The Gradual Normalization of Violence Against Indian Muslim Women

NEW DELHI — In April, a video emerged of a Hindu priest addressing a crowd outside of a mosque in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, threatening to kidnap and rape Muslim women.

He was recorded making many incendiary remarks against the Muslim community — each met with cheers from the crowd and chants of “Jai Shri Ram” (“Victory to Lord Ram,” a phrase of nationalist devotion co-opted by Hindu supremacists) — but what garnered the strongest reactions online was his pronouncement that if a Muslim harassed any (Hindu) girl in the area, he would respond by kidnapping Muslim women and publicly raping them. The video immediately went viral.

Only a few days before, in the eastern state of Gujarat, the national president of a right-wing extremist group — known for inciting violence against India’s marginalized communities — launched into a hate-fueled diatribe against Muslims while giving an address at an event, encouraging Hindu men to “save” Muslim women by impregnating them.

Anti-Muslim violence and hate speech have become normalized under the ruling Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which rose to power after the country’s 2014 general elections, but activists say that the attacks against India’s Muslims (which are India’s second-largest religious group, with a population of 172 million) have ratcheted up over the last year — particularly, against Muslim women.

While the harassment of Muslims in India is nothing new, it has become observably more pronounced in recent years. In 2020, while Muslim women were being targeted by law enforcement for protesting the new Citizen Amendment Act (CAA) — which eased citizenship access for religious minorities from Muslim-majority countries but not for Muslims themselves — “love jihad,” an Islamophobic conspiracy theory portraying Muslim men as sexual predators converting Hindu women to Islam, inspired “unlawful conversion” laws that served no other purpose than to further malign the Muslim community.

More recently, Muslim women have become targets of a unique and insidious ire. In July 2021, an app called “Sulli Deals” surfaced that reportedly allowed men to bid on the profiles of featured Muslim women — all of whom happen to be prominent figures within their respective professions, including journalists, social workers, students, and online personalities. Rather than an actual sales platform, the app, hosted on GitHub, functioned only to humiliate the women who appeared on it.

After sparking public outrage, GitHub suspended the account. Delhi Police were just as slow to open an investigation into its founders. In January of this year, another app, called “Bulli Bai,” emerged on the same platform, also containing photos of Indian Muslim women, accompanied by derogatory content. But this time, the app included Muslim women in their 60s and 70s. The app again sparked outrage, not least of all after law enforcement failed to make any significant arrests in the “Sulli Deals” case.

After significant pressure from civil society, and multiple complaints, six people were eventually arrested in connection with both cases; all have been granted bail.

One of the women featured on the “Bulli Bai” app was Khalida Parveen, 67, who runs the feminist organization Amoomat Society in Hyderabad. Parveen has spoken publicly about rising fascism in the country, which put her squarely on the radar of right-wing trolls on Twitter.

“I was not ashamed,” said Parveen. “I felt pity that people like that can stoop to such a level that they can auction off the photo of a woman who could be their mother.”

Rather than placing the blame on the app’s creators, Parveen pointed to the political climate that enabled them to make it. “With this government, the hate factory towards Muslims has taken an ugly turn.”

For the third consecutive year, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has recommended that the US State Department designate India as a “Country of Particular Concern” for “for engaging in and tolerating systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom,” noting the worsening crackdown on religious freedom in the country in 2021. “The Indian government escalated its promotion and enforcement of policies — including those promoting a Hindu-nationalist agenda — that negatively affect Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Dalits, and other religious minorities.”

The report also accused the government of targeting individuals “documenting or sharing information about violence against Muslims, Christians, and other religious minorities.”

But what was perhaps most striking in both cases of these “auction” apps was the selective targeting of Indian Muslim women with significant online audiences.

“Toxic masculinity plays a major role here,” said Fatima Juned, an analyst at a political think tank in Delhi. “In a deeply patriarchal and polarized society, the woman is perceived as a belonging. Muslim women thus become the key to the expansion of the ideology of a political party that depends on the vilification of the Muslim men for its legitimization. [The Muslim woman’s] body becomes another site of conquest, of violation and humiliation, and her submission to an alternate culture of patriarchy is taken as a reinforcement of control over the Muslim population.”

Consequently, said Juned, “You [humiliate] a Muslim woman who is doing the opposite of what you thought a Muslim woman should do.”

“A hostile environment already exists in India that is traumatizing for Muslims,” said Sara Ather, a Muslim Indian writer who herself has been targeted for online harassment and abuse from fringe Hindu groups for writing about rising Islamophobia. “Any outspoken Muslim on social media is bombarded with trolls.”

Muslim women are humiliated in creative ways offline as well. Last December, a government college in the southern state of Karnataka barred six students from entering the classroom for wearing hijabs, on the grounds that the hijab violated the school’s uniform rules. The girls petitioned college, but to no avail.

They then organized a protest, which inspired other protests across the state. Many of them were then met with counter demonstrations involving saffron scarves, worn by counter-protesters as a Hindutva (Hindu nationalist) symbol to classes if Muslim girls are allowed to wear the hijab. Similar incidents of hijab bans have been reported across the country.

On February 5, citing the protests, the Karnataka government ordered all colleges to avoid religious activities and implement strict uniform dress codes.

A month later, the Karnataka High Court upheld the ban, reasoning that hijab is not an essential religious practice under Islam and is, therefore, not protected by the constitution protecting the fundamental right to practice one’s religion.

“It is important to understand that every aspect of a Muslim’s life — be it where they offer prayers, where they offer prayers and the food that they eat to the clothes that they wear — has all been brought under attack in India,” said journalist Sumedha Pal, who has long covered the persecution of minorities in the country.

Still, Pal said, the fetishization of Muslim women’s bodies makes them a unique target. “If we look at the conversation among the right-wing circles, they [are] either fetishizing or violently looking at [their] bodies, be it auctioning women online or criminalizing them for wearing hijab.”

Islamophobia in India is only gaining momentum, as Hindu-nationalist rhetoric — and violence — is engaged at all levels of society with little to no consequences. The only way to counter it, said Juned, is to recruit allies to help change the narrative.

“The burden, right now, is on the majority community to step forward,” said Juned. “Countering in conversation, I feel, is the best way to bring change. It also comes from the recognition that something is happening against a particular community. That is the one thing that is lacking. Despite all the news we keep sharing on social media, nobody is ready to believe that something is happening.”