Description
“The Revolution Will Wear Burkas and Bangles” (Kiran Bhatiya 2022). Bhatiya discusses Shaheen Bagh Movement, a Muslim women’s movement in Delhi, that started with protests in December 2019 against the current government’s decision to pass Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) which provides citizenship to six religious minorities from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan while denying citizenship to Muslims from these countries. These protests took a national character and were led dominantly by women. In another context, the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP), a Muslim-women-dominated group, started in 1994 against the enforced disappearances in Kashmir continues to protest and occupy public space for justice. The two movements contextualise their politics differently; Shaheen Bagh grandmothers protest the government’s anti-Muslim policies, and the women activists of APDP seek answers for the disappearances of their relatives, primarily from the Indian state. While the movements have a commonality of being Muslim and publicly adorning their Muslim identity by covering their heads, they could position women at the centre of future politics in their respective societies. The paper aims to discuss how space and political mobilisation have changed over time? What does this public space mean in terms of Muslim women‘s subjectivity as political subjects and how they imagine their futures given the constraints they operate from and within?
