Asserting Political Subjectivities, Negotiating Citizenship: Indian Muslim Women in Contemporary Times

Abstract

5th August 2019 marked the revocation of the special status accorded to Jammu and Kashmir,
finally ‘integrating’ it with the Republic of India. The region suffered 552 days of ‘preventive’
communication blockade from no to limited internet, one of the longest internet and social media
blackouts reported in the world. The region continues to date to be one of the most militarized,
as more troops were sent in to apprehend any kind of unrest, countering the abrogation and its
aftermath. Kashmir as an occupied land and a necropolishas suffered serious human rights
violations. In the Muslim-majority region, women have been at the center of these violations.
From enduring mass rapes to reprisals and being half-widows, Kashmiri women have been an
icon of resilience. Opposing their reductive characterization and objectification by society at
large, these women take to organizing themselves, singing songs of Azaadi or freedom.Such
moments have proved to galvanize the women into a form of a subaltern united front of shared
identities and experience. I propose to study these movements led by Muslim women in Kashmir
fighting against oppression and marginalization to lay claim to their political subjectivities under
the current neoliberal, biopolitical, and necropolitical regime. I propose to engage with the
memory and cultural productions emanating from the women’s struggle of 2009 and 2016
Kashmiri rebellion, and independent women-led collectives like Zanaan Wanaan. My attempt
shall be to arrive at a deliberative understanding of public sphere engaged by these women
enabling democratic possibilities (using Habermas’s, Nancy Fraser’s and Abu- Lughod’s ideas) in
this era of capitalist democracies stifling and regulating the rights of the minority and subaltern.