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India
OpinionComment
Akanksha Khullar
Akanksha Khullar

Opinion | India’s leaders are failing to protect Muslim women from online abuse, putting them at risk of actual violence

  • The emergence of a fake app listing Muslim women ‘for sale’ – the second in six months – has added to fears of growing Islamophobia in the country
  • Threats of cyberviolence against women must be taken seriously, yet India’s ruling party remains complicit

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Quratulain Rehbar, a 27-year-old Kashmiri photojournalist, was among the Muslim women whose names and photos were listed on the ‘Bully Bai’ app. The app also purported to offer high-profile figures like Pakistani Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai and Indian actress Shabana Azmi “for sale”. Photo: EPA-EFE
Akanksha Khullar

India is known for its multiculturalism; people follow different faiths, speak different languages and believe in different values.

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But while communalism – a political philosophy rooted in these ethnic and cultural diversities – was once a fringe issue, today, the tensions between different groups have become a persistent feature of India’s polity, placing religious minority groups in an increasingly vulnerable position.

The secularism on which the world’s largest democracy was built has been rapidly fraying, and anti-Muslim attacks in particular have become rampant across many Indian territories.

More than anyone, Muslim women have paid the price for these tensions. Over the past few decades, Muslim women have been crushed under human rights abuses owing to the treacherous combination of religious intolerance, deeply ingrained gender inequalities and medieval personal laws.

They suffered significantly under the practice of “triple talaq”, or instant divorce, due to patriarchal misinterpretations of their religion. They were denied their rights under family law in the Shah Bano maintenance case. And they were subjected to vicious and sadistic forms of violence during the 2002 Gujarat carnage.
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But women who have dared to challenge taboos and demanded punishment for gender crimes have time and again been silenced, as has been the cry for retribution and justice in all these above-mentioned cases.

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