https://thewire.in/politics/ali-khan-mahmudabads-arrest-reveals-the-political-capture-of-womens-rights-in-india This article explores how Professor Ali Khan Mahmudabad’s arrest exposes the political misuse of women’s commissions—especially in BJP-ruled Haryana, where the Women’s Commission acted swiftly on a tweet while the state reports 19 crimes against women daily. I discuss how BJP’s model of “Mahila Sashaktikaran” is hollow and how “majoritarian genderwashing” is being used to silence dissent rather than ensure real justice for marginalised women.
While the weaponisation of the women’s commission is new, the use of women’s rights to propagate a majoritarian agenda is something which we have seen aplenty in the past decade. ..
majoritarian gender washing is a term used often to describe how regimes, quite intelligently, adopt a language of gender justice in the garb of empowering women while fulfilling the actual intent of sanitising authoritarianism. In India, it has been quite rampant and visible through instances such as criminalisation of Muslim men under the guise of “protecting Muslim women” through moves like the triple talaq ban, or “protecting Hindu women” through “love jihad” laws, or selective invocation of women’s honour on any random day to justify majoritarian control.
The UP Women Commission reduced “women’s safety” to a question of physical proximity to men. This not only infantilises women by implying they cannot make autonomous decisions about their bodies or professional interactions, but also reinforces deeply patriarchal and moralistic anxieties about women’s presence in public life.
By implicitly targeting professions that employ large numbers of Muslim men – such as tailoring and training – it furthers the ongoing vilification and otherisation of a specific community under the pretext of protecting women.