Before liberation, the suppression of women was brutal, despite the fact that in national folklore ... the woman was often treated as a dignified figure ... and with special tenderness, particularly as a mother. In reality, the woman was divested of every economic and political right. She could not have a say in family gatherings, nor could she have a voice in marriage ... She did not have the right to call her husband by his first name, but had to speak of him as ‘he’. Women were assigned separate places apart from men ... sometimes they were sold in marriage at a very young age.”
That could very easily be India. It is, in fact, Albania before 1946, which was ruled by a party actually calling itself the National Fascist Party. The country was largely Muslim with a substantial Christian population but all women were under the veil and equally oppressed. Then, in 1946, when Albanian men decided to liberate themselves from fascism, Enver Hoxha, the communist leader, gave a call to women to resist fascism as he was convinced that a force of women was needed to liberate the country—and, of course, themselves from Italian and German domination (Albania was occupied by both fascists and Nazis during World War II).
Albania saw nothing short of multiple revolutions, both social and political, during Benito Mussolini’s and Adolf Hitler’s expansionist regimes. But it was only when a call was given out to youth and women to resist fascism did the country arrive into the modern era and achieve lasting peace and prosperity.
Hoxha, who liberated the Albanian women from their veils and helped them find their voice, was a communist. The BJP in India is the anti-thesis of communism and is today accused of exactly the same kind of religious discrimination as happened during World War II. But the BJP government, which showed the same zeal as the communists of Albania in the 1940s, is finding the liberation of Muslim women in the country from triple talaq and other social ills and the urgings to find their voices now being turned upon their own government—unlike in the case of Hoxha and his party.
There are examples from all over the world, including Libya where women resisted the trifurcation of their country and the Montgomery bus boycott, which are notable for how determined women, singly or in groups, can achieve lasting changes in societies or even countries. The Montgomery bus boycott is particularly notable for the fact that it was started by one woman—Rosa Parks—refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. She was arrested for that defiance but then the US Supreme Court ruled against the government and put an end to such racial discrimination. But even more noteworthy is the fact that the bus boycott gave rise to a young civil rights activist—Martin Luther King Jr. The rest, as they say, is history.
Closer home, we have the example of Shiv Sena women organised into a Mahila Aghadi only after the Rajiv Gandhi government in the 1980s enacted a law reserving 33% seats for women in local self-government bodies. Until then, by its founder Bal Thackeray’s own admission, the Sena was a purushi (male) party on the fringes of polity. In the first local body elections after the reservation, the Sena handed out tickets to mostly the female relatives of their prominent leaders. But the common women in the Mahila Aghadi came into their own, even if for the wrong purposes, during the 1992-93 riots of Mumbai.
They egged on the reluctant men into rioting and if they refused, dressed them in bindis and bangles, however patriarchal that may have been, until they agreed to take on the ‘enemy’. They protected those men against police lathis and firings, coming between the men and the cops who were wary of physically manhandling the women, thus allowing the men to escape. Had the police been able to round up rioters freely, the violence may not have escalated to the extent it did, but from the Sena’s point of view, their campaign succeeded entirely on account of their women.
When Thackeray did not know what to do with these women during peacetime, they defined a role for themselves and the party, shifting the focus from lumpenisation to the use of the party’s formidable reputation to prevent social evils like harassment of women over dowry, and shut down liquor stores, gambling dens, etc., to the utter annoyance of their own partymen who might have had interests in these enterprises. Eventually, though, these acts helped the Sena mainstream itself, turning from a militia of macho men into a proper political party acceptable to the likes of the Congress and NCP, which has propelled it to the head of a coalition government in Maharashtra.
So the women at Shaheen Bagh in New Delhi who are throwing off their veils and camping out in the freezing cold with children nestling under their blankets are not to be taken lightly. They are women of all ages, including octogenarians, and upon them has fallen the mantle of preventing the new Citizenship (Amendment) Act from destroying the spirit of the Indian Constitution. I have heard them say that they have taken their prime minister’s remarks seriously—to find their voices and speak up for themselves. With tricolours and the national anthem, it is Mahatma Gandhi’s satyagraha returning in a way, with women at the centre stage, something even Gandhiji may not have envisaged. But Hoxha did. These undeterred Indian women will yet be the emancipators of themselves, the society, the government and its policies.
Sujata Anandan
Senior journalist and political commentator
Email: sujata.anandan@gmail.com