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Friday, December 11, 2020

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

This article is by
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 4:52 PM

Persecution of Uighur Muslims in China and the silence of Muslim Countries

Uighur are natives of  Xinjiang province of China who are Muslims and regard themselves as culturally and ethnically close to Central Asian nations. Xinjiang province has been under the control of China since it was annexed in 1949 and many Uighurs still identify their homeland by its previous name, East Turkestan. There are around 11 million Uighurs in Xinjiang and China claims that Uighurs hold extremist views that are a threat to national security.

In 2017, the Xinjiang government passed a law prohibiting men from growing long beards and women from wearing veils and dozens of mosques were also demolished.

As per the report of UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Descrimination, the Chinese government has detained at least one million Uighurs in the detention camps in Xinjiang, China. After denying the existence of the camps for a long time, when the photos of the camps emerged, the Chinese government called them “re-education centres'' for Uighurs though the former detainees said they were detained, interrogated and beaten because of their religion, and not “re-educated.”

In July 2019 to the U.N. Human Right Council, 22 countries, mainly European countries, responded to “disturbing reports of large scale arbitrary detentions of Uighurs” and condemned the Chinese leadership.

Four days later, 37 countries, defended China’s “remarkable achievements in the field of human rights” by protecting the country from “terrorism, separatism and religious extremism.” The list of the 37 countries also included Muslim-majority countries like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Qatar etc.

At the end of October 2019, 23 countries including France, the United Kingdom, United States denounced the repression of the Uighurs at the UN Committee on Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Affairs. Nevertheless, Beijing won the support of 54 countries, who praised the Communist Party’s management of Xinjiang.

In February 2019, Saudi Arabia showed their “respect” for Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader before they signed major commercial contracts with China. Egypt wants Beijing to finance its infrastructure and hence allowed the Chinese police to interrogate Uighur exiles on its soil in 2017. Pakistan, who has talked about the mistreatment of Rohingyas, has been silent on Uighurs since the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative is going on in the country.

Even Iran, who issues occasional criticism wants support from China and hence keeps the criticism coded. “There is a lot of sympathy for the Uighurs in Turkey, but the reality is that Erdogan needs China as an ally for economic reasons and to counteract the West’s diplomatic pressure on issues like Syria,” said Rémi Castets, a political scientist.

In 2017, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation responded very differently to the Rohingya Crisis (Myanmar’s military crackdown on the country’s Rohingyas), where countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey defended the rights of the Muslim minority group in Myanmar and actively condemned the treatment of Rohingyas in the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.  

The question here arises is that contrary to the sentiments of their citizens, why do Muslim states stay silent over China’s abuse of the Uighurs?

Sophie Richardson, the director of China at Human Rights Watch, has a short and simple answer — there is less solidarity for Uighur than Rohingyas or Palestinians because China has managed to win these countries’ support due to its economic might.

Only time will tell how long these countries will continue to give preference to the economic interests over the anti-China sentiments of the citizens.

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