NEW DELHI: India’s Muslim women politicians have been chief ministers, constituency managers, party faithfuls, party hoppers, managers of important ministries– in short, capable of every quality shown by men to be go-getters and parliamentarians. Missing from the House (Juggernaut), a new book by journalists Rasheed Kidwai and Ambar Kumar Ghosh, however, has come up with a shocker.
Since the first general elections of 1951-52, there have been, until 2024, only 690 women MPs. Of this only 18 have been Muslim women. Out of the 18 Lok Sabhas constituted till 2025, there were five that did not have a single Muslim woman member.
“Equally shocking is the fact that the number of Muslim women elected to Parliament in one tenure, never crossed a mark of four in the 543-seat Lower House of Parliament,” they write in the book.
Speaking at the book launch organised by Juggernaut Books and the Prabha Khaitan Foundation at Delhi’s India Islamic Cultural Centre on Wednesday, Iqra Hasan, Samajwadi Party’s Kairana MP, spoke of “having to play by the rules set”, but underlined the “need for reservations within the party’s workforce” for an organic leadership to emerge so that there are enough women around to benefit from the 33 per cent reservation in Lok Sabha that the Women’s Reservation Bill 2023 promises.
Reservation will most likely benefit dynasts—Muslim women across most parties who have been MPs come from political families— but is perhaps the first step towards empowering a minority within the minority community: women with political ambitions and the capacity to deliver on them. Such women, as the book shows, are dogged by patriarchal patronisation from the beginning to the end of their political life. They step in after the death, arrest, or absence of the family’s men, are seen though “behen-bahu” optics and elected as such.
Begum Akbar Jehan Abdullah had a political career after the arrest of National Conference founder and leader Sheikh Abdullah. The wife, mother and grandmother of chief ministers, she was an MP; she played a key role in the Jammu and Kashmir Plebiscite Front; and she sided with her son Farooq, who was aligned with her husband’s political legacy, over her daughter, who was “orchestrating a putsch in cahoots” with the Indira Gandhi-led Congress. There have been tweaks to ‘the rule’ and few exceptions. Mamtaz Sanghamita, daughter of a law minister in a Left Front government in West Bengal became MP on a TMC ticket.
Common to them all has been their devotion to the parliamentary process, their rooting for reform or legislation on various issues—from forest rights, trade and infrastructure to questions on thefts occurring within Parliament House itself. “Not one out of the 18 had any major allegations of corruption, criminal charges, or hate speech,” the authors say.
The launch discussion, attended by politicians Salman Khurshid and Omar Abdullah, also raised the moot question of Muslim women who have tried to be political outside mainstream parties. What happened to the women leaders of Shaheen Bagh and CAA movements is a story waiting to be told.