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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 4:55 PM

Suppressing the Minority Voting: An effective discrimination tactic of the US Conservatives

The recent protests over George Floyd’s death and reactions of the conservatives against the protest laid bare the systemic injustice and oppression faced by the people of color in the USA.

The other, albeit invisible form of discrimination perpetuated by the conservative political establishment in the USA is “Minority Voter Suppression”.

Though it may seem improbable that long after the Jim Crow laws are junked and Civil Right Laws are in place, the effort to disenfranchise the Black people is still going on.

The major piece of legislation which protected minorities from electoral exploitation was the Voter Registration Act which underpins the basic ideal of a universal adult franchise by specifically addressing and combating voting discrimination.

To ensure the representation to minority communities, this act mandated that “At-Large Elections”, where the whole of the jurisdiction elects all of the city council, were replaced by the single member districts in which each community selects a person to represent them in the city council.

It was also prohibited to draw the voting district in such a way that  minorities could be clubbed in only a few of the districts. It was also made mandatory for those states which have a history of discrimination to get pre-clearance from the justice department before changing their voting laws.

This law, however, lost its power in a process which began in 1980. In 1980 the Supreme Court ruled that at-large elections were not unconstitutional, on their own. In 1995, the Court began restricting the construction of majority minority districts on grounds that it segregates people on the basis of race.

In 2008, the court ruled that a photo voter ID law in Indiana was constitutional and was in state interest to protect against voter fraud (research shows that photo voter IDs provide disincentive to vote for people of color). The voter ID law requires the voters to have a government-issued photo ID to cast a ballot.

In 2013, the Supreme Court scrapped the part of the law which stated that some states (which had an alleged history of discrimination) needed federal preclearance in any changes of their voting laws, meaning that the state laws would need approval from the federal government before being put into practice. This was done so citing that the methods which determined discriminatory states were invalid.

All of these slowly chipped away at the laws, and especially the 2013 Shelby County vs Holder case which led to a host of issues whVoter Suppression is Still One of the Greatest Obstacles to a More Just Americaich directly/indirectly keep a significant proportion of minorities from voting. Few of such actions are closure or relocation of precincts in majority black areas, purge of minority voters from the voter lists, and elimination of Sunday early voting days which are preferred by black voters.

There have been attempts to restrict registration drives in Tennessee on the basis that many of the forms were incomplete.

There have also been laws enacted which needed people to participate regularly in elections to keep their voting rights and reply to a letter sent to their residence, which makes it difficult for Black and Hispanics due to obscure areas and the fact that they’re half as likely than other people to get a day off work to vote.

The governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, has been accused of using intimidation tactics to scare minority communities.

In Texas, the acting secretary of state said that he had a list of 95,000 non-citizens who were registered for voting in the state, and 58,000 of them had already cast a vote. That claim was proven untrue when it was noted that there were tens of thousands of people who were naturalized citizens.

In many states, felons are not allowed to vote even after they have served their sentence, and in Florida felons are allowed to vote only if they have paid an array of fees after serving their sentence, which sets an economic bar on their ability to vote.

This is evident that forces working against the equal rights for the minority communities are still working at full force to reverse the gains of civil right movements. The fight for the unhindered voting rights for the minority communities in the USA at the social, political, and judicial front will continue in the foreseeable future.

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