Indian democracy loves to flaunt its credentials as the world’s largest and most vibrant. It points proudly to seven decades of regular elections, the routine alternation of power, and the remarkable diversity of its electorate. Yet, there are silences embedded in its statistics that are harder to explain away. One such silence is the virtual absence of Muslim women in the nation’s highest elected forum.
Since the first Lok Sabha in 1952, only eighteen Muslim women have managed to cross the multiple thresholds that stand between political ambition and parliamentary presence. Eighteen, across seventy-five years, across seventeen general elections, across thousands of parliamentary seats filled by men of all faiths and classes. It is this silence, this stubborn under-representation, that journalists Rasheed Kidwai and political scientist Ambar Kumar Ghosh take up in their remarkable new book, Missing from the House: Muslim Women in the Lok Sabha (Juggernaut, 2025).
Excavating Forgotten Biographies
The book is both a biography and an archive, part excavation and part argument. Each of the eighteen women is given a chapter that traces her political journey, from local beginnings to party negotiations, to the Parliament benches. But Kidwai and Ghosh are too seasoned to treat these women as isolated exceptions. Each life story is braided with the institutional, cultural, and electoral context that shaped it.
We meet figures who came from politically prominent families, their candidacies often facilitated by dynastic connections. We also meet women who clawed their way into politics through activism, community leadership, or professional standing. What unites them is not similarity of background but the double burden of gender and faith. Being a woman in Indian politics is difficult enough; being a Muslim woman makes it doubly so — one is forced to carry the community on one’s shoulders while negotiating patriarchy at home and party gatekeeping outside.
The Tokenism of Representation
The authors are unsparing in their recognition of how tokenistic such representation often was. For many political parties, the candidature of a Muslim woman functioned as a symbolic gesture rather than a genuine attempt to empower. She was a signboard for pluralism, a talisman for the party’s secular credentials, or a convenient “soft” face in times of communal strain.
But when it came to the actual business of legislation, shaping debates, influencing policies, steering party strategies, these women were too often kept at the margins. The book chronicles how speeches went unheard, motions went unadopted, and careers ended prematurely once the symbolic function had been fulfilled. Presence, the book insists, is not the same as voice.
The Courage Beneath the Statistics
And yet, Missing from the House never collapses into pure lament. It gives us, instead, stories of extraordinary courage. Kidwai’s instinct for the telling anecdote and Ghosh’s institutional clarity combine to produce textured portraits. A speech in the Lok Sabha is read against the backdrop of constituency struggles. A successful election campaign is weighed alongside the midnight canvassing and community negotiations that made it possible.
We see women who endured derision from patriarchal elders, resisted pressure to remain within the “domestic” sphere, and battled the perception that a Muslim woman could only be a token. These details bring flesh and blood to what might otherwise have been a dry statistical exercise. They remind us that each parliamentary seat was won not only against rival candidates but also against centuries of social hierarchy.
Visibility Without Power
One of the most important threads the book teases out is the uneasy relationship between visibility and power. A Muslim woman MP might attract media spotlight, even party praise, as evidence of inclusivity. But when it came to real decision-making, candidate selection, policy priorities, cabinet posts, she was often sidelined.
Kidwai and Ghosh show how this dynamic was reinforced across parties and decades. Even those who managed to carve out some influence had to do so by navigating respectability politics, proving themselves “safe” and “loyal” in ways male colleagues were never asked to. Representation, in short, did not translate automatically into empowerment.
Beyond the Lok Sabha
The authors are candid about the limitations of their canvas. By focusing on Lok Sabha MPs, they leave largely unexplored the rich and varied world of Muslim women’s political participation in state assemblies, panchayats, municipal councils, and movements. These subnational spaces often provided training grounds and platforms where women could build durable reputations, even if they never entered Parliament.
That said, the choice to focus on the national legislature has its own logic. Parliament is the stage on which the Republic enacts its claim to pluralism. To show the absence of Muslim women here is to strike at the symbolic heart of Indian democracy.
Memory as Political Work
What the book achieves most powerfully is memory-making. It restores to public consciousness names and careers that might otherwise have disappeared into footnotes. This act of retrieval is itself political. In recording these eighteen biographies, the authors insist that they be acknowledged as part of the democratic narrative.
At the same time, the book also functions as an indictment. It raises uncomfortable questions: Why has the system failed to create pathways for more Muslim women to enter politics? Why have political parties, even those who speak the language of secularism and equality, done so little to nurture them?
Toward a Cautious Hope
Kidwai and Ghosh are not content to remain with critique alone. They gesture toward the possibilities of the present moment: a younger generation of Muslim women activists, lawyers, professionals, and students who are politically engaged, vocal, and ambitious. With institutional reforms — more transparent candidate selection, financial and organisational support for women candidates, and affirmative party practices, these women could be tomorrow’s parliamentarians.
This hope is pragmatic rather than utopian. The authors do not expect sudden epiphanies from political parties. What they argue for are cumulative changes that can shift incentives: lowering the cost of entry, ensuring security, and rewarding cross-community alliances rather than narrow communal tokenism.
Style and Tone
The writing is accessible, empathetic, and quietly sharp. Kidwai’s journalistic eye lingers on small details, the repeated refrain in a condolence letter, the stubborn slogan on a campaign banner, while Ghosh’s academic background ensures structural clarity. The book avoids both the trap of hagiography and the aridity of pure data. It reads as history with heart, and reportage with rigour.
Answering the Ethical Summons
Ultimately, Missing from the House is not just a book of political history. It is an ethical summons. By showing us who is absent, it asks us to imagine a democracy that could be fuller, richer, and more representative. It reminds us that the strength of a legislature is not merely in the laws it passes but in the range of stories it allows to be told from its benches.
The ‘missing’ of the title is not only a fact but a wound. To heal it will take deliberate effort: from political parties, from civil society, from voters themselves. Until then, absence will continue to speak, louder than presence, in the halls of Indian democracy.
(The author is a Bangalore based management professional, literary critic and curator)
