, later in time.

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