The Kairana bypoll is a watershed moment
Tabassum Hasan’s victory has turned the myth of the faceless and powerless Muslim woman on its head
With the victory of Tabassum Hasan in Kairana, are we looking at a watershed moment for Muslim women in national politics? Only two days before this woman made contemporary history, an exhibition was held by Muslim Women’s Forum (MWF) titled Pathbreakers: The Twentieth Century Muslim Women of India. It featured 21 women, whose major work was in post-independence India, and who became fellow architects in building a new nation which rose from the destruction and devastation of Partition.
The MWF came into existence in 2000 as a leadership training and advocacy group . Its first president was Begum Saeeda Khurshid, who was among the 21 women selected. Among them were were Muslim women who became MPS and MLAS in the first three elections. Sharifa Hamid Ali, born in Surat, sat in the Constituent Assembly. She went to the UN Commission on Status of Women as India’s representative and prepared a model nikahnama. Mofida Ahmed was an MLA from Jorhat in Assam, Aziza Imam, Anis Kidwai and Qudsia Aizaz Rasool were members of Parliament. Some of the participants were writers, poets and chroniclers of their time. Surayya Tyabji designed the Indian flag at the behest of Jawaharlal Nehru using the Ashoka Chakra at the centre instead of the charkha.
The MWF decided thus to break the stereotype of Muslim women as cloistered victims of triple talaq, polygamy, burqa and halala.
Freedom brought with it two nation states and a dawn which was bloody and violent. Thousands of refugees were thrown across the border on both sides. The woman who tended to the Hindu sharnarthis in the camps was 28-year-old Anis Kidwai whose husband, a district commissioner, was murdered in Dehradun by mobs because he was Muslim and tried to stop their killing spree. Along with Subhadra Joshi and Mridula Sarabhai, she worked day and night in refugee camps. Being Indian was her only identity.
As we delved into research, stories came tumbling out from every corner of the country. At the colloquium, one speaker, who works with weavers in UP, spoke about pathbreakers in his village. Why mark them as Muslims, some asked? Why not ‘women’ without the Muslim tag?
It was providence that the day after these women emerged from decades of oblivion, a woman got elected to Parliament from UP by a huge margin. Despite the global atmosphere of antipathy to Muslims, there is one woman who has turned the myth on its head. How often do you fall in a situation where you do realise that the fault committed was yours but you still go on with the blaming spree? I think it happens quite often. Agreed? The most common example of this occurrence is the time while are you are driving.
I encountered a similar situation once. While crossing a junction area and struggling with the traffic, I passed a sincere, strict look to an army truck driver who was