The statement has been Initiated jointly by Javed Anand and Feroze Mithiborwala (Indian Muslims for Secular Democracy-IMSD), Zakia Soman and Noorjahan Safia Niaz (Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan-BMMA), Shamsuddin Tamboli (Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal) and Bader Saeed (Roshni).

The signatories to the statement include Naseeruddin Shah, Zeenat Shaukat Ali, Sultan Shaheen, Teesta Setalvad, Ram Puniyani, Tushar Gandhi, Amol Palekar, Mallika Sarabhai, Ratna Pathak.

Read the full statement below: 

Progressive Muslim activists, intellectuals and women’s rights advocates strongly oppose the ill-conceived nationwide ‘Save India, Save Shariat’ campaign launched by the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB).

• A Political Gift to Polarisation: 

Following the 2024 Lok Sabha elections where civil society and opposition parties rallied under ‘Save the Constitution’, the AIMPLB’s campaign inadvertently gives the BJP and the sangh parivar a platform to posture as defenders of constitutional norms. Ahead of crucial state assembly elections, this campaign reinforces false narratives and fuels propaganda that Indian Muslims reject the law of the land.

• Defending Patriarchy in the Name of Faith: 

The so-called “God-given Shariat Law’ in India is nothing but man-made personal laws, male interpreted patriarchal interpretations defended by the AIMPLB. In its September 2016 Supreme Court affidavit in the Triple Talaq case (Sayara Bano v. Union of India), the AIMPLB through its affidavit claimed divorce rights belong primarily to husbands because men allegedly possess “greater power of decision-making” and “control emotions.” It even argued that without quick separation option, a husband “may resort to illegal, criminal ways of murdering or burning her alive”—a disturbing rationalization of domestic violence. While claiming these laws are divine, the Board admitted in Paragraph 46 that “India is a patriarchal society, and therefore personal laws of all communities are aligned with the patriarchal notion…”

• Selective Use of the Constitution:

The AIMPLB selectively invokes Articles 25–30 (Religious Freedom), ignoring that these rights are explicitly subject to public order, morality, and health. They conveniently bypass Articles 14 and 15, which guarantee equality before the law and prohibit sex or religion-based discrimination.

• Global Precedents of Reform:

Muslim-majority nations worldwide—including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Tunisia, and Morocco—have codified and reformed personal laws to protect women’s rights. Millions of Muslims live in secular democratic nations with uniform family codes without putting “Islam in danger.” The Muslim community’s current legal predicament in India is the direct result of the AIMPLB and conservative leaders failing to proactively reform and codify Muslim Personal Law.

• Exposing Political Exploitation:

While mainstream parties often ignore Muslim women’s civil rights, the Hindu Right exploits the UCC debate for political polarization. Genuine family law reform must guarantee Muslim women equal rights regarding minimum marriage age, abolition of polygamy, mutual divorce, equal inheritance, child custody, adoption, and a ban on female genital mutilation and halala.

• BJP, Sangh Parivar’s Hate Campaign:

While secular parties rarely support the rights of Muslim women, the BJP and the Hindu Right do so with an obvious motive: communal polarization. The sangh parivar sheds crocodile tears for Muslim women while ignoring relentless hate speech (love jihad, land jihad…) and hate crimes—mob lynching, bulldozing homes, demolishing masjids, and economic boycotts, with chants of Jai Shri Ram to strike fear and intimidation. This accompanies state actions targeting Muslims: Waqf Amendment Act, draconian anti-conversion laws, and a weaponised SIR (Special Intensive Revision of Electoral Rolls) to disenfranchise vast sections of the electorate.

• Ignoring Everyday Survival Concerns:

While ‘Saving Shariah’ tops the AIMPLB’s agenda, real life everyday challenges facing Indian Muslims—socio-economic marginalization, security, education, and employment—are ignored. The ulema must address survival issues rather than furthering retrogressive norms.

• Our Call:

We call upon all progressive forces, civil society organizations, and secular political parties to intervene actively to ensure that the demand for a gender-just, religion-neutral Uniform Civil Code is rooted in equality and human rights, rather than weaponized for communal division.

Signatories:

1. Javed Anand, Convenor, Indian Muslims for Secular Democracy (IMSD), Mumbai
2. Zakia Soman, Co-convenor, Bhartiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (BMMA), Ahmedabad
3. Noorjehan Safia Niaz, Co-convenor, BMMA, Mumbai
4. Feroze Mithiborwala, Co-Convenor, IMSD, Mumbai
5. Shamsuddin Tamboli, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Pune
6. Bader Sayeed, Former MLA, lawyer, President, Roshni, Chennai
7. A. J. Jawad, Lawyer, Arbitrator, IMSD, Chennai
8. Afroz Javed Inamdar, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal Bengaluru
9. Ajij Sayyed Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal Pune
10. Akbar Shaikh, Social Activist, IMSD, Farmer, Solapur
11. Altaphusen Ramjan Nabab, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Satara
12. Amar Tamboli, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal Satara
13. Amol Palekar – Actor, director, film producer – Pune
14. Anand Patwardhan, Documentary Filmmaker, Mumbai
15. Ani Zonneveld, President, Muslims for Progressive Values (MPV), USA, and Founder Member, Alliance of Inclusive Muslims (International)
16. Anita Cheria, Indian Christian Women’s Movement, Bangalore
17. Anjum Rajabali, Film Script writer, IMSD, Mumbai
18. Anwar Shaikh, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Pune
19. Arshad Alam, Columnist, editor, IMSD, Delhi
20. Ashok Dhiware IPS, Rtd. Additional DIG of Maharashtra State, Pune
21. (Dr) Ashwini KP, UN independent Expert, Bangalore
22. Asim Sayyed, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Pune
23. Askari Zaidi, Veteran journalist, IMSD, Delhi
24. (Prof) Azharuddin Patel, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Satara
25. Azim Pathan, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Pune
26. Benazeer Tamboli, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Pune
27. Benazir Kazi, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Solapur
28. Bismilla Sayyed, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Jalana
29. Dilawar Shaikh, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Pune
30. Gulab Attar, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Kolhapur
31. Hasan Ibrahim Pasha, Writer, IMSD, Allahabad
32. Hasina Khan, Bebaak Collective, Mumbai
33. Hilal Ahmed, Scholar and Author, Asst Professor, CSDS, Delhi
34. Iqbal Ahmad, BBC, Delhi
35. Irshad Wadgavkar, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Kolhapur
36. Jamir Momin, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Satara
37. Jamir Shaikh, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Pune
38. Jeibunnisa R, BMMA, Tamil Nadu
39. Jyothi Yedulla, Vice-President, Casteless Society of India, Hyderabad
40. Khadijah Faruqui, Feminist and human rights consultant, Delhi
41. Dr. Lata Pratibha Madhukar, Bahujan Feminist Writer and Critique, Founder of Manomitr
42. Madan Lal Hind, Samajwadi Jan Parishad, Delhi
43. Madhu Bhaduri, Retd. Ambassador, Indian Foreign Service, Delhi
44. Madhu Bhushan, feminist, social activist, Bangalore
45. Mallika Sarabhai, Classical dancer, activist and actress, Ahmedabad
46. Mariya Salim, feminist development professional, Delhi
47. Mohammad Waheed, President, Casteless Society of India, Hyderabad
48. (Dr) Mohd Farooque Khan, Associate Professor, Marathwada University, Sambhajinagar
49. Mufid Shaikh, Muslim Satyashodhak, Mandal, Pune
50. Munir  Shikalgar Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Sangli
51. Muniza Khan, IMSD, CJP, Varanasi
52. (Adv) Nazrana Ahemad, Social activist, academician, Dibrugarh (Assam)
53. Naseeruddin Shah, Actor, Mumbai
54. Nasreen Contractor, Co-convenor, IMSD, Mumbai
55. Nasreen M, BMMA, Karnataka
56. Naureen Sophie Musvee. EC member, Roshni, Chennai
57. Parvin Altaphusen Nabab, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Satara
58. Peehu Pardeshi, PEHEL Foundation, Mumbai
59. Preeti Oza, Development Professional, Gandhinagar
60. Qaisar Pasha, Homemaker, Allahabad
61. (Prof.) Radha Kumar, renowned academic, former GOI Interlocutor for J&K, Kodaikanal
62. Rajesh Singhi, Social Sector Consultant, Alwar, Rajasthan
63. (Prof) Ram Puniyani, Author, Activist, President, CSSS, Mumbai
64. Ratna Pathak, Actor, Director, Mumbai
65. SR Darapuri, IPS(Retd), National President, All India Peoples Front, Lucknow
66. Sabah Khan, Parcham, Mumbai/Mumbra
67. Sachendra Pratap Yadav, Activist, Lucknow
68. Salim Momin Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Sangli
69. Samina Pathan Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Pune
70. Samreen Khan, Socio-political Blogger, Kolkata
71. Sandeep Pandey, General Secretary, Socialist Party of India, Lucknow
72. Sandhya Gokhale – Author and activist, Pune
73. Sayara Mulani Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Kolhapur
74. Shabana Dean, IMSD, Pune
75. Shagufta Musvee, President Soroptimist International, EC member, Roshni
76. Shahed Shaikh, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Pune
77. Shaikh Yusuf Baba, Convenor, Duniyadari Social Reform Movement, Hyderabad
78. Shahjahan Patel, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Mumbai
79. Shakun Mohini, feminist, social activist, Bangalore
80. Shama Zaidi, filmmaker, script writer, Mumbai
81. (Dr) Shaniya Zarina Khan, Dentist, Delhi
82. Shriya Maini, Advocate, Supreme Court, Delhi
83. (Dr) Shujaat Ali Quadri, Convener, Muslim Youth organization of India
84. Sultan Shahin, Editor-in-chief, New Age Islam (online portal), Delhi
85. (Dr) Suresh Khairnar, Social Activist, Nagpur
86. Suresh Nautiyal, India   Green Party (IGP), Garhwal, Uttarakhand
87. Teesta Setalvad, Journalist, activist, educationist, Secretary Citizens for Justice & Peace, IMSD, Mumbai
88. Tushar Gandhi, President, Hum Bharat ke Log, Mumbai
89. Ummid Shaikh Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Pune
90. Yash Paranjpe, Writer, Navi Mumbai
91. (Dr) Zaheer A Sayeed, Neurologist, Chennai
92. Zeenat Shaukat Ali, Islamic Scholar, Director-General, Wisdom Foundation, Mumbai

The post Shariat Campaign: Ulema’s Boon to Hindutva appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Hence the alliance of women rights organisations from across the country has rejected the conflation of equality with uniformity and homogeneity. Likewise, ALIFA has ‘refused the criminalisation and surveillance being imposed in the garb of ‘gender justice’. We demand an immediate rollback of these Codes and insist that there must be no rush to enact or impose them without ensuring that all constitutional rights of the affected communities are fully safeguarded and that widespread consultations are held with them.’

‘A week ago, on September 13, 2026, Mr Amit Shah, the Union Home Minister, publicly said that a Uniform Civil Code (UCC) would be implemented in all 21 BJP- and NDA-ruled states before 2029. This renewed push by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to impose a UCC across the country before the 2029 elections demands a firm and clear response from women representing diverse social locations across India, in whose name this monolith project of the BJP-RSS is being orchestrated.

The Uniform Civil Code in Uttarakhand has been in force since January 27, 2025. The UCC Bills passed by Gujarat, Assam and Madhya Pradesh in their Legislative Assemblies are awaiting Presidential assent as of September 2026, and therefore, not yet in force. Neither Uttarakhand’s UCC nor the frameworks contained in the Gujarat, Assam and Madhya Pradesh UCC Bills provide a model that incorporates substantive gender equality, let alone gender justice. A critical scrutiny of the UCC Codes across states by ALIFA has revealed the many ways in which these are likely to have adverse impacts on women and vulnerable social groups, while claiming to ‘safeguard women’s rights’.

The All-India Feminist Alliance (ALIFA) elaborates on our key concerns regarding the UCC Law and Bills here:

• The new codes retain and reproduce unjust provisions that push back against hard-won rights, over decades. They retain restitution of conjugal rights equally for men and women, a remedy long denounced by women’s rights advocates for compelling marital cohabitation and for its potential use against women attempting to leave abusive marriages. They restrict access to divorce during the first year of marriage, subject only to narrow exceptions, rather than expanding women’s ability to leave a marriage safely and autonomously and include religious conversion as a ground for divorce. All these provisions are regressive and inimical to constitutional freedoms and rights.
• The new Codes fail to address the gaps already known in the existing Personal and secular laws across the country. Rather than providing a comprehensive family-law framework, many remain largely focused on marriage, divorce, succession and live-in relationships. They do not address issues such as marriage inequality, the absence of a concept of marital property for women, no-fault divorce with safeguards for women, and marital rape, which have been consistently brought before the Supreme Court for redressal or raised by women’s and queer movements, and legal reform campaigns. Nor do they suggest reform of adoption and guardianship to guarantee equal parental rights irrespective of gender identity, sexual orientation, religion or marital status.
• Instead, some of these Codes introduce new criminal penalties into intimate and family relationships without adequate provision for ensuring the matrimonial rights of women. The emerging approach of selectively criminalising certain marriage and divorce practices historically associated with Muslim Personal Law and practices such as Triple Talaq is a glaring example of this. Gender justice does not mean arbitrarily singling out particular communities and practices for penal treatment, while leaving the structural inequalities experienced by women across communities substantially untouched. As feminists, we oppose the substantive inequality and discrimination related to divorce, separation and annulment, inheritance, custody, and guardianship in all communities.
• Most glaringly, the Codes do not address women’s economic inequality within marriage. They do not establish a marital-property regime that recognises women’s unpaid care and domestic labour or guarantees an equitable share in assets accumulated, sustained, or value-added during marriage. Formal equality in marriage and inheritance means little, if women must leave decades-long marriages without an enforceable share in the wealth their unpaid and paid labour helped create.
• The succession provisions in the Codes also require much closer scrutiny than the language of “equal inheritance” suggests. Under the Hindu Succession Act, daughters and sons currently have a birthright in Mitakshara coparcenary property. Uttarakhand’s UCC removes the distinction between coparcenary and other property and permits property to be disposed of by will, potentially removing the limited protection against disinheritance that daughters had in ancestral joint-family property. The Muslim Personal Law provides mandatory shares for legal heirs, including daughters and sons, and restricts testamentary disposition to one-third of the estate. The Goa Succession Special Notaries and Inventory Proceeding Act stipulates one-half of the estate to the “forced heirs” in case of children. The UCC displaces these protections too. A genuinely gender-just succession regime should not merely ask whether formal shares are described as equal, but whether women and other vulnerable heirs remain protected against disinheritance and economic dispossession.
• The UCC Law and Bills empower the State to surveil and arbitrarily intrude into the intimate lives of citizens, including coercive intervention through registration, inquiry, reporting and penal provisions in the name of ensuring equality in marriage, inheritance and other aspects of family law. These provisions are especially dangerous for inter-faith, inter-caste, queer and transgender couples whose relationships are already under extreme scrutiny and stigma. The Gujarat Bill, which makes registers of marriages, divorces and other prescribed records open to inspection, allows certified extracts to be obtained on application, and requires employers, government bodies, companies and other authorities to rely on UCC registration certificates before changing a person’s recorded marital status, typifies this approach. While this may protect women who could be deceived if information regarding their intended marriage is not in the public domain, there are no safeguards for the adverse consequences this can have for inter-faith or inter-caste marriages that face opposition from family or civil society groups.
• The UCC Law and Bills criminalise aspects of consensual adult relationships, creating victims and culprits without a crime. The provisions transform consensual adult intimacy into a matter for administrative verification, third-party complaint, police record and criminal punishment, including imprisonment merely for failure to register a consensual adult relationship. Under Uttarakhand’s UCC Law, adults in a live-in relationship MUST register it within a month or face imprisonment; similar mandatory-registration and penal provisions have now been reproduced in the Gujarat, Assam and Madhya Pradesh Bills. In Gujarat, for example, the Registrar may summon the partners or “any other person” as part of an inquiry; records of live-in relationships are required to be forwarded to the local police; parents or guardians are required to be informed where either partner is below 21and non-registration can attract imprisonment. A complaint or information from a third party can trigger proceedings requiring the couple to register as well. The arbitrariness and discrimination are stark, as those in consensual adult live-in relationships are subjected to registration and policing under the garb of protection, while corresponding protections are not included in the Codes for adults in forced marriage, in inter-caste, in inter-faith marriage or queer and transgender couples facing familial coercion or violence.
• The UCC Law and Bills do not apply to all women. One, they explicitly exclude Scheduled Tribe communities, almost 15% of the Indian population. Two, some emerging UCCs continue to organise marriage and family around binary categories of “man” and “woman”, do not recognise same-sex marriage, and fail to create a clear framework recognising queer and trans people’s relationships and families and other forms of CIS families. The Gujarat Bill, for example, contains no reference to transgender persons at all, thereby completely excluding the relationships and marriages of transgender people and other queer people.  Transgender and queer people, as well as Adivasi women, have been demanding gender justice, rights and equality (not UCC) in live-in and marital relationships for a long time. A UCC Law or Bill cannot credibly describe itself as “uniform” while shutting out the lived experiences of entire communities and family forms and/or rendering them legally invisible.
• The new Codes totally ignore Goa’s experience and the complexities and contradictions with its UCC. The Goa ‘UCC’ is hardly uniform when looked at closely. It continues to recognise both canonical and civil registration of marriages, which may not per se be discriminatory, while many discriminatory provisions of the Code of Customs and Usages of Gentile Hindus continue to be applicable. Uniform provisions that are discriminatory for women include empowering the male spouse to manage the marital property. The issues of inadequate access to family law and several other concerns identified in the Goa UCC remain unaddressed in the new UCC Law and Bills.
• The Uniform Civil Code was placed in the Directive Principles of State Policy of the Constitution, under Article 44, a goal that the State should be working towards. But Article 44 does not prescribe what form such a Code must take, nor does it require uniformity to be pursued through the erasure of legal pluralism and social diversity.  Thus, Article 44 clearly enables amendments to existing laws to move towards uniformity of rights. Even the 21^st Law Commission (2018) set up by the BJP government found that a UCC is neither necessary nor desirable. Instead, it recommended amending every Personal Law to remove discrimination within family laws while preserving diversity where difference itself was not discriminatory. Similar demands have been placed by several women’s groups for decades.
• The UCC Law and Bills, by conflating equality with uniformity, miss the point that uniformity does not guarantee equality, nor is non-uniformity necessarily discriminatory. The prescriptive law of monogamy has not ensured justice and equality. This for instance, is the case for women whose husbands enter subsequent relationships or marriages without their consent or knowledge, as also for women who marry not knowing of the prior marriage of their husband, and those who marry in coercive circumstances. Nor does formally identical treatment necessarily address unequal bargaining power, unpaid care work, economic dependence, domestic violence or women’s lack of access to marital assets.
• Notably, despite BJP’s push, UCC is not fully agreeable even to all NDA constituents. Bihar’s ruling JD (U) has ruled out implementing a UCC in the state. Other NDA allies have called for discussion or consultation rather than automatic implementation. Those objections cannot simply be overridden.  BJP cannot and should not manufacture consent by projecting the UCC as an instrument for achieving women’s rights in live-in relationships or marriage.
• BJP deliberately denies the plural Indian reality that all people need not live by ONE prescribed model of family, culture or community and that gender justice does not require erasure of non-discriminatory difference. India has multiple kinds of kin relationships/families that are determined by locality, community, history, geography, religion, caste, sexuality and gender. Customs differ across the country within the same religious community too. Likewise, the communities categorised as scheduled tribes also have diverse customs within. What we require is that women, queer and transgender persons across communities and social locations, enjoy equitable rights, dignity, autonomy and freedom, and the capacity to determine the terms on which they live their own lives.
• In an electoral democracy, lawmaking for citizens in the absence of their significant representation in national parliament and state assemblies is undemocratic. Laws restructuring the intimate and family lives of hundreds of millions of people require meaningful participation by those most affected, including Muslim women, Adivasi women, Dalit and Bahujan women, queer and transgender people, women from indigenous communities, persons with disabilities, single women and women from diverse regional and religious communities. Representation cannot be substituted by governments claiming to speak on their behalf. In fact, without immediate and unconditional implementation of Women’s Reservation (including for women from all disadvantaged and vulnerable groups), such laws having far-reaching implications cannot be legislated on behalf of women. If specific provisions of Personal Laws that are discriminatory in nature require reform, the Government should bring in the reforms only through widespread consultation with women, queer and transgender people from all social and geographical locations.

For all these elaborated and articulated arguments, ALIFA states that it “believes that BJP’s obsession with regulating intimacy – who to marry, form relationships and constitute families belongs to an age-old repertoire of social control, now refurbished in the garb of ‘modernity’, ‘reform’ and ‘women’s empowerment’. The BJP cynically co-opts and turns upside down this language of women’s empowerment and gender justice to advance a much wider project of cultural homogenisation, control, and Hindu Rashtra. We see this pattern across a range of current initiatives, from the politics around NRC and SIR to the High-Powered Demography Mission that proposes demographic surveillance and other measures that seek to define who belongs, who does not, and what constitutes an acceptable citizen and family. We firmly place the UCC within this larger political context, rather than treating it as an isolated question of legal reform.”

Among the demands placed before the government are:

1. The Government of Uttarakhand to immediately repeal rights-repulsive provisions including those that criminalise non-registration of consensual live-in relationships, mandatorily require police and parental notification, and subject adult relationships to State inquiry, and to incorporate provisions that factor in both legal pluralism and enabling rights after due consultative processes.
2. That the Governments of Gujarat, Assam and Madhya Pradesh immediately withdraw the Bills passed in the respective state Assemblies.
3. That the governments of Maharashtra, Rajasthan, West Bengal and Chhattisgarh, which have set up committees to recommend a draft UCC, do not take any further steps and instead institute widespread democratic consultations with women’s rights and civil rights organisations, queer and transgender persons groups, Adivasi organisations, disability-rights groups, minority organisations and other affected communities.
4. That all the state government’s stop family law legislation in the name of UCC, which is being imposed and accompanied by an Islamophobic diatribe.
5. That any amendments to family laws that are discriminatory should be done only after consultation with women, queer and transgender people across communities and social locations, and should be assessed against the substantive outcomes of equality, autonomy, dignity, economic security and freedom from discrimination and violence rather than against uniformity for its own sake.
6. Any reform of succession law must preserve or strengthen protections against the economic disinheritance of women, rather than replacing existing birthright or mandatory-share protections with unrestricted testamentary power.
7. Any reform of family law must recognise the different consensual relationships, families and parental rights of adult cisgender, queer and transgender people rather than maintaining a formally uniform but substantively heteronormative and gender-binary framework that is effectively discriminatory.
8. The State must address the substantive areas on which women’s, transgender and queer movements have repeatedly demanded reform, including marital property, no-fault divorce with safeguards for women, equal guardianship and adoption rights, marital rape, maintenance, economic security on dissolution of marriage, and meaningful access to family-law justice.
9. Family-law reform must recognise unpaid care work and women’s contribution to assets accumulated during marriage and create enforceable equitable economic rights at separation, divorce and death.
10. Any legal recognition of live-in relationships must be rights-conferring and dignity-affirming rather than surveillance-based, intruding on privacy: access to maintenance, protection from violence, inheritance and other remedies must not depend upon compulsory registration of an intimate relationship.
11. Personal and relationship data collected under family law must be subject to strict necessity, confidentiality and data-protection safeguards, as also upheld by the Supreme Court in the right to privacy judgements and must not be routinely shared with police, families or third parties.
12.  No person’s free choice of partner or intimate relationship should trigger parental notification, police scrutiny or administrative investigation because of their religion, caste, gender identity, sexuality or decision not to marry.
13. Any comprehensive reform must be tested not only for formal equality but for its actual impact on women and people facing social and structural disadvantage, particularly economically poor women, Adivasi and Dalit-Bahujan women, Muslim women, queer and transgender people, persons with disabilities, migrants, single women and survivors of violence.

In conclusion, All-India Feminist Alliance (ALIFA) has stated in this detailed public statement that it “unequivocally rejects the deeply paternalistic, invasive and unwelcome ‘reforms’ being imposed in the name of women and the attempt to homogenise equality for all women, erasing the agency of women across social locations. We refuse to be fooled by the smokescreen of ‘women’s rights’ and seek to expose both the rhetoric and the substantive content of the Uniform Civil Code, including enacted and emerging Codes across India. Through a continuing critical examination of their provisions and underlying political project, we shall strive to engage with and enable women, queer and transgender people across India to see through these UCCs for the falsehoods that they are and collectively resist the exclusionary politics, the conflation of uniformity with equality, and cultural control with women’s empowerment.”

The statement has been issued by both the All-India Feminist Alliance (ALIFA) and the National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM).

Related:

Assam: Bill on Uniform Civil Code (UCC), a partisan act?

Uttarakhand implements Uniform Civil Code (UCC) attracting criticism and concerns

Uttarakhand Uniform Civil Code: A Majoritarian Code – Neither Uniform nor Civil

The post Strengthen gender justice & secular legal frameworks, No To ‘Uniform Control Code’ in garb of UCC: ALIFA appeared first on SabrangIndia.

One of the first conventions was a gathering of over 3,000 women in Dahanu taluka, Thane-Palghar district. Mariam Dhawale, Prachi Hativlekar, Lahani Dauda, and Sunita Shingda addressed and guided the attendees. Similar conventions will be organised across all other talukas of the district, followed by all districts in the state.

When the Janwadi Mahila Sanghatana announced its state-wide decision during this gathering to lead a massive march of thousands of such excluded women to the Mantralaya in Mumbai on November 3, 2026, the thousands of women present welcomed it with resounding slogans.

From the Thane-Palghar district alone, 3,000 excluded ‘Ladli Behna’ beneficiaries from the Dahanu tehsil expressed their strong protest at this arbitrary exclusion and vowed to join the protest march under the AIDWA banner, said the organisation.

The AIDWA in Maharashtra is conducting a state-wide campaign for the nearly 1 crore women who were arbitrarily excluded recently from the BJP Chief Minister’s ‘Ladli Behna Scheme’, by giving flimsy reasons.

It may be recalled that before the 2024 Maharashtra state assembly elections, the BJP-led state government had begun the ‘Ladli Behana Scheme’ of giving Rs 1,500 per month to nearly 2.63 crore women in the state, clearly with a view to induce their votes. After winning the election, the BJP-led regime started a so-called ‘verification’ drive, after which it arbitrarily excluded nearly 1 crore beneficiary women from the Scheme in July 2026 and stopped giving them the amount, leaving only 1.66 crore, many of whom are also not getting their amounts regularly.

That is the rationale behind the AIDWA campaign which started by filling up thousands of forms of the excluded women, and holding large women’s gatherings across Maharashtra from September 20, 2026, onwards.

AIDWA national vice president Mariam Dhawale, state general secretary and national joint secretary Prachi Hatiwlekar, district president and state vice president Lahani Dauda, and district secretary and CEC member Sunita Shingda addressed the gathering. Similar gatherings will be held in all other talukas of the district till September 27 and then in all districts of the state.

At this large Dahanu gathering, the AIDWA leadership announced its decision to organise a massive Struggle March to Mantralaya in Mumbai, bringing together thousands of women from across Maharashtra who have been excluded from the Scheme. This announcement was greeted by thousands of women present with resounding slogans and great support.

Earlier, in July this year, Indian Express reported that the BJP-led Maharashtra State government has sent a list of 25 lakh probable beneficiaries for Income Tax verification. The reason: the deletion of over 92 lakh beneficiaries from the Ladki Bahin scheme — nearly 38 per cent of those enrolled — proved deeply embarrassing for the Maharashtra government and drew sharp political attacks.

As part of a “stricter verification process” before rolling out its flagship farm loan waiver scheme, the first list of around 25 lakh probable beneficiaries under the Punyashlok Ahilyadevi Holkar Loan Waiver Scheme has been sent to the Income Tax Department for verification before it is made public. Farmers who are income taxpayers will be excluded before the final list is published.

Unlike Ladki Bahin, where benefits were released before eligibility checks were completed, farmers shortlisted for the loan waiver will also have to verify details uploaded by banks before the final beneficiary list is notified. The actual waiver process is now expected to begin only by end of July.

Related:

AIDWA Calls for Fight Against Increasing Gender-Based Violence

AIDWA Writes to Parliamentary Panel, Seeks More Time for Views on Personal Law Reforms

Scrap the move to raise the age of marriage of girls to 21: AIDWA

The post Struggle for re-inclusion of lakhs of women ‘deceptively excluded by govt’, march to Mumbai: AIDWA appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Pooja Mathur set the tone at the meeting held by the Press Club of India, the Delhi Union of Journalists and the Network of Women in Media to protest attacks on women journalists.

Mathur spoke boldly of how she has been targetted by the UP government for her coverage of the bulldozing of a Saharanpur masjid on Sept. 6. Mathur said she was the first to report the demolition on her YouTube channel Red Chili Live. She interviewed the Imam of the mosque and took a video of the rubble. After that she received messages demanding that she delete the videos, followed by threats when she refused. An FIR has been filed against her.

Mathur said courageously, “I was doing my job. I àm not afraid. I will not cry, I will make them cry.” She also pointed out that women journalists like her are the voice and the inspiration of countless other women who dare not step out of home and raise their own voices against oppression.  Mathur also said to the big gathering present, “Do not dismiss us as mere Youtubers. We are serious journalists, we are qualified, we do our research before we go online.”

Divya Srivastava spoke of how she was targetted after she dared to speak at a ‘press conference’ held by UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Sept 12. The CM spoke but took no questions. When Divya loudly called him out, asking him to hear her question, he simply walked away. This smàll incident was blown out of proportion with some fellow journalists warning her to go into hiding as she would now be under fire. She was trolled heavily, with threats, abuse and allegations that she had been sent by a rival political party to ask questions.

“Why should I hide, journalism is not a crime,” Mathur said.

She said her job at a channel was now insecure as the channel owners were afraid of the backlash.

Bindu Romi Gujjar and Monika Singh, both independent journalists based in Delhi, were among the first to reach Balaghat in Madhya Pradesh after several Baiga tribal children died of disease in August 2026. They interviewed parents and relatives of the children.

Gujjar described the trauma of witnessing funeral rites. She said there was only one primary health centre for 25 villages and the nearest hospital is 130 km away. No ambulance is available. She said that the deaths were caused by malaria, a treatable disease. She asked why no malaria vaccines are provided in malaria prone areas. Singh described conditions in the government hospital where three or four children were lying in each bed. The journalists’ documentation of 30 deaths, backed by Aadhar cards and other evidence, embarrassed the local administration which claimed there were only eight deaths. The reporters were shadowed for several days and threatened. The Superintendent of Police wanted them to meet him. They did not go. Two policemen came to their hotel room at 2 a.m. at night, she said. They began to fear for their lives. Eventually they left the hotel in the night and returned to Delhi.

Singh spoke of the conditions in the Baiga villages where there are no facilities, not even clean drinking water. She spoke of the hospital which the District Magistrate, she said, visited several days after the first deaths. She claimed that 34 children were discharged the day before his visit, more beds were supplied, bed linen changed and the entire hospital disinfected. She said the journalists were accused of being Muslim and a doctor at the hospital openly displayed bias.

On Sept 6 the social media accounts of Bindu Gurjar, Lok Singh and Monika were suspended. Monika’s account is still suspended. “We are independent journalists,” she said, “how will we earn and continue to work if accounts are suspended?”

Impassioned testimonies came from Shaheen Khan and Nafeesa Khan of 4 PM News, who were picked up by Saket police on Sept 3, 2026, while standing on the roadside to report the visit of Home Minister Amit Shah and Chief Minister Rekha Gupta to Max Hospital to inaugurate a new wing. Nafeesa described in detail their detention at Saket police station and the trauma of being beaten with fists and a lathi by a woman inspector. She said she began to fear for her life after the inspector learnt they were Muslim and began to beat them more viciously. The SHO, she said, had ordered the beating and other police personnel were complicit.

Shaheen said that after the incident became public senior policemen later apologised and admitted there had been a mistake. However, she said, the FIR eventually registered names of only two police personnel, although they have filed a complaint against several personnel. She urged journalists to take up the issue and ensure justice.

The meeting was also addressed by PCI President Sangeeta Baruah Pisharoty, Secretary General Afzal Imam, DUJ President Sujata Madhok, Divya Arya of the Network of Women Journalists in India, journalist Khushbu Akhtar and Caravan Editor Hartosh Singh Bal who expressed solidarity with the media women and applauded them for their courage in speaking out.

Sabrangindia was among the first to interview both Shaheen and Nafeesa Khan. The interview may be watched here. 

Details of these testimonies by women journalists were released by the Delhi Union of Journalists (DUJ) in a statement, by the organisation’s president, Sujata Madhok and its general secretary, A.M. Jigeesh.

Related:

Press bodies condemn alleged assault on women journalists at Saket Police Station, seek inquiry and action

Two women journalists allege police assault after questioning Delhi CM, say attack intensified after police heard they were Muslim

Two Delhi-based women journalists arrested by Assam police on request from Tripura cops 

The post Women journalists who were attacked prevented from reporting, protest attacks appeared first on SabrangIndia.

A country of 1.48 billion people, confronting questions of unemployment, economic opportunity, human development, inequality, institutional accountability, caste and communal issues and human rights, is spending enormous public attention on the actions of women who lived centuries ago. There is something deeply revealing about the manner in which Brahminical elites evoke Rajput or Muslim history to gain media attention, employ them to duel against each other and keep public focus away from current issues. 

This is not an argument that history is unimportant. Quite the opposite. History matters precisely because it deserves to be understood properly, with context, evidence and respect for the people who lived it.

But history should not become a substitute for governance. As I have argued previously in SabrangIndia, the political manufacture and amplification of historical controversies can serve as a convenient substitute for difficult questions about governance and accountability. When citizens are encouraged to fight over competing versions of the past, attention can move away from the performance of the state in the present. When History Substitutes Governance: Hindutva’s Politics of Manufacturing Pasts . By shifting the goalpost from the Government’s misrule to the choices of 13th-century Rajput women, who ultimately benefit from Swara’s intervention is hardly a riddle. 

1. Main Wapas Aunga and Padmaavat: Same Tragedies, Different Reactions 

Padmaavat and Main Wapas Aunga are two films. Their interpretations belong to their respective directors and makers. Neither represents the viewpoint of the communities whose victims they portray. 

The scene from Main Wapas Aunga showing the character played by Dolly Ahluwalia slitting throats of her daughters and female relatives, is a reminder of the events from Toha Khalsa involving Sikh women during Partition-era riots. The movie was loved by the so-called liberals and this painful scene drew empathy. 

Historian Saquib Salim remarked “Recently a movie, ‘Main Vaapas Aaunga’ was released & admired by people on the left liberal spectrum for getting everything correct.” He also wrote, “What I cannot understand is how come the same set of people think that committing Jauhar was bad but slitting the throat was alright.”

It is ironic that the same set of people who empathise with the 20th century Sikh women of Partition-era and the extreme steps taken by them, simultaneously dismiss similar choices made by the 13th century Rajput women by invoking modern yardsticks of feminism. 

This accentuates caste-based prejudice against the people of Rajput origin within sections of the so-called liberal discourse, while also betraying an erosion of the very liberal ethos that claims to oppose such prejudice and discrimination. This is the double standard that deserves scrutiny. If a woman facing the threat of sexual violence and captivity can be understood historically as an agent who made an extreme decision under extreme circumstances at Toha Khalsa, why must the Rajput woman who confronted a comparable threat century earlier necessarily be imagined as a passive victim without agency?

Hence, this article strives to educate both Hindutva rabble-rousers and Bhaskar’s apologists about Jauhar and related medieval tragedies. 

2. Rajput’s Jauhar to Samurai’s Jigai: Not Unique events

A few days back, Kshatriya Parishad, a New Delhi based Rajput organization issued a statement titled “Our Memory of Jauhar Is No Political Tool”. Condemning the usage of Jauhar for communal polarisation, it recounted certain instances of Jauhars involving Muslim women. 

In 1682, the Mughal prince Muhammad Azam Shah (who would later become Emperor) entrusted the safety of his wife, Jahanzeb Banu Begum, to Rao Aniruddh Hada of Bundi. However, when a huge Maratha army had surrounded Jahanzeb Banu’s camp, she called upon Aniruddh Hada and confided that if their small army failed and capture seemed inevitable, she would kill herself. 

Historian K. S. Lal, in Twilight of the Sultanate (1963, p. 269), records that “Jauhar was prevalent both in the north and the south. During Timur’s invasion Muslim women also performed Jauhar when Bhatnir was sacked.”

In 1301, Muslim Mongol soldiers of Allaudin Khilji led by Muhammad Shah (called Mahimashahi by Hammīra-Mahākāvya ) rebelled against the Sultan and along with their families took refuge in Ramthambore, ruled by Chauhan rajput Hammirdeva. During the siege of Ranthambore, when Hammīra offered him an opportunity to leave the besieged fort with his family, Muhammad Shah returned home and killed the members of his household rather than allow them to fall into enemy hands. Michael Bednar has interpreted this episode as potentially representing a Muslim equivalent of Jauhar. The same narrative subsequently describes Hammīra’s wives performing Jauhar before the final battle.

Jauhar among Rajput women had a similar analogy in Jigai among medieval Samurai women of Japan. While Rajput and Samurai women gave names to these events, such wartime suicides were ubiquitous part of medieval history. The fall of Deeg Fort in 1776, caused all three Jat queens of Raja Ranjit Singh of Bharatpur, commit suicide to evade capture. 

Far from being a Hindu-Muslim phenomenon, Jauhar and its similar instances were unique to all warrior communities across the world. On the other hand, sedentary and mercantile Hindu communities like Brahmans or Banias never saw such instances unlike Muslim women because they were not viewed as political threats. 

3. Rajput Queens Hapless Sans Agency? Or, rulers and Warriors. 

Karnawati Hada, widow of Rana Sanga, was the de facto ruler of Mewar for her last seven years and was associated with the defence of Chittor during its siege by Gujarat forces. Her eventual participation in Jauhar after the defeat of the fort cannot simply be reconciled with the image of a woman who possessed no political agency. 

Jawahirdevi, another widow of Rana Sanga, is remembered as having died fighting on the battlefield. 

Rani Durgavati Chandel, widow of Dalpat Shah of Garha-Katanga, personally led her forces against the Mughals. When defeat became unavoidable and capture appeared imminent, she chose death rather than surrender. 

Another Rajput ruler, Karnavati of Garhwal provides an illuminating contrast. The widow of Mahipat Shah Parmar successfully resisted Mughal forces, defeated a Mughal commander and negotiated with the Mughal emperor. She did not take her own life because her circumstances were different: she had not reached a situation in which capture appeared inevitable. 

Noted Ambedkarite and Human Rights activist Vidyabhushan Rawat writes “Well, I would like to state a few points here about how the liberals or so-called Brahmanical feminists are missing the point. There are numerous examples of Rajput women fighting bravely for their territories in Rajasthan itself and leading from the front. It is not merely in Rajasthan; we have examples elsewhere too, including Uttarakhand, where people still remember Tilu Rauteli and her bravery.” 

These women discussed above, were widows who went on to administer their kingdoms and command their armies for years after the deaths of their husbands. If, as some of Swara Bhaskar’s apologists argue, Sati and Jauhar were essentially the same practice, then a simple question follows: why did these women not commit Sati upon their husbands’ deaths? Why did they continue to rule, administer their territories and lead their armies, only to die later in the context of warfare and impending capture? 

Conclusion:

The above examples discussed in this article are absent from the narration of those dominating the discourse on either side. This reinforces the fact that those driving and controlling the discourse on the subject on both sides, clearly lack any genuine scholarship and authority on it. 

It also deserves an analysis as to why only Muslim and Rajput histories are subjected to such repeated controversies by those dominating the political and intellectual ecosystems. Why are Brahmin and Maratha history left out? Why are not the crimes of Peshwas in North India discussed? Why is Shivaji’s imposition by Hindutva in Uttarakhand and Bihar over their own local history not questioned? 

The Brahmin elite’s strong dominance across public institutions and influential platforms is an incontrovertible fact. However, it is barely debated how such dominance fosters a sense of authority and arrogance over how the histories, identities and narratives on non-Brahmin communities are framed, discussed and controlled. The right-wing Brahmin intellectual appropriation of Jauhar as a vehicle for anti-Muslim discourse is, in turn, complemented by an allegedly liberal Brahmin tendency to belittle or de-legitimise Rajput history and memory. The growing tendency to superficially compare these medieval Rajput women (without knowing their own historical roles) against Rani Lakshmibai, an 18th-century figure living in a very different historical context, and consequently diminish them, reflects that very assertion.

Lastly, the selective usage of medieval Muslim or medieval Rajput history is a deliberation to alienate these two communities — using one community’s history against the other, while those employing them and presenting their ignorant opinions on public platforms garner social and political benefits without any responsibility. However, it also damages the nation at large – as it helps, the Government keep citizens diverted to dodge accountability on tangible current issues affecting all citizens across India. 

Related:

RSS ideologues ‘wrong’; Sati wasn’t product of ‘Muslim’ rule, it existed in ancient India too

Bollywood epic Padmavaat has emerged out of the mists of legend to divide Indian society

“Communalisation” of Indian history around Padmavati, a fictitious character, has colonial roots: Irfan Habib

The post Jauhar & the Politics of Distraction: How the Right and so-called liberals often complement each other appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The question has acquired renewed urgency following recent remarks by Kerala-based Sunni cleric Sheikh Kanthapuram A.P. Aboobacker Musliyar, popularly known as Sheikh Abubakr Ahmad and widely referred to as the “Grand Mufti of India”.

Speaking at a Hubbul Rasool conference in Kochi, the cleric reportedly said that women should remain confined to their homes and should not enter the public sphere. He defended purdah as a means of protecting women’s dignity and compared women to gold ornaments that, in his analogy, must be kept safely inside a box. He further argued that bringing women into the public sphere could lead to “great destruction” and attributed this position to the Qur’an.

Such remarks deserve serious theological scrutiny—not merely because they concern women’s rights, but because they raise a larger question about how scripture is interpreted and transmitted in contemporary Muslim society.

The issue is not whether Islam prescribes modesty. It unquestionably does. The Qur’an calls upon both believing men and believing women to observe modesty, chastity and moral restraint. The issue is whether modesty necessarily means confinement, whether purdah necessarily means social invisibility, and whether the Qur’an actually establishes a universal prohibition against women participating in public life. It does not.

The Qur’an is not a charter for female confinement!

The verse most commonly invoked to justify the confinement of women is Qur’an 33:33:

“And remain in your homes and do not display yourselves as was the display of the former days of ignorance.”

The verse occurs in a specific passage addressing the wives of the holy Prophet (pbuh). Its immediate context concerns the conduct, dignity and special responsibilities of the Prophet’s household. To extract one phrase from this context and transform it into an absolute command that every Muslim woman, in every society and historical circumstance, must remain inside her home is an interpretive decision—not an uncontested Qur’anic fact.

This distinction is fundamental!

The Qur’an repeatedly recognises women as autonomous moral subjects. It addresses believing women directly, assigns them religious responsibilities, grants them rights of inheritance and property, and describes believing men and women as mutual allies in establishing what is right and resisting what is wrong.

Most significantly, the Qur’an says:

“The believing men and believing women are allies of one another. They enjoin what is right and forbid what is wrong.” (9:71)

How can women be described as moral partners in the collective ethical life of the ummah if they are simultaneously understood to be categorically barred from public life?

The answer cannot be obtained by isolating one phrase and ignoring the Qur’an’s wider moral vocabulary.

From modesty to misogyny: where interpretation goes wrong

The second important word in Qur’an 33:33 is tabarruj. It is often translated as displaying oneself or one’s adornments in an ostentatious manner.

Classical exegetes associated tabarruj with conspicuous self-display, affected mannerisms and the public exhibition of beauty or adornment intended to attract sensual attention. In other words, the Qur’anic concern is with ostentatious and sexually provocative display, not with the mere physical presence of women outside their homes.

This distinction is essential!

A woman who goes to a university, teaches in a school, works in a hospital, runs a business, attends a conference, visits a market or participates in civic life does not thereby commit tabarruj.

To equate a woman’s physical presence in public with tabarruj is to expand the Qur’anic concept beyond its moral meaning.

Purdah, likewise, cannot simply be transformed from an ethic of modesty into an architecture of female imprisonment.

What happened to Bibi Khadija (RA)?

There is also a profound historical problem with treating women’s public presence as inherently destructive.

Khadija al-Kubra, the first wife of the Prophet (pbuh) was a successful businesswoman before her marriage to him. Her commercial activity was not presented in Islamic tradition as a moral failure. She was not described as having compromised her dignity merely because she participated in economic life.

The Prophet’s own community included women who transmitted knowledge, engaged in commerce, sought medical treatment, participated in communal affairs and contributed to the social and intellectual life of the Muslim community.

Women were not invisible in Medina!

Nor was the mosque exclusively a male social institution. Women attended the Prophet’s mosque. They listened to his sermons, asked questions, transmitted hadith and participated in the religious life of the community.

The historical record therefore does not support the simplistic proposition that Islam’s ideal woman is one who never enters public space.

The “gold in a box” analogy is particularly revealing!

The analogy comparing women with gold ornaments deserves special attention. A woman is not jewellery.

She is not an object whose value increases because she is locked away from society. She is a human being endowed by God with intellect, conscience, moral responsibility and spiritual agency.

The Qur’an does not describe women as commodities whose social value depends upon physical concealment. Indeed, the Qur’anic account of human dignity begins at a level far deeper than gender:

“Indeed, We have honoured the children of Adam.” (17:70)

The Qur’an speaks of Bani Adam—the children of Adam—not merely men. Human dignity precedes gender.

The “gold in a box” analogy may have been intended to express protection and honour. But theological language must also be judged by the social meaning it produces. When women are repeatedly described as precious objects who must be hidden, protected and controlled, the distinction between protection and possession becomes dangerously blurred.

A woman does not need to be locked away to possess dignity. She needs education, security, freedom from violence, economic rights, social respect and the ability to exercise her God-given moral agency.

Protection cannot become prohibition!

There is a legitimate Islamic concern for women’s safety. Muslim societies, like all societies, must protect women from harassment, exploitation and violence.

If a public space is unsafe because men harass women, the Islamic response cannot reasonably be to imprison women at home. The ethical response should be to discipline those who harass, educate society, strengthen public safety and uphold the dignity of every human being. Otherwise, the victim is effectively punished for the misconduct of the perpetrator.

The Indian Muslim tradition is more complex!

The proposition that Muslim women belong exclusively to the domestic sphere also sits uneasily with India’s own Muslim social history.

Indian Islam has never been a monolithic civilisation of female seclusion. From the courts of Muslim rulers to the intellectual circles of scholars, from women poets and mystics to educators and reformers, Muslim women have participated in India’s cultural and intellectual history in diverse ways.

The subcontinent’s Sufi traditions, in particular, cannot be reduced to a theology of female invisibility. The spiritual vocabulary of Islam speaks of taqwa, ilm, ihsan, adl and karamah—God-consciousness, knowledge, excellence, justice and human dignity. None of these virtues is exclusively male.

The Qur’an itself declares:

“Surely the Muslim men and Muslim women, the believing men and believing women, the devout men and devout women, the truthful men and truthful women…” (33:35)

The verse then proceeds to promise forgiveness and an immense reward to both.

The spiritual subject of Islam is therefore neither exclusively male nor domestically confined.

A dangerous hermeneutical shortcut!

The deeper problem exposed by Sheikh Abubakr Ahmad’s statement is not simply one controversial sermon. It is a recurring hermeneutical tendency within certain strands of Muslim clerical discourse: a social custom is elevated into an immutable divine command, and a particular historical interpretation is presented as though it were the only possible meaning of revelation.

This is precisely where Muslim scholarship needs intellectual courage. The Qur’an must be read holistically.

A verse cannot be separated from its linguistic context, historical context, rhetorical context and the broader ethical trajectory of the Qur’an. Nor should the opinions of medieval or modern exegetes—however respected—be treated as revelation itself.

The Qur’an is divine. Our interpretations of the Qur’an are human. That distinction is indispensable. The Qur’an asks women and men alike to become people of faith, knowledge and righteousness. It does not ask half of humanity to disappear from society.

When clerics tell women that their presence in public spaces will lead to “great destruction”, they are ultimately constructing a theology of fear around the female body. But Islam did not come to make women afraid of their own existence.

The Qur’an came to liberate human beings especially the womenfolk from forms of domination—spiritual, social and moral. The Prophet (pbuh) did not establish a community in which women ceased to exist beyond the threshold of their homes. He established a community in which women were recognised as believers, mothers, daughters, wives, teachers, narrators, benefactors and moral agents.

That historical reality should make contemporary Muslims cautious about transforming one interpretation of one verse into an absolute social doctrine.

The future of Indian Islam does not depend upon keeping Muslim women inside four walls. It depends upon creating a society in which women can walk outside those walls with dignity, modesty, security and equal moral agency.

A regular contributor to New Age Islam, the author is an Indo-Islamic scholar, researcher on Indian Sufism, an author of “Ishq Sufiyana: Untold Stories of Divine Love”

Courtesy: The New Age Islam

The post When purdah becomes prison appeared first on SabrangIndia.

“Muslim women are not objects to be locked away in rooms or told where they can and cannot go. We have agency, autonomy, and every right to participate fully in public life,” said the statement by Bebaak released on social media. “What is especially concerning is that such views are being expressed from a position of religious scholarship. When influential religious figures promote restrictions on women, it can reinforce regressive ideas within the community. But let us be clear: Maulanas and Muftis do not represent all Muslims, nor do they speak for Islam in its entirety.

The Bebaak statement also states, “More importantly, we must recognise how statements like these are used to play dirty politics in the name of Muslim women. When religious figures make regressive statements about Muslim women, our identities and our names are turned into political tools. And as a consequence, we are forced to face discrimination and hostility from other quarters as well.

“Stop doing religious politics in our name. Muslim women are not political pawns. Our lives, our choices, and our identities do not belong to politicians, religious leaders, or anyone else to weaponise.

“Islamic history itself tells a different story. Muslim women have been scholars, teachers, entrepreneurs, traders, and active participants in public life. If women could occupy these spaces centuries ago, why are they being pushed back into the home today?

“Muslim women will not be confined by outdated interpretations of our place in society. We will define our own lives, our own choices, and our own futures.”

It had been widely reported in the media, and also in The Hindu, that Kanthapuram A.P. Aboobacker Musliar, known for many as the Grand Mufti of India, recently issued a “joint-circular” to mahallus in his capacity as general secretary of the Samstha Kerala Jamiyyathul Ulama, asking them “not to exhibit women in front of other men on the streets or stages” during Islamic celebrations. Aboobacker Musliar, known for his proximity to various political formations, has been a leading figure in Kerala’s traditional Sunni Muslim community for more than five decades. The widely publicised diktat was reportedly issued in the context of the Milad festivities. Specifically, the circular courted controversy, following which Kanthapuram said bringing women to public forums would cause serious “chaos” and that Islam prescribed purdah for women to prevent this. These comments had been criticised both by the ruling United Democratic Front (UDF)’s leading party, the Indian National Congress (INC) with Chief Minister V.D. Satheesan and the CPI(M), also a long-term ally of the Mufti. Interestingly, the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML), a component of the ruling UDF has been silent.

Background

The ‘Grand Mufti’ who is at the centre of this controversy that significant influence extending across India and to Muslim communities abroad. Kanthapuram, Ustad in Kerala, is known as Sheikh Abubakr Ahmad in the wider Muslim world. He is the founder of Jamia Markaz at Karanthur near Kozhikode, around which he has built a large religious, educational and social network. At 89, he continues to teach the Hadith collection regarded by Muslims as the most authentic collection of reports on Prophet Muhammad’s teachings and practices.

Kanthapuram’s rise began within the Samastha Kerala Jamiyyathul Ulama, the traditional body of Islamic scholars in Kerala. He was one of its prominent secretaries under Shamsul Ulama E.K. Aboobacker Musliar. In 1989, differences over the influence of the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) led to a split. Kanthapuram and his followers walked out and formed a separate organisation. The division continues, leaving Keralam’s traditional Sunni community broadly divided between the E.K. and A.P. factions. He built his organisation around Markazu Saquafathi Sunniyya, founded at Karanthur in 1978.

His reach extends well beyond politics. He was also been associated with the Amman Message and A Common Word, international initiatives promoting Islamic unity and Muslim-Christian understanding. His organisation has also reportedly used these networks for humanitarian causes. In 2025, he intervened in the case of Kerala nurse Nimisha Priya, who was facing execution in Yemen, and saved her from the gallows through contacts with influential Yemeni religious figures.

Few religious leaders in the southern state of Kerala have remained so influential for decades. From a scholar in Kozhikode to the chief of an international network, Kanthapuram’s influence extends far beyond Karanthur. To his followers, he is a scholar, teacher and institution-builder; to his critics, a conservative cleric with deep influence over public and political life.

The statement by Bebaak collective may be read here.

Related:

Equal Inheritance Rights for Muslim Women: Upholding Constitutional Justice and Gender Equality

Wars Fought in The Name of Women’s Rights

Muslim women need not move court to register divorce by talaq: Kerala High Court

The post Muslim women will define their own lives & choices: Bebaak Collective responds to Kerala cleric appeared first on SabrangIndia.

She was reportedly employed as a domestic worker by the alleged rapist, who was also her neighbour and teacher at the school where she studied in the eighth grade. She carried the pregnancy resulting from the sexual assault for seven months and ultimately died beneath the weight of a stigmatised identity ‘Gujjar’ while her financially and socially vulnerable father was allegedly pressured into compromising and settling through the dominant social apparatus. The tyranny of the local social hierarchy the ‘Kechari milieu’ is said to have terrified her father from the moment the pregnancy became apparent. He was reportedly terrified to succumb” either settle the matter or face consequences. Political cum social intervention of influential and dominant figures, allegedly, including former Sarpanch Haji Ghulam Qadir, raises an even more disturbing question about the manner in which social power can transform justice into a bargain. It was, in effect, a negotiation between the powerful and the vulnerable, as though a butcher were bargaining with a shepherd over the price of a life. After the matter remained unsettled, the girl returned to her father’s home, where she remained for approximately seven months. During this period, a neighbour, Mohd Iqbal, was paid to assume responsibility for the pregnancy and was settled with a certain amount of money. On August 19-20, however, she was reportedly suddenly and secretly taken to Kishtwar hospital. Hospital staff were persuaded that Mohd Iqbal was her husband. An abortion was subsequently carried out without informing her father.

Adivasi (tribal) activist Talib Hussain has claimed that this plan was designed to conceal the identity of the biological father and potentially manipulate subsequent DNA evidence by exchanging or disposing of the foetus through hospital personnel. These allegations, if established through an impartial investigation, would indicate an attempt not merely to terminate a pregnancy but to destroy potential evidence of sexual violence. When the initial reports and allegations are read together, the case raises disturbing similarity with the 2018 rape and murder of the minor tribal girl in Kathua, Jammu and Kashmir. That how social power, political influence, and the vulnerability of a tribal minor intersect.

This is not necessarily an isolated event. Rather, it must be examined within a larger pattern of social stratification and institutional neglect. Consider the case of Suraya Begum of Kalaroos, Kupwara, on January 17, 2019. When she was nine months pregnant, she was reportedly carried on a charpoy through heavy snow to Lal Ded Hospital in Srinagar because the local roads were impassable. At Lal Ded, however, she was allegedly not admitted overnight. Her family repeatedly requested that she be allowed to remain in the hospital, explaining that they had travelled from a distant, snowbound area. They were reportedly refused and told to leave, with the alleged remark: “Gujjar happat” (“You Gujjars are bears”) and “Amis chu fakh yiwan, yim chi Gujjar” (“They smell foul; they are Gujjars”). At approximately 8:30 p.m., Suraya reportedly went into severe labour and delivered a baby girl by the roadside. The new-born died shortly afterwards. Srinagar’s temperature that night was reportedly around −0.7°C.

And how can we ignore Noor Jahan, a 45-year-old woman who was reportedly gang-raped on May 4, 2025 at Nishat, Srinagar? Neither civil society appeared to express comparable outrage, nor did the case receive significant national-media attention. Her case once again exposes the hierarchy of public empathy, whose suffering becomes a national outrage and whose suffering disappears into silence! The tragic death of Razim Akhter on December 23, 2024 at GMC Rajouri, and the fatal delay in medical care reportedly suffered by Naseem Akhter on February 18, 2021 at District Hospital Poonch, are among the recorded cases, yet they should not be dismissed as isolated medical anomalies. They point instead towards a deeper crisis in healthcare infrastructure and access in the border districts, where marginalised and nomadic communities can face disproportionate barriers to timely medical care.

While Gujjar and Bakarwal communities traverse harsh terrains to sustain an important pastoral economy, the state apparatus too often appears incapable of guaranteeing them equal access to healthcare and, ultimately, equal protection of the right to life.

In the Chenab region and, to some extent, in the Kashmir Valley, Gujjars and Bakarwals are often reduced, in the dominant social imagination, to a labouring and servile population. Their social position is frequently determined by dominant groups rather than by their own agency. Justice, therefore, becomes selective, and so does outrage. If Gujjar itself can function as a social slur, and if individuals can be judged through expressions such as “Gujjar khaslat” (“Gujjar traits” or “Gujjar habits”), then the problem is no longer merely individual prejudice. It is a structure of social perception. Generations of Gujjars and Bakarwals have grown up within conditions of poverty, exclusion, geographical isolation, and social stratification. In such a setting, a child can be socially assigned a position even before birth. The prevailing hierarchy can determine not merely where that child will live, but what kind of work, dignity, and social status society expects that child to possess. If a community is historically imagined as born to serve, how can one expect society at large to respond to violence against its members with the same moral urgency accorded to those belonging to socially privileged groups?

The deeper problem, therefore, is that crime, criminality, and the administration of social justice cannot be completely separated from the social structure in which they occur. As Hunter S. Thompson put it, “In a close society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In the world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.”

According to local media reporter Asif Iqbal Naik, there was allegedly no anaesthesia technician available during the thirteen year old girl’s abortion procedure and, consequently, she may not have been properly anaesthetised. Her initial medical reports, according to him, reportedly support this possibility. Asif also stated that, when he spoke to a woman who performed the girl’s final rites, she described injuries to the victim’s private parts that appeared to have been inflicted unprofessionally. If these facts are independently verified, the absence of qualified medical personnel and the manner in which the procedure was conducted could become crucial elements in determining the circumstances of her death. Otherwise, the thirteen-year-old girl might have survived. The irony is devastating. Article 21 of the Constitution guarantees the right to life and personal liberty to every person, yet social prejudice can determine whose life receives its full protection in practice.

Rape is one thing. But the collective response that follows when families, relatives, community elders, Sarpanches, local leaders, medical personnel, and politically influential individuals allegedly become involved in concealing the consequences of rape is something altogether different. Had she survived, the seven-month-long history of alleged sexual violence, pregnancy, and subsequent attempts at settlement might have not come to light.

Was her life also the culmination of a collective effort to prevent the truth from becoming public? The real tragedy is not merely that one individual allegedly committed sexual violence. It is that a wider social environment which have normalised, concealed, negotiated, and ultimately enabled the consequences of that violence because the victim belonged to a socially marginalised community. This is the brutality of identity-based dehumanisation.

When a society in general have expression such as “Agar toi wechew janglas manz aike anndhh saruf (snake) bai Gujjur, Gujjur gase marun, saruf gasai travun”— “If you ever encounter a Gujjar and a snake at the same time, kill the Gujjar and leave the snake” it becomes necessary to ask what happens when such prejudices enter institutions. How does one expect a doctor, teacher, administrator, political leader, or police officer to respond with ordinary human compassion if the social environment has already taught them to see a particular identity as inferior? It is like expecting a butcher to show compassion towards the goat standing before him. The problem, however, is not the individual butcher alone, it is the social system that has taught him to see the goat merely as an object for slaughter.

The victim may have been beaten, threatened, frightened, humiliated, and psychologically broken during those seven months. She may have cried out to the sky, while the social apparatus around her remained unmoved. And when, in the name of abortion, she allegedly underwent a procedure that ultimately ended her life, her screams may have disappeared into the trenches of the identity assigned to her. Perhaps her greatest tragedy was not simply that she was allegedly raped. It was that her suffering could be negotiated because she was Gujjar. Her identity became the very condition through which her vulnerability was interpreted.

Her screams have yet to shake a society sufficiently to demand a comprehensive and impartial investigation. She may have hoped that her suffering would not disappear into the trench of identity rather a beginning where no other girl would be ruined, bargained over, and ultimately sacrificed beneath the accumulated weight of social stigma. The identity that isolated her from the social mainstream was not created by her. The stigma attached to it was inherited from generations before her.

Gujjar and Bakarwal marginalisation cannot simply be explained through a supposed cultural fear of modernity or by attributing their deprivation to ignorance. Many of them have remained rooted in the pristine valleys and higher altitudes of the Himalayas, but they have simultaneously been left miles behind the rapidly changing capitalist, technological, educational, and globalised world. It was and remains the responsibility of socially privileged sections of society to bring such communities into confidence, to create meaningful access to modern education and to make them feel that they too belong to the wider socio-economic and political order. When that process fails, the responsibility becomes even more urgent for an educated and conscious class emerging from within the marginalised community itself. For example, in twentieth-century Kashmir, Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah became associated, in a different historical context, with the mobilisation of people who had experienced generations of deprivation and political exclusion.

This thirteen-year-old girl must have been asking why has the social mobility achieved by a section of the Gujjar and Bakarwal elite not percolate into a sustained transformation of the conditions of the overwhelmingly deprived majority? The Gujjar and Bakarwal question deserve to be viewed through a similar lens. The relationship between an emerging community elite and an overwhelmingly deprived majority. A considerable socio-economic distance has emerged between sections of the Gujjar elite and the ordinary people whose identity has provided much of the basis for their political and institutional representation. Some politically and economically prosperous members of the community have built political careers and public faces around their tribal belonging. Yet examples of their sustained efforts to mobilise, educate, organise, and unite the most deprived sections of their own community remain comparatively rare.

Her death should not be reduced to another isolated crime report. It should force us to confront the deeper structures that determine whose suffering becomes visible, whose testimony is believed, whose death produces outrage, and whose identity makes suffering easier to ignore.

(The author is a Research Scholar in Modern Indian History at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU). His writings engage with questions of history, society, identity, and contemporary Indian public discourse)

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The post Kishtwar Minor’s Rape Case: Selective societal outrage and price of being Gujjar in Kashmir appeared first on SabrangIndia.

In the letter, Rahul Gandhi said that tribal students across the state had been protesting for more than ten days. “Many Adivasi students come from remote villages and depend on government hostels to study in the cities. A new rule bars anyone over 30 from these hostels, excluding many who are still completing their studies or preparing for exams,” he stated. He added that hostels for these students are unsafe as they reportedly lack food, sanitation and medical care. Incidents of snakebites have also been reported. “I was shocked to learn that female students returning after an extended absence must undergo pregnancy tests and a range of other medical tests, to prove their ‘fitness’. It is a humiliation that presumes them guilty until they prove otherwise. This rule is an attack on their dignity and their humanity,” he said.

Adivasi students across Maharashtra started their protest after the BJP-led state government introduced a government resolution (GR) on Aug 4, which fixed the age limit for staying in hostels at 26. However, after the decision sparked protests, the GR was revised on August 14 and the age limit was increased to 30. The students, however, are demanding complete withdrawal of the GR, besides seeking better facilities at hostels run by the Tribal Development Department across the state. They are also demanding immediate recruitment of aspirants from tribal community for 12,500 vacant posts which they claim have been stuck for a long time.

In his letter to Mr. Fadnavis, Mr. Gandhi followed up on interactions with students in Pune during the Chhatron ki Gunj (echoes of students) programme last Saturday. He said students from across Maharashtra had told him about hostel rules that “strip them of their dignity and shut off their path to education”.

Mr. Gandhi expressed particular concern over facilities for women, saying female students returning after an extended absence were required to undergo pregnancy tests and other medical examinations to establish their “fitness”. “It is a humiliation that presumes them guilty until they prove otherwise,” he said, describing the requirement as an “attack on their dignity and their humanity”. Mr. Gandhi also flagged a rule barring those above 30 from hostel accommodation, saying it excluded many students still completing their studies or preparing for examinations.

He also alleged that hostels were unsafe and often lacked food, sanitation and medical care, with students suffering injuries and deaths, including from snake bites.

“These students are not asking for charity. They are demanding what is theirs by right,” Mr. Gandhi said, urging Mr. Fadnavis to hear the students’ concerns and resolve them immediately.

Earlier in the day, the party had sought a special committee to probe the deaths of tribal children allegedly due to malnutrition in Madhya Pradesh and of tribal girls following snakebite in Maharashtra and demanded action against officials found responsible.

Adivasi Congress chief Vikrant Bhuria also called for a safety audit of tribal hostels, citing alleged lapses in facilities in the two States. Addressing a press conference here, Mr. Bhuria claimed that 22 children from the Baiga tribal community had died of malnutrition and related diseases in the Balaghat district of Madhya Pradesh. He alleged that a nutritional meal delivered to households had been discontinued for six months and that the nearest primary health centre was 20 km away. Vaccination coverage in the area was also below 80%, he claimed. “I had asked in the Madhya Pradesh Legislative Assembly how much budget was allocated for preventing malnutrition in the State’s tribal blocks and projects from 2020 to 2025, and how much of it was spent. The response was extremely concerning. The government said malnourished children are given a nutritional meal worth only ₹12 per day,” he said.

On Maharashtra, Bhuria alleged that more than 70 girls at a tribal hostel in Gadchiroli were made to sleep on the floor in a single room. Six girls were hospitalised following a snakebite incident, of whom three died, he claimed.

Mr. Bhuria said students protesting in Nashik were continuing their hunger strike, demanding better facilities at tribal hostels. He sought a probe into the Balaghat deaths and action against officials found responsible.

Related:

Bihar: Not just Delhi, Patna, Siwan too saw brute police violence against demonstrating students: PUCL

Maharashtra: After backlash, govt. moves to withdraw FIRs against student protesters but questions remain

Youth Uprising: A protest, a brute crackdown, a continuing countrywide response

Mumbai stands with students, but the state pushes back

The post Forced pregnancy tests for Adivasi women students in Maharashtra’s hostels, Rahul Gandhi registers strong protest appeared first on SabrangIndia.

According to her husband, Jumman Fakir, the family soon received a call from the Mumbai Police’s Chembur Crime Branch. Sahida had been detained on suspicion of being an “illegal immigrant”. Within days, the family was told that she had been sent to Bangladesh. Her husband says he had repeatedly approached the authorities with documents establishing her identity and roots in West Bengal, but they were allegedly disregarded. Sahida eventually called her family from Satkhira, Bangladesh.

The story, first reported in detail by Scroll on August 11, is disturbing not merely because of what allegedly happened to one woman, but because of the larger question it raises: what happens when the State begins treating Bengali identity as evidence of foreignness?

The Indian Express separately reported that Sahida was detained on July 18 and that sources said she was taken to Assam before being pushed across the border along with others. The report also provided that her family was preparing to approach the Calcutta High Court and that a migrant workers’ forum had written to the Ministry of External Affairs seeking intervention.

The facts, as reported, demand something more than administrative clarification. They demand scrutiny of the entire architecture through which a person can apparently move from being a resident of India to being labelled an “infiltrator”, detained and ultimately expelled from the country without a meaningful opportunity to contest that determination.

A woman disappears, and the State’s explanation is suspicion

Sahida’s case is particularly troubling because her family says it did not merely possess one disputed identity document. They produced a birth certificate recording her birth in Swarupdaha village in West Bengal in 1988. They produced a school certificate, a voter identity card issued in 2008, documents relating to land in Gobindapur, and records concerning her family. Her parents’ names, according to Scroll, also appeared in the 2002 electoral rolls.

None of these documents, individually, should be treated as an automatic and conclusive certificate of citizenship. That distinction matters. A voter ID, Aadhaar or land document cannot, by itself, settle every question concerning citizenship. But that is precisely why the State’s obligation becomes more important, not less.  If citizenship is disputed, the answer cannot simply be deportation. The dispute must first be investigated.

Sahida’s husband told Scroll that police asked for the birth certificates of her parents even after he had produced her own birth certificate and other documents. He said the family could not provide such certificates because they were from a generation in which birth registration was not common. That raises an obvious question: how much documentation must a poor citizen produce before the State believes that she belongs to the country in which she was born and has lived?

For months, instances of forced deportations and illegal pushbacks have surfaced from Assam, West Bengal, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Delhi of individuals “suspected” of being Bangladeshi nationals. In many of these cases, the family of those deported have approached the courts alleging that the removals were carried out without any disclosed nationality verification, without travel documents, and without Bangladesh formally acknowledging or accepting the individuals concerned.

Detailed reports may be read here, here, here, here and here.

The most dangerous word in this story is “suspected”

There is a profound legal difference between suspecting that someone may be a foreign national and establishing that they are one. The first is an investigative starting point. The second is a legal conclusion. Sahida’s case, as reported, appears to collapse the two. Scroll reported that the family was not given documents relating to her arrest or detention and that the Mumbai and Navi Mumbai police did not respond to questions seeking clarification about the grounds for her detention.

When the State takes away a person’s liberty, the burden of public accountability does not disappear merely because the allegation involves “illegal immigration”. If anything, the stakes are higher because the consequence may ultimately be removal from the country itself. The Constitution does not create a zone of executive immunity around immigration enforcement.

Article 21 protects life and personal liberty. Article 14 demands non-arbitrariness and equality before the law. Article 22 contains safeguards concerning arrest and detention. These constitutional protections cannot become conditional upon whether the person is socially respectable, economically secure or perceived to “look Indian”. And the constitutional question becomes particularly serious when a person is allegedly identified not through a properly adjudicated finding but through a combination of suspicion and social profiling.

The border cannot become a substitute for a hearing

Sahida’s husband told Scroll that she was detained because she was Bengali. In Maharashtra, the crackdown has become increasingly expansive. Hindustan Times reported in March that the state government told the Legislative Council that more than 2,000 alleged illegal Bangladeshi nationals had been deported in 2025, compared with 202 in 2024, and that the state planned intensive “combing operations” in slums, construction sites and other areas. There is nothing inherently unlawful about a State identifying and removing foreign nationals who are illegally present. Immigration control is a legitimate governmental function. The danger begins when the hunt for foreigners becomes a hunt for people who appear foreign.

The physical act of pushing someone across an international border has consequences that are fundamentally different from ordinary detention. Once a person is in Bangladesh, an Indian court’s ability to protect her becomes substantially more complicated. Access to lawyers, family members and documents becomes difficult. The very act of deportation can therefore create a second legal problem out of the first. This is exactly what makes Sahida’s account so alarming. According to the Indian Express, she said she was taken to the Assam border and pushed into Bangladesh at around 1 a.m. She reportedly walked for hours through muddy fields before local residents helped her and a family in Satkhira provided her shelter.

A precedent already exists for bringing people back

The danger of mistaken deportation is no longer theoretical. In 2025, several Bengali-speaking residents working outside West Bengal were detained and sent across the Bangladesh border amid claims that they were Bangladeshi nationals. One of the most consequential cases involved Sunali Khatun, her husband and their son. The Calcutta High Court’s September 2025 judgment in Bhodu Sekh v. Union of India is particularly relevant. The court examined the deportation of Sunali Khatun, Danish and their son Sabir. The authorities had argued that the family had failed to establish Indian citizenship. But the court also considered the procedure prescribed by the Union’s May 2, 2025 memorandum for persons suspected of being Bangladeshi or Myanmar nationals who claimed Indian citizenship in another State.

The memorandum contemplated verification by the State or district from which the person claimed to originate. Where a person claimed Indian citizenship and residence in another State, the concerned authorities were required to seek verification from that State and district administration. The judgment records that such verification was to be undertaken within a specified period, during which the person could be kept in a holding centre.

The Calcutta High Court ultimately held that the procedure had not been followed and described the authorities’ action as being undertaken in “hot haste”. It set aside the detention and deportation orders concerning Sunali, Danish and Sabir and directed the authorities to take steps to bring them back to India. In May 2026, the Union told the Supreme Court that it would bring back people deported to Bangladesh and verify their citizenship claims. All those six deported in this case are now back in India.

Detailed reports may be read here and here.

Notably, a separate affidavit was filed by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) on July 31, 2026 in Rajubala Das v. Union of India pursuant to the Supreme Court’s order dated March 21, 2025. The affidavit sought to explain the legal and administrative framework governing deportation where the nationality of a declared foreigner remains unknown or unverified. In doing so, the Union makes one of its clearest judicial admissions to date: deportation cannot even be initiated unless the individual’s nationality has first been verified by the receiving State, appropriate travel documents have been obtained, and the receiving country has agreed to accept the individual.

The affidavit fundamentally distinguishes between being declared a foreigner and being legally deportable. While a declaration by a Foreigners Tribunal may settle a person’s legal status within India, it does not, the Union now accepts, authorise the State to physically remove that individual from Indian territory. Deportation remains contingent upon a separate process involving diplomatic engagement, nationality verification, issuance of travel documents and, most importantly, the consent of another sovereign State. In other words, the executive cannot unilaterally deport a person merely because Indian authorities believe them to be a foreign national.

Detailed report may be read here.

The SIR connection makes the situation even more sensitive

Sahida’s case also comes amid intense scrutiny of electoral citizenship verification in West Bengal. According to Scroll, Sahida’s parents appeared on the 2002 electoral roll, while Sahida herself was marked “under adjudication” in the recent Special Intensive Revision process, with an appeal pending before the relevant tribunal. The fact that an electoral-roll dispute exists cannot itself establish whether Sahida is or is not an Indian citizen. But it does reinforce why administrative processes must remain separate and carefully bounded. Being excluded from an electoral roll is not the same thing as being declared a foreign national.

Indeed, in August 2025, the Supreme Court sought clarity from the Centre on the standard operating procedure governing deportation drives and specifically raised concerns about allegations that Bengali-speaking minorities were being singled out. The Court observed that while persons attempting to illegally cross into India could be dealt with at the border, once a person was already inside the country, the law prescribed a procedure.

Over the past few months, multiple petitions before the Supreme Court and High Courts have alleged that persons suspected of being Bangladeshi nationals were taken across the international border without any publicly disclosed deportation process. In several cases, families have alleged that individuals were picked up without prior notice, denied access to lawyers or relatives, and removed without any disclosed deportation order or travel documents.

Detailed report may be read here, here, here and here.

Related:

‘Deportation Cannot Begin without Nationality Verification’: Union’s Rajubala affidavit clarifies legal limits on executive power

Aadhaar, Voter ID and PAN Cannot Prove Citizenship: Calcutta High Court’s Foreigners Order and the burden of belonging

They Belong Here: An elderly couple’s victory for citizenship

Another CJP Victory: Barpeta Tribunal declares Alam Khan ‘not a foreigner’

When a narrow reading of documents decide citizenship: GHC in Aminul Hoque

‘Fairness & reason ‘: SC rules that due process is a must for citizenship determination

Gauhati High Court upholds foreigner declaration, rejects mental illness plea

The post When Suspicion Becomes Deportation: The case of Sahida Fakir and the dangerous criminalisation of Bengali identity appeared first on SabrangIndia.